The West is falling and falling hard. Nothing but nothing can halt its demise

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue — James Baldwin

Since the collapse of free market capitalism in 2008, the world and the values fashioned in its name have been living on borrowed time.

Evidence for this is the extent of the stunningly vast distance travelled in historical time between the received truths of 2008 and those of 2023. Back in 2008 terms and words that currently enjoy common usage in the English political and ideological lexicon were either totally or almost totally non-existent — ‘woke’, ‘virtue signalling’, ‘social justice warrior’, ‘trans rights’ ‘conspiracy theory’, ‘culture wars’, and so on.

All of the above are symptoms of a collapsed economic system and the values system it maintained thereby. Those values were centred around the perverse and reductionist idea of human beings as bees and of healthy and functioning societies as beehives, rooted in the supposed virtues of work as the critical and dominant metric of worth, validation and identity.