A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss

Cook, Jonathan
http://dissidentvoice.org/2019/01/a-liberal-elite-still-luring-us-towards-the-abyss/
Date Written:  2019-01-29
Publisher:  Dissident Voice
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23367

A recent manifesto decrying "populism and nationalism" see today's problems as coming from the abandonment of liberal ideals when they are in fact caused by extreme adherence to them.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.

But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side - or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism's abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal's political project....

The liberal's professed concern for others' welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism's humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims' inheritance.

Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great - if fetishised - art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources....

Liberalism isn't the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual's good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.
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