Liberalism ended up going pretty well and changing a lot of conditions and making a lot of things better for a lot of people. But of course it has its own endemic problems and side effects and cost and pathology. We’ve now reached the point in history where the pathology of liberalism has become more keenly felt (and understood and articulated). Partly this is bound to happen any time a system becomes the dominant or default or assumed manner of being. And now, after the initial rush to conquer the world with it, we’re left, in a sense, to just live with it and figure out where we’re going. And suddenly we start noticing that things aren’t perfect. And we become more and more aware of the disappointments and dissatisfaction that still remain in our hearts.

We’ve had some time now to think over the flaws that still attend our lives under liberalism, or maybe even because of it. We’ve seen the ways in which it can go wrong, the negative outcomes, and have the sense that it hasn’t given us everything we hoped and were promised, a failure to deliver, or perhaps we’ve come to feel that the costs are too high. And when you get that kind of tension in a system, people want to break out and start trying new adaptations to life to see if they might be more optimized to some internal urge of where they think the human race needs to go.

Maybe liberalism has made us weak and decadent, or maybe it has caused too many washouts to pile up at the lower end of the system, or maybe the psychic burden of everyone having absolute freedom to define the countours and meanings of their existence is just proving to be too much (considering people already have a lot burdening them).

Maybe liberalism doesn’t even work without some grounding, grand, unifying narrative, and once that narrative goes down or fractures into many competing and contradicting narratives the liberal system can’t function any more. Maybe the internal tension and variance goes beyond the tolerances of the system. Maybe people sense this and it makes them instinctively try to break the system, regardless of how necessary it is for everything they enjoy. We shake under the pressure of enforced unity in contentious diversity and desire a great reorganization and consolidation, or maybe even a great scattering (if anarchists could have their way).

There’s a natural instinct in humans, that once certain problems inherent to a system pile up sufficiently (even intangible problems, like depression and anxiety), they try to flip the board and reset all positions to zero. That’s the patterns you see in the book “The Great Equalizer”. Basically, that stability always produces inequality, which gradually increases inherent tensions in the system, and only a catastrophic resetting of the conditions of society resets it.
We have a great and powerful society, enormous and ridiculously complex. But it comes with massive costs, many of them tangible, and many of them intangible psychic costs. And since there doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent those costs from accumulating, gradually some people just get frustrated and want to reset the whole game.

Maybe they imagine the cost of the reset will be worth it; maybe they think those costs won’t really be that great and they’ll get to keep what they have in the reset (that’s another lesson from The Great Equalizer; great levelings are always negative, not positive; the only way that tensions get resolved is that everyone gets taken down to the same base level; it’s never been the case that things got eucatastrophically better for everyone, progress only comes positively in stable games, and always unequally).

I think a lot of people aren’t really thinking the matter through that deeply. They’re following their inherent moral and social instincts. And maybe in a way that’s an unavoidable and justifiable part of how human beings and societies are meant to work, as a dynamic and living and adapting and competing entity, not as some static, mineral edifice. Maybe our desire to crystallize the state of humanity into one form and one path is inherently frustrating and reprehensible to the kind of creatures we are. Maybe it is true, as someone once said, that if ever mankind could devise a perfect system, that there would always be those who felt the need, even the moral necessity, to break it, just to make something happen.

So maybe the instinct to destroy liberalism is inevitable. Maybe the sense of its limitations and injustices and inadequacies has just grown too great. But maybe, just maybe, those instincts are out of whack because people are ignorant about what the world really is or could be like, because they’re too sheltered behind our technological wall and the comfort and ease the system provides. And maybe they’re out of whack because our information gathering and evaluation systems were designed to work based on a narrow and proximate, intimate data set (like your home and immediate community), and we’ve reduced our involvement in those arenas and extended our data collection out to a massive (but shallow and non-intimate) extent through technology.

Maybe those moral and social instincts were never designed to receive their data from a constant stream of indirect, non-personal sources gleaned from a set of four hundred million people. Maybe the calibration of our moral emotions is no longer in alignment with reality simply because they operate best (not only, but best) at a certain specified level of intimacy, detailed and personal knowledge, personal efficacy, environmental limitation and regulation,. Maybe we make poor gods. Maybe seeing all, the gleaned moments of millions, isn’t something we are generally well adapted to do (without easily screwing it up and misinterpreting the data). Maybe it’s a psychic burden of scale we aren’t well adapted to carry and it forces us into a continuous state of lymbic arousal. Maybe being able to do all, maybe wielding immense power over the lives of millions, is also not a burden we are well adapted to carry without a grave tendency toward error and miscalibration and misguided action. Maybe being in a state of constant hyper arousal and selective data (because it is selective, most daily life data in our lives is fairly banal) immersion makes wielding immense and nearly infinite power over others a very dangerous prospect.

Maybe that is why the form of the bottom up government of the United States was so successful, because it made it easiest to do things at the lowest and most local and specified and intimate levels and hardest most complicated to do things at the largest and most sweeping levels. Maximum power was assigned to the smallest social units, individuals and families, and each step up from that point, each increase in distance, resulted in a drop in effective power and greater technical barriers to effective action.

At the highest level, the national level, the amount of checks on power, the number of contradicting stakeholders, the amount of hoops that must be jumped through, and the vulnerability of any action to being derailed or having its wings clipped, increases exponentially. It becomes extremely hard to wield power at that level, excepting global mandate (which is very unlikely). And maybe that’s a brilliant move. And maybe we’ve circumvented many of the protections put in place to help us avoid dangerous outcomes through our technology.