Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics: A New Theory for the Applicability of Ideas (Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth) 3030149021, 9783030149024

Table of contents :
Preface
References
Contents
1 Introduction
Social Conditioning
“This is not Who We Are”
References
2 Ideas as a Medium
Universal Ideas and Context
What Is an Idea
The Idea of the West
Ideas of the Enlightenment
References
3 Political Culture and Ideology
The Notion of Ideology
Ideology and Policy Transfer
Domination and Degeneration
References
4 Revisiting the Dominant Paradigm
International Regimes
The Post-WWII World Structure
The Proliferation of Crises
References
5 Concluding Remarks
References
Correction to: Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics
Correction to: E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN DEMOCRACY, INNOVATION, AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR GROWTH SERIES EDITOR: ELIAS G. CARAYANNIS

Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics A New Theory for the Applicability of Ideas Elias G. Carayannis · Ali Pirzadeh

Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth

Series Editor Elias G. Carayannis, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

The central theme of this series is to explore why some areas grow and others stagnate, and to measure the effects and implications in a trans-disciplinary context that takes both historical evolution and geographical location into account. In other words, when, how and why does the nature and dynamics of a political regime inform and shape the drivers of growth and especially innovation and entrepreneurship? In this socio-economic and sociotechnical context, how could we best achieve growth, financially and environmentally? This series aims to address such issues as: • How does technological advance occur, and what are the strategic processes and institutions involved? • How are new businesses created? To what extent is intellectual property protected? • Which cultural characteristics serve to promote or impede innovation? In what ways is wealth distributed or concentrated? These are among the key questions framing policy and strategic decision-making at firm, industry, national, and regional levels. A primary feature of the series is to consider the dynamics of innovation and entrepreneurship in the context of globalization, with particular respect to emerging markets, such as China, India, Russia, and Latin America. (For example, what are the implications of China’s rapid transition from providing low-cost manufacturing and services to becoming an innovation powerhouse? How do the perspectives of history and geography explain this phenomenon?) Contributions from researchers in a wide variety of fields will connect and relate the relationships and inter-dependencies among (1) Innovation, (2) Political Regime, and (3) Economic and Social Development. We will consider whether innovation is demonstrated differently across sectors (e.g., health, education, technology) and disciplines (e.g., social sciences, physical sciences), with an emphasis on discovering emerging patterns, factors, triggers, catalysts, and accelerators to innovation, and their impact on future research, practice, and policy. This series will delve into what are the sustainable and sufficient growth mechanisms for the foreseeable future for developed, knowledge-based economies and societies (such as the EU and the US) in the context of multiple, concurrent and inter-connected “tippingpoint” effects with short (MENA) as well as long (China, India) term effects from a geo-strategic, geo-economic, geo-political and geo-technological set of perspectives. This conceptualization lies at the heart of the series, and offers to explore the correlation between democracy, innovation and growth.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14635

Elias G. Carayannis · Ali Pirzadeh

Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics A New Theory for the Applicability of Ideas

Elias G. Carayannis School of Business George Washington University Washington, DC, USA

Ali Pirzadeh Washington, DC, USA

ISSN 2662-3641 ISSN 2662-365X (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth ISBN 978-3-030-14902-4 ISBN 978-3-030-14903-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) under, exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

I have taught economics and been involved with various developmental projects with international agencies such as the World Bank and United Nations in three different continents for more than a quarter of a century. During this time, I did what I had been schooled to do: sponsor certain ideologies that proclaimed to have in their possession a cookbook with precise recipes that could be applied universally to liberate the world from all obstacles that limit its potential to be democratic and to prosper. The premise was that in a thriving world everybody would flourish. In all honesty, I must admit that I did not have anything else to offer except for the prevailing beliefs that I was schooled to promote. Yet what puzzled me throughout my career was why country after country had failed to reach, or at least approach the vicinity of, such a worthy goal (even when they had fully followed the prescribed policies). In fact, in most instances, they ended up in total disarray.1 Searching for a reason, I contemplated several options. For a while, I considered the main problem to be the inability of local institutional settings to adapt their structures and implement the proposed instructions. I also envisaged other causes, such as endemic corruption, as well as various national structural rigidities that either slow down or simply resist the whole process of transition. It took some time for me to realize that even countries with robust democratic institutional

1 See Gera (2006).

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foundations and well-entrenched traditions of market mechanisms had also failed to achieve the objectives. Once I stepped outside my schooled mindset, it resulted in clarifications that allowed me to think critically and to examine my own convictions. It did not take long for me to realize that the main problem lied elsewhere and that I was asking the wrong questions. Instead of posing questions about the competence of those who were persuaded to follow the cookbook of fortune, I should have questioned not only the validity of prescribed schemes, but more importantly the relevancy and applicability of the centuries-old ideas upon which these instructions were founded. When examining these latter issues, however, we are examining more than the understanding that earlier ideas are inherently less pertinent and applicable to the present. More importantly, they shed light on the notion that an idea, as a reflection and a manifestation of one’s thoughts, is innately connected to its own specific historical and cultural contexts. In other words, social ideas are products of their surroundings. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle came about in the fourth century BCE, Arendt (2005) tells us, “…under the full impact of a politically decaying society” (p. 6). Taking into consideration the context of an idea not only reveals its historical roots but also rectifies many of our erroneous beliefs, and consequently allow us to address various misgivings that divert our awareness from the real issues at hand. An ample example of the former is the social idea of supremacy, the primacy of one over others in terms of authority, power, status, etc., which has been deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of European civilizations that gained prominence during the Renaissance. In most accounts, the Spanish Inquisition is often depicted as a point of reference for European supremacy, as thousands upon thousands of “inferior” Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. In 1499, a Roman Catholic, Pedro Sarmiento, wrote the anti-Semitic SentenciaEstatuto, which prohibited non-Christians, including those who converted to Christianity (e.g., Jews), from holding public office and testifying against Spanish Christians in courts of law. This decree, according to Britannica, was followed by the sixteenth-century laws of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) which further strengthened the laws against anyone

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of Jewish ancestry2 and were more racial than religious in nature. Sven Lindqvist articulates this point when he states, “that Europe’s destruction of the “inferior races” of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler’s destruction of six millions Jews in Europe” (Lindqvist 1992, Preface, p. x). Racism in the United States today is an instance of the latter case, as it is commonly perceived outside its historical and political context, to the extent that the majority believe it to be an outcome of personal bigotry. This could not be further from the truth, as demonstrated by the recently-deceased historian Lerone Bennett. Racism in the United States was deliberately and carefully developed in the 1600s–1700s by the press, the pulpit, and the schoolbooks to validate and perpetuate slavery.3 Later, Jim Crow laws, prejudicial employment practices and educational policies, inequitable housing, and militarized policing worked to maintain racist ideas and practices. Today these disparities are very much part of the fabric of American culture, which raises the question: can the widelyidealized economy do without them? Coincidently, the recent IRS leak that apparently shows that the 25 richest Americans “legally” paid little— and, in some cases, nothing—in federal income taxes, and the Biden administration’s swift decision to take legal action against it because such information is considered “illegal,” may make a response easier. As we become aware of context, one would soon realize almost all predominant ideas (e.g., democracy, liberalism, communism, fascism, nationalism, etc.) cannot bear any significance or convey any meaning if they are applied incongruously. In another world, if we deprive ideas of their context, we have mere empty words.4 When ideas are used out of context, we are unable to grasp anything they were designed to convey. Ignoring this fact leads to the result we see before us: a world that has been run into the ground, where on the slightest pretext, countries and

2 The most reveling aspect of the Inquisition, however, is the fact that the Jews who were successfully escaped from Spain were given protection by a Muslim king, Sultan Bajazet (see https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-spanish-expulsion1492). The Sultan’s action was by no means an anomaly since the multicultural social fabric of the Middle East region was rooted in ancient times and lasted until European colonization, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, began to partition the ancient land (e.g., by nation-state building) and invent new communities. 3 See Bennett (1970/1975). 4 For an excellent work on this topic see Weil (1986, pp. 211–218).

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cultures are obliterated and millions of people are slaughtered, all in the name of empty words. Each of these empty words is presented to us out of context, so that they can be depicted as absolute ideals, independent of the specific historical circumstances in which they were conceived, propagated, and harnessed. This is the essence of my argument in the present study. No one, as far as I know, has ever regarded honesty among the political virtues for an obvious reason: politics is not a profession that rewards, much less fetishizes, truthfulness. We all know that politicians are likely to lie, what is puzzling is why we are likely to believe them. From where I stand, our prevailing political universe is peopled exclusively by sociopaths, charlatans, and monsters.5 This is not accidental, but an intrinsic part of the present paradigm that is morally bankrupt, detached from people and the world, relentlessly devouring everything in its path. However, history teaches us that no feast is indefinite. Therefore, to prolong the lifeline of domination for as long as possible, people around the table must convince everybody else of their centrality and that the world is a faceless sphere, filled with autonomous floaters who need no moral compass but are innately programmed to contain a selfish gene. The more we considered ourselves as predetermined entities, the more we continue to do things without considering the consequences. What consolidates this “world design guide” are collections of ideas packed together as contextagnostic notions and depicted as idol ideologies. What is inevitable is that such bundling transforms them into farcical thoughts. Despite this loss of meaning, these are the common denominators that allow the ruling machinery to perpetuate false narratives so that power remains in the hands of those at the helm of the ideological ship and so that the state’s subjects prioritize their lifestyles over the value of life. This study intends to counter such a world simply by bringing back the notion of context. When ideas are reattached to their proper context, they lose their “capital letter” and can no longer serve either as a banner for an invading army or as a hostile slogan against divergent thoughts. They become mere

5 About 2700 years ago we were told, “Now as for you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what you have said: “Surely our offenses and our sins are upon us, and we are rotting away in them; how then can we survive?’” Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure at all in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then should you die, house of Israel?’” (Ezekiel 33:10–11; New American Standard Bible).

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signs, “helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity” (Weil, 1986, p. 222). One such reality is that all human activities are made up of human practices framed by history and institutions, both embedded in specificities of cultures; “that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market” (Polanyi 2001, p. 60). Economic action requires the existence of a human community. In this light, our economic actions and political practices are all forms of social action that occur in interactions with other people.6 They are all “collective” representations and expressions within such community. Oddly, it has taken a deadly pandemic for the world as a collective entity to finally realize the profound significant of our “common” interconnection, as headlines read, We Are All in It Together or None of Us Is Safe Until All of Us Are Safe. These captions do resemble what Martin Luther King Jr (1963) boldly said more than a half century ago: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” If we truly adhere to these words, then I must say the pandemic was an instance of serendipity that just might propel a paradigm shift. In this book, I am trying to convey that we are facing a choice between two distinct options: we can stand firm against the present system of violence or remain complacent and continue to be part of it. My criticism is generally directed at our ways of being, believing, and behaving, as they justify all sorts of violence and destruction. My hope is for us to recognize our present condition and take responsibility for it. Common people living in many different states under cruel regimes often assert that their convictions have not contributed notably to the current mechanisms of destruction. Sometimes they go as far as to suggest that they are not fully aware of the moral dilemmas confronting them. I reject the notion that this naïveté is possible. On the contrary, the consummate talent with which common people navigate everyday life entails a prudent appreciation of precisely these sorts of human consequences. Claims of “not knowing” are better understood as voluntary and conscious self-deception. As

6 For a more detailed clarification, see Granovetter and Swedberg (1992, pp. 8–9), Tobin (1980), and Ingham (1996).

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the Persian sage Rumi once said, “The fool’s excuse is worse than his crime; the excuse of the ignorant is the poison of every knowledge.” It is not a lack of knowledge that stops us from changing our conditions. We have already experienced enough to know what to do. Sven Lindqvist put it brilliantly: It’s not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions. (Lindqvist 1992, p. 2)

Washington, USA

Ali Pirzadeh

References Arendt, H. (2005). The promise of politics (J. Kohn, Ed.). Schocken Books. Bennett, L. (1970/1975). The shaping of Black America. Johnson Publishing. Gera, V. (2006). Eastern Europe in political disarray amid fatigue over economic sacrifice. Associated Press. Granovetter, M., & Swedberg, R. (eds.) (1992). The sociology of economic life. Westview Press. Ingham, G. (1996). Money is a social relation. Review of Social Economy, 54(4), 507–529. King, M. L., Jr. (1963, April 16). Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963). April 16, 1963. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham. html. Lindqvist, S. (1992). Exterminate all the brutes. The New Press. Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation; the political and economic origin of our time (2nd ed.). Beacon Press. Tobin, J (1980). Discussion of overlapping generations. In J. H. Kareken & N. Wallace (Eds.), Models of monetary economics. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Weil, S. (1986). An anthology (S. Miles, Ed.). Grove Press.

The original version of the book frontmatter was revised: The World Bank copyright statement has been removed. The correction to the book frontmatter is available at https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_6

Contents

1

Introduction Social Conditioning “This is not Who We Are” References

1 10 20 31

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Ideas as a Medium Universal Ideas and Context What Is an Idea The Idea of the West Ideas of the Enlightenment References

37 42 55 58 63 78

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Political Culture and Ideology The Notion of Ideology Ideology and Policy Transfer Domination and Degeneration References

85 85 89 102 112

4

Revisiting the Dominant Paradigm International Regimes The Post-WWII World Structure The Proliferation of Crises References

117 117 125 140 152

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Concluding Remarks References

Correction to: Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This study does not have a strategy to prescribe certain relief from the overwhelming distresses of the present. What I am trying to do here is to facilitate comprehension of today’s reality so that we, as a collective group, may arrive at the conclusion to take the first step out of the present dire conditions and embark on a path to make the world a better place. This is why the book is written not by the subject matter but by questions it evokes in light of the present state of affairs in the world. The premise here is that the human-made world is in an unprecedented crisis due to the fact that the dominant ideologies1 of today are all on their deathbed. In the face of this reality, we can no longer hope for a return to our complacent life, the normal still defended by the “naïve empiricists”—who think that our tomorrows will likely resemble our yesterdays. This tendency mainly owes its survival to a standardized mindset that has been in the making for centuries but only reached its peak a few decades ago. In this light, and contrary to popular commentaries, our most celebrated ideas (e.g., democracy) are not threatened by a political circus, insurgency, or dysfunctional governing institutions but rather by pervasive 1 The term refers to the attitudes, beliefs, values, and morals shared by the majority of the people in a given time period. As a mechanism of social control, the dominant ideology frames how the majority of the population thinks about the nature of society, their place in society, and their connection to others (Bullock, 2000, p. 236).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_1

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discontentment among the majority who have finally realized democracy should mean ensuring that people have the health, education, and security to lead the life they choose.2 Let me begin with a general consensus about ideas. We all know that the importance of ideas in society and history3 can be found through basic reflection on human action. In other words, an idea exists through its practice. In addition, ideas may be cognitive/philosophical in character, have a normative/positive nature, and influence people’s overall perspectives, preferences, and propensities. These properties, therefore, substantiate ideas as byproducts of the human world. The applicability and usefulness of ideas do depend on, are shaped by, and are grounded in history and culture. Apart from these palpable observations, everything else remains cheerfully ambiguous. In the following, some of these ambiguities are outlined in the form of questions. The first question is: Do ideas invite or necessitate skepticism? More to the point, can an idea be false? If so, under what conditions can an idea be false, incomplete, or inadequate? What constitutes a good or a bad idea? How do we distinguish between them? Is it accurate to determine the quality of an idea by considering if it achieved its intended objective(s) or not? Why do ideas turn into an ideology? Are ideas/ideologies applicable universally? If not, why are they imposed or mimicked? How do we decide whether the success or failure of embedding ideas serves the chosen mechanisms to disseminate or impose them? Do the outcomes linked to an idea determine its values and effectiveness? Who determines that? For whom are ideas bad or good? Do we need to consider the conditions under which ideas are conceived or pay more attention to articulating the causal processes through which ideas exert effects? What are these processes? How do we find them? These questions are hardly original. Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume, to name a few, also struggled with and were bewildered by some of them, 2 A similar argument also appeared in the Beveridge Report, commissioned by the wartime Coalition under Winston Churchill in 1942, which underlined “bread for all…before cake for anybody” as the fundamental principle of any democratic government. For an informative discussion of the topic, see Renwick (2017). 3 The reader should note that I am using the word “history” in a broad sense. It ought to be understood as a method of approach rather than a particular field of study. Carl Becker alluded to this point when he wrote, “Much of what is called science is properly history, the history of biological or physical phenomena. The geologist gives us the history of the earth; the botanist relates the life history of plants” (Becker, 1965, p. 18).

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leaving it to Berkeley and Reid to ask: how can one know an object at all if it can only be understood by means of an idea? (Cummins & Zoeller, 1992, p. 3) For the present study, however, John Locke provides a sufficient guide to discuss the subject. In the first chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke asks his reader to excuse him for the frequent use of the word “idea.” However, he justifies such repetition by arguing: “It [idea] seems to be the best word to stand for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks; I have used it to express whatever is meant by ‘phantasm,’ ‘notion,’ ‘species,’ or whatever it is that the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I couldn’t avoid frequently using it.” (Locke, 1689 [2004], p. 40) A few pages later, Locke highlights the issue most relevant to this book by stating: Let us then suppose the mind to have no ideas in it, to be like white paper with nothing written on it. How then does it come to be written on? From where does it get that vast store which the busy and boundless imagination of man has painted on it—all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer, in a word, from experience. Our understandings derive all the materials of thinking from observations that we make of external objects that can be perceived through the senses and of the internal operations of our minds, which we perceive by looking in at ourselves. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from which arise all the ideas we have or can naturally have. (Locke, 1689 [2004], p. 47)

In this passage, Locke underlines two distinct types of experience. External experience or sensation provides us with ideas through our senses: sight gives us ideas of colors; hearing gives us ideas of sounds. However, sight, for instance, should not be considered wisdom. As Locke points out, the source of our knowledge is the inner experience of the human mind, which is constantly working and performing, a process Locke calls “mental operation.” This operation enables us to acquire ideas by reflecting on our surroundings, including imagination, desire, choice, and judgment. As the French scholar Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais reminds us, “The philosopher... acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch” (As cited in Baumer, 1978, p. 380). Goethe shares the same sentiment when he says: “It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free

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ourselves from the desire to comprehend it” (As cited in Stark, 2010, Preface). The implications of such a reflective feature are obvious: an individual who lived his entire life in a desert could not possibly interpret a mirage of a body of water; a person who was born and raised in an affluent setting can only respond to destitution and hunger by suggesting, “Let them eat cake”; a man who spends all his life in a white-colored room could not possibly know any color but white. These commonsense observations, which are embedded in Locke’s empiricism, bear profound applications and effects. Regarding the present study, two important corollaries allow us to separate facts in science, as far as our understanding permits, from ideas in the realm of social science. In hard science, so to speak, we often come across discoveries that are not a product of scientists’ reflective inner experiences. All scientific theories, Fritjof Capra observes, “are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena” (Capra, 1984, p. 101). I do not know of a scientist who suggests the world is flat, believes that “mother earth” is the center of the universe, or refutes that the basic laws of nature exist independent of humans’ thoughts and experiences. As far as our knowledge allows, the laws of physics display symmetry with respect to space and time: they do not depend on where, when, or from which angle we examine them. Most importantly, these laws are universal—identical, if you will—to all observers, irrespective of their position (whether they are at rest, moving at a constant speed, or accelerating), the location of the experiment (whether it takes place in China, Washington, or the Andromeda galaxy), or its time (whether it takes place today or a billion years from now). This consistency confirms the universe is underpinned by the same order. That is why mathematics, for example, is the natural language of science. The more significant point is that ideas conceived by people’s cognition alone, like those in social science, are perceived and reflected by the internal operation of his mind, unlike his outer experiences (e.g., sound, colors). They are based on and reflected by our assimilated understanding of the human material world of phenomena. Hence, they should be considered context-bounded, as our awareness can only materialize through a continuum acquired gradually over time.4 In other words, 4 The presumption here is that the world of inner-experience is not merely a theoretical representation, but is directly present to us as embodying values that are formed by, and

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ideas occur in a context. According to Oxford Dictionary, the definition of “context” is simply, “The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.” Even from this simple definition, it is probably fairly clear why context is imperative in security intelligence: contextual information provides clarity in security events, and that clarity drives operational efficiency in the actions taken to address events. Similarly, context in a literal sense is the immediate surroundings which inform the whole, so it may clarify meaning as well as intent. Given the dryness and obtuseness of most of these definitions, it is not surprising that many writers have switched tack to define context metaphorically rather than literally. Perhaps the most popularly invoked metaphor in the social and organizational sciences is the notion of “context as the garden, terrain or domain.” Hence from Kanter (1988) all the way back to Simmel (1976) we come across references to the need for a rich, fertile soil (context) in which a thousand flowers can bloom, about “cultivating” and “nourishing” cultural contexts, and about enclosing and turning the barren wasteland into something altogether more productive. In this light, the narrative of the genesis of the ideas that dominate our mindset today is not the “grand sweep,” in the words of William Blake. Rather, they formed as a result of the slow organic process by which their birthplaces grew and continue to grow. This process is largely due to the imaginations, historical necessities, political susceptibilities, and sense of community of the people themselves, which I hope is vividly conveyed in this study. The context of an idea is the specificities of the surroundings (e.g., historical incidents, cultural and institutional settings, political and economic conditions, etc.) in which it is conceived. Indeed, without historical context, we are only seeing a piece of the scene and not fully understanding the influence of the time and place in which a situation occurred. A good example is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry

relevant to, our surroundings. For instance, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that humans are motivated by self-interest and self-love, and that the exploitation of this trait leads to greater wealth for all and a more effective distribution of labor. Looking back, one can understand why Adam Smith wanted to figure how to get the economy to produce more. Britain in the 1700s was not a nice place to live. The average life expectancy was just thirty-five years (Botsman & Rogers, 2010, p. 411).

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Finn, published in 1885. It is considered an enduring work of American literature and a biting social satire.But it is also criticized by modern critics for its casual use of a racial epithet to describe Huck’s friend Jim, a freedom-seeking enslaved person. Such language is shocking and offensive to many readers today, but in the context of the day, it was commonplace language for many. Back in the mid-1880s, when attitudes toward newly liberated slaves were indifferent at best and hostile at worst, the casual use of such racial epithets wouldn’t have been considered unusual. In fact, what is actually more surprising, given the historical context of when the novel was written, is Huck’s treating Jim, not as his inferior but his equal—something rarely portrayed in the literature of the time.5 In short, ideas are not recipes or “cookbooks” for particular desired effects, but visions that are inherently limited by the framework of intervening forces. It is noteworthy that despite the importance of Marx’s contribution to the development of Western ideology, he spent surprisingly little time depicting what this world6 would be like. He refused to write “recipes for the kitchens of the future” (As cited in Ball, 1991, p. 139). Accordingly, if an idea is used out of context, the circumstances in which it was conceived are not correctly captured, and hence it seems to mean something different from its intended meaning and purpose. This proposition is by no means new. For instance, such a suggestion should be familiar to the student of Veblen in the sense that he “used a historical comparison of Germany and Great Britain before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution to show the difference in their developments due to history and context that focused on material causes as well

5 Similarly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein cannot be fully appreciated by a reader who is

unaware of the Romantic movement that took place in art and literature in the early nineteenth century. It was a time of rapid social and political upheaval in Europe when lives were transformed by the technological disruptions of the Industrial Age. The Romantics captured the sense of isolation and fear that many experienced as a result of these social changes. Frankenstein becomes more than a good monster story; it becomes an allegory for how technology can destroy us. See Fleming (2019). 6 The era in which Marx wrote was filled with talk of revolutions and new ideas (e.g., communism, socialism, anarchy, etc.) Charismatic political leaders appeared on the historical stage and stirred audiences with their speeches. Marx, however, was intellectually opposed to painting idolized visions of the future. To Marx, the most important task was the critical analysis of contemporary capitalist society. (See Ritzer, 2011, p. 73).

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as social-psychological states, and he claimed that when a culture industrializes more rapidly, the country will use this industrialization to produce weapons because of the honor and prestige in being warlike. Militarism is barbaric because it enforces the values of obedience and is obsessed with honor and prestige. Hence if a nation becomes militaristic, this is a sign that it is crossing the border to barbarianism, where war is a natural outcome.”7 By ignoring context, an idea is transformed into a fragmentary noncontextual thought, which by definition, impairs our ability to develop a complete perspective of how and why the idea formed (e.g., the factors that spurred its conception). Another way of saying the same thing is: an idea without a context is merely a pretext for a proof-idea (i.e., whatever you want it to mean). Accordingly, the first argument in this study asserts that when an idea is inner-reflective, it must be considered a context-bounded notion, with specificities that limit its applicability across place and time. The second hypothetical argument alleges that idolization and ideology are some of the most effective vehicles to strip ideas from their context. One significant shortfall of ignoring the context of ideas stems not so much from our inability to recognize that no idea is conceived in a vacuum, but rather from an obvious error in judgment that considers certain ideas universally applicable and not bounded to specificities of time and place. Instances of this type of misjudgment are plentiful in social science disciplines. For example, Adam Smith’s idea of how an economy should function is depicted as a natural phenomenon (universal blueprint) instead of an ideological and value-laden structure constructed to promote certain interests and principles during the Scottish Enlightenment era.8 Charles Hall alludes to this point when he states: “Industrial 7 “Veblen often contrasted the still-surviving eighteenth-century institutional framework of private property and national sovereignty with the twentieth-century ‘machine process’ of industrial production, which was severely restricted, he argued, by its archaic eighteenthcentury institutional context. In his later, more outspoken writings Veblen frequently spoke of the ‘triumph of imbecile institutions.’” For both quotations, see “Veblen, Thorstein.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 8 For an informative discussion of this topic, see Johnson (2005). There are a wealth of studies that highlight the impact of various social, political, and economic developments on the conceptualization of prized ideas in Europe, which later became dominant ideologies in the world. Among classic studies, for instance, I refer the reader to Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization & Capitalism 15 th –18 th Century; Laurence

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changes of the 18th century made room for new economic theories. Economists regarded the new phenomena in the light of new political doctrines: The Law of Nature in Epicureanism and the social compact; Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau; the state of nature and natural rights. Fusion with the theological notion of divine harmony in creation. Resultant individualism” (Samuels, 2003, pp. 10–11). Regarding social science, such erroneous universality is detrimental to thinking and cognitive cultivation, discourages alternative views, and contradicts its core objective—that is, to instill social values, customs, and traditions that appreciate the context of ideas and consequently the relativity of human perspectives. It should be noted that the rejection of universal ideas and endorsement of the relativity of human perspectives are shared by those whose ideas we prize, as well as hosts of scholarly studies. For instance, in his masterpiece The Spirt of The Laws, Montesquieu insists upon the wide variety of thoughts throughout the world and rejects absolutism in beliefs, values, and practices. Similar sentiments are prevalent across broad and diverse sources: Marx and Engels’s later works on the Asiatic mode of production; Karl Wittfogel, who notes and characterizes Oriental Despotism; Sir Arnold Toynbee, who feels obligated to explain the title of his marvelous book The World and The Wes t because he believes “it has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit—and hit hard—by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first” (Toynbee, 1952, pp. 1–2); Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which offers an alternative to the idealized conception of liberal democracy; John Gray, who critiques the universality of liberalism in Two Faces of Liberalism; and Homi Bhabha, a post-colonial theorist who presents a world of hybrid identities and localized culture in The Locations of Culture. Finally, Strayer and Coulborn, in the classical study Feudalism in History, reject the concept of uniformities in history. They argue, “no single description of feudalism has ever fitted with all the facts,” and hence, no single formula can possibly describe common elements in all selected feudal or partially feudal societies (Coulborn, 1965, pp. 3–4).

S. Moss, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Historian of Economics: Perspective on the History of Economic Thought; Brandon Dupont, The History of Economic Ideas; Alessandro Roncaglia, The Wealth of Ideas: A history of Economic Thought; Iain Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought.

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As inner-reflective ideas reflect their social context, the best way to understand our present is to understand the context of the ideas that have formed it. To acquire such an understanding in the present world, which is overrun by falsifications and value-laden assertions, we must embrace clarity and abandon the inclination to delude what constitutes the reality we are facing. As Harari warns us, “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it—and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding it will make it easier to control it” (Harari, 2018). There are countless examples of this dictatorial tendency. In the early twentieth century, a favorite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of “a people without a land (the Jews) to a land without a people (Palestine)” (Ibid.).9 Another example is Martin Bernal’s thought-provoking book, Black Athena, which illustrates that the conventional “truth” is not exactly a match made in heaven. My aim in using these examples is not to open old wounds, but to insist that we no longer can afford the luxury of indifference. More than two centuries ago, John Donne reminded us that we should feel a sense of belonging to the whole of the human race, and a sense of loss at every death, because it has taken something away from humankind, as he wrote: No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (As cited in Kastan, 2006, p. 193)

We need to change our views of the world so that the world can change accordingly. We are all descendants of those who fought to make the world a better place, so we can demand a world that values life and

9 In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir reaffirmed this clear violation aggression when she famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli parliament, in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter “p” does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? It is worth noting, however, in Arabic, “F” stands for “P”, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin. See Harari (2018) in The Guardian.

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lives above all else. This book is written to defend this world by arguing that the ideas that liberated one generation’s mindset centuries ago have become our present shackles. We must be reminded that the opinions of dead philosophers regarding the predicaments of their world cannot rescue us from the present nature of the world; their contexts, however, can enlighten us by revealing their irrelevance to the present day. We need context to remind us that people are not an undifferentiated mass to be standardized and made to conform at will. Standardization and conformity should not be regarded as the ultimate goals in life. No one has ever made such goals come true. To reverse the course of our world, William Jennings Bryan’s advice is persuasive: “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved” (Bryan & Bryan, 1909, p. 11). The effectiveness of our choices, however, depends on the sincerity of our overall intention. For instance, history teaches us that to retain one’s liberty when others are under the yoke of occupation and domination is an apparent misreading of what liberty means. Martin Niemöller, the German theologian and Lutheran pastor, expressed this fallacy best when he wrote: First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (As cited in Hockenos, 2018, Introduction)

Social Conditioning The geniuses and demons of our world live in our minds by how we perceive and describe them; for example, the designation of a terrorist depends on who one thinks he is.10 The cause of such blurriness is neither 10 Terrorism, as a noun, is formally defined as “the unlawful use of violence and intim-

idation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” However, as such, this definition is extremely problematic: (1) Does “unlawful use of violence” imply that we have lawful use of violence?; (2) Historians of wars would tell you that the notion of civilian is extremely vague, particularly from the point of view of those who target them; (3) What constitutes “political aims?” Is fighting against occupation by foreign

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epistemological complexity nor ontological difficulty, as Khatchadourian (1988) argues,11 nor is it related to a philosophical disagreement on whether a specific delineation is possible; it is the outcome of a purposeful composition that wishes to eliminate or minimize cases of mistaken identity. Otherwise, terrorism can be interpreted as self-defense, in which “an unlawful use of violence” turns into the “legitimate use of force” as one faces violence and aggression.12 This explains why the notion of terrorism is stripped from its context: to avoid confronting the reasons that instigate it. In addition, based on what we have all witnessed across the world for more than a half-century, ambiguity about the exact boundaries of the term also seems to provide a convenient haphazard façade for the perpetrators-in-chief to continue business as usual with total immunity from any condemnation or responsibility for their wicked deeds. The clues to why these and many similar degenerating developments are vastly prevalent in today’s world lie in how we have learned to perceive and relate to them. Our overall understanding of the world is often shaped by certain beliefs. These convictions are, more or less, the direct product of our social conditioning, our conformity to the “norms” that instruct inhabitants of society to think, believe, feel, want, and react in a manner that is approved and promoted by those in control. Even if these norms are outdated, false, misleading, or incompatible with the present world, we nevertheless comply because we have grown to trust them, particularly when seeing them adopted by everyone around us. This collective quality makes social conditioning tremendously effective and long-lasting. We see this effect vividly in the United States, where a group of people was taught that they had the divine right to own “other” human beings and consider

force consider political? The etymology of the word also brings us no closer to clarity and certain understanding. 11 Academically, however, debates on a single definition are far from over. See Teichman (1989). 12 Many believe in the right for an individual to use force to defend themselves (selfdefense), others (alter ego defense), including the use of deadly force (See Sangero, 2006). In this respect, people whose land is occupied can lawfully use force against occupiers; people whose livelihoods are threatened can legitimately use force against those threats; people who are subjected to violence and destruction can legally use force against the perpetrators, etc. Having said that, I also believe legitimacy through Law neither inherently furnishes a right to use violence nor justifies such a use. However, by considering the context under which a violent act appears, one can prevent it by avoiding the circumstances that led to aggression.

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them property. To reverse this collective mindset, no legislation or denial can help because the attitude is embedded in the fabric of society. The only way is to go back to where it started, acknowledge it as what it is, make a firm stand against it, and finally find a way back to the present by admitting it, compensating those who were harmed, and educate the public that the only race is the human race. This wicked conditioning is not limited to the United States but pervades all of Western history.13 Natural law tradition in eighteenth-century Europe, for instance, typically maintained that basic human nature and its requirements should be evident to all reasonable people. However, what seemed natural at the time was the result of the cruel social conditioning that promoted the inferiority of women, the acceptability of slavery, the colonization of others, etc. In these instances, we see the moral values that were promoted in eighteenth-century European societies. On the issue of inferiority of women during the period, Gerald Bergman writes, …a major plank of early evolution theory was the belief that women were intellectually and physically inferior to men. Female inferiority was a logical conclusion of the Darwinian world view because males were believed to be exposed to far greater selective pressures than females, especially in war, competition for mates, food and clothing. Conversely, women were protected from selection by norms that required adult males provide for and protect women and children. Darwinists taught that, as a result of this protection, natural selection operated far more actively on males than on females, producing male superiority in virtually all intellectual and skill areas. As a result, males became ‘more evolved’ than women. The women inferiority doctrine is an excellent example of the fact that armchair logic often has been more important in building Darwinism than fossils and other empirical evidence.” (Bergman, 2002, p. 379)

The notion of social conditioning may seem controversial or even conspiratorial. I can assure you that it is not. Many eminent scholars regard it as an integral part of contemporary society. Several classical

13 One may wonder why I am mainly emphasizing the West, since the whole world has similar, if not worse, experiences through the history. My reasoning, however, is simple. It is the West, not the whole world, which has claimed to be the sole flagship of virtue and have the high ground over all others for close to five hundred years. For this reason alone, we should hold Western nations to a higher standard of conduct.

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works have been written using it as a vital element of their core arguments. According to Mannheim (1954), one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century as well as one of the creators of the discipline of sociology of knowledge: In every society there are social groups whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society. We call these the “intelligentsia.” The more static a society is, the more likely is it that this stratum will acquire a well-defined status of the position of a caste in that society...[this intellectual strata] enjoyed a monopolistic control over the moulding of that society’s world-view, and over either the reconstruction or the reconciliation of the differences in the naïvely world-view of the other strata. (p. 9)

He later expands this view and claims, “The sociology of knowledge has set itself the task of solving the problem of the social conditioning of knowledge by boldly recognizing these relations [interrelations between thought and action] and drawing them into the horizon of science itself and using them as checks on the conclusions of our research” (Ibid., p. 237). In short, our knowledge of the world and ourselves is not our own, but is conditioned by those who constantly try to own us. In 1956, W. Beckerman wrote an illuminating article, “The Economist as a Modern Missionary,” with the intent to shed some light on one of the profound myths of modern economics. He confronts it head-on at the outset: ALTHOUGH economics has never divested itself fully of the stigma of “the dismal science,” it is surprising how many romantic doctrines it is used to support. One of the most prominent is the widespread belief in the possibility of rapidly accelerating the development of “under-developed areas.” Fundamentally the article of faith, which is propagated, is that the economic product of most under-developed areas could be made very much higher than it is today by means simply of a large injection of capital plus technical and economic “know-how” of various kinds. The White Man, in general, can and should supply the capital. The White economist or technologist can and should supply the know-how. The resemblance of this to the romantic belief in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the civilizing function of the White Man is too close to need much elaboration. The under-developed areas then were, of course, the areas which were under-developed spiritually rather than economically. But happily, these areas more or less coincide. In fact, it could be argued that the best way to

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define under-developed areas, or rather peoples, is as people who do not think that their mission in life is to show other people how to develop, on the grounds that a capacity for self-deception is the hallmark of an advanced society (witness a large number of psychiatrists required). The way in which the conception of the White Man’s burden has developed is also very clear. In the nineteenth century, the duty of the White Man was to carry into under-developed areas the elements of spiritual civilization, namely religion. If in some cases, the increase in the natives’ happiness was not obvious, this was irrelevant. The important thing was their souls. Today, the White Man’s duty is commonly assumed to be to carry into under-developed areas the elements of economic civilization and society looks to the economist to do his duty. If, in some cases, the increase in the natives’ happiness is still not patently obvious, this is not relevant. The important thing is “income.” (Beckerman, 1956, p. 108)

Two years later, John Kenneth Galbraith’s well-known work, The Affluent Society (1958 [1998]), confronts the broader social doctrine of more-is-better, which has been the Conventional Wisdom of the dominant paradigm since the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing tenfold boom in the population of England, a tradition that still insists on outdated trends, propensities, and assessments. The enemy of the conventional wisdom, Galbraith writes: …is not ideas but the march of events…the conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret, but to the audience’s view of the world. Since the latter remains with the comfortable and the familiar, while the world moves on, the conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence…the fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable. (Galbraith, 1958 [1998], p. 11)

The general flaw, as Galbraith sees it, is “that ideas are held over from one historical setting to another, where they are obsolete and ill-suited” (Stanfield, 1983, p. 589). He further elaborates on this point by stating, “The notion that wants do not becomes less urgent the more amply the individual is supplied is broadly repugnant to common sense. It is something to be believed only by those who wish to believe” (Galbraith, 1958 [1998], p. 124). It is repugnant to commonsense because more-is-better is an obstruction, which stands in the way of the economic progress that could be possible if the resources of industrial society were put to better

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use than creating an artificially constructed feast. Galbraith points out that the agent of this artificial conditioning is “the advertising and salesmanship,” which ironically contradicts the accepted capitalist principle of consumer sovereignty. Through advertisements, for instance, “One man’s consumption becomes his neighbor’s wish. This already means that the process by which wants are satisfied is also the process by which wants are created” (Ibid., p. 126). In this, a flaw in the system legitimizes itself: the production that satisfies wants cannot be justified if it also creates the wants. (Ibid., p. 124) Galbraith also underlines another detrimental impact of social conditioning: when consumers are persuaded to consume—or, as he puts it, “wants are synthesized”—the outcome is debt, as consumer demand “comes to depend more and more on the ability and willingness of consumers to incur debt. Advertising and emulation, the two dependent sources of desire, work across the society. They operate on those who can afford and those who cannot” (Ibid., p. 145), Debt is a well-known tool of social control, to the extent that sociologist Edward Ross describes it as a “prophylactic against mob mind” (Ross, 1917, p. 89). For instance, Tayyab Mahmud considers home mortgages such a form of control: “As organized finance took roots, captains of industry recommended that workers should be induced to ‘invest their saving in their homes and own them. Then they won’t leave and they won’t strike. It ties them down so they have a stake in our prosperity’” (Mahmud, 2015, p. 83). In retrospect, one may wonder about our role in shaping our lives and the world. Are we all bystanders who mindlessly follow the given instructions? Is it not pure hypocrisy to deny people social rights and then consider them citizens? Should we all be surprised to see vulgarity and disorder at the top of the food chain when self-interest is the only ideal principle of action? Is this an era of turmoil where the emerging disarray is decoded in terms of unanticipated changes and unintended consequences and, to the proverbial “man on the street,” politics seems unwilling and economics unable to make any sense, and social coherence is stretched beyond limits due to fundamental structural contradictions?14 The answers to these questions are: yes, we are bystanders; yes, it is hypocrisy; no, we should not be surprised; finally, Yes, with a followup caveat: descriptions such as “unanticipated changes” and “unintended 14 These flawed characterizations are most common in works of the professional intellectual class. For instance, see Katzenstein (2014, pp. 209–210).

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consequences” must be rejected because they are value-laden. In the context illustrated above, these sorts of categorizations are often intended to suggest that a bad thing happened and we should “get on with it.” So, people forgo responsibility for their deeds. It is a common insinuation that people are prone to do things they know well are wrong but choose to ignore without accepting any culpability. We have known this human attribute since Isaiah, but our contemporary prophets are more attentive, as they witness the “falling king” multiplied by millions. The significance of this devotion is vividly prevalent in Goethe’s Faust, the poetic drama that defies all common categories of both form and content, but is aesthetic and forceful: “I see my discourse leaves you cold; Dear Kids, I do not take offense; Recall: the Devil, he is old, Grow old yourselves, and he’ll make sense” (Goethe, Faust II, lines 6816–18). In addressing the audience, Mephistopheles is issuing a command: grow older so that you may understand me. Who was mindful of this advice? Not surprisingly, Max Weber, another German with a profound sense of ethos. However, from a political and epistemological perspective, Weber’s realism does not allow us to misread what Goethe intended to convey, an ethic of responsibility that is manifested in the responsibility for consequences. According to Weber, “The sentence; ‘the Devil is old, grow old to understand him!’ does not refer to age in terms of chronological years... Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly” (Weber, 1946, p. 46). In Politics as a Vocation, Weber points to two distinct ethics: an ethic of absolute/ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility. The former is often held by Weltanschauungs-politicians (career politicians who can roughly be described as pragmatists for their lack of imagination and insight) who gather masses around the catchphrase, “The World is stupid and base, not I. The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon others whom I serve and whose stupidity or baseness I shall eradicate” (Ibid.).15 The latter ethic acknowledges value obligations and assumes awareness of “responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility…Here I stand; I can do no others.’ That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding

15 For a more detailed discussion of this topic see Starr (1999).

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himself at some time in that position” (Weber, 1946, p. 47). Otherwise, no “summer’s bloom lies ahead of us.” Weber ends his essay by advising us not to conform to a mindset that limits possibilities, as “man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible” (Weber, 1946, p. 48). I must admit that it takes more than ethical ethos to reverse the present course of world affairs. One urgent need is to rethink the nature of the present issues and identify their principal causes. Supposing we do this right—by which I mean accepting that our ideological blinders have been our burdens for generations, preventing us from seeing things as they are—we can ascertain a stance that espouses a better future than the one knocking at the door.16 A stance that bears a clarity of mind and the spirit of unity in which “our great strengths lie,” in the words of Thomas Paine. Today, we appear dazed by the dreadful apathy that has been the hallmark of the ideological world, about which we have been warned by men like Alexander Hamilton and Malcolm X: “when you don’t stand for anything, you fall for everything.” And we are failing when people have died by the hundreds of thousands in the wealthiest country in the world because of the innate inequality revealed by COVID-19. Contrary to populist commentaries, these are selective killings on a grand scale in which victims are chosen not by the color of their skin, gender, or ethnicity but their socioeconomic status.17 It is imperative to comprehend the depth of what we are witnessing today: people are dying primarily not because their skin is dark or because they are ethnically identified as Hispanic but rather because of the system-driven poverty imposed on them. More accurately, preventable abject poverty is murdering human beings by the hundreds of thousands. That isn’t really all that surprising, this is an expected outcome in the wealthiest country in the world, a social selection if you would, in a society that has been constructed according to a caste system, in the words of Isabel Wilkerson.

16 Conceptually, the right way of doing things is to engage in critical assessment that has no air of circularity—or, for a better term, the circular reasoning fallacy, such as “you must obey the law, because it’s illegal to break the law,” knowing well that laws are made to be broken when they are found faulty. In terms of practical matters, I am referring the reader to an occasion when Confucius was asked for a single idea to guide a person’ action and answered, “What you don’t like done to yourself, don’t do to others.”. 17 See Rollston et al. (2020); Raghunath and Tan (2020); The Lancet Public Health (2021); Yaish et al. (2020).

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If anything, the legacy of 2020 for Americans is nothing more than the classic exhibition of a class conflict they are so reluctant to consider.18 The few jetted off to private islands or sanctuaries away from all unpleasant noises, while “essential” workers had no choice but to fill their roles, jeopardizing their own health and the well-being of their families. The middle classes were told to stay at home while their daily meals and other necessities would be dropped off at their doorstep. We all understood what “economy first” meant: a grim Faustian pact that forced the “havenots” to sacrifice so the “haves” could flourish still more. This was not a momentary lapse of judgment or even a necessary sacrifice in a moment of crisis but an ideological stand. A year into the pandemic, the main topics of discussion among the “representatives of the people” (e.g., raising a minimum wage that is lower today than four decades ago, or providing social assistance for those in despair through no fault of their own) are still considered as expenditure items because the monetary valuation of life surpassed all other considerations. Never mind the fact that these policies, even if they were passed by the legislative branch, are still far removed from making any headway against the depth of structural problems people face today.19 Some may view my argument as dull and scientifically meritless. To prove the point, they recite Richard Dawkins, who writes in The Selfish Gene about “a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live…. if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 3). In reply, I only point 18 See Gindin (2021); Khazan (2020); Jordan (2020); Jacob (2020). 19 In most likelihood, an increase in the minimum wage will be offset by price increases,

as indicated by many private small businesses, or the increase would be passed on to consumers, most of whom are the population who saw their wages increased. A more effective and sustainable approach is if Congress makes the law part of the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA), permanently demanding that the federal minimum wage keep pace with workers’ productivity and inflation, adjusted retrospectively. In this respect, and according to the AFL-CIO, the minimum wage would be $24 an hour. Moreover, if the reason of the increase is to relieve minimum wage earners from the high cost of living, the best policy is to provide free health coverage, since health care devours most this group’s earned income. So why has such a policy become the main topic of discussion? For me, the answer is obvious: the more we debate about non-issues the less we need to discuss the real issue. The more two political parties engage in spurious quarrels, the less effort they need to diverge attention from systematic malfunction.

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out, based on current scientific knowledge, that humans possess approximately 30,000 genes and that humans and chimpanzees differ in only 1.6% of their DNA (Svante, 2001, pp. 1219–1220). Suppose Dawkins is right that “we are born selfish”20 and I am wrong that selfishness is a learned behavior. In that case, this trivial genetic difference must account for all of the human predispositions that are allegedly based on a universal genetic law, as well as the spiritual convictions that separate us from apes! Others, particularly those in positions of power like Congressman Mo Brook, claim that they express the views and values of their constituencies when pointing out that “good, healthy” people should not be “subsidizing” others’ care. My response is short and simple: since the Greek masters, we have been taught that people are the most valuable resource in the human world. In fact, without people, healthy or not, there is neither a political system nor an economic mechanism. In other words, people define our plural existence. What is wrong with today’s politics and economics is an absence of people. The validity of this fact is more apparent in, and relevant to, a capitalist economic system, where human labor and ingenuity transform material objects into commodities, all of which are intended for exchange. Only in a market economy are subsidies commonly used to facilitate exchange and offset market failures (e.g., misallocation of resources). In fact, more often than not, we lavishly subsidize failures against the principle that market forces should determine which enterprise should survive or fail. For instance, when banks fail due to their predatory behaviors and fraudulent accounting practices, they are immediately rescued. This is committing a cardinal sin in the market square, where such an error of judgment is written off by Wall Street bankers as the cost of doing business. There is another, more important part to my answer. A significant portion of the population (e.g., the lower and middle classes) have been disproportionally (relative to their earned income) subsidizing, via wealth tax, care for others who indeed do not need such support, including major banks, pharmaceutical and agriculture giants, the oil industry, etc. Contrary to what we have been told, a wealth tax is not a novel idea with unpredictable consequences. It has been in place in this country for decades, in the form of a tax on properties such as homes, business inventories, lands, etc. However, what is unique about the wealth tax in the

20 Dawkins (2006, p. 3).

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United States, compared to other affluent democracies, is that it does not include stocks and bonds, mainly held by a fraction of the population. In other words, the only group excluded from paying the wealth tax in the United States is the one who holds almost all the wealth.21 Senator Warren expresses similar sentiments when she states, “You’ve been paying a wealth tax for years. They just call it a property tax. I just want their tax to include the diamonds, the yachts, and the Rembrandts.”22

“This is not Who We Are” A broader response must be made regarding the nature of this lack of empathy and the context in which it formed. Let me start by drawing attention to common but misleading terms like “political polarization,” “divided nation,” and the even fancier “survivorship bias,” which have been put forward to justify the prevailing lack of empathy among a significant portion of the population. Their common quality stems from the conventional view that reduces everything to a measurable singularity and regularly “misses the forest for the trees” by either regarding people’s apathy as a lack of feeling (dispassion) or depicting it as a psychological disorder such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, or dementia that can be medically treated (Ishizaki & Mimura, 2011). In fact, since man has been Enlighted around the eighteenth century, our main objective is to measure the world rather than understand it. At the risk of being overconfident, I would say that none of us was born with a predisposition for indifference toward others. Such a deficiency is not contagious; we can’t catch it and turn into an apathetic individual by not wearing a mask. A lack of empathy toward others is a learned social attitude, a benchmark of social conditioning, in which disconnection from others has been made so routine that, when the worldwide pandemic drove massive stock market gains, no one seemed surprised by the disconnect. (Dure, 2020) We all go about our lives, desensitized and unaware that the danger “lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it” (Arendt, 2007, p. 201). Our numbness, as Trump’s presidency adequately illustrated, should not be interpreted as a shortage of 21 According to the report by Federal Reserve Board in Washington D. C., as of 2018, the wealthiest 10% owned 70% of the country’s wealth. (Batty et al., 2019). 22 https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1122314100363579398. understanding of the issue see Li (2020).

For

a

better

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feelings and passions. It is a product of a process that we all consent to that has aimed to reconfigure the interaction between oneself and others by disconnecting individuals from collective awareness—in the words of Emile Durkheim, “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society” (Durkheim, 1893 [2013], p. 63). As Foucault suggests, an individual’s practices of self and sentiments are not something that the individual invents by himself but are collections of institutional roles and patterns imposed on him by his society and cultural evaluations (Fornet-Betancourt et al., 1987, p. 122). These societal values and mindsets generally reflect ideologies and perceptions promoted by the dominant classes; for instance, when there is discontent and grieving about murdering black men, the country runs out of ammunition for guns (Brown, 2020). This language is misleading, first and foremost, because terms like “political polarization” and “divided nation” hint at a transitory quality of the behavior: it is a temporary anomaly that, if treated, will go away. This sense of impermanence feeds an ingenuine sentiment—“this is not who we are”—which eventually shifts expectations to another false direction when its fictional nature is revealed. This is a typical evasion-ploy, often deployed when the gatekeepers of power feel threatened. A historical mindset testifies to how detached those in positions of power have been and how far they are willing to go to avoid the reality waiting on the horizon. However, the main lesson of history is that nothing can prevent the manifestation of what has been carved in the past. Today, the majority of the world understands what the subjectification of man (as property) means, the motives and the rationale for establishing transatlantic slavery in the Age of Enlightenment,23 and who was responsible for enslaving human beings for profit.24 These are not value-laden observations, but demonstrable facts. For instance, using the framework of bookkeeping, 23 There are plenty of studies on this issue. For instance, see Hugh (1999). 24 A few points need to be clarified here. First, slavery has been an integral part of

human wickedness since the dawn of civilization. However, considering human beings property, justifying their enslavement by the reason of racial inferiority, and then commodifying them through trade to the so-called New World, should certainly be regarded as the product of the West. Second, the peculiarity of the Enlightenment is not so much that Western colonization (or better to say looting and vandalism) of the world reached its peak during the era, or that slavery was endorsed by those who are now considered its spiritual fathers (e.g., John Locke), but the fact that it claimed liberty was a natural human right, but also argued for slavery based on a hierarchy of race. (see Jönsson, 2018).

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Tyson and Oldroyd (2019) ascertain: “Belief in progress through reason, the common denominator of Enlightenment thinking, was not generally evident in the management and accounting practices on plantations and that the utility of accounting to slaveholders was limited. These practices were not geared toward improving productivity. Instead, short-term gains were achieved by driving the slaves harder, or longer-term ones by treating slaves more benevolently to extend life spans or acquiring new plantations to expand capacity” (p. 212). Ironically, we are witnessing the same motives, rationale, and principles dominating our world today. Some, perhaps, may find my reading and characterization of “this is not who we are” insensitive or outright offensive. Such a statement is made with good intentions, they would say. More importantly, pragmatism (they would argue) is sensible politics that gets things done because politics with a capital “P” is party politics, which is about building consensus—that is, accepting that nobody is right and everybody correct. This means, in politics, we face competition over interests and power. This is what “good politics” is all about; a process of competitive claimsmaking by rival parties to mobilize support in the direction of their particular interests. Any alternative approaches are not only naïve but asking for a confrontation, which is the last thing a stable democracy needs. In short, telling the truth about anything is “bad politics.” Indeed, the argument goes, we have made progress at both the national and international levels. A Person of Color was elevated to the presidency; women are in high places; we have seen the first Native American as a member of the Biden administration; Richard Grenell, the former Acting Director of National Intelligence, was the first openly gay member of an American administration (Trump’s cabinet). Internationally, Max Roser closes debates on global progress when he informs us that “the number of people in extreme poverty fell by 130,000 since yesterday” (Roser, 2016). I fully support the notion of “bad politics” and concur that “telling the truth is bad politics,” particularly for those who have chosen politics as a career. Having said that, I must add that our present state is the product of “good politics.” I know, by saying that, I will lose some of you. But ultimately, we are bound to make a judgment as to where we stand and how to move forward. Believing that telling the truth is unwise is only effective if this view resolves the problems at hand, and it’s doubtful that deception has done much to address the underlying structural unfitness of the system we so deeply idolize and so dearly ask

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the world to pursue. I truly do not see the benefits of “good politics” anywhere in the world, unless one believes hypothetically that things could be much worse if we disregarded this approach, which deserves no response. At the international level, I will not engage in a dialogue here about the accuracy of conventional claims like the one made by Max Roser. It will suffice to mention that one of the U.S.’ most celebrated economists and World Bank chief economist Paul Romer was forced to give up managing its research department because he had finally had enough of “good politics.” His crime was bad politics: in an exchange with a dozen other economists in October 2016 regarding growth models in the World Bank’s analysis of individual countries, Mr. Romer sharply criticized how the bank handled its economic reports and accused his colleagues of “shameless self-promotion”: I’ve never in my professional life encountered professional economists who say so many things that are easy to check and turn out not to be true… Imagine a field of science in which people publish research papers with data that are obviously fabricated…When someone points this out, the Internal Justice Bureau steps in [and] says that the concerns do not meet the burden of proof required for them to take action. Nothing happens. So in this equilibrium, it is perfectly rational to fake the data without even bothering to hide what is going on. (Donnan, 2018)

He went on to say: “There is no way to bootstrap this field back to a state in which people put effort into maintaining a reputation as someone who is a source of reliable information” (Ibid.). I am not claiming there has been no economic growth; far from it, the world economy has grown, but such expansion has only benefited a minuscule fraction of the population while the rest have been left behind. For instance, India ranks 7th on nominal GDP ranking by country, behind France and Italy. It has 119 billionaires who collectively have over $300 billion; however, it sits among the poorest nations in the world (102nd out of 117 nations) and ranks 94th out of 107 countries in terms of food deprivation (hunger).25 On the global scale, the domination by a few is more visible, as 130 out of

25 In other words, take 119 individuals out of the equation, and India will fall to the bottom. The reason is simple: if Jeff Bezos moves to my neighborhood, we will jump to the top of the richest districts in the country, while many still collect unemployment benefits.

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195 nations have not received a single COVID-19 vaccine as of the end of March 2021. We can now move to the ostensible achievements of “good politics.” Let us start with a fact. Unlike other political agendas like launching invasions, providing subsidies for corporations, and passing regressive tax cuts, resources are always considered scarce when the provision of public goods is under consideration. Rivalry over resources for an exclusive interest is the normal frame of mind in the politics of the dominant paradigm; competition pits one group against another to access leftover (scarce) resources for interests that are neither identical nor far-reaching, but disjointed and divisive. Therefore, zero-sum thinking overrides all possible alternatives, such as an allocation of wealth (resources) that is beneficial to the public as a whole, including free education, housing, health care, etc. Deprived of a collective identity, each alienated group in the political arena takes on a designated identity (e.g., skin color, gender, ethnicity, etc.) to represent its own interests and hopes for a seat at the table. In this light, the possible delegation of resources or rights to one group implies that these are particular treatments or privileges rather than general entitlements.26 This procedural adaptation of identity underlies what is known as “identity politics,” which compels us to rejoice when one or a few members of any of the exclusive alliances are included in a governing administration or even becomes the head of state. Can such outright inclusion be considered progress for the whole or a step forward for the sustainable advancement of the group’s interests? My answer is resounding NO. The reason is that one’s conventional identity does not represent the essential nature of the self as a social entity but is largely a manifestation of the divisive categories imposed by social conditioning mechanisms, which themselves are detrimental to the cohesion and sociability of a community and hence are not conducive to actual/real social progress. In short, people in the plural sense, not interests, are represented in politics. Judith Butler captures the essence of this argument by stating, “My sociality precedes my agency”(As cited in Famisaran, 2008, p. 1). Indeed, Butler goes so far as to argue that gender, as an 26 I call them “rights” because that is how they are depicted. For instance, a guarantee for equal treatment of all citizens is not considered inherent in one’s status as a citizen but must be given to a particular group (e.g., the Equal Rights Amendment, which has still not been added to the Constitution after two centuries).

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objective, natural thing, does not exist: “Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed” (Butler, 1988, p. 527). Gender, according to Butler, is solely and completely a social construction, and therefore is open to change and contestation: “Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis” (Ibid., p. 522). Butler’s conception of identity as constituted through performativity offers a kind of political representation in which the act creates the identity. Like Hannah Arendt, Butler views acting as “an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political” (Butler, 2015, p. 9). In this light, as Taylor points out, collective acts of political protest perfectly illustrate the idea of performative assembly Butler intends to articulate (Taylor, 2017, p. 171).27 More important is what Butler accepts from Arendt: “Freedom does not come from you or me; it can and does happen as a relation between us, or indeed, among us. So this is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality. Indeed, there is no human, in her view, if there is no equality. No human can be human alone” (Butler, 2015, p. 89). And no group can safeguard its interests as long as the interests of other groups are imperiled and overlooked. In this respect, the notion of identity politics is extremely deceitful in the sense that it is exclusive; it does not represent broader and more significant socioeconomic categories. For instance, within a frame of identity politics, a well-off insider who happens to have a “dark” skin color or an “undesired” ethnic background does not represent the millions and millions of individuals who may share similar identities but cannot keep themselves out of poverty, afford healthcare, or own a home with their wages.28 27 Examples of such political actions are abundant: at the global level, we have the 2019 worldwide climate rallies; at the national level, the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration was a significant example; and at the moral level, the 1987 Palestinian protest against occupation stands alone. 28 Despite the fact that the ethos of the New Deal insisted that the government provide basic economic goods so that individuals could be free to express themselves however they

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Identitypolitics is deceptive because it is confined to a distinct ruling political class that is mainly responsible for safeguarding the internal hierarchies of power. It is a scheme that does not intend to form alliances and solidarity across groups but diminishes politics to gaining recognition of ornamental artifacts, rather than a collective being. This is why unions will never be recognized as a legitimate political identity, even if labor unions represent millions of workers in many industries and have been recognized under U.S. law since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. From a broader perspective, this obvious misrepresentation of interests is also readily apparent when one considers the interests of the American people and those commonly marked as “America’s interests.” While the latter—let’s say in the Middle East—is confined to “the small number of energy companies, Wall Street banks, the political establishment, and their well-paid lobbyists,” the former group hardly has any interests in the region, except for tourist attractions.29 In fact, even the government of the United States is inept at determining its interests because the relationship between the government and corporations has become so close that, when presidents travel overseas, they are accompanied by representatives of corporations and banks.30 This is not a new development, but it has been exacerbated and become prevalent as the present ideological paradigm has taken command. The root of this deficiency goes back to the Founding Fathers of this country, who perceived the power of government as the central threat to liberty, in the sense that they were willing to allow an armed militia to counter and challenge such power (the Second Amendment to the Constitution). Indeed, the drafters of the Constitution, Charles Derber tells us, “were all part of the propertied elite. Collectively, they were as much concerned with limiting the power of the people as they were with limiting the power of government. The protection of private power serves their own interests, and one of the chose and to experiment with alternative lifestyles, free from the burden of providing for themselves or for others. 29 It is often argued that Americans’ interests in Middle East are affirmed because of oil. However, the United States is the top oil-producing country globally, and the three next top oil-producing countries are Russia, Canada, and China (Investopedia, 2021). 30 For instance, according to the late Helen Thomas, “On President Clinton’s trip to Africa in 1998, there were sixty eight people attached as part of the white House delegation, sixteen members of Congress and a twenty-four member ‘citizens’ delegation’ ranging from bank presidents to investment corporation representatives” (Thomas, 1999, p. 174).

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great dangers that John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and others sought to head off was a populist challenge to property rights” (Derber & Nader, 1998, p. 175). Along with many others, Harari shares a similar sentiment when he says that the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “meant simply that the state could not, except in unusual circumstances, confiscate a citizen’s private property or tell him what to do with it. The American order thereby upheld the hierarchy of wealth, which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed as representing the immutable laws of nature” (Harari, 2014, pp. 133–134). The state’s loss of authority over its political, economic, and social affairs is not unique to the United States but a global development that has also been vigorously examined and reliably demonstrated by many in the fields of Political Economy and International Relations. For example, Susan Strange in The Retreat of the State lays out a framework for analyzing the “who-gets-what” of world society according to four structures. In this framework, power over others and ideological values are executed within and across borders by: . . . those who are in a position to offer security, or to threaten it [e.g., Facebook, Twitter]; by those who are in a position to offer, or to withhold, credits [e.g., private banks that led to a bizarre notion of nation’s insolvency, i.e., Greece]; by those who control access to knowledge [e.g., technological/media corporations that monopolized knowledge].31 Last but not least, there is the production structure, in which power is exercised over what is produced, where and by whom on what terms and conditions. (Strange, 1996, p. ix)

She then concludes, non-state authorities [corporations] “have come to play a significant role in determining who-gets-what in the world system” 32 (Strange, 1996, p. 54). In this respect, even the notion that a national government represents the will of the people is questionable at best. It is truly bewildering that, in the country that claims it is the greatest democracy on Earth, the president can declare war on any sovereign nation in the world without express Congressional consent (e.g., the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, the

31 See Cozzi and Galli (2021). 32 See also de Cecco (1976); and Turner (1978).

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Afghanistan War of 2001, the Iraq War of 2002, etc.)33 but cannot control easy access to firearms. Now, we have arrived at the point to address “this is not who we are.” For one thing, the phrase has become the cornerstone of “good politics,” the construction message that signifies American denial. Let me refresh our memories by going back a few years. Former President Obama liked to use it even before he became president. In a 2007 speech on Iraq, he said: “A war to disarm a dictator has become an open-ended occupation of a foreign country. This is not America. This is not who we are.” Then, in 2013, Obama’s reaction to the CIA torture report published in 2012 was simple: “This is not who we are” (Capital Gazette, 2014). A year later, his former chief of staff and former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, said exactly the same thing while apologizing for years of systematic torture of suspects by the city’s police. In 2015, the president of Oklahoma University, David Boren, uttered the same phrase after fraternity members were filmed chanting racist epithets on a coach bus. Shortly after, the leadership of the fraternity in question, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, released a statement that said, among other things: “This is absolutely not who we are” (Dowling, 2015). Then in 2021, after the spectacle at U.S. Capitol, a statement from a bipartisan and bicameral group of elected representatives was released, beginning, “The behavior we witnessed in the U.S. Capitol is entirely un-American.” In the following days, several former presidents also expressed similar sentiments: George W. Bush, the man responsible for the obliteration of Iraq and Afghanistan, which drove the region as well as the world into unprecedented chaos, said, “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic–-not our democratic republic” and Jimmy Carter, a president who committed human rights violations and whose administration

33 According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war. The President, meanwhile, derives the power to direct the military after a Congressional declaration of war from Article II, Section 2, which names the President Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. These provisions require cooperation between the President and Congress regarding military affairs, with Congress funding or declaring the operation and the President directing it. Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Presidents have often engaged in military operations without express Congressional consent. These operations include the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, the Afghanistan War of 2001 and the Iraq War of 2002.” See Legal Information Institute (LLI) article on War Powers.

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assisted the right-wing Salvadoran government in late 1980 to form its death squad, stated, “This is a national tragedy and is not who we are as a nation” (Kendi, 2021). This is what happens in “good politics,” where “consensus-building” is a tradition and “denial” a strategy to avoid reality. On the former, Stephen Bronner notes that such a tradition often “generates conflicts…especially given the narrowing of contemporary political discourse; highlighting what is distinctive about them is probably more important than ever before. Consensus is the death of political theory… Political theory should never serve as the handmaiden of political practice” (Bronner, 1994, pp. 1–2). Unlike the dominant process, which can be summarized as “wheeling and dealing,” politics only gains meaning only if it has principal beliefs and convictions, the grounds upon which diagnoses and resolutions are made in light of the problem at hand. Policies-basedin-consensus are a mere public relation scheme. What does it mean to claim a “rescue plan” reduced child poverty by half for a fixed interval? Why is child poverty tolerated, to begin with, in the richest country in the world? And why does rescuing children from poverty have to be temporary rather than permanent? It is profoundly cruel to lift children out of a wicked situation only to put them back in it. Another example is the attempt to regulate gun sales. If guns are the problem, why not eliminate them for good? Well, you may say, it is not easy: gun lobbyists are strong and influential. However, that may be because the politics of “consensus-building” has made them so. When there are no principles, nothing works the way it’s supposed to from the very beginning. However, I suspect such an evaluation is politically inconvenient for career politicians in “good politics,” whose occupation is to formulate hollow administrative solutions for the ever-increasing socioeconomic malaises of a nation (and a world) drained by lies and ineffective policies. Nevertheless, these politicians steadily trim their sail for the seas where sailing is easy. “Good politics” is making us into a one-dimensional society/world that insists on denying reality through beliefs, norms, and values drawn from prepackaged, context-agnostic ideologies and feeble practices. In these circumstances, thinking is also becoming onedimensional: everything is viewed in terms of a single scale (“good vs. bad,” “us vs. them,” “democracy vs. tyranny,” “civilized vs. Evil,” etc.). When thinking is not one-dimensional, we are able to be critical, an

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insight needed to understand reality.34 Catchphrases of “good politics” like “this is not who we are” are often designed to defuse tensions and achieve some momentary distraction before the sobering reality prevails again. In the introduction to Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Douglas Kellner warns us about such a reality: “One-dimensional society operates by steering erotic and destructive energies into social controlled modes of thoughts and behavior. Aggressive behavior thus provides a social bond, unifying those who gain in power and self-esteem through identifying with forms of aggression against shared objects of hate. This trend is all too visible in current American society.” The fact is that the dominant system could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus, and, with it the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly abandoned its grip of power, and it is utopian to think that any ever will. We must go back to see how we have ended up here, in a system that has no humanity and never included all of its people. As Martin Luther King Jr wrote: One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power. It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today. (King, 1968)

34 The following epitomizes the point. As Iraqis revolted against the British Indian Empire in 1920, T. E. Lawrence wrote the following comment: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows” (Calameo).

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Mannheim, K. (1954). Ideology and Utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. Harcourt, Brace & Co. Raghunath, N., & Tan, T. (2020, September). The impact of social stratification on morbidity during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Renwick, C. (2017). Bread for all: The origins of the welfare state. Penguin. Ritzer, G. (2011). Sociological theory (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill. https://archive. org/details/SociologicalTheory8thEditionGeorgeRitzerUploadedByUnivers ityOfSargodha.TaimoorAli. Rollston, et al. (2020, May 5). The Coronavirus does discriminate: How social conditions are shaping the COVID-19 pandemic. Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School. http://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/blog/soc ial-conditions-shape-covid. Roser, M. (2016, December 23). Proof that life is getting better for humanity, in 5 charts. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/140 62168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty. Ross, E. A. (1917). Social Psychology: An outline and source book. MacMillan. Samuels, W. J. (2003). Charles Henry Hull’s syllabus of lectures on the History of Economic theories—Cornell University, 1895. In W. J. Samuels (Ed.), Histories of Economic thought: Research in the history of Economic thought and methodology (Vol. 21, Part 2). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Sangero, B. (2006). Self-defence in criminal law. Bloomsbury Publishing. Simmel, G. (1976). Der conflict der modernen culture[Conflict in Modern Culture]. In P. A. Lawrence (Trans.), Georg Simmel: Sociologist and European. Thomas Nelson Publisher. Stanfield, J. R. (1983). The affluent society after twenty-five years. Journal of Economic Issues, 17 (3), 589–607. Stark, W. (2010). Sociology of knowledge: Toward a deeper understanding of the history of ideas. Routledge. Starr, B. E. (1999). The structure of Max Weber’s ethic of responsibility. The Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 (3), 407–434. Strange, S. (1996). The retreat of the state: The diffusion of power in the world economy. Cambridge University Press. Svante, P. (2001). The human Genome and our view of ourselves. Science, 291, 1219–1220. Taylor, D. (2017). Review: Butler and Arendt on appearance, performativity, and collective political action. Arendt Studies, 1, 171–176. Teichman, J. (1989). How to define terrorism. Philosophy, 64(250), 505–517. The Lancet Public Health. (2021, January 20). Covid-19-break the cycle of inequality. The Lancet Public Health, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/S24682667(21)00011-6. Thomas, H. (1999). Front row at the White House. Simon & Schuster.

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Toynbee, A. (1952). The World and the West. Oxford University Press. Turner, L. (1978). Oil companies in the international system. Allen and Unwin for RIIA. Tyson, T. N., & Oldroyd, D. (2019). Accounting for slavery during the enlightenment: Contradiction and interpretation. Accounting History, 24(2), 212. Veblen, T. (March 27, 2021). International encyclopedia of the social sciences. https://www.encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/ social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/veblen-thorstein-0. Weber, M. (1946). Politics as a vocation. Oxford University Press. Yaish et al. (Eds.). (2020). The consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic for inequality. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. https://www.sci encedirect.com/journal/research-in-social-stratification-and-mobility/specialissue/10BV3KNP6QD.

CHAPTER 2

Ideas as a Medium

This chapter aims to provide a re-appraisal of the dominant ideas (i.e., democracy, capitalism) that have commonly been considered apart from their historical developments and cultural affiliations to set up universal benchmarks, inherently distorting political reality. Here, I suggest that understanding historical and cultural specificities is a necessary condition for understanding, applying, or adopting these concepts. To deny this proposition means to believe that they do contain elements of timeless and perennial values, which defeats the purpose of studying what they convey: their social context. The essential belief is that each idea can be applied universally, replicating some predetermined set of “fundamental concepts” or “perennial values” without considering the social bedrock in which it was conceived. The idea is universal but is irrelevant and elusive without its context. A breach of this rule seems to be the primary source of the prevalent confusion in most conventional policy formulation and orthodox approaches in social science. It is easy to label such an error as an intellectual blunder. It is equally evident that a misjudgment of this sort reflects the world we live in. The history of such misleading exercises is marked by the employment of “fairy tale” vocabularies that carry the traces of everyday language and experience but are mainly the products

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_2

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of the efforts of dominant institutions, which explains why these expressions are incompatible with the innate characteristics of the concepts they presume to represent.1 This is a misrepresentation that has prevented us from seeing the dominant ideas for what they are, a falsification that has become an integral part of the smart world, in which everyone comes installed with cognitive instructions that underline what is good and desirable and what is not. In other words, we are taught to see an approximation of reality—to see what we need to see, which is constantly in flux according to circumstances—and not how things are. This is a rational mechanism founded in abstract and outdated ideologies, which allows people to legitimize the structure of domination through their subjective reality. No doubt there is science to prove this. As Donald Hoffman, cognitive psychologist, writes, “An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct” (Hoffman, 2019). However, we are not extinct—at least not yet—but we are disoriented, frustrated, and alienated due to rampant deception. Duplicities, either official or unofficial, have “paid off,” allowing the system to endure various crises, but transformed people into a messy lump of discordant individuals. Throughout this ordeal, the setting that has emerged, mainly from the 1970s onward, is a brilliantly appropriate dystopic stage on which poet-cum-idealogues play the roles of puppeteers orchestrating spectacles. This is significant, considering that “in 95% of the years in U.S. history, all but 11 years in U.S. history, the United States has been involved in some form of war or other combat.”2 Under these circumstances, submission to dubious official narratives and norms becomes the standard mode of thought and value, even when it becomes clear that we have been fed outright lies (e.g., Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction). This is because the common man does not assert these ideas but merely follows them. He is deprived of assuming any basic principles necessary to empower his community as a collective and 1 For informative discussions on political language, see Wolin (2004, pp. 12–17). 2 See the interview with David Vine, the author of The United States of War: A Global

History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State at Democracy Now! (2020).

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unified group. This is where man’s self-interest rules him and compliance with the dominant paradigm becomes his attitude of mind, rather than the chosen principle of his life.3 This leaning constitutes his overall outlook; official lies override truths and facts he may observe or propositions he may dispute. We are witnessing the emergence of a model of society, particularly among nations that have adopted the dominant ideas to construct their governing bodies, which creates fertile ground for mendacity, vulgar conduct, widespread deception, and pervasive corruption. I perceive these foul behaviors as the specific historical and cultural products of the prevailing dominant civilization. They reflect a particular set of social values and practices that articulate and disseminate certain viewpoints, appeals, and responses, developed in institutions that are principally controlled by the ruling class. Understanding this conduct depends on understanding the formal justification of prevailing beliefs. Hence, managing deep-seated social, political, and economic problems is linked to the prevalent modes of control and governance. In such a structure, unsurprisingly, the dominant orthodoxy is committed to deluded views: persisting social inequality and injustice are depicted as policy issues rather than an inherent structural feature of the ruling system; institutional bigotry is “an ideology of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the physical characteristics of race”4 that can be eradicated through a legislative process; democracy is portrayed to have all the good and desirable attributes needed to advance human communities worldwide, but when it turns out to be detrimental and divisive, the fault always resides elsewhere (e.g., with individuals). None of these conventional positions can stand against the reality of the present. The widening wealth gap in the United States, the signifier of today’s governing paradigm, confirms this claim. For instance, the median net worth of a white household in Boston is $247,500, while for black Bostonians it is $8; net assets are $256,500 and $700, respectively (Johnson, 2017; Muñoz et al., 2015). Moreover, in one instance, we were told that Barack Obama’s election illustrated the virtues of the democratic system. However, when Donald Trump became the president, he claimed that “the system was rigged against him” even when he used it to win the 2016

3 Self-interest implies man’s separation from his community, sustained by his compliance with the official narratives. 4 See D’Souza (1995).

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election.5 The objective reality is they are both parts of the same power structure that leans on democracy to gain legitimacy. However, what Obama lacks, Trump has in abundance; he epitomizes the core liberal principle of male egocentricity. Trump, Trumpism, and all of its “undesired” traits are inevitable products of the mechanism that can be traced back to groups of Enlightened Caucasian men of European descent, who claimed that an individual was entitled to unlimited self-development, while their governments engaged in rampant and vicious colonization of the world. This is the mindset adopted by the Founding Fathers of the United States, who declared “all men are created equal” as they were served by their slaves at home. So, they established the wicked structure that still operates today as a caste system, in the words of Isabel Wilkerson. The United States began, Wilkerson explains, when: the people who were the colonists, who were British, placed themselves, obviously, at the top of the hierarchy and then imported, brought people in, from Africa to be the enslaved people, who would automatically, by definition, be at the very bottom of the caste system, having no rights whatsoever, not even rights over their own bodies. And so, there also were, of course, the Indigenous people, who were the First Nations of this land, who then were in some ways exiled from the caste system that was being created, as in a bipolar caste system. So, in many respects — and I also say that they are, in some ways, outside — forced to be outside of the caste system in the ways that the colonists devised it, by forcing them off of their land. The bipolar caste system meant that there were basically two main groups that were the foundation that the country created. And then, anyone entering this bipolar caste system then had to figure out where did they fit in, had to somehow navigate what had been created as a two-tiered system. And the infrastructure that had been created had to also decide — you know, actually assigned people to roles on the basis primarily of what they looked like and what their lineage might have been, what part of the world did they come from. (Democracy Now!, 2020)

5 A significant portion of criticism of Trump seems mainly about his demeanor and

vulgarities, which incidentally has generated considerable pecuniary rewards for leading mainstream media conglomerates (see Huddleston, 2016). In fairness, many across the world, including myself, would rather dine with Obama than Trump. Nevertheless, many people are pleased with Trump’s non-aggression policy, which in itself is an anomaly among American presidents.

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Wilkerson’s brilliant understanding of the American system was also shared by Frederick Douglass, who, on July 5, 1852, gave the keynote address at an Independence Day celebration, declaring, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, you may rejoice, I must mourn…Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us” (Douglass, 1852).6 In perspective, today’s desire to go back to the normal past illustrates how miscued our understanding of our present condition is. To achieve justice, first and foremost, requires a transformation in how members of the community relate to one another, similar to Toni Morrison’s words in Paradise: “Home is not a little thing.” It is not hard to trace an inherent error in yearning for a “return to normal,” as we have been conditioned to regard all things in their presumed “normal” setting and thus submit to the official instructions of the highly individualized mind. We submit without thinking because we can hardly think outside of the given “normal” frame of mind. Whatever is not “normal,” we reject, which is why we remain comfortably silent and indifferent to the conduct of our leaders when they refer to other sovereign countries as “shitholes,” implement official assassination programs and call them drone policies, and obliterate ancient civilizations to “civilize” them with total immunity. The prevailing climate of opinion is that we cannot seemingly understand our world unless we fit it into a given frame of normality. This is the essence of the “us versus them” mindset that fails to see “the freedom of each would be the condition of the freedom of all” (Sherover, 1992). When all is not well, it can only be due to the decaying ideas and institutions that persist in surviving at any cost. This is the crisis of the decaying paradigm, whose central ideas are no longer relevant but only “dominant.” As Gramsci brilliantly observes, “the crisis consists precisely rests in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be re-born” (Gramsci, 1997, p. 276). The central theme in this book is that new ideas cannot be born as long as the world is grasped in light of the old ones. For human communities to survive and overcome our collective deeds, we need to invigorate our thinking and mindset. This pressing rejuvenation, first and foremost, depends on our willingness to abandon previously dominant thoughts. We must recognize them as experiments that have frequently failed but are commonly praised because “there are no better ideas.” However, there is

6 Read the speech in full at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html.

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a simple reason there are no better ideas: no one has bothered to think of them. This study argues that much-admired Western ideas, ranging from capitalism to communism and liberalism to neoliberalism, are mistakenly viewed as universal, in the sense of a one-size-fits-all garment. They are nothing of the sort. The ways they have been formulated and conceptualized, within a particular intellectual horizon of age and society, are determined, I argue, not so much by fortune and haphazard intellectual curiosity as by specific historical and cultural circumstances that underlined the basic concepts at people’s disposal for investigating and describing their world’s shortfalls and needs. Without a doubt, such descriptions and ideas were needed to deal with various political or domestic experiences. Still, they cannot be seen as universally relevant across the world, since the circumstances in which they developed depended on local experiences and necessities. Different mindsets take similar events in very different lights.7 The corollary of this is that every society conceives ideas and meets new ideas according to its local context, its understanding, its—as Susanne K. Langer, the distinguished American thinker, puts it—“fundamental way of seeing things, that is to say, with its own question, its peculiar curiosity” (Langer, 1980, p. 6). The arguments in this study all rest on this basic premise.

Universal Ideas and Context I vividly remember the day I picked up Aldous Huxley’s book, Ends and Means, in one of the secondhand bookstores near the university district in Seattle, Washington. I was preparing for a comprehensive examination in Microeconomics, and I was fixated on differential equations, the chain rule, and first- and second-order conditions. Armed with statistical manipulations and mouth-filling but meaningless academic jargon, these were the days when I believed there was no scarcity of grand ideas to resolve most economic problems throughout the world. I thought that my toolbox’s only weaknesses were the fuzziness of Euler’s theorem and the peculiarity of necessary and sufficient conditions for a Cobb–Douglas production function’s strict concavity. Then I opened Huxley’s book:

7 For an informative discussion of this topic, see Fisher (1988).

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About the ideal goal of human effort there exists in our civilization and, for nearly thirty centuries, there has existed a very general agreement. From Isaiah to Karl Marx, the prophets have spoken with one voice. In the Golden Age to which they look forward there will be liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love. “Nation shall no more lift sword against nation”; “the free development of each will lead to the free development of all”; “the world shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (Huxley, 1946, p. 1)

No thinker of any consequence had ever refuted these noble goals, which is a testament to the desirability of such objectives throughout history, but “not so with regard to the roads which lead to these goals” (Huxley, 1946, p. 1). According to Huxley (1946), some have followed social machinery and chosen a shortcut to Utopia through military conquest and the domination of others. Others have thought we could attain these same goals by altering society’s mindset through pedagogy, an appeal to the supernatural, or a return to religion (Huxley, 1946, p. 2). Every era and its ruling class has had its ideal: The ruling classes in Greece idealized the magnanimous man, a sort of scholar-and-gentleman. Kshatriyas in early India and feudal nobles in mediaeval Europe held up the ideal of the chivalrous man. The honnete homme makes his appearance as the ideal of seventeenth-century gentlemen; the philosophe, as the ideal of their descendants in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century idealized the respectable man. The twentieth has already witnessed the rise and fall of the liberal man and the emergence of the sheep-like social man and the god-like Leader. (Huxley, 1946, p. 2)

Yet, the common man everywhere has been deprived of the most basic human needs, including being well-fed, well-housed, well-educated, free, and unoppressed. Today, we marvel at our advancements and various signs of progress. Men now have taken visual images of galaxies nine million light-years away, replicated life-like cells, cracked the genetic code to understand the secrets of life’s building blocks, and discovered the unusual laws of quantum mechanics to process information. Yet, we seem unwilling to strive for—let alone attain—the fundamental human needs or identify a set of attributes with “universal appeal” for any human settlement, despite the pronounced heterogeneity of human communities. By now,

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we should be able to consider the essential needs of the human communities and examine to what extent the organization of the community (or the world) serves those interests or helps prevent the most conspicuous and acute threats. It is time for us to finally recognize that the human essence is “the ensemble of social relations” and that individuals are socially constituted beings; hence, the human community reflects these interactions and experiences. Our world does not consist of countless iterations of the particular idealized fairy tales. International relations are no longer based on prioritizing the prosperous few over all others. This highly celebrated worldview has lost credibility in the face of the reality of today’s world. Nations differ from one another; Papua New Guinea differs totally from Brazil. Even in countries with shared cultural commonalities like England and the United States, or those with shared borders like Germany and France, distinctions and variations prevail. Diversities among nations are embedded in the modern world and the Western political fabric of nation-state building. George Orwell (1945/1982), among many, affirms this reality: One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty…Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not. Also, one must admit that division between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook…Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England. And, as Western peoples go, the English are very highly differentiated. (pp. 3–4)

Despite these palpable differences, today we are persistently told that the social, political, and economic problems of nations around the globe are identical; hence, they can be diagnosed and resolved by the same value-laden tools and beliefs. Remarkably, this dominant tendency has gained ground in the past several decades in the face of advancements of multiculturalism and the cemented philosophical platform. Like all ideas, these ideas reflect the specific social and historical circumstances in which they were conceived, which are all unmistakably absent in today’s world. This is puzzling, especially when considering that all contextbounded ideas are copies of impressions, in which specific interactions

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with the world form real knowledge. David Hume (1748/2007) clarifies this observation when he states, “All our ideas or more feeble perception are copies of our impressions” (p. 13). On the other side of the spectrum, Walter Lippman (1922/2010) tells us, “The very fact that men theorize at all [about their surroundings] is proof that their pseudo-environments, their interior representations of the world, are a determining element in thought, feeling and action” (p. 20). Hume (1748/2007) further explains, “every idea is copied from some preceding impression or sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea” (p. 56). The term impression in this context means experiencing the world through our senses: “All our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will” (ibid., p. 13). For instance, if you can perceive the taste of a juicy peach, call up the peach’s taste in your mind, and almost feel the puckering of your lips in response to the sweet juice, you are focused on an idea in David Hume’s sense of the word. You have that idea because you have tasted a real peach before; you have impressions of the peach in your mind and can form an idea, a reproduction, based on them; you can call an idea into consciousness without having the object present. You can form an idea of something without being in its presence, but you cannot have an impression of something that has never been present in your mind. An exception to this role appears in what Hume categorizes as the Matter of Facts aspect of human reasoning. For example, Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic are based on the relation of ideas. A proposition concerning them is intuitively or demonstrably certain; one and one, for instance, are together equal two. This proposition is certain, and it is concerned with a relation between numbers and established accords. On this note, Hume stated, “Proposition of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truth demonstrated by Euclid would forever retain their certainty and evidence… [However] In reality, there is scarcely a proposition in Euclid so simple, as not to consist of more parts, than are to be found in any moral reasoning which runs into chimera and conceit” (see Hume, 1748/2007, pp. 18, 44–45). To reject Hume’s view, we are expected to believe that men are endowed with a superpower, forming ideas of things they have never

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experienced or had an impression of.8 This is neither a refutable proposition nor a philosophical opinion, but mere faith in a supernatural cognitive power, to which this study does not subscribe. I am bewildered as to why it is so hard to understand and accept that the ideas of past centuries, particularly those designed to understand human community and culture, are less applicable and relevant to our present living conditions and life. Is it not apparent that we live in a different world and under other conditions and relations than we did one hundred, fifty, or twenty years ago? Isn’t it the essence of modern disciplines like the social sciences and humanities to examine and understand these various evolutionary yet transformative changes? But dead men’s thoughts continue to rule, as they have been perceived for centuries as ideals and instructions for bettering all societies, despite their distinct cultures and histories. Today, this nostalgia has been transformed into a liberal mania to “enlighten” the rest of the world, who should all do and believe the same things as the West yet are expected to feel free and liberated. Whether or not this conformity is valuable, compliance is unattainable. To expect that all people can live in distinct cultural settings and believe in the same things is dubious. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “It is not founding society on a communion, or even on a convention, but rather on coincidence”9 in which individuals gather around an idol for a mere transitory affinity instead of any historical context or cultural associations.10 In this context, as defiance appears in every corner of the world, it is not unexpected that we witness the ground crumbling beneath our feet. The pointers of resistance are present everywhere in the Western ideological network, from the American continent to the European mainland, from Africa to Asia. While there is no single locus of great refusal, widespread resistance is apparent; where there is an imposition of absolutism and self-righteousness, there is resistance. 8 See https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Hume/hume. html. 9 Chesterton (1921, p. 54). 10 Chesterton (1921) symbolically depicts this sort of coincidental society as the gath-

ering of four men at a pea green lamp post: “Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is unwise…” (p. 54); also cited in Lippman (1922/2010, p. 23).

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Indeed, we should all be aware that the colonized people’s struggle to free themselves from the yoke of Western colonializations did not result from Montesquieu’s, Diderot’s, or Raynal’s denunciations of the colonizing regime but were a direct consequence of the subjugated thought . (Hargreaves, 2005). The intent to convert people and its later dire and counterproductive outcomes are neither novel nor surprising. The Islamic Empire, particularly during the Abbasid reign, converted many to Islam, only to see its downfall by the infidel Mongol invaders. The first Crusaders claimed they were bringing order to the world by “taming savages” and “scouring evildoers,” only to be described by eighteenth-century sages like Edward Gibbon and Voltaire as examples of medieval barbarism. And finally, the Enlightenment philosophers and their disciples who formed the modern version of the world, during which Western ideologies were widely propagated, gradually fell to the supremacy of idols like the Cartesian worldview, through which we are witnessing their gradual demise as I will discuss in the later sections. One can only speculate why a tendency to convert others to one’s tenets and convictions is perceived as an attractive proposition, particularly for those seeking to rule others. To the casual eye, for instance, it seems absurd to believe that all men should go on valuing and trusting the same idea (e.g., liberty) and yet still expect them to be voluntarily subordinate to the will of the master. One possible explanation for such appeal is what Toynbee (1951) called man’s psychological tragedy, in which “the sinful soul comes to grief because, so long as it wills to sin, God’s grace is unable to inspire and inform it” (p. 257). So, the intent to convert others is meant to guide sinful souls to the Kingdom of Heaven. My view, however, is more skeptical. It concerns the tendency to exercise power, which, according to Foucault (1984), “is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others...Power exists only when it is put into action…This also means that power is not a function of consent…the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus” (p. 426). This inference makes more sense when we realize that all attempts at persuasion have a common denominator: they claim to have the answer to man’s predicaments anywhere in the world. This claim to superior knowledge enables them to disqualify all other ideas by positioning them low on the hierarchy, beneath the level of cognition and valuable thoughts. This

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alleged superior knowledge gains supremacy, debases all other ideas, and is branded as subjugated knowledge.11 According to Ann Hartman, subjugated knowledge is the knowledge that has no place, or which has been confined by dominant and standard forms of knowledge sanctioned by the established dominant network (see Hartman, 1992, pp. 483–484). Before we proceed, I must make one clarification about what constitutes knowledge. Van Doren (1991) declares that “two types of our general knowledge are characterized by certainty. One is our knowledge of self-evident propositions. The other is faith” (p. xxi). Neither is under consideration here. The knowledge I am referencing in this study is related to knowledge communicated and diffused by an idea, which I will discuss later in this chapter. An approach that claims superior knowledge is, more or less, a totalizing approach that breathes totalizing practices; it is an instrument used by those who assert that they hold certain privileged truths; it silences dissent on the ground of its totality. But such an approach is inherently problematic. First, allegedly superior ideas, except for religious doctrines, rarely provide a roadmap to how their promised objectives can be achieved; there is no universally agreed-upon blueprint. The only chance for a semi-successful adaptation is when an idea offers—theoretically, at least— a means to convince agents at the local level. Even at this level, success is uncertain unless the essence of the idea is suspended, ignored, turned upside down, misplaced, or ridiculed. Examples are abundant: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Asian capitalism. This is mostly due to the nature of ideological fixation: ideologies are often adopted despite the absence of a clear definition. For instance, democracy is commonly conceptualized by its etymological roots: the people (demos ) and power/rule (kratia). However, the primary issues remain unresolved: who constitutes the people, how do they rule, and what are the conditions for such authority to prevail? According to Bosteels (2016),

11 To the best of my knowledge, Michel Foucault first introduced this term and signified an insidious imbalance of power—generally between a dominating group and a subjugated group (dominators and dominated).

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[T]he question “What is a people?” invites us to abandon the essentialist presuppositions behind “the” people and opens up the possibility of talking about “peoples” in the plural. This may be linguistically awkward in English but in other languages, such as Spanish, helps draw critical attention to the indigenous presence that continues to resist the colonial framing of the capitalist world-system dominated by the West—with los pueblos originarios, for example, constituting key political actors throughout much of Latin America today. On the other hand, no sooner is the term chosen than the people also begins to function as an exclusionary category in its own right, always in need of being internally demarcated from that which is not yet or no longer part thereof and which for this same reason tends to be relegated more or less violently to the pre-political or nonpolitical realm indicated by the pejorative use of terms such as plebs, populace, mob, or rabble. (p. 2)

Also, we have all kinds of democracies: there is direct democracy, indirect democracy, representative democracy, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy. As time passes, we keep adding new categories, to the extent that we now have democratic imperialism, of which Stanley Kurtz—of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism—has generously provided a blueprint (Kurtz, 2003). Perhaps this absence of guidelines is due to cultural diversity. Hence, the resolution is that each culture should adapt democracy to its societal specificities. Following this school of thought, it is inevitable to have a notion of democracy that resembles a mystical creature like the Assyrian Lamassu, the Greek Pegasus, or the Roman faun: neither human nor beast, but enigma. For instance, we have East Asian democracy (Japan, South Korea), Southeast Asian democracy (Thailand, Malaysia), and South Asian democracy (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan). None of these countries has similar governing or legislative bodies and hence they are generally categorized. Secondly, while these ideas can be easily selected and soon presented as a principal guideline, incorporating their framework of references into different historical, cultural, and institutional settings is neither feasible nor desirable. They are all context-specific-bounded, meaning they are interconnected with the specific historical and cultural contexts in which they were conceived and comprehended. Denying this means denying the diversity of the social world, where 7.8 billion people are affiliated with

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4300 religions and there are approximately 200 ethnicities and over 6500 languages spoken today. The third issue is related to the fact that all fetishized ideas are innately depicted by monologic texts,12 which “employ a consistent and homogeneous representational style…and express a dominant authorial voice” (Jeffcutt, 1993, p. 39). A certain arrogance, exclusivity, and selfrighteousness is bound to prevail in constructing the ideas of truth, right, or the best interpretations. Here, we face an articulation that is not attached to a multitude of perspectives but instead corresponds to some peculiar, systematically monologic context; everything that is true, good, and ideal is deposited within the boundaries of a single consciousness. There is no need for a multitude of consciousnesses since dismantling the monopoly ownership of the truth by interactions without exclusion would mean abandoning the supremacy of a discourse (Glaveanu, 2019). This is the arrogant overconfidence commonly detected in previous centuries, as naked power ruled the world and exhibited its will very efficiently. One must admit that imperial nostalgia dies hard. For instance, according to a recent poll, the British public is generally proud of their country’s role in colonialism and the British Empire (Stone, 2016). Today, such superiority has been exposed as a fallacy, as many communities around the world struggle to keep their heads above the water; I mean this literally. The discourse of “we know what’s best for everybody” seems out of touch with the reality of the present century, when “artificial” is the primary adjective used to categorize intelligence. 12 According to Somekh and Lewin (2011), “A monologic text is one that attempts to

define meaning tightly, defining and redefining what is intended until the opportunities for readers to create meaning are limited” (p. 18). In this context, “monologism is the reduction of multiple voices and consciousness within a text to a single version of truth imposed by the author. The truth of other consciousness or ideologies are never treated alongside the author’s but are instead refuted or reduced to a common denominator” (Makaryk, 1993, p. 596). For instance, Tolstoy is considered a monologic novelist. The first sentence of Anna Karenina verifies this observation: “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here, “The authorial voice is absolute and uncontestable. There is no counterstatement within the text to query the author’s truth” (ibid.). In contrast, “dialogic text… invites the reader to find within it multiple resonances with other text, and multiple possibilities for engagements” (Somekh & Lewin, 2011, p. 18). In this respect, “Dialogic texts assume and give expression to many of the voices that exist in all naturally heteroglot [the term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single ‘language’], linguistically stratified style societies…. dialogic has seemed a natural gloss for multicultural, even democratic” (Morris, 1995, p. 3).

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Finally, a totalizing approach needs a broad sense of legitimacy to persuade the minds of wider audiences. It has no choice to secure such legitimacy but to present its promoted idea(s) as a universal value. However, because there are few ways to validate such a claim, idioms are commonly used. The problem is that idioms are not universal; hence, the connotations and denotations of messages rarely are conveyed to and consented to by all potential subjects (interlocutors, audience). The term democracy signifies the point. The word “democracy,” Richard Mulgan said back in 1968, “is so vague, democracies are so varied, that there is little chance of substantial agreement” (p. 3). For a concept like democracy to bear any meaning as a coherent notion or a universal value worth pursuing, it must connect to and be comprehended by the people “out there” in the real world. Yet, for more than half the world’s population, the expression has no equivalent and no etymological root in their languages (e.g., Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu). In Chinese, the word democracy (min zhu or 民主) is relatively new and added to the language by Japanese writers during Japan’s Meiji Restoration. This is why it conveys a distinctively different concept from the word’s Western connotation (see Lin, 2018; Peng, 1998, p. 410). Similarly, ), in Hindi, dI mAkrsi the word appears in Arabic, dimuqratia ( ), in Farsi, di mäkrs¯e ( ). It appears as a mere trans( lation, an artificial construction, a word without a context.13 In this respect, the language commonly used to idealize a concept like democracy resembles what Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, labels a private language: “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking — to his immediate private sensations. So, another person cannot understand the language”14 (Wittgenstein, 1953/1986, p. 89). This is a language devised as necessarily comprehensible only to its sole orator, the single 13 Also, history shows that a shift in language to using extrinsic terms can also bear political consequences. For instance, to introduce democratic institutions, India had to adopt the English of its colonizers as a lingua franca. Similar alterations have occurred in many other colonies, where the language of the colonizers has become the public language (often for restricted minorities), whereas vernaculars (often utterly different one from another) have prevailed for elite group use (see Archibugi, 2005). 14 Wittgenstein sees language as not only a contextualized but also an embodied activity: “Let us be human…” He adds, “Language—I want to say—is a refinement.” Quoting Faust in his study, he further adds his newly contextualized and now famous appropriation of the words “in the beginning was the deed” (Hagberg, 2017, p. 73).

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originator culture. The things that define and give meaning to an individual culture’s vocabulary are necessarily dialectally inaccessible and philosophically disconnected, and thus cognitively incomprehensible to others (Candlish & Wrisley, 2019). This reminds me of Goethe’s observation as he calls attention to the divergence of the monologic and the dialogic: “To be sure, I could proceed in this manner [lecturing] only didactically and dogmatically—I had no talent for true conversation or for dialectics” (as cited in Burgard, 2010, p. 145). The superiority of democracy as the preferred form of governance, like all similar ideologies, is not inherently evident and usually takes decades, if not centuries, to be perceived as a universal value. This is a multifaceted process, often organized and executed didactically through dominant discourses; democracy must be depicted and celebrated, more accurately presented and disseminated by those who own the platforms of domination in society. One such platform is the public sphere of pedagogy. Indoctrination in the parochial ideologies of the ruling elite is the ultimate objective, which is why the prevailing educational structure is merely confined to subjugated knowledge that limits our capacity to think beyond popular headlines. The effects of such incapacitation and knowledge are devastating. The former impairs our judgment to see the reality unraveling in front of our eyes. It diminishes our ability to take much-needed responsibility for a meaningful change of the status quo. The latter’s most damaging feature is neither the solidification of the imbalance of power (e.g., between domination and its subjects) nor the perpetuation of the existing hierarchical structure, but its inherent ignorance of the question of context. By ignoring the context of an idea, subjugated knowledge becomes dangerously effective: dangerous because the created mindset15 is irreversibly destabilizing via the prevalence of apprehension, distrust, and resentment; effective in the sense that an idea without context bears only random meanings. An open-ended proposition allows for a broad spectrum of connotations and denotations, according to the temporal requirements of the climate of opinion. 15 This mindset also bears other qualities that are equally damaging. One such feature is known as cognitive rigidity, which formally implies “difficulty changing mental sets.” In other words, the expression means switching from thinking about things one way to thinking about them a different way (Coplan, 2016). This is an inflexible mindset, but not just inflexibility in a general understanding of things, rather the inability to develop a capacity to think clearly through things, particularly ideas which one is schooled to idolize.

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The meaning of such an idea is undetermined, and hence the subjects of such knowledge have no clue what they are endorsing, which enables them to navigate a range of meanings as they see fit. The result is the total disorientation of the subjects. For instance, they regard wearing a mask during a pandemic as an infringement on their personal liberty rather than an urgent public health issue. It is one thing to subscribe to certain “in fashion” notions or “-isms” and explain it as “herd mentality,” but another when enthusiasts lack even a basic understanding of the idea they endorse. Some time ago, Senator Huey Long hinted at one dire, but accurate, consequence of such a gap when he stated, “When fascism comes to America, it will come in the form of democracy.” This tragic bewilderment, like all other prevailing social malaises, such as social division and rapacity, vulgar mendacity, alienation, rampant violence, and lack of empathy for others, may not have an immediate underlying cause. For instance, consider conventionally delineated hollow terms like social-media-misinformation, fake news, and cyber propaganda. If one believes such causes, then one should also think the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” was the main reason for the destruction of Iraq and that federal housing programs should be blamed for the financial fallout of 2007.16 Instead, all of these issues can be explained and regarded as casualties of the relentless promotional projects of the vast, monopolized communication network that disseminates false discourses so that the dominant structure maintains its grip on power and control. A diverse group of scholars has widely shared this observation. We have the brilliant Marshall McLuhan, who outlines the manifestation of this damaging-beyond-repair transformation before it becomes apparent and declares the incoming disaster by pointing to the media as “make-happen agents” rather “make-aware agents” (McLuhan, 1998, p. xiii). Harold Innis, for instance, extends the economic concept of monopoly to include politics and culture and coins the phrase “monopolies of knowledge” to outline the similar detrimental effect: namely, incapacitation of the mind. Indeed, Innis and Michel Foucault demonstrate that individuals or groups who control access to these points wield great power. Those who monopolize knowledge are also in a position to define what is legitimate knowledge. For instance, monopolization of knowledge tends to polarize societies into mass submission to a knowledgeable elite. Monopolies of

16 For an informative analysis of the latter example, see Dunbar and Donald (2014).

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knowledge are an integral part of the centralization of power. Those who control knowledge endorse themselves with the power to define reality (Soules, 2007). In many instances, the networking campaigns are so mouth-filling that they wash away all the subtleties of the idea. Worse still is the characteristic of such publicities to trivialize the original thinker’s intentions by recasting the idea as a pale shadow of its original quintessence and purpose. Inevitably, this manner of idealization dissociates ideas from their historical contexts. They become irrelevant to the historical process by being placed outside of history. Marx’s metaphor illustrates this point: “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known” (Marx, 1939/1973, p. 38). Arif Dirlik highlights Marx’s point by stating, “There is a profound methodological difference, the statement tells us, between seeing the ape in the man and seeing the man in the ape. The difference is history” (Dirlik, 1986, p. 106). A clear manifestation of this neglect of history appears in the dominant discourse: in an idealized society, depicted by the present paradigm, the individual is portrayed as a free person detached from societal and natural bonds. However, this man is the product of the imaginations of eighteenth-century thinkers (e.g., Adam Smith and David Ricardo), who witnessed how men in earlier historical periods were confined to a definite and limited institutional setting. Consequently, the eighteenthcentury men of the pen pictured their ideal modern individual as a free man who was “the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, [and] on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century” (Mark, 1973, p. 17). The ideal man, the detached free man, is a form whose existence is projected from the past. By neglecting this history, we misrepresent the intellectual history of the ideal man and disembody the idea, whose only relationship to social and historical context becomes incidental: a man articulated by someone at a particular time.

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What Is an Idea17 Defining an idea seldom comes to mind because the answer is often perceived as self-evident and irrelevant to our lives. What difference does it make how an idea is defined when we all know what it means when someone says, “I have an idea”? Not quite. Ideas differ from opinions. An opinion is a view or insight that one forms about a topic or issue. For instance, these days, there is no shortage of opinions about the present state of American politics. An idea, however, remains inherently abstract until its peripheries are clarified and its inherent meaning determined. An idea is commonly delineated by either a narrow term (as in science) or a broad perspective (in philosophy). But these classifications are not trouble-free. A narrow approach encompasses specificity: the definition it offers is based on specific parameters embedded in its structure to ease understanding and explain the word. For instance, in science, specificity is made up of—but is not necessarily confined to—precision, replicability, and observability. An idea ought to be defined within these parameters. More important, such specificities do not allow a subject/object under study to fall into ambiguity; that is, various interpretations may be contradictory. In a confined realm, a principle can be separated from an idea; the former meets all predetermined standards while the latter does not. For instance, the proposition that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses is neither an opinion nor an idea but a rule that offers a precise formulation known as Newton’s law of gravitation.18 It is a wellestablished law in classical physics because it is observable, replicable, and measurable anywhere in the known universe; it is a universal rule, at least for now. However, when a young German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg, proposed in 1925 that we cannot measure various properties (e.g., the position and the momentum) of an object (a particle) with absolute precision, he introduced an idea,19 which has changed 17 No attempt will be made to review the vast literature on the history of ideas. However, out of the research that has been accumulated, certain tendencies relevant to my discussion can be discerned. 18 Newton’s law of gravitation is a simple equation with a tremendously useful application: “plug in the numbers, and you can predict the positions of all the planets, moons, and comets… in the solar system and beyond” (The Guardian, 2013). 19 The idea is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more accurately we know one of these values (either position or momentum), the less accurately

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our perception of the physical world and established one the main pillars of quantum mechanics. It should be noted that the distinction between Newton’s law and Heisenberg’s idea is not only significant in this study because of the difference between a law and an idea, but also because of the overall social condition and the historical circumstances in which they prevailed. More to the point, throughout this study, I argue that a considerable proportion of thoughts and aspirations that have been conceived, are, to a great extent, the fruits of their particular social and historical context. In other words, ideas are manifestations of the era in which they are designed. There is no sign of an idea’s universality in the broad approach, usually used to define social science ideas.20 There is no Idea of Idea. The focal point is on the function or purpose of an idea. The delineation of an idea is mainly concerned with its manifestation, which is presumed to emerge in a human endeavor; it is human action that gives meaning to an idea and determines its applications and implications. For instance, let us consider one of the less contested but ambiguous notions, freedom. Freedom, as Maurice Latey declares accurately: … may not mean the acceptance of necessity; but it does mean a choice among fairly limited option, the limits being set by man’s nature and the society into which he is born, the various institutions to which he belongs by nature, tradition or choice, and the various relationships accepted or chosen by him. It is precisely these relations which form the field of his freedom, and the independence of the various institutions he is associated with is the guarantee of it. (Latey, 1969, p. 298)

Because of this, an idea gains its power through people’s actions. An idea only exists because men conceived and applied it. There is no universality of an idea because it is not itself presentable but is the presentation of men’s mental conceptualization. Therefore, broadly delineated ideas can seldom, if ever, be universal laws because of the diversity of human communities; all human societies have been profoundly distinct

we know the other. For a short and non-technical description of the principle, see The Guardian (2013). 20 The sign of Universal Idea appears when we have reached the limit; the only thing behind it is the void of its presentation. It is absolute.

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from one another since the written history of civilization.21 Ideas are not autonomous but rooted in the material conditions in which they arise. In this context, ideas exist because “they are objects of our knowledge. It is impossible that what is nothing should be known” (de Laguna, 1934, p. 447). The reader should note these contentions—either rejection of the universality of broadly defined ideas/idealization or regarding ideas as objects of human society—are not novel assertions; they have been the topic of philosophical discussions from Francis Bacon’s criticism of the “idols” of conventional knowledge22 to Claude Adrien Helvétius, a favorite of both Marx and Nietzsche, who claims, in sociological theories of knowledge, “our ideas are the necessary consequences of the societies in which we live” (As cited in Lichtheim, 1967, p. 9). And Marx, in a famous passage from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, reiterates the same notion with a structural metaphor that has become central to subsequent discussions of ideology: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite form of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Marx, 1859/1904, pp. 11–12)

Today, however, to observe this idea’s validity, we are no longer confined to scholarly discourses because it is apparent on both sides of the Atlantic that current political, economic, and social ideas exhibit who

21 The only exception to this fact, as in all communities of species, is that we all share identical DNA genes, which nevertheless has failed to provide a rationale to wipe out the ugly face of rampant bigotry in the “enlightened” continent—Europe for at least the last several centuries. For a fascinating and informative discussion of this issue, see Kolbert (2018). 22 For an excellent discussion on Cartesian and Francis Bacon criticism of idols, see Tymieniecka (2007, p. 217).

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we are and what we have become. I can point to a number of cases that reaffirm this claim. On one side of the Atlantic, we have witnessed uncontested and official manufacturing of lies to invade countries with extensive public support, the efforts of billionaires like the Koch brothers, and Donald Trump’s election. Only a few decades ago, the Koch brothers’ ideas were considered absurd to the extent that even the conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr., called their views “Anarcho-Totalitarianism,” but now they are viewed, by friends and foes, as an influential force in the American political landscape in which money can buy anything. On the other side of the Atlantic, one can point to the exodus of people and widespread public disenchantments about Rupert Murdoch and his family’s elevation on the broader global stage (Gross, 2019; Mayer, 2018). Those who adhere to a broad definition of an idea (e.g., social scientists) are interested in various aspects of human behaviors, communities, and human-constructed social systems and civilizations. However, combining this broad delineation with an interest in human societies and affairs is often a recipe for controversy, misuse, and mistreatment of the idea under consideration. The lack of precision means open-ended interpretations, and subsequently, the exacerbation of the already fluid circumstances commonly associated with inquiries in human behaviors, communities, and cultures.

The Idea of the West For instance, let us consider the idea of the West as the place where the prevailing ideology was born. Most people, particularly in prosperous economies, associate the West with ideas such as democracy, freedom, and the free market; some may equate it with Christendom and pale pigmentation; others still with secularism and rationalism. So, the question is: are these observations correct or sufficient? Let me begin my response by stating that reaching a consensus on what constitutes the West is essential, especially when the dominant discourses of the past fifty years have orbited around the overall transformation of non-Western states by Western ideas

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and values.23 In this light, and contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, which limits itself to questions of when and how the West achieved its global hegemony, the question that must be asked, but is oddly muted, is: what do we mean by the West? This is an essential question for all Westerners and non-Westerners because the success or failure of the Western ideal largely depends on how well the West is grasped, so others (suitors) can effectively pursue its ideas and values. From a personal perspective, the question of the West never crossed my mind. Like most people, I had no reason to think about it because I assumed I knew the answer. I have lived all my adult life in the United States and worked in most European countries, and yet, when I look back, there was not a single moment in which I felt like a Westerner. At the same time, I never hesitated to see myself as a Western-schooled person. Without a doubt, for me as having been born in a non-Western country, the West has been an idealistic marker, a self-accreditation, which, ironically, is contrary to the connotation of such a categorization. Nevertheless, if I am honest with myself, being associated with the West functions as a medium of self-integration; it secures one’s self-importance despite the risk of falling into a derogatory, but accurate, label of “Brown Skin, White Masks.”24 Indeed, I am not alone in feeling this way. Many in similar situations have felt the same, to the extent that they sensed an obligation to explain the complexity of their experiences. Du Bois (1940/2007) reminds us how deep such a sentiment lies within one’s psyche: I lived in an environment which I call the white world. I was not an American; I was not a man; I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world; and that white world often existed primarily, as far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bound. (p. 69)

23 The latest hint of the desirability of such an ideal at the global level was Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw in 2017, which warned, “The fundamental question of our time [and for the Western Nations] is whether the West has the will to survive,” apparently against onslaughts of people migrating from non-Western nations. 24 This is a title of the book by Hamid Dabashi, a take on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask, which provides a critical examination of the role that immigrant “comprador intellectuals” play in facilitating the global domination of American imperialism.

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In this positively charged frame of mind, it is not surprising that the question of what we mean when we speak of the West is often null, while almost no one misses an opportunity to either idealize or demonize the West. These inclinations can be interpreted to indicate that the West’s definition may depend on the delineator and his state of mind. The Western world is perceived as synonymous with the white world for a nonwhite man. Or perhaps the question is flawed. After all, the West, like all others, is not a static locale. It has evolved and is still evolving, in all aspects of its life throughout history, particularly since WWI, to the extent that its physical components and structure (e.g., nation-states and spiritual body) are not the same today as they were a hundred or even fifty years ago. If this is a plausible observation—and I contend it is—we should ask ourselves why knowing the West is important. In the context of the present study, the answer is directly linked to its impact on others; as Arnold Toynbee brilliantly observes, “It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit—and hit hard— by the West” (Toynbee, 1952, pp. 1–2). In this light, knowing the West helps us understand its impact. It has played a crucial role in altering all other areas in the world, in the form of regeneration, degeneration, or both. Understanding the West’s sociohistorical development through different stages of its evolution will provide better insight into the nature of what has happened to others and the essence of the West today. However, it seems, the West has become whatever the individual defining the term wants it to be. On this note, the historian Norman Davies in Europe: A History points out that the West, from the Greeks to the present, “has been given layer upon layer of meanings and connotations,” of which the most important are: The Roman Empire, Christendom, The French West of the Enlightenment, the imperial West, the German-controlled West based in central Europe (Mitteleuropa in German), the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) West, the Third Reich, the American-led Cold War West (including NATO members in Western Europe and the supporting cast of Japan, Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia), and finally a European West based on the European Union (Davies, 1998, pp. 22–25). These groupings result from many factors, but none is more significant than the overall circumstances under which they were conceived and prevailed. Two examples clarify this point.

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First, Colin Campbell, in Easternization of the West, underlines the same issue but from a different angle. At the outset, he proposes that “the West is now no longer ‘the West’ as it has been constituted for most of its history” (Campbell, 2008, p. 3). He sets out his argument by defining the idea of the West “with respect to its meaning as a distinctive set of beliefs and values, as embodied in a particular world view” (ibid., p. 6), and hence rejects the West as a geopolitical entity, widely interpreted to mean the United States and its allies (e.g., Western Europe, Israel). In defense of his thesis, Campbell reminds his readers that those who are portrayed, perceived, and condemned as enemies of the West (e.g., Muslims in the Middle East) are actively pursuing the values and beliefs set forth by the peculiar idea of the West. He argues that the primary concern of such delineation is that the formerly oppressed who fought imperial aggression and engaged in “wars of independence” against colonial occupiers have been transformed into the present oppressors, claiming they intend to establish freedom. If we believe in the popularized idea of the West, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Chechens should be revered and celebrated rather than condemned. My second example follows Norman Davies’s observation. It is hardly contested that the experiences of WWI and WWII, as well as the Cold War, had a tremendous emotional and psychological impact on Western populations and how they perceived themselves and their continent. For Davies, this influence appears more vividly in what he calls “the Allied scheme of history” (ibid., pp. 39–42). This version saturated all aspects of life in much of Western Europe and the United States, encompassing education, public opinion, and political doctrines from the 1940s to the 1980s. Its proponents, according to Davies, asserted a “unique, secular brand of Western civilization” in which “the Atlantic community” (NATO) was “the pinnacle of human progress,” emerging from AngloSaxon democracy, liberal capitalism, and the rule of law in the tradition of Magna Carta. The foundational elements of the scheme, Davies observes, include “the Wilsonian principle of National Self-determination (1917) and the Atlantic Charter (1941)” (ibid., p. 40). So why do these variations appear? More to the point, are there intrinsic elements within a culture as broad and diverse as the West that systematically configure various narratives of its history, provide fabricated images of itself, and demonize imagined others? Davies (1998) offers an

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answer: “Western civilization [as is popularized today] is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of their authors. It is the product of complex exercises in ideology, of countless identity trips, of sophisticated essays in cultural propaganda” (p. 25). Davies’s grievances, however, are not about the accuracy of variations of the West, but rather how these versions formed peculiarly, in one part of Europe, namely Western Europe, that is excessively celebrated and valued. Simultaneously, the other side—the Eastern side of the continent—is entirely ignored. A question may arise as to why the West has been the dominant region globally for the last several centuries, regardless of its various definitions (see Morris, 2011). In response, one can point out that Western domination of the word did not occur because of its novel ideas. Instead, such dominance was implemented via colonization and efficiency in the art of killing, neither of which are related to philosophical superiority nor high moral ground. Indeed, there is an emerging consensus among Western scholars who underline a similar point (see Buzan & Sen, 1990; de Wijk, 2005). They suggest that to match the prosperity of many Western nations, non-Western countries need to emphasize military improvement rather than pursuing philosophical notions such as democracy, freedom, etc. This is also a sensible argument if one considers the “deterrence argument,” which was viewed quite favorably in the West during the Cold War. If all nations were equipped with adequate military hardware, the breakout of war is less likely, which is good news for all. The reader should note that this is not an endorsement but rather a mere argument. In a broader sense, such comprehensions will help us to formulate more relevant questions, such as: Is the present currency of the West, particularly in terms of its social, political, and economic ideas, linked to the loftiness of its philosophical foundations and allegedly transcendent values and norms? If so, are these views and values accurately understood and generally explained by their sociohistorical context? Moreover, should a society that aims to alter its institutional settings and its traditional norms and values to match those of the West be categorically viewed as a subject of Western invasion? This is a classical metaphorical case of “shooting the messenger” that illustrates how we tend to take a dim view of the bearer, the West, rather than the host. Is it plausible that such a case is an example of mimicry, a reflection of a society that has failed to mature and establish its identity, and therefore deludes itself into believing that its essence lies elsewhere? Is this not an illustration of an immature collective

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mindset, which voluntarily assumes extrinsic notions and standards, with the desire to elevate itself to the level of an idealized image? Jacques Lacan serves us well here as he observes, “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage.... It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled— exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.”25 In the given example, however, the warfare is against the “self.”

Ideas of the Enlightenment Many disciplines in the humanities have been the handmaidens of politics and docile servants of a dominant ideology. This subordination is a common tendency among men of the pen who subscribe to specific values that reflect a society to which they belong. This is not a subjective observation, but a topic well studied and documented; we now consider there to be “a single intellectual history that merges the politics of imperialism with the evolution of classics as a discipline” (Bradly, 2010, p. 8). The extent of imperialism’s effect on literature is not limited to classical texts. Many contemporary scholars have highlighted this influence in the modern period, most notably J. Webster and N. Cooper’s edited volume Roman Imperialism: Post-colonial Perspective (1996), C. Edward’s collection Roman Presence: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 (1999), and Edward Said’s justly influential Culture and Imperialism (1993), which superbly unravels implicit imperialist assumptions and implications in classic texts of the contemporary era (the seventeenth century onward).26 Orwell reveals that he was resented by both conqueror and conquered: “I was hated by large numbers of people [native]—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me” (Orwell, 1950, p. 1). Others, like Kipling’s “White 25 The quote was used in Bhabha (1994, p. 85). The reader should note that, unlike Said’s Orientalism which seeks to explain how literature, through the colonizer’s institutional apparatus, can essentialize the colonized, Bhabha uses the notion of mimicry to highlight the unsettled interdependence between the dominant power and the conquered. His mimicry described a type of resistance by the colonized that pretends to mimic the dominant power. 26 For more studies on the topic, see “Imperialism in Literature: Selected Full-text books and articles” at: https://www.questia.com/library/literature/literary-themes-andtopics/imperialism-in-literature.

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Man” are always willing ready to go to war, to kill and be killed, about which Said observes, “Being White men, for Kipling and for those whose perceptions and rhetoric he influenced, was a self-confirming business” (Said, 2003, p. 227).27 These views neither appeared out of the blue nor were held by a few in a close and an exclusive circle. They were gradually institutionalized in the psyche of the dominant West, which began with what Thomas Bisson labels “the crisis of the twelfth century” in Europe (Bisson, 2015, p. 18). They reached their full maturity in the so-called Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in wicked colonialism. William Kentridge alludes to this point by observing, “Every act of Enlightenment—all ambitions to save souls, all the basic impulses— is so dogged by the weight of what follows it, the shadows, the violence that has accompanied the Enlightenment. The colonial project, in its own description of bringing light to darkness, is a gruesome working out of Plato’s cave” (as cited in Lenfield, 2012). These developments had significant consequences that drove the old world into ignorance and established the doctrines of the New World, in which the cognitive supply chain of the modern Western world experienced its coronation: In the early ages of the world men looked round upon nature, and everywhere recognised the action of conscious agencies; and upon the per version of this truth, all the ancient religious systems were obviously founded. We do not refer to the Grecian philosophical sects, for they were employed in darkening counsel with words without knowledge, and were running into the grossest errors; among some of them, however, a great 27 Kipling, in early 1898, celebrated the road taken by White Men in the colonies:

Now, this is the road that the White Men tread When they go to clean a land— Iron underfoot and the vine overhead And the deep on either hand. We have trod that road—and a wet and windy road— Our chosen star for guide. Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread Their highway side by side! (Said, 2003, p. 226)

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measure of truth was preserved, for it was reserved for modern wisdom to survey universal nature, to see it all action and all motions, to see the perfect harmony, and the uniform effects, and the beautiful arrangements, that result from that action, and yet to ascribe it all to unconscious, unknowing agencies. Men are constrained to admit the evidence of intelligence and contrivance; but this intelligence is with a being distinct from the contrivance, and all the wonderful works of nature are the immediate productions of unknowing agencies; it is assumed that such cease less action, such continued uniformity, and such perfect results, arise from the action of elementary principles, and agencies, that have in themselves no life, and which are altogether devoid of consciousness or understanding. It is assumed that matter is perfectly unconscious, that it is destitute of all sensibility, and that it has no power of motion. (Blackwell, 1832, pp. 191–192)

As a result, frontiers were redrawn, and mindsets reconstructed; the calendar of saints and heroes was altered in favor of reason and selfbeing.28 Perhaps, it all began, more or less, on the night of November 23, 1654 when Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Catholic theologian, had a visionary experience in which he came to the conviction that “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is

28 Understanding of concepts of “self” and “being” required broad perspectives. Philosophical discussions of these notions often deal with epistemological, ontological, moral, and ethical concerns that explore human identity, intention, agency, and causation. They commonly use “person” to mean the experiencing, behaving self. Questions about self and being are also central to other disciplines. Political theory, legal doctrine, psychology, and theology all deal with human beings as doers, perceivers, believers, and knowers. However, in Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel provides us with an illuminating response: “Many people’s lives are absurd, temporarily or permanently, for conventional reasons having to do with their particular ambitions, circumstances, and personal relations. If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity, however, it must arise from the perception of something universal—some respect in which pretension and reality inevitably clash for us all. This condition is supplied, I shall argue, by the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt” (Nagel, 1991, p. 13). On the idea of rationality, Nagel observes, “the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claim to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question” (ibid., p. 15).

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not “the God of the philosopher,” and a man of faith (Christian) should believe in the former..29 For the first time, the stage was set for man to liberate himself from the influences of what he perceives subjected him. For the first time, social malaises were attributed not only to the rulers’ material advantages but also to inconsequential privileges, such as education. It was the great intellectuals of the “dix-huitieme” century that introduced this state of affairs.30 And so, Western societies came of age—or at least so they thought—not only because of political repression and economic exploitation but also because of the desire to spread knowledge, which formed the premise that literacy can free men from fanaticism, prejudice, superstition, and fake news, and hence belongs in any human community. On this point, Darrin McMahon (2001) states, “Aided by a general increase in literacy…secular men of letters carried out a dramatic transformation in both their status and their calling over the course of the eighteenth century” (p. 6). Another interpretation points to an entirely different discourse that sounds less romantic but more accurate when critically examining history. It claims that the importance of mass education/schooling was related to the need for a task-oriented labor force during Europe’s industrialization. In other words, mass schooling and a new system of production (industrialization) went hand in hand. The reader should also note that Adam Smith, at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, underlined reasons for nations to instruct their populations: “The more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition,” he argued. “An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves,

29 Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas’s

Summa Theologica) is not a thought or representation of God, but of thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God. In a simple form, the argument is known as “Pascal’s Wager (bet).” Pascal holds that believing in God is a good bet at any odds since the possible payoff, eternal happiness, far outweighs any costs of believing, even of believing in a God who does not exist. 30 Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance on the Occasion of Death of Jean Calas from the

Judgment Rendered in Toulouse (1763) signifies this age. In reading Voltaire, or anyone of an equal intellectual caliber, one must retain that the visions and social taste of eighteenthcentury France, or Europe, were still fouled by medieval perceptions of the world and hence some of his passages must be judged according to the standards of that time. For an illuminating discussion of this topic, see Voltaire (1912, pp. x–xiii).

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each individually, more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superior” (Smith, 1791, pp. 100–101) This is an essential factor underlying the sources of a nation’s creativity and intuitive understanding of the world.31 Other instances indicate that Enlightenment awakening underwent a series of striking reinterpretations during a short period. In the twinkling of an eye, the “dix-huitieme” turned into an ecosystem of thoughts that functioned as a tribal depository of ideologies, resembling today’s various assembled think-tanks—a private enterprise solely intended to circulate the ideas of the new emerging ruling class. And so, the malformation of the novel eighteenth-century project began with ideologies and demented fixations at its helm. For instance, aristocrat Destutt de Tracy and his fellow ideologues turned Rousseau’s description of the individual self-upside down. They promoted the conviction that liberty was to be equated with the satisfaction of our desire (Jennings, 2016, p. 60). Gallicized Irish merchant, multimillionaire, and banker Richard Cantillon single-handedly drew the contour of modern economics when he wrote the first treatise on economics over four decades before the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.32 Inspired by Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Cantillon reinterpreted forces of inertia and gravity in the natural world, equating them with human reason and market competition in the economic realm (de Vylder, 2010, p. 76). The world was primed to bow to colonial expansion, which came to full maturity from the 1760s to the 1870s. This is the period when colonies came to be untapped resources for the colonizers. As these predatory views gained prominence alongside the critical modern notions—universalism, democracy, and individual liberty—a broad reaction against Franco-Kantian propositions was in the making, along with opposition to the British Enlightenment from John Locke to David Hume (Sternhell, 2010). This dualism laid the foundation for

31 See TED Radio Hours: Guy’s Favorites: The Source of Creativity at https://player. fm/series/ted-radio-hour-2462266/the-source-of-creativity. 32 See Rothbard (2010). For an excellent discussion about Cantillon’s contribution see, Thornton (2007) and Higgs (1897).

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a historical battleground, to the extent that the history of the Enlightenment is as contested as the Enlightenment itself, through endless academic disputes and tabloid analyses filed with absurd parlances and inferences. To evade these contentions and my partialities, I will appeal to sources and authors and refer directly to those who conceptualized the Enlightenment. Let us go back to 1712 when Joseph Addison described the world as “enlightened by Learning and Philosophy” (Fleischacker, 2013, p. 11). Twenty years later, Bishop Berkeley called his age “enlightened.” David Hume, in his discussion of the miracle in 1748, separated “the enlightened age” from those with “ignorant and barbarous ancestors” (Hume, 1748/2007, Section X, (§) 20, p. 86). But many questions remained unanswered, most notably, “What is enlightenment?” This question first surfaced in an article by the German theologian Johann Friedrich Zöllner in the December 1783 issue of the Berlin magazine, Berlinische Monatsschrift. The article’s topic was about a mundane theme, the desirability of purely civil marriages, and “it might have passed unnoticed and probably ignored if it had not been for a single footnote. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Zöllner asked. ‘This question, which almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins Enlightenment. And still, I have never found it answered!’” (Pagden, 2013, p. 6; Zöllner, 1783, p. 516). A year later, the editor of the same magazine asked the same question, Was ist Aufklärung? A precise response came from Immanuel Kant. In Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Kant (1784/2013) begins his essay by stating: Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use of own’s understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] “Have courage to use your own understanding!” – that is the motto of Enlightenment. (p. 1)

Before we go further, I would like to comment. Suppose one seeks a suitable way of capturing the spirit of the age or hopes to cite the renewed devotion to the universal application of Enlightenment. In that case, Kant’s spirited offering is the most appropriate. And yet, his insightful description is why his vision has been the victim of its

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potency. The essay needs to be placed with several essential works (e.g., Plato’s Republic, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Marx’s Capital , and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents ) which are frequently cited for ascertaining certain valued-laden convictions but rarely studied to grasp their essences. Other scholars made similar observations. For instance, Gisbert Beyehaus, in his 1921 article on Kant’s “program of enlightenment,” complains that previous scholars have treated Kant’s answer in a “step-motherly” fashion (see Beyerhaus, 1921, p. 2) According to Dan Edelstein, scholars have gotten into the habit of using Kant’s 1784 answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” as a convenient “one-stop-shop for defining the Enlightenment” (Edelstein, 2010, p. 117).33 This lack of appreciation for the core implications of classic works has gone as far as one historian, Franco Venturi, questioning whether Kant’s essay is even worth reading because Kant’s understanding of European Enlightenment is mainly a product of the philosophical tradition of the German Aufklärung linked to “the vision of the Humanität at the turn of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the passion for Greece and Rome which grew in the universities of Germany” (Venturi, 1971, p. 5).34 Since Kant was born and educated in Germany, reading his essay perpetuates the German-specific interpretation of the Enlightenment and neglects the various visions of other European philosophical traditions (e.g., Scottish, British, French). Venturi’s claim against Kant’s description of Enlightenment is characteristically wrong if one considers, as this study does, “enlighten,” “enlightened,” and “enlightenment” are commonly used not as an ideological platform, but rather as indications of opening one’s mind’s eye: Enlightenment is not an ideology but a state of mind. The way from preenlightenment to a state of Enlightenment is through experience; it passes from a condition of not knowing to one of knowledge. (Hamnett, 2017, p. ix)

33 A study has recently been posted on this issue using Google Ngram, which confirms the “step-mothering” treatment of Kant and fascinating data on its evolution (Persistent Enlightenment, 2014). 34 For a better understanding of his entire argument, see Venturi (1971, pp. 1–17).

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It is not Descartes’s appeal to the “natural light of reason” or Augustine’s “motion to the inner light,”35 but rather, as Kant perceived it, learning that releases a man “from his self-incurred tutelage” and renders him prudent to make up his mind “without direction from another.” Kant’s motto of Enlightenment is a mere echo of the 1660 Royal Society’s slogan, Nulius in verba (Latin for “on the word of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it”), which guided Europe to open its mind’s eye; the transformation that compelled men of the pen like Locke to begin his Essay on Human Understanding by stating that the mind has “no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our knowledge is only conversant about them” (Locke 1813, p. 61, emphasis added). The Royal Society’s slogan and Locke’s observation may be mistakenly interpreted as short-sighted, airily dismissing the scholarly tradition of learning from previous generations, upon which countless new convictions have been based. It was meant to underline the historical significance of the era in which the “self” gained currency but was left exposed and vulnerable to different and occasionally contradictory interpretations. These different interpretations are by no means unexpected, as I argue, because they prevailed among “those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” (This quote attributed to Nietzsche) The latter group (those who could not hear the music) mainly included folks who either misunderstood the spirit of the idea of “self” or exploited it to mark their theme. For instance, they perceived the significance of the individual, given the laboratory experimentations, the physiological psychology, and the statistical studies that are commonly used to achieve consensus about human activity and ability. According to this view, individualism is, broadly speaking, mentalistic, in that a person’s mental states (and events) form in isolation, detached from his physical or social environment. This view owes its prominence to Descartes. It was embraced by Locke, Leibniz, and Hume. However, members of other groups firmly danced to the spirit of “self” as they grasped its essence. For them, the future is dazzling if an individual can look himself in the face, not as a self-indulging and egoistic entity but

35 In which Alanen (2009) explains, “…the object of which are accessible to all rational beings, and which corresponds to the role given to intellectual intuition… as the only source of true and certain knowledge” (p. 106).

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a self-questioning, self- “overcoming” individual (Smith, 2019, pp. 141– 142). Here self-independence of mind became the prerequisite of view was a rhetorical calling for self-renewal (self-creation), which the eminent post-Enlightenment philosophers endorsed. For Nietzsche, for instance, the self, motivated by will, was an aesthetic self-creation expressed in spontaneous, creative action, which was the essence of humanity, if not superhumanity. And that self-creation demands rejection of the dominant norms. The key to meaningful self-renewal is the will; not in the sense of “solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will” but a disposition to relinquish a predetermined outlook which one has been instructed to adopt as his own (Burke, 1992, p. 7). This self-creation (actualization) is no longer defined in terms of fidelity to an already prescribed “vain” self, but in constructing something new, which can only prevail if one thinks independently and “without direction from another.” Thinking requires independence of thought, a faculty that inheres in a person’s value system and surroundings. In this context, and unlike liberals and postmodernism, I see Nietzsche’s self-creation fitting well with Kant’s delineation of Enlightenment (For an informative discussion on Kant’s influence on Nietzsche, see Sokoloff, 2006, pp. 501–518). The mind is the most excellent means for self-liberation that a man possesses. When individualism prevails, reason instructs. As such, Enlightenment reason constitutes a static rational framework, which is intrinsically uncompromising to everything outside its contours. Reason is a universal platform equipped with an absolute and uncontested endowment (knowhow), we are told, to usher men to the land of no faults. The ardent supporters of this high ground view depict the Enlightenment as an intellectual project, how the human spirit achieved “clarity and depth in its understanding of its nature and destiny, and its fundamental character and mission”36 (Cassirer, 2009, p. xii). Considering the reality of eighteenthcentury Europe, particularly France, this view seems to stretch the imagination far. The century of Voltaire, John Roberts observes, “was one in which fashionable people bid heavily for the seat from which to witness

36 Peter Gay’s two-volume study, Enlightenment: An Interpretation, also emphasizes a similar theme.

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the appalling torments on a would-be assassin of Louis XV [RobertFrançois Damiens],37 one in which, in 1783, horrified French peasants set upon a balloon fallen within a few miles of Paris and destroyed it under the belief that it was the moon,38 and one which would close with revolutionaries having visions of angels with tricoloured wings”39 (Roberts, 1976, p. 58). Roberts (1976) further elaborates, “Purely statistically, the salient fact about eighteenth-century mentality is that the minds of most

37 His horrific execution was documented by the famous adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who wrote in his memoirs: “We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours … Damiens was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. … I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch’s wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited” (see Braungardt, 2020). Michael Foucault also discusses the Damiens execution in detail in the first chapter of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), arguing that capital punishment involves the use of the physical body in a ritual that symbolizes pain, fear, and guilt. Perhaps Foucault had Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French social philosopher, in mind, who writes, “The essence of a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common and also that they have already well forgotten some of them” (Renan, 1882/2018, Chapter 9). Renan believed it the duty of French citizens to “have already forgotten” the great massacres—of the Albigensians in the thirteenth century, and of the Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 1572—that haunted the collective memory of the French with the trauma of fratricide. 38 On August 27, 1783, Cesar Charles, a member of the French Academy of Science, launched the first balloon inflated with hydrogen gas. Ascending from the Place des Victories in Paris to a height of nearly 3000 feet (914 m) and coming down some 15 miles (24 km) away, where terrified peasants attacked and destroyed it. Six years later, in July 1789, the horrified peasants stormed the Bastille, a small prison in Paris, and started the Revolution. In retrospect, perhaps a less attractive but plausible explanation of the Revolution is related to the fact that the population was growing just a little faster than food supply rather than a passionate longing for the liberty of humankind. 39 The term, “angels with tricoloured wings” is a reference to Perrine Dugué, one of the famous figures of a French revolutionary, the martyrs of “liberty.” (The other was Marie Martin.) Dugué was a nineteen-year-old girl from Mayenne in the west of France. On her way to see her brothers, who were ardent supporters of the Revolution, she was attacked and murdered. Her body was found the next day and buried in a nearby field, which became the site of miraculous cures. A chapel was built in her name in 1797, and she was seen to ascend to heaven with “tricoloured wings ” (Tallett, 1996, p. 127, emphasis added).

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Europeans in 1800 were very little different from those of their predecessors a hundred years earlier…It is not unreasonable to say that the content of popular mentality in continental Europe and even of that of much of the directing classes changed hardly at all between 1700 and 1789” (p. 58). To sustain his argument, Roberts (1976) brings up another fact about the reality of eighteenth-century Europe: “In its last quarter [of the eighteenth-century] …there was another striking phenomenon which may have been linked to this [his claim of mental stagnation in Europe], the first real growth of a newspaper Press. Yet the ability to read by no means meant access to the works of advance speculation which are now remembered as the major literary embodiments of ‘Enlightenment,’ nor was it likely, once away from one or two major centers, that most people wanted to read that sort of book in any case...Ideas which an intellectual historian thinks of as typical of 1775 were not shared by most men until many decades had passed—if then” (pp. 58–59). Carl Becker’s classic work, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, published in the dark Depression year of 1932, sets forth the novel and revealing thesis that the eighteenth century was far closer in its fundamental values and worldview to the thirteenth century than to the twentieth. “There is more of Christian philosophy in the writing of the philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories…the Philosophes demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials,” writes Becker (Becker, 1932, p. 31). Becker’s view has been supported by many scholars with diverse backgrounds and interests. For instance, Habermas (1992) emphasizes that the normative self-understanding of modernity receives its substance from the Judeo-Christian tradition and draws our attention to Postmetaphysical Thinking: “I do not believe that we, as Europeans, can seriously understand concepts like morality and ethical life, person and individuality, freedom and emancipation, without appropriating the substance of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of salvation”40 (p. 15). Habermas (2001) describes those modern concepts that would be unthinkable without the infiltration of Greek thoughts into the intersection of ancient Greece and Judeo-Christianity:

40 See also Kuipers (2006, pp. 131–133).

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I am referring to the concept of subjective freedom and the demand for equal respect for all—and specifically for the stranger in her distinctiveness and otherness. I am referring to the concept of autonomy, of a self-binding of the will based on moral insight, which depends on the relations of mutual recognition. I am referring to the concept of socialized subjects, who are individuated by their life histories, and are simultaneously irreplaceable individual and member of a community; such subjects can only lead a life which is genuinely their own sharing in a common life with others. I am referring to the concept of liberation—both as an emancipation from degrading condition and as the utopian project of a harmonious for of life. Finally, the irruption of historical thought into philosophy has fostered insight into the limited span of human life. It has made us more aware of the narrative structure of the histories in which we are caught up, and the fateful character of the events which confronted us. This awareness includes a sense of the fallibility of the human mind, and of the contingent conditions under which even our unconditional claims are raised. (p. 82)

Becker has also faced criticism, particularly among those who hold a more positive view of Western political institutions. For instance, Peter Gay, “one of the most distinguished historians of Europe of the postwar era,” in the words of Helmut Walser Smith, believes Becker’s thesis to be “sheer nonsense” and has determined to refute it (Gay, 2004, p. 5). He objects to the notion that the Enlightenment replaced Christianity with a new faith or “secular religion.”41 Gay believes that Becker’s view was a rhetorical attempt to delegitimize the Enlightenment by erasing precisely what made it a modern, secular phenomenon. For Gay, Freud—not Voltaire or Kant—“was the greatest child of the Enlightenment which our century has known. For ‘his fundamental assumption’ was ‘that the search for truth must never stop, that only knowledge allows reason to function, and that only reason can make us free’”42 (Gay, 1954, p. 379). This is a peculiar observation, especially when one considers Freud views men as Homo homini lupus [in Latin, “one-man wolf”] and observes:

41 For Gay’s criticism of the notion of “secular religion,” as applied to the French Revolution, see Gay (1961). 42 See also Hughes and Hoffman (2017, p. 152).

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Men are not gentle, friendly creatures, wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the country, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is less to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. Their neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. [‘Man is a wolf to man.’ Derived from Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88.]. (Freud, 1962, p. 58)43

Another, and perhaps more accurate, explanation is related to the fact that the Enlightenment “was not a consistent theoretical structure but rather an intellectual tradition with immediate and practical objectives” (Sternhell, 2010, p. 4). The inclination of the time appeared to be, more than anything else, a political movement to inaugurate the New World by aligning it with the image of the prevailing Western bourgeoisie, ranging from racial hierarchies44 to the empire of universal conformity. “I saw that everything essentially depended on Politics,” wrote Rousseau, “and however one looked at it, no people would ever be anything except what the nature of its government made it. And thus, this great question of what the best possible government would come down to this: What would be the nature of the government that would form the most virtuous, enlightened, wise people—the best people in the noblest sense of the word?” (Rousseau, 1824/1959, p. 404). Rousseau was not alone; John Locke owned stock in slave trading companies and was secretary of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, where slavery was constitutionally

43 Another aspect of Freud’s works makes Gay’s claim puzzling. Despite his uncontested intellectual contributions to the modern climate, some of his observations seem driven by the specificities of his interests and are, to some extent, perplexing, which casts doubt on his views’ applicability across the board, which Gay assumes can make us free. Freud’s following analysis underlines the point: “The Development of civilization appears to us as a peculiar process which mankind undergoes, and in which several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize this process with reference to the changes which it brings about in the familiar instinctual dispositions of human beings, to satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of our lives. A few of these instincts are used up in such manner that something appears in their place which, in an individual, we described as a character-trait. The most remarkable example of such a process is found in the anal erotism of young human beings” (Freud, 1962, p. 43). 44 See Zack (2017) and Purdy (2015). See also Spiro (2009, p. 73).

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permitted; (Uzgalis, 2017) David Hume attached a note to his essay Of National Characters, in which he found himself duty-bound to state: “…. the negros, and in general, all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the white. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no science… On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the white, such as the ancient GERMAN the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe. None ever discovered any symptom of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us distinguish themselves in every position. In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly. (As cited in Garrett & Sebastiani, 2017, p. 32)

In this context, the Enlightenment provided the blueprint for a complete Western mastery of the world, which explains why the Enlightenment’s intellectual and moral advent coincided with the world’s colonialization by the “noblest” Western imperialist powers. Before the Reformation and the Enlightenment period, invaders often claim to be serving some divine purpose or bringing order to the world by ruling and taming their subjected “savages” or scouring evildoers. Debasing them, therefore, was essential, for they were no longer considered genuinely human, and could rightfully be killed or enslaved. Such an attitude was prevalent when Christopher Columbus and his disciples reached the New World and killed or enslaved the Indians and the people of the Caribbean. The reform movement changed this attitude and established the norm that the non-Western population was human with a soul and hence could be converted to Christianity. In this light, killing or enslaving them was prohibited unless “they rejected salvation and defied God and King” (Hyslop, 2019, p. 14). The eighteenth century, however, did not end the cruelty of colonization. Instead, it transformed the colonizers from vice into virtue as they redeemed the country (they claimed) by converting or civilizing its inhabitants and respecting their rights. Enlightenment

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philosophers did not believe in conditional rights for those who embraced Christianity and obeyed the Crown but inalienable human rights, derived from natural rights. But even in this light, Enlightenment colonizers failed: “American occupiers who later promised Californios justice and equal rights failed to deliver on that pledge. Human expectations may have risen over time, but human nature (the nature of imperialism) remained much the same. Dreams of power and preeminence that were older than civilization and scripture had to contend with the requirement that conquest be rationalized and justified as never before” (ibid., p. 15). This aggression outlined the contour of the modern period and empowered the Western conquerors to perceive others as representations, in the words of the late Edward Said, of what they saw them to be and not as real depictions of themselves.45 The striking features in these descriptions of others are the rhetorical figures that one often encounters (e.g., primitive, uncivilized, or barbaric), encompassing wide geographic ranges and diverse ethical groups, including those from Africa, India, China, Ireland, Jamaica, and Persia. This is the context in which imperialism, in the modern sense of the word, emerged—not merely the “extraction of resources of others,” the “export of capital,” and the “domination of one nation over another,” but the belligerent mechanism that encompasses the entire “way of being” through which no national sovereignty or national identity is recognized (Chandra et al., 2004, p. 13). The modern form of imperialism affects every aspect of social existence at home (e.g., via nationalism) and abroad (e.g., via colonialism) (Arrighi, 2017; Duara, 2016). As men enter productive or economic relations, they are dominated by those who operate on relentless accumulation and speculation. This drives the knowledge of how to behave, the laws, economics, politics, language experience, and communication in the contemporary world’s discourses. Perhaps a short explanation clarifies my point here. Consider two fundamental human attributes: language and kinship. A human is born into both. You probably did not choose to learn your mother tongue, and you did not choose to be a citizen of your country. These slots existed before you were born, and you learned how to occupy them. Likewise, nobody knows all the forms of kinship. In most cultures, the knowledge of how to be a citizen differs from the understanding of how to be a mother. These

45 For an illuminating discussion of this topic, see Said (1980).

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are essential roles because a citizen’s responsibilities are not equivalent in all cultures, and a mother’s function is not homogenously perceived in all societies. It is not right to identify culture as the knowledge that an individual possesses, for no individual in any culture knows that entire culture. Culture is more significant than individuals with knowledge. This does not mean it cannot be directed or influenced, just that it can’t be owned, only sampled. In the next chapter, I will further elaborate on the reasons behind the ideologization of these ideas discussed above and their subsequent utilization in cultural propaganda and policymaking.

References Alanen, L. (2009). Descartes’s concept of mind. Harvard University Press. Archibugi, D. (2005). The language of democracy: Vernacular or Esperanto? (Center for European Studies, Working Paper No. 118). Arrighi, G. (2017, March 18). Nationalism and imperialism: The premises of Hobson’s definition. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3141-nationalismand-imperialism-the-premises-of-hobson-s-definition. Becker, C. (1932). The heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers. Yale University Press. Beyerhaus, G. (1921). Kants Programm der Aufklärung aus dem Jahre 1784. Kant-Studien, 26, 2–16. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Bisson, T. N. (2015). The crisis of the twelfth century: Power, Lordship, and the origins of European government. Princeton University Press. Blackwell, J. (1832). The voice of one crying in the desert. John Brooks. Bosteels, B. (2016). This people which is not one. In A. Badiou, P. Bourdieu, J. Butler, & J. Ranciere (Eds.), What is people. Columbia University Press. Bradly, M. (Ed). (2010). Classics and imperialism in the British empire. Oxford University Press. Braungardt, J. (2020). The execution of Damiens. https://sites.google.com/ view/philosophical-explorations/humanities/the-execution-of-damiens?aut huser=0. Burgard, P. J. (2010). Idiom of uncertainty: Goethe and the essay. Penn State Press. Burke, E. (1992). Further reflections on the French revolution (D. E. Ritchie, Ed.). Liberty Fund. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/burke-further-reflections-onthe-french-revolution.

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Buzan, B., & Sen, G. (1990). The impact of military research and development priorities on the evolution of the civil economy in capitalist states. Review of International Studies, 16(4), 321–339. Campbell, C. (2008). Easternization of the West. Routledge. Candlish, S., & Wrisley, G. (2019). Private language. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2019 ed.). https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2019/entries/private-language/. Cassirer, E. (2009). The philosophy of the enlightenment. Princeton University Press. Chandra, O., Ghost, A., & Kumar, R. (2004). The politics of imperialism and counterstrategies. Aakar Books. Chesterton, G. K. (1921, January). The next renascence: Thoughts on the Structure of the future. XII. The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder. Vanity Fair, 15(5), 54–58. Coplan, J. (2016, August 1). Cognitive rigidity: The 8-ball from hell. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-senseautistic-spectrum-disorders/201608/cognitive-rigidity-the-8-ball-hell. Davies, N. (1998). Europe: A history. Harper Perennial. de Laguna, T. (1934). Notes on the theory of ideas. The Philosophical Review, 43(5), 443–470. Democracy Now! (2020, September 11). Costs of War: After 9/11 attacks, US wars displaced at least 37 million people around the world. https://www.dem ocracynow.org/2020/9/11/9_11_war_on_terror_report. de Vylder, G. (2010). Economic leadership in the 18th century Britain: Swift’s orientalism versus Defoe’s pragmatism. In R. Ghesquiere & K. J. Ims (Eds.), Heroes and anti-heroes: European literature and the ethics of leadership. de Wijk, R. (2005). The art of military coercion. Mets & Schilt. Dirlik, A. (1986). Reviewed work: China and Charles Darwin by James Reeve Pusey. Journal of Asian History, 20(1), 106–108. Douglass, F. (1852). The meaning of July 4 for the Negro. In P. S. Foner (1950), The life and writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume II. Pre-civil war decade 1850–1860. International Publishers Co. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/ part4/4h2927t.html. D’Souza, D. (1995, April 10). Is racism a western Idea? American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/is-racism-awestern-idea/. Duara, P. (2016). Modern imperialism. In J. H. Bentley (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of world history. Fredric Jameson, Modernism Papers, Verso. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940/2007). Dusk of Dawn (H. L. Gates, Jr., Ed.). Oxford University Press.

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Dunbar, J., & Donald, D. (2014, May 19). The roots of the financial crisis: Who is to blame? The Center of Public Integrity. https://publicintegrity.org/inequa lity-poverty-opportunity/the-roots-of-the-financial-crisis-who-is-to-blame/. Edelstein, D. (2010). The enlightenment: A genealogy. University of Chicago Press. Fisher, G. (1988). Mindsets: The role of culture and perception in international relations. Intercultural Press. Fleischacker, S. (2013). What is enlightenment? Routledge. Foucault, M. (1984). The subject and power. In B. Wallis (Ed.), Art after modernism: Rethinking representations. New Museum of Contemporary Art. Freud, S. (1962). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton. Garrett, A., & Sebastiani, S. (2017). David Hume on race. In N. Zack (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and race. Gay, P. (1954, September). The enlightenment in the history of political theory. Political Science Quarterly, 69(3), 374–389. Gay, P. (1961). Rhetoric and politics in the French Revolution. American Historical Review, 66(3), 664–676. Gay, P. (2004). A life of learning (American Council Learned Societies [ACLS] Occasional Paper 58), p. 5. https://publications.acls.org/OP/Haskins_2 004_PeterGay.pdf. Glaveanu, V. P. (2019). The idea of dialogue: Mikhail Bakhtin. In V. P. Glaveanu (Ed.), The creativity reader. Oxford University Press. Gramsci, A. (1997). Selection from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Ed., Trans.). International Publishers. Gross, T. (Host). (2019, August 13). ‘Kochland’: How the Koch brothers changed US corporate and political power. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750803289/kochland-how-thekoch-brothers-changed-u-s-corporate-and-political-power. Habermas, J. (1992). Postmetaphysical thinking: Philosophical essays (W. M. Hohengarten, Trans.). MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2001). The liberating power of symbols: Philosophical essays (P. Dews, Trans.). MIT Press. Hagberg, G. L. (2017). Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding. Springer International Publishing. Hamnett, B. (2017). The enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America. University of Wales Press. Hargreaves, A. G. (Ed.). (2005). Memory, empire, and postcolonialism. Lexington Books. Hartman, A. (1992, November). In search of subjugated knowledge. Social Work, 37 (6), 483–484. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/37.6.483.

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Higgs, H. (1897). The Physiocrats: Six lectures on the French economists of the 18th century. Macmillan and Co. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/higgs-the-phy siocrats-six-lectures-on-the-french-economistes-of-the-18th-century. Hoffman, D. (2019, July 31). Is reality real? How evolution blinds us to the truth about the world. News Scientist, Physics. https://www.newscientist. com/article/mg24332410-300-is-reality-real-how-evolution-blinds-us-tothe-truth-about-the-world/#ixzz6hkX8P0vY. Huddleston, Jr., T. (2016, March 1). CBS chief: Trump’s success is ‘Damn Good’ for the network. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2016/03/01/lesmoonves-cbs-trump/. Hughes, H. S., & Hoffman, S. (2017). Consciousness and society. Routledge. Hume, D. (1748/2007). An enquiry concerning human understanding (P. Millican, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Huxley, A. (1946). Ends and means: An enquiry into the nature of ideals and into the methods employed for their realization. Chatto & Windus. Hyslop, S. G. (2019). Contest for California: From Spanish colonization to the American conquest (Vol. 2). University of Oklahoma Press. Kant, I. (1784/2013). An answer to the question: ‘What is enlightenment?’. Penguin Books Limited. Kolbert, E. (2018). There’s no scientific basis for race—It’s a madeup label. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/mag azine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/. Kuipers, R. A. (2006). Reconciling a shattered modernity: Habermas on the enduring relevance of the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. In L. Boeve, J. Schrijvers, W. Stoker, & H. M. Vroom (Eds.), Faith in the enlightenment? The critique of the enlightenment revisited. Rodopi. Kurtz, S. (2003, April 1). Democratic imperialism: A blueprint. Hoover Institution. https://www.hoover.org/research/democratic-imperialism-blueprint. Langer, S. K. (1980). Philosophy in a new key. Harvard University Press. Latey, M. (1969). Patterns of tyranny. Atheneum. Lenfield, S. L. (2012, April 3). How the enlightenment led to colonialism. Harvard Magazine. https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/04/howthe-enlightenment-led-to-colonialism. Lichtheim, G. (1967). The concept of ideology and other essay. Random House. Lin, W. (2018, December). The translated and transformed concept of Min Zhu (Democracy and Republic): A political culture influence on translation. International Journal of Language, Literature and Linguistics, 4(4). Lippman, W. (1922/2010). Public opinion. Greenbook Publications LLC. Locke, J. (1813). Essay on human understanding. Cummings & Hilliard and J. J. T. Buckingham. Jeffcutt, P. (1993). From interpretation to representation. In J. Hassard & M. Parker (Eds.), Postmodernism and organization. Sage.

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Jennings, J. (2016). Rousseau and French liberalism, 1789–1870. In A. Lifschitz (Ed.), Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and interpretation from the eighteenth century to the present. Cambridge University Press. Johnson, A. (2017, December 11). That was no typo: The median net worth of black Bostonians really is $8. Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/ metro/2017/12/11/that-was-typo-the-median-net-worth-black-bostoniansreally/ze5kxC1jJelx24M3pugFFN/story.html. Makaryk, I. R. (1993). Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: Approaches, scholars. University of Toronto. Marx, K. (1859/1904). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Charles H. Kerr & Company. Marx, K. (1939/1973). Grundrisse, Penguin in association with New Left Review. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ index.htm. Mayer, J. (2018, June 8). One Koch Brother forces the other out of the family business. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ the-meaning-of-a-koch-brothers-retirement. McLuhan, M. (1998). Understanding media. The MIT Press. McMahon, D. M. (2001). Enemies of the enlightenment: The French counterenlightenment and the making of modernity. Oxford University Press. Morris, I. (2011). Why the West rules—For now: The patterns of history and what they revealed. McClelland & Stewart. Morris, T. (1995). Becoming canonical in American poetry. University of Illinois Press. Mulgan, R. G. (1968). Defining democracy. Journal of Political Science, 20(2), 3–9. Muñoz, A. P., Kim, M., Chang, M., Jackson, R., Hamilton, D., & Darity, W. A. (2015). The color of wealth in Boston. https://www.bostonfed.org/public ations/one-time-pubs/color-of-wealth.aspx. Nagel, T. (1991). Mortal questions. Cambridge University Press. Orwell, G. (1945/1982). The lion and the unicorn: Socialism and the English genius. Penguin Books. Orwell, G. (1950). Shooting an Elephant, and other essays. Secker and Warburg. Pagden, A. (2013). The enlightenment: And why it still matter. Oxford University Press. Peng, Y. (1998). Democracy and Chinese political discourse. Modern China, 24(4). Persistent Enlightenment. (2014, February 23). Tracking the reception of Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”. https://persistentenlighte nment.com/2014/02/23/kantreception-2/.

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Purdy, J. (2015, August 13). Environmentalism’s racist history. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmenta lisms-racist-history. Renan, E. (1882/2018). What is a nation? And other political writings. Columbia University Press. Roberts, J. (1976). Revolution and improvement: The Western world (1775–1847). University of California Press. Rothbard, M. N. (2010). Richard Cantillon: The founding father of modern economics. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/richard-cantillon-fou nding-father-modern-economics. Rousseau, J. J. (1824/1959). Oeuvres completes (Vol. I). Editions Gallimard. Said, E. (1980). Islam through Western eyes. The Nation, 26, 14–18. Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin Books. Sherover, C. M. (1992). The conditions of freedom: A new world order. Public Affairs Quarterly, 6(4), 415–433. Smith, A. (1791). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (Vol. IV). J. J. Tourneisen and J. L Legrand. Smith, R. (2019). Individuality, the self and concepts of mind. In G. Claeys (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to nineteenth-century thought. Cambridge University Press. Sokoloff, W. W. (2006). Nietzsche’s Radicalization of Kant Polity, 38(4), 501– 518. Somekh, B., & Lewin, C. (2011). Theory and methods in social research. Sage. Soules, M. (2007). Harold Adams Innis: The bias of communications and monopolies of power. Media Studies. https://www.media-studies.ca/articles/ innis.htm. Spiro, J. (2009). Defending the master race: Conservation, eugenics, and the legacy of Madison Grant. UPNE. Sternhell, Z. (2010). The anti-enlightenment tradition (D. Maisel, Trans.). Yale University Press. Stone, J. (2016, January 19). British people are proud of colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/politics/british-people-are-proud-colonialism-and-british-empirepoll-finds-a6821206.html. Tallett, F. (1966). Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789. A&C Black. The Guardian. (2013, October 13). Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/13/newtons-univer sal-law-of-gravitation. Thornton, M. (2007). Was Richard Cantillon a mercantilist? Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 29(4), 417–435. Toynbee, A. (1951). A study of history (Vol. IV). Oxford University Press. Toynbee, A. (1952). The world and the West. Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER 3

Political Culture and Ideology

Socrates tells us in the Phaedrus, he has confined his teaching to the spoken word. He contends that committing one’s teaching to writing is dangerous because words, “when they have been once written down they are thrown about any-where among those who may or may not understand them, and they know not to whom they should reply, to whom not; and if they are illtreated or abused as illegitimate, they always need their father to protect them, being quite unable to help or to protect themselves.” Phaedrus, 257d

The Notion of Ideology Even though ideology has been the subject of inquiry of thousands of books and articles across a broad spectrum of disciplines, from philosophy to anthropology, it remains as elusive and confused as ever. While no definition can be expected to convey the full essence of the concept, it is astonishing that many theorists construct and utilize versions of “ideology” that disregard usage and general understanding, as if they are endowed with the power to define the word as they see fit. This shows we live in an era dominated by the perspectives of a small but overbearing segment of society rather than all of society. Today, we need only to consider those in positions of power, such as politicians, corporate leaders, and those represented in mainstream media, to recognize which segment © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_3

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of society has the power of definition. We are instructed, it seems, to submit to a few like-minded mouthpieces who operate in terms of a preestablished ideology of a solution to solve the many issues facing our society. This study has chosen a less complicated approach based on the conviction that a human community perceives reality through belief. A human is as much Homo credens as Homo sapiens; “we are all really believers” in that “our elemental assumption and beliefs themselves cannot be empirically verified or established with certainty” (Smith, 2009, p. 46). In this light, belief is the basis of human action, and it is the answer to questions that otherwise cannot be answered. It helps us to act consistently rather than spontaneously and chaotically when faced with uncertainty. It gives us the grounds to accept a preconceived reality. When a belief is shared among community members, it gains a social dimension and legitimacy. Thus, belief is an integral part of a man and his community; belief-asconviction, belief-as-opinion, belief-as-longing, and belief-as-ideology are the bases of our decisions to act (Paltonova et al., 2017, p. 66). According to Peirce (1877), “Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our action…The Assassins, or followers of the Old Man of the Mountain, used to rush into death at his least command because they believed that obedience to him would ensure everlasting felicity. Had they doubted this, they would not have acted as they did. So it is with every belief, according to its degree. The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of establishing some habit in our nature to determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect” (p. 4). From this perspective, an ideology is the fixation of a belief, specifically constituted according to its environment (e.g., the historical and cultural settings in which it is conceived). For instance, as an ideology, a religion natively bears a unique spirituality, values, and moral doctrines following its original environment,1 and uses the community of believers as a means to transcend itself. More importantly, it lays the groundwork for overcoming doubts and uncertainties in its disciples’ mindsets. An ideology relieves a community of its anxiety and

1 For instance, Christianity reflects the Roman empire, as Jesus said, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.” Christianity was born in the realm of Rome and hence was exposed to Roman Law. Judaism and Islam are both tribal, in the sense that both groups of followers were nomadic. Islam became an empire, and hence the empire was built around its tenets.

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insecurity by ushering its members out of predicaments that otherwise seem impossible to overcome. It empowers men. However, this quality underscores the susceptibility of ideologies to ideas, an indication that ideologies can be redefined and reconstructed as new ideas emerge and are assimilated. When no new ideas emerge, ideologies become timeworn and incompatible with the present environment and conditions, to the extent that they eventually degenerate as their visions and projections become irrelevant. Today, this absence of new ideas is easily observable among the dominant ideologies (e.g., democracy, the market economy, individualism, liberalism) which were conceived when the ritual of wife-selling (a way for a man to end a bad marriage) was a regular occurrence in the Western world, starting in the seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Johnson, 2010); the tobacco smoke enema was a medical procedure wildly used in Western medicine; infectious diseases like chickenpox, smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, and pneumonia were epidemics in many parts of Europe; there were countless “scientific bigotries,” such as drapetomania, which was perceived as a mental illness and described by the American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 as the cause of black slaves fleeing captivity. Yet, we still consider these ideas as if they relate to our lives in the twenty-first century. They do not, in the West or anywhere else in the world. One reason often mentioned for such persistence is that we do not have better ideas to replace them. To those who subscribe to this rationale, the reason for this void is that if one keeps retelling and referencing the same narratives, one becomes bound by them in the same manner that if one repeats the same lie, people start eventually to believe it. Continuing to appeal to the same centuries-old thoughts has sluggardized our minds. It has disoriented our cognition to the extent that we have lost our ability to understand and face the challenges of today. This stagnation of intellect is the effect of the peculiar form of domination that has harmed our ability to think for ourselves since the great triumph of capitalism over its illegitimate socialist sister. An astute mind may argue that ideologies, unlike organic materials, are not inclined to rot. Thoughts cannot be obsolete. All three main monolithic religions have retained their tenets for thousands of years, and today they have more faithful followers than ever before. So, why should economic or political ideologies be any different? I would respond to this plausible but inaccurate observation with the following argument.

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First, the visions of monolithic religious doctrines have been dramatically altered by men like Ibn Rušd (Averroes in Latin), Galileo Galilei, and Charles Darwin. All realized the incompatibility of their faiths with the reality of their times.2 Second, it may seem that ideas and ideologies orbit men’s lives forever, but their effectiveness is not infinite and has an expiration date. For instance, the idea that all economic agents are price-takers (e.g., both me and Bill Gates have similar power to influence market prices) must expire in the face of Mr. Gates’s net worth surpassing the GDPs of a few countries combined; his influence on prices is more potent than mine. Finally, there are vast dissimilarities between religion as an ideology and economic or political ideologies. The essence of religion rests solely on saintliness and spirituality, while economic and political ideologies have assumed no such characterization or attributions. In societies worldwide, religious narratives are used as symbols and traditions to interpret life beyond materialistic existence, while the other two ideologies are both products of the realm that is utterly preoccupied with worldly concerns. This is why religious beliefs often manifest in supernatural and divine ideas that members of a particular faith hold to be accurate: Moses parted the Red Sea; Jesus Christ was the son of God; Muhammad made a night journey with the angel Gabriel. Furthermore, the dissemination of religious ideology, solely to gain subscribers, differs significantly from the other two. This observation may be challenged if and only if economic and political ideas are perceived as articles of faith, and hence given a heavenly quality, which would enable their proponents to present themselves as evangelists who intentionally engage in the propagation of spiritual messages. But even if we can assume there is compatibility between the means of propagation of spiritual messages on one hand and economic and political notions on the other, we must acknowledge these ideas as divine notions are still not objective, but propositions that bear specific context-bounded implications (as propaganda starts with an ideology endowed with a particular set of values).3

2 A significant segment of the world population today does not think that the Earth is flat, or it is the center of the Universe. Darwin’s view of nature, right or wrong, has its subscribers, and until Ibn Rušd, Islamic traditions were unfamiliar with Greek thoughts. 3 According to Cunningham (2002), propaganda is pseudo-information with an essential philosophical shortfall. Reliant on epistemology and ethics, he argues that propaganda

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However, before we continue, let us return to the attribute underlined above and elaborate on ideologies’ susceptibility to ideas. The core argument here is that this property exposes a dichotomy, highlighting one of this study’s main contentions. If you recall, an ideology takes on the form of fixation of belief because it facilitates decisionmaking by removing uncertainty. Here, on the one hand, ideologies, like any fixation, make decision-making easier because they are inherently constructed to avoid incompatible and uncertain circumstances by creating a predictable environment. Perhaps this explains why in the prevailing globalization scheme, shared ideologies (conformity to a standard) between culturally diverse communities are perceived as stabilizing elements in both formal (political and legal) and informal (social and cultural) institutional practices. But fixation is inflexible and insensible, which leads to path dependence4 and prevents any alteration of the described reality, even when it is proven false. It deludes the mind. In recent years, however, this dichotomy has come to the forefront of global governance practice and debates, particularly in what is generally called policy transfer.

Ideology and Policy Transfer Policy transfer is described as the cross-cultural transfer of the best practices of prosperous Western nations’ institutions, policies, and delivery mechanisms under a Western-oriented standardization of norms.5 One of the earliest and most commonly cited definitions of the term comes from Dolowitz and Marsh (2000), who define it as “the process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements and institutions, and ideas in another political setting” (p. 4). This delineation, particularly the

is inherently unethical because it exploits information, poses as knowledge, generates a belief system, skew perceptions, and systematically disregards epistemic value (pp. 3–4). 4 According to Liebowitz and Margolis (2000), “path dependence means that where we go next depends not only on where we are now, but also upon where we have been” (p. 981). 5 Walker (1969) traces the origin of the contemporary study of policy transfer to policy diffusion of innovations between developed countries or between states in the United States—which is a subset of the comparative literature in politics.

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phrase “knowledge about policies,” presumes not only that such “knowledge” is absent but also that the prevailing difficulties in implementing policies are unrelated to ideology. On the former, several distinct issues come to mind. First, there are apparent differences between what constitutes knowledge, as opposed to information.6 Second, the transferability of knowledge is a difficult—if not outright impossible—task due to the relative incompatibility of a Western donor and a non-Western recipient country: there are a host of cultural and historical features that distinguish them, including language, institutional settings, the means by which collective legitimacy is attained and retained, bureaucratic structures, the makeup of the elite, and their interests. Third, there are other critical issues, such as adequately diagnosing the problem at hand and selecting an appropriate policy to address the problem. Fourth, it is not clear what policy transfers require to be effective, where such requirements begin and where they end, what kind of support is needed to sustain them, what sort of arrangements must be put in place to maintain them, etc. For instance, if the ultimate aim of policy transfer is to alter administrative settings and bureaucratic structures in the host country to improve shortfalls—such as lack of overall transparency, lack of decision-making, and endless paperwork—it should not target a single sector of the national policy apparatus, but the whole organization and structure of the public sector. The minimalist view that endorses incremental changes, such as standardized accounting practices, has never converged into the more holistic and comprehensive reforms necessary for the meaningful, lasting improvement of society. The standard response to such criticism is often related to the belief that broad change, under any circumstances and no matter how urgent it may be in any country, is almost impossible, and so why bother? There is also a common belief among conventional Western experts and international institutions that their overall institutional incapacity causes non-Western recipient countries to fail to comply with prescribed policy guidelines.7

6 For an unsophisticated discussion to understand the difference between knowledge and information, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0wxOvfh-Hg. 7 The primary step, known as capacity building, must be taken to improve the existing institutional settings. However, it has never been outlined what constitutes incapacity. As a noun, incapacity implies “physical or mental inability to do something or manage one’s affairs,” and it is often used as a legal term to indicate “legal disqualification.” It is hard to believe it only prevails in non-Western nations, mainly since most international

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The consequence of neglecting these issues is to turn policy transfer and the agencies that implement it into policy translation procedures and networks designed to diffuse information to entrench conformity and the understanding of standardized norms by creating perceptive common ground.8 On the latter, the assumed ideological detachment must first realize the obvious: a policy is an idea.9 Colebatch (2009), in the preface of his book Policy, observes, “Policy is an idea which flows through all the ways in which we organize our life: it is used by a wide range of participants in public life—public officials, elected representative, activists, experts, journalists, and others—in their attempts to shape the way public life is organized” (p. ix). Tropman (1984) shares a similar sentiment when he defines policy as “an idea reduced to writing, approved by legitimate authority, which gives direction or guidance” (p. 2). Accordingly, the formulation of policy requires a subscription to an ideology. For instance, for a monetarist economist, inflation is always a monetary phenomenon since he subscribes to the world’s monetary views. The instrument in his policy toolbox to fight inflation is the extraction of money from the economy. In this light, various ideology-based policies on a typical policy transfer menu, such as supply-side guidelines, should be excluded or, at least, be taken with a grain of salt. The dim image that orthodox experts in donor countries often present is that both policymakers and senior public figures in most recipient countries lack know-how about building up structures institutions, to some degree or others, have been criticized and scorned as “black boxes,” which produce ineffective and often useless policies (see Payer, 1982, p. 345). In 2012, the survey conducted of the World Bank’s 10,000 employees revealed that the Bank suffers significantly from a “culture of fear,” pervasive “fear of risk” and a “tribble” environment for collaboration. This is at a considerable development institution which lends more than $30 billion a year (see Lowrey, 2013). For the second thing, what is capacity building? Baguant’s answer to this question is illuminating: “Sharing the common fate of many development buzzwords, ‘capacity building’ has been added to the lexicon of popular development catchwords without being defined clearly in the process. In the convoluted style typical of international documents, the citation in UNCED’s Agenda 21 (Chapter 37) defines capacity building as follows; ‘Specifically, the capacity building encompasses the country’s human, scientific, technological, organizational, institutional and resource capability.’” (Baguant, 2002, p. 1). 8 For an informative discussion on this topic, see Holden and Von Kortzfleisch (2004). 9 Indeed, this is why a policy anywhere in the world is written as an idea (e.g., suggested

by a government member, and approved by the legislative body).

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that promote economic growth and misunderstand the essential functions of an independent democratic state. This perception, I contend, is deceitful and misguided. My skepticism is grounded in the following observations. First, such a view is erroneous because it often leads to imprudent justification and analysis, as in Stead et al. (2010): “In a situation mainly characterised by a lack of policy-making skills combined with low competence on the part of public servants, it was easier to copy or emulate a foreign programme than to start from scratch. In this way, policy transfer provided a means of avoiding ‘newcomer costs’; using the experience of other countries was cheaper, because they had already borne the costs of policy planning and analysis, whereas creating original policies required substantial financial resources” (pp. 314–315). To suggest that imitating a policy formulated elsewhere rather than tailor one to local conditions and structures is justifiable because it is easier, and hence less costly, is beyond any comprehension. This narrow perception of cost is designed for an orthodox probe to overlook the value and consider only a particular cost incurred at one time. For instance, this is why public education is usually assessed by incurring cost instead of its importance to society; health is evaluated by expenditure criteria rather than the worth of human life; environmental devastation is dealt with via carbon pricing known as a cap-and-trade policy.10 But even in this partial assessment, such analysis is misleading due to selecting a “cost” that occurs and ignoring future liabilities and the costs that will arise in the future.11 In this context, the cost associated with copying a policy may seem trivial at first. Still, when a mimicked policy fails, which is often the case, the final cost outweighs the estimated short-term cash-based cost, because it includes the policy failure plus the opportunity cost, which narrows the range of options for allocation of scarce resources. If the main objective of policy transfer is to provide expertise and know-how so decision-makers in the recipient country can put their house in order, why on earth should they follow practices that have not only proven ineffective in the medium and long term but also created the

10 For a critical discussion of cap-and-trade, see Ball (2018). 11 This is like the difference between a cash-base and an accrual-based accounting proce-

dure. In the former, the cost is recognized when money exchange hands. In the latter, the cost is identified when a bill is generated but not paid.

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currently prevailing chaotic conditions in Western nations? It is astonishing to pursue status quo policies when Western powerhouses like the United States, France, Germany, and Britain face tremendous political, economic, and social discontentment. In response, some argue these adverse developments should not be perceived as disapproval of Western philosophical foundations (liberalism, democracy, individualism) but indicate how well these notions are functioning. For instance, the Brexit case shows how the system of checks-and-balances restrains a chaotic situation, which elsewhere would lead to the total collapse of a governing system. I beg to differ. The current crises precisely outline the underlying shortfalls of these concepts. For instance, democracy is a divisive mechanism because polarization undermines society’s collective principle by nourishing various interests. One of the central pillars of American justice, the independence of the courts, was subjected to mockery when the minority-elected president (given that half of eligible voters did not participate in 2016, and less than half of those who did participate voted for him) openly discussed selecting a Supreme Court justice who would vote in his favor. In addition, suppose a policy is an idea that enables its subscribers to diffuse a specific ideology. In that case, a successful transfer of policy does not entail administrative expertise and proficiency to improve policymaking. What is needed is already in place: the dominant perceptive platform that depicts neoliberalism, which has been described by David Harvey as Creative Destruction, as the universal ideology that saves us all. According to Harvey (2005): There has been everywhere been an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking…Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common. Almost all states, from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in other instances in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly . (pp. 2–3)

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Elsewhere he points out that neoliberalism12 has “become hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense ways we interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey, 2007, p. 23). Harvey, however, warns us that “the wave of creative destruction neoliberalization has visited across the globe is unparalleled in the history of capitalism. Understandably, it has spawned resistance and a search for viable alternatives” (ibid., p. 39). The neoliberalism’s inherent advantage is mainly its pseudo-intellectual pretentious aura, enabling those in positions of power in recipient countries (e.g., policymakers) to legitimize and adapt the prescribed policies that have subjugated the global mindset for decades. Under these circumstances, mimicry of these policies is a suitable course of action; policy transfer is an appropriate mechanism pursued by international institutions; and non-Western countries—those who seek to catch up by adapting imported political and economic ideologies—are the textbook venue. In this context, criticism directed at agents of transfer (e.g., international financial institutions) and their counterparts in recipient countries (e.g., national bureaucrats, politicians) is nothing more than an ad hominem argument or “shooting the messenger.”13

12 The term “neoliberalism” has a fascinating intellectual history. It appears as long ago as 1884 in an article by R.A. Armstrong for The Modern Review. He defined liberals who promoted state intervention in the economy as “neo-liberal”—almost the exact opposite meaning from its widespread and academic use today. Another early appearance is in an 1898 article for the Economic Journal by Charles Gide. He used the term to refer to an Italian economist, Maffeo Pantaleoni, who argued that we need to promote a “hedonistic world … in which free competition will reign absolutely”—somewhat closer to our present conception (see Birch, 2017). 13 Let us consider the IMF and the World Bank’s overall conduct in the globalized arena. First, they did nothing more than follow their given mandate. Originating in the post-WWII period, the capitalist financial institutions, also labeled as Bretton Woods Twin Institutions by John Maynard Keynes in 1946, were given explicit instruction by the Western power-house economies to launch a framework for economic cooperation and development via policy advice and capacity development, including technical and financial support to help countries around the world to reform in accordance with the post-war dominant capitalist ideology. Second, while these institutions’ objectives may seem hegemonistic, the fact is they were, and to some extent still are, an integral part of international politics that created the world as it is now. Consequently, the prevailing acute adverse reactions against them could not have formed if they were not formulated and pursued effectively. In my view, such a critical examination should be considered a positive development.

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Instead, it is necessary to address the underlying issue, capitulation of the recipient countries to the “universal ideology” of the victor of the recent ideological war that leaves no space to diverge by insisting on the validity of the prescribed “values and norms.” Such a mindset allows the self-righteousness of absolutism without context, nuance, or degree to fester in our society; degenerates our politics and politicians so that instead of moving away from the Gilead of Handmaid’s Tale, we are hurled toward it; transforms the economy, and to a greater extent the government, into a mechanism that, by design, does not work for its members but propels everyone to serve its few beneficiaries; and pushes the world’s ecosystems to the edge of an abyss. Predictably, experts and epistemic communities are given vast platforms to confirm the West’s conventional wisdom. They insist that current common problems and policy resolutions are not country-specific but universal. “Every country has problems,” Richard Rose noted, “and each thinks that its problems are unique to its place and time… problems that are unique to one country…are abnormal. The concerns for which ordinary people turn to government—education, social security, health care, safety on the streets, a clean environment, and a buoyant economy— are common on many continents. Within a given policy area there is much in common on many continents” (Rose, 1991, pp. 3–4). To be fair, Rose acknowledges that some specificity exists since “difference in history and institutions make the budget deficit facing the President of the United States different from that facing a Soviet leader” (ibid.). For Richard Rose, the historical and cultural differences between Russia and the United States can be squeezed into a budget deficit analogy, revealing how these experts view the world. In the contemporary literature, the prevailing logic supporting universality, similar to Rose’s opinion, appears to interpret Western ideological dissemination as a rational process and depict those in the receiving end who see it through and ensure its implementation as rational actors.14 In most studies, the common theme is to fulfill the prophecy of “good governance” in non-Western nations because public organizations and institutions in these nations do not always know how to tackle the problems they face. Hence, they must look outside their borders to affluent Western countries and international organizations to address their

14 See, for instance, Simmons et al. (2010), Weinert (2014), and Warner (2016).

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predicaments. Under this scenario, policy transfer is a rational choice for non-Western countries to pursue. And so, over 80 states enacted the “rational” privatization of 8500 state-owned enterprises from 1980 to 1992 (Kikeri et al., 1992). Most newly democratized countries worldwide imported electoral systems from prosperous Western countries to be adopted as their own rational choice (Norris, 1997). Finally, the Structural Adjustment Program and its subsequent ex-ante conditionality clauses (overall administrative reform, the fire sale of state-owned enterprises, national currency devaluation, price liberalization) exceeded all expectations of being a rational choice. Implementing these policies is a way for a participant country to earn a membership application to the prosperous unipolar club. This study has no dispute with the extent of the problems or various calamities staring at many non-Western states. Rather, the disagreement is with the classification of “rationality” that intends to vindicate the continued implementation of failed policy transfer instead of explaining the reason for such a procedure. More to the point, characterizing non-Western states’ imitation of policies as rational is absurd, senseless, and usually proven counterproductive. There is no single case in which one can claim that the reproduction of Western ideological ideas (e.g., liberalization of the domestic economy, liberalization of property and ownership) has propelled an imitating country to reach similar conditions to a Western state—or that such imitation can lead to positive overall change that can be sustained over a considerable period without detrimental impacts.15 For instance, China is a suitable case that underlines the devastating effects of economic growth, where a significant portion of the population is suffocating because of the country’s economic success.16 Conceptually, the prescribed economic growth in policy transfer’s arsenal always creates devastating residuals due to the law of entropy. More 15 This observation is not limited to the liberal economic paradigm but encompasses much of the Western ideological domains. For instance, in political science, we confront the notion called political entropy, which is described by Carl Boggs as “the deep sense of political malaise that gripped American society in the 1990s—a malaise deeply rooted in historical processes that have given rise to unprecedented levels of popular distrust, hostility, and alienation toward the political system, politicians, and indeed ‘politics’ in general” (Boggs, 2001, p. 3). 16 According to the World Bank’s report, “the economic implications of environmental degradation by estimating that the cost of air and water pollution in China is between 3.5 and 8 percent of GDP” (see World Bank, 2007, p. ix).

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precisely, the Second Law of Thermodynamics underlines the impossibility of perpetual economic growth, which is promoted by the prevailing liberal ideology, with devastating and often irreversible harm to the environment: “The second law is about the dissymmetry of nature. […] once used up the energy cannot be recovered” (Lovelock, 1988, p. 21). Neglecting this proven fact will have existential consequences for all: “If humanity proves successful in meeting its most pressing challenges, it will be because we were able to see the entire forest instead of remaining lost amongst the trees” (Stollery, 2017). Trademarks like “miracle economies” and “tiger economies” are now mundane labels, because their ingenuine nature was revealed after the Asian economic crisis and the accompanying social and political turmoil. Also, capitalism, the most grandiose of all triumphant Western ideas, has undergone an extensive transformation and has even become an oxymoron. That is why it had to be repackaged and showcased with even more absurd names like Asian capitalism and Chinese capitalism, as if capitalism bears various national identities. Finally, China’s transformation into the world’s second-largest economic power was more related to its vast untapped labor than its prudent economic policy. Some argue that the phenomenal economic growth that prevailed in China resulted directly from the low cost of labor. For instance, in recent decades, according to Li et al. (2012), cheap labor has played a central role in Chinese economic success; China has also relied on expanded participation in world trade as a primary driver of growth.17 A mere examination of Chinese GNP over the past decades confirms this observation and reveals that a significant portion of what is produced in China is not owned by Chinese firms but foreign ones.18 However, no shortfalls and arguments could convince the promoters of policy transfer to reconsider its effectiveness or critically examine its stated goal. For instance, normative evidence suggests that rational and progressive learning is possible if and “only if the policy that is transferred is compatible with the value system of the recipient organization,

17 See also Lin et al. (2003, pp. 103–202), Bernstein (2004). 18 The recent trade dispute between China and the United States also underlined a

similar point when several mass media platforms suggested that many foreign firms in China move to neighboring countries because the cost of Chinese labor is rising. This is a lesson all non-Western nations ought to learn (Farrell, 2014).

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culturally assimilated through comprehensive evaluation, and, builds on existing organizational strengths” (Evans, 2017, p. 4). On the contrary, proponents of the scheme predicated on a Western understanding of good governance have exhibited another argument supporting their ideological diffusion: the positivistic science model of the evidence-based policy. This model gained political currency under Tony Blair’s administration, intending to replace ideologically-driven politics with science-based decision-making, which is most appropriate for a government mandate in the twenty-first century.19 As rational choice is invalidated, due to a failed history that attests to a poorly conceived process, it is then replaced by rational analysis because “…policy which is based on systematic [scientific] evidence is seen to produce better outcomes” (Sutcliffe & Court, 2005, p. iii). Briefly, evidence-based policy is a form of information/data-based assessment in which ex-ante analyses commonly involve quantification via risk analysis or cost–benefit studies and use mathematical modeling to that effect.20 It aims to legitimize a specific set of policy options that correspond to a predetermined framing of the issue under consideration as a promoted global practice.21 Therefore, it is an analytical methodology bounded to conform to a single view of the problem. Corollary to this limitation, such a method also distracts its subscribers and those who intend to use it from all other alternatives. When it is commissioned as an optimal instrument, various alternative options become a sort of irrelevant knowledge and hence are de facto removed from the policy discourse (Saltelli & Giampietro, 2017, p. 2). More to the point, this tunnel-vision analytical method explicitly disregards all local factors (e.g., socioeconomic and political condition, institutional setting, values, and norms), which should otherwise be incorporated in the formulation of any policy resolution. 19 The British government’s 1999 Modernising Government White Paper stood for acknowledging the need to modernize policy and management at the center of government. It argued that the government “must produce policies that deal with problems; that is forward-looking and shaped by evidence rather than a response to short-term pressures; that tackle causes not symptoms” (see Evans, 2010, p. 12; Sutcliffe & Court, 2005, p. iii). 20 This is the reason why such a technique is commonly used in the financial market to assess risk. See an interview with Nobel Laureate economist Robert Engle on evidencebased policymaking at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18Bv2H_furw. 21 Predetermined framing is needed for setting up a mathematical model. You cannot construct a model with an undetermined goal.

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The main flaw of such methodological exclusion is that a cooked policy outcome is nothing more than an exaggerated simplification. An inherent partiality compresses perceptions of the state of affairs into a single snapshot constructed by the medium of information/data, with an ideological message embedded in the method and objectives of gathering it.22 In this context, McLuhan (1998) brilliantly reminds us, “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message…unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name” (p. 8). For instance, when a specific ideology dictates that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, it also decides what data should be collected. In this respect, data on inflation spell out a particular ideology. Ironically, while international institutions and organizations insist on an evidence-based policy scheme as an optimal instrument worldwide,23 a debate is also unfolding about the failure of mathematical modeling to inform policies.24 For instance, Oreskes (2000) underlines the mathematical modeling paradox, mainly when a parallel is made between a logical proposition (a theory-based statement) and a model prediction: “ … models are complex amalgam of theoretical and phenomenological laws (and the governing equations and algorithms representing them), empirical input parameters, and a model conceptualisation. When a model generates a prediction, of what precisely is the prediction a test? The laws? The input data? The conceptualisation? Any part (or several parts) of the model might be in error, and there is no simple way to determine which one it is. (pp. 35–36)25

22 E.g., a partial listing of items to be collected, vague descriptions of data and data collection instruments, bias in identifying information, detachment or lack of connection with the community under study. 23 For instance, the World Bank is tracking the progress of developing countries towards the Millennium Development Goals and Poverty Reduction Strategies in developing countries (see Scott, 2005). 24 For an informative discussion on this topic, see Zaringhalam (2016). An ample example of the failure of science to inform policies is the cholesterol versus sugar saga (Leslie, 2016). 25 She continues, “So what use are predictions? A logical prediction can serve as a

test that give us a clue when something is wrong, if it fails to define what is wrong uniquely. Temporal prediction can serve this role, but only if the time frame is short or the predicted events frequent. Forecast of events in the far future, or of rare events in the near future, are scant value in generating scientific knowledge…. They tell us very little about the legitimacy of the knowledge that generated them” (Oreskes, 2000, p. 36).

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Joseph Stiglitz observes a more relevant mathematical modeling perspective when he underlines a fallacy of the ceteris paribus assumption: “Models by their nature are like blinders. In leaving out certain things, they focus our attention on other things. They provide a frame through which we see the world” (Stiglitz, 2011, p. 591). In short: “ceteris are never paribus” (Saltelli & Funtowicz, 2015, p. 149). The question is why evidence-based policy—and, more generally, policy transfer—still dominates international institutions and organizations. A short answer would be that this promotional venture is an excellent exhibition of the law of the instrument; as Abraham Maslow states, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” While surrendering to ideology may curtail uncertainty, it also disarms one’s cognitive ability to see through a reduced reality, even if it is staring at one. And so, an international epistemic community that locked into a particular ideology faces a daunting dichotomy. On the one hand, their instruments and cognitions mirror the convictions that tell them how to resolve ongoing crises. On the other hand, their ideological fixation reassures them that it is “business as usual”: there are no crises. This bewildering situation may occur because the profession of subscribing to ideology may not correlate with an understanding of its basic tenets. Hence, subscribers may pursue a specific dogma for a host of reasons such as the bandwagon effect,26 the influence of peer pressure,27 or a predisposition to seem informed and in tune with the latest buzzwords. A mid-range reason is related to the entangled cultural and historical web that depicts the West’s evolution of values and interests. There is a secure link between the importance of science and normative impulses. In other words, appeals to science in the Western cultural setting reflect beliefs and attitudes about the role of science in reducing vulnerability by promising protection against uncertainties.28 This appeal enables conformists to often perceive themselves as armed and committed to science’s collective knowledge to solve problems. In this respect, evidence-based policies, and in the broader domain, policy transfer, do not consider their applicability to a highly diverse community of nations, their compatibility with

26 Van Arkadie (1989, p. 182). 27 See Campos et al. (2017). 28 For an interesting commentary, see Orr (2011).

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the culture of the recipient nation, (e.g., the value system of the recipient organizations and existing governmental strengths), their feasibility relative to an institutional setting in a recipient nation, their viability close to the problem at hand and in relation to both economic and political dimensions,29 and finally their desirability regarding local norms and values that galvanize local actors joining for a common purpose.30 John Kenneth Galbraith sums up these points brilliantly when he talks about “the considerable number of students at Harvard from poor countries who were studying the sophisticated and, for them, often irrelevant models of the advanced economy” (Galbraith, 1994, p. 161). Again and again, Galbraith returns to the idea that not everything produced, valued, and taught in the Western world has any meaning for the rest, which is also the main contention of this study (Peach, 2008, p. 25). Western ideas are invested with values that make them inadaptable elsewhere, and non-transferable if one expects to achieve similar results. To get the same results, one must replicate the same context, which is impossible. Considering an idea desirable does not translate into an ability to achieve the concept if one remains alien to its envisioned principle and

29 Many observers also express similar shortfalls. For instance, Howes et al. (2017) indicate, “Evidence-based policy making has been advocated as much, if not more, for developing as developed countries. However, very little attention has been given to the conditions or prerequisites for evidence-based policy making, and whether these are in general more or less likely to hold in developing countries. We argue that an environment conducive to evidence-based policy making is one in which there are strong incentives for good policies to be adopted, capable institutions to implement them, a wide range of domains within which good policy can be adopted, and a ready supply of well-developed policy proposals.” 30 On this last issue, I would like to point out that the capacity to act collectively for a public-political purpose is what Hannah Arendt calls power. Power should be distinguished from strength, force, and violence (Arendt, 1972, pp. 143–155). For Arendt, power is sui generis because it is a product of collective-action and rests on persuasion; it arises out of the concerted activities of a plurality of agents, and it rests on persuasion because it consists in the ability to secure the consent of others through unconstrained discussion and debate. Its only limitation is the existence of other people. Still, this limitation, she notes, “is not accidental, because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality, to begin with” (Arendt, 1958, p. 201). In this context, ignoring desirability implies an intention to ignore or disturb the formation of collective power that may prevail among local actors.

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incapable of comprehending its historical roots. An adaptation of an idea, which is neither historically-based nor culturally-ingrained and originated on the “other side,” is not only erroneous, but often has detrimental consequences on its host country’s political, social, and economic stability and well-being.

Domination and Degeneration As many casual observers often insinuate at the outset, I must state this study does not consider the individual as the passive victim of domination or ideology. In contrast, all humans throughout communities worldwide are actors in their own lives, whether they play passive or active roles in adopting, imposing, or resisting dominant discourses. One of the main arguments of this study is that if we are to learn anything in life, it must be through remembering our history, neither as master narratives nor stories of specific mastery, but preferably by attending to our role in making those narratives. When we examine domination, be it political, social, economic, the results are understandable; though no one invented it and few can be said to have defended or formulated it, it has been an integral part of all human communities. However, between the clarity and ambiguities, a life of domination, and more precisely, the life of a dominator (dictator) resembles the experience of the smallest pathogen, a virus. Both manifest with considerable variation in their adaptation strategies to the organism. They infect and dominate, and need a reservoir host to survive and proliferate as they co-evolve with their hosts. Domination foremost needs people as its reservoir host; this empowers it, not in the shape of an institutional power structure but instead as an innate agent to encounter and neutralize inevitable obstacles, conditions, and resistances. When domination prevails, no mechanism of governing a society is in equilibrium, nor can there be any functional organization. Domination suppresses the intrinsic logic of stability and demands practices that characteristically orbit around petty calculations of self-interest instead of the means to preserve collective welfare. In this context, Foucault’s observation is illuminating: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what they do does” (as cited in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 187). The impact of this “not knowing,” whether conscious or unconscious, is both the

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most degenerating and revealing aspect of domination; as the legendary Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid once said: “The vices that defeat the dream/Are in the plant itsel’, /And till they’re purged its virtues maun / In pain and misery dwell” (as cited in McCulloch, 2009, p. 139). To understand this point, it is essential to recognize colonization for what it is and “decolonize the mind.” According to Marcelo Dascal of Tel Aviv University: The metaphor “colonization of the mind” highlights the following characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny here: (a) the intervention of an external source – the “colonizer” – in the mental sphere of a subject or group of subjects – the “colonized”; (b) this intervention affects central aspects of the mind’s structure, mode of operation, and contents; (c) its effects are long-lasting and not easily removable; (d) there is a marked asymmetry of power between the parties involved; (e) the parties can be aware or unaware of their role of colonizer or colonized; and (f) both can participate in the process voluntarily or involuntarily. (Dascal, 2009, p. 2)

From this description, Dascal concludes that “colonization of the mind” often operates through the transmission of mental habits and contents via social systems (e.g., the family, religion, ideology, education) rather than the colonial structure. Dascal also underlines a principal factor in this process: local actors who perform the colonizing: … are either not aware of the nature of their action or of the epistemic and other damaging consequences of their action. On the contrary, they believe they are helping the colonized, by providing them with better beliefs and patterns of action that improve their ability to cope successfully with the environment. Furthermore, they are also unaware of the fact that for the most part their minds have themselves been colonized by others, whose agents they become by attributing to them the same epistemic authority they rely upon vis-à-vis those they colonize. (ibid., p. 3)

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Briefly, colonization of the mind prevails when the colonized adopt the colonizers’ beliefs as their own.31 “Colonization of the mind” entails engendering a set of convictions in the colonized mind through a pervasive cognitive and pedagogical process. This clarifies why the successful implementation of “colonization of the mind” requires a voluntary and local base. This limits the chance that it will be perceived as compulsory. It is attained through the coordination of a local power structure (e.g., a state’s ruling elites) and a subordinated group (e.g., an epistemic authority) that can present itself as the social authority. Such incorporation is endowed to legitimize all forms of partialities and devalue all other traditions in favor of the adopted ideologies. In retrospect, the essence of “colonization of the mind” is linked to the implicit acceptance of a rule of inference 32 that bestows dominance to the colonizer’s ideas. While it is debatable whether “colonization of the mind” can control the public mindset, its intent typically prevails, which is nothing short of ideological hegemony.33 James Scott labels this effect as 31 On this point, Judith Butler makes a similar observation by connecting subjection

and power in a circular flow and declared subjection “signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject” (Butler, 1991, p. 2). Rothbard (2015), in a reiteration of the central thesis of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (written some time between 1552 and 1553), also alludes to the same inference as she noted in her introduction, “ … the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection” (p. 12). She further elaborates on this point by stating, “The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.” If this were not the case, no colonial power and colonizing institutional settings could have been established; and indeed, no domination would long endure. A skeptic may point out that Rothbard’s point is irrelevant to the context of the present discussion since colonization of mind does not occur because of an individual or individuals, but rather, as Dascal underlined, it is matter of a broader spectrum of existing social structures. The answer is undoubtedly provided by Dascal when he highlights the fact that local agents of implementation of colonization of the mind, for the most part, are those whose minds are also subjectified by the same ideologies they advocate. Whether they are aware of this contradiction or not does not negate the point of contention—that is, subjects of domination, consciously or not, are responsible for their subjectification. 32 Generally speaking, the rule of inference is a syntactic rule or function, which takes premises and returns a conclusion in a sense that if the premises are true (by an interpretation of “true”), then so is the conclusion. 33 This outcome is compatible with the current interpretation of the political cultures of modern democracies as comprising two significant ideologies: a ruling ideology which is a coherent system of thought, and a subordinate ideology which often exhibits contradictory

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the public transcript: “a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate”34 (Scott, 1990, p. 2). However, such subordination is primarily displayed at the level of thought rather than action. This separation inherently leads to disconnection, even contradiction, between what the hegemonic discourses depict as idols and what the ordinary life of common people shows. The former have the sole purpose of blowing bubbles into the air, expecting their audiences to be mesmerized by the bubbles’ beautiful colors and wobbly shapes; the latter is ever eager to leap in the air and pop one after another. However, such a reaction gradually evolves into a degenerating force as the contrast between what is preached and what people experience in their daily life widens. Today, this evolution has come full circle, as many in the United States, which symbolizes the “free world,” think that global warming is a hoax. Hence, it is acceptable to burn down the house for a short-lived fest (by deregulating economic activities and commercial interests, which have been identified as the leading causes of the calamity). Others believe that they have achieved lasting progress by prioritizing access to public toilets by gender over securing rights to affordable housing, health, education, and economic opportunities.35 We also witness similar sentiments against the dominant liberal tenets gaining currency throughout Europe—the birthplace of the liberal description of the word—ranging from civil unrest and an upsurge of nationalism/fascism to a general mistrust of governmental institutions and Brexit. Under piling pressures, attempts to justify, rather than explain, these “illiberal” reactions have been hesitantly offered to assure everyone that these occurrences are temporary unpleasant events, and order will prevail. Most of these justifications are symptomatic of what are perceived

consciousness. In discussing the social structuring of political consciousness, Converse (1964, pp. 211–212) gives the most attention to the diffusion of “packages” of ideas from creative sources to the masses. Successful diffusion, of course, depends on effective communication. Weakness in ideological thought is therefore explained as the result of imperfections in the transmission of information (see Cheal, 1979, p. 109). 34 Scott (1990) further elaborates on this issue and states that the public transcript commonly “provide convincing evidence for the hegemony of dominant values [and]… the hegemony of dominant discourse…where the effects of power relations are most manifest [in which] subordinate groups endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination” (p. 4). As the reader will see, the interpretation offered here is a bit different. 35 See Kirkup and Evans (2009).

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as popular grievances: people in the heartland of America were ignored for many years; minority groups were marginalized in Europe; people of Northern Europe wanted their country back from invading refugees; Brits felt their sovereignty was lost. But few of these validations were attentive to the root cause of these outrages since the denial of reality always surpasses the understanding of it. For instance, Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry of Foreign Affairs Journal state, The recent rise of illiberal forces and leaders is certainly worrisome. Yet it is too soon to write the obituary of liberalism as a theory of international relations, liberal democracy as a system of government, or the liberal order as the overarching framework for global politics. The liberal vision of nation-states cooperating to achieve security and prosperity remains as vital today as at any time in the modern age. In the long course of history, liberal democracy has hit been hard times before, only to rebound and gain ground. It has done so thanks to the appeal of its basic values and its unique capacities to effectively grapple with the problems of modernity and globalization. The order will endure, too.” (Deudney & Ikenberry, 2018, emphasis added)

In response, I only underline a few facts. Since the “liberal vision of nation-states cooperating to achieve security and prosperity,” we have endured two World Wars; we have witnessed many mass exterminations in which liberal flagship nations remain silent; obliteration of nation after nation in the name of liberal institutional building; demonization of culture after culture because they simply did not fit into the liberal sketch of the world. Second, modernity and globalization were started and constructed by liberal thoughts and the liberal economic order. Hence, it is misleading, if not outright ingenuine, to claim that liberal values have the capacity to resolve the problems they are solely responsible for creating. However, there is no lack of conceptual explanations for this widespread resistance against ideological domination (see Malksoo, 2012; Romero-Trillo, 2001). In anthropology, for instance, there is the term liminality (from the Latin word l¯ımen, meaning a threshold), which describes a condition of disorientation that commonly occurs when people transitioning from their convictions to new beliefs no longer hold

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their traditions and are ill-equipped to embrace idealized standards.36 This bewildering state is often exacerbated over time due to an absence of alternatives, as the newly promoted ideas failed to live up to the idealized brand’s expectation. It becomes apparent that the emperor has no clothes. With their traditions abandoned and hung out to dry by fetishistic ideologies, people inevitably align their identities with toxic principles in direct contrast to those of the human community, which entails recognizing connectedness, responsibility, and vulnerability. On this point, Johann Baptist Metz cautions us against living off the bread of dominant ideology which disconnects people: “An identity thus formed through the principles of domination and subjugation makes the individual profoundly disconnected and, in the strict sense of the term, egoistic” (Metz, 1999, p. 54).37 Today, we need not stretch our imagination to observe this disconnection: a picture-perfect White House with the former President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu unveiling the “deal of the century,” while the president has been impeached and the Prime Minister formally indicted for corruption in his own country; the ineptitude of “the democracy solution”38 remaining unacknowledged in the increasingly linked global system, even though it ignores cultural, religious, and circumstantial differences in the name of abstract propositions; how nation after nation has been obliterated while the Western liberal world order and those who claim its flagship have not only participated in the destruction but refused

36 The reason is apparent: liminal person during the transition period is in a position of neither here nor there; a limbo status that perpetuates a sense of disorientation that comes about as a result of detachment from one’s social structure and cultural condition (Turner, 1996, pp. 94–95). 37 Metz (1999) starts the chapter with the following: “What does man live on? Whose bread does he eat? Which food nourishes his life? Nietzsche: ‘I am Zarathustra, the godless; I keep cooking for myself in my pot every kind of chance. And only when it is well cooked through, do I welcome it as my food. And verily, many a chance came to domineeringly; yet still more domineeringly did my will speak to it—and at once it lay there imploringly on its knees” (p. 53). 38 See Galston (2005).

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to accept any responsibility for their wicked deed.39 These are confirmations of the glaring mess we are in, signifying the present disconnect between people and the promoted ideological icons; the disorders that sometimes manifest as nervy restlessness and sometimes seem like outright bigotries are mere vibrations that sometimes whisper and other times scream: “Nothing is working, and no one is listening.” The gap between what one is told to pursue to better his overall condition and what one experiences in the routines of his life inevitably leads to a social anomaly. On the one hand, his daily life activities unite him with his surroundings and fellow humans in the actual transformation of the real world. But the sheer weight of hegemonic thought incapacitates his ability to think for himself. It prevents him (as a member of the subjected community) from critically examining his day-to-day actions and surroundings. This disability is not without degenerating consequences; as Socrates reminds us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He also repeats a similar point in Phaedrus: “People make themselves appear ridiculous when they are trying to know obscure things 39 Many similar examples should compel us to ask the question, how can one believe in, let alone promote, the “universal” compass to guide us all to the promised land under these conditions? Few have attempted to answer this question by examining what they observe daily, despite their often-ridiculed analyses and belittled inferences. For instance, French critic Jean Baudrillard, in his book The Spirit of Terrorism, offers us his reading of the phenomenon of terrorism: “The more concentrated the system becomes globally, ultimately forming one single network [that resemble the world envisioned by Soviet Communist Bureau], the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point. Here it was eighteen suicide attackers [reference to 9/11 attack] who, thanks to the absolute weapon of death, enhance by technological efficiency, unleashed a global catastrophic process. When global power monopolized the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed [to investigate the root cause of such catastrophe] what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer? It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rule. And the new rules are fierce ones, because that stakes are fierce” (Baudrillard, 2013, p. 7, emphasis original). And yet, instead of responding to Baudrillard’s critical analysis, Bruno Latour, Baudrillard’s compatriot, and a Stanford presidential lecturer, addressing an audience of academics at the Stanford Humanities Center, asked, “What has critique become when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness? What has become of critique when a book that claims that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon can be a bestseller?” (as cited in Di Leo, 2014, p. 2).

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before they know themselves.” Socrates’ dictum signifies that today’s active “mass man” cannot engage in any critical reasoning of his own or make any vital decision by himself according to his values and convictions. Digging up the history of the common man’s struggle to free himself from despotic rule, he has usually failed to challenge the nature of domination. He has been subjugated, his mental aptitude (propensity) for subordination compelling him to be servile to power. Perhaps this is a reason he often appears in any discussion of his welfare merely as the obscure background of social revolt, and even if a bulk of theoretical questions, methods, groupings, and perspectives make an attempt to penetrate this obscurity, his mindset remains impossible to articulate. His subjugated mind can only explain his absence; he does not expect representation. Only the most radical forms of struggle have occasionally succeeded in that they have temporarily incited mass anger and raised the question of whether kings, the papacy, feudal-lords, bourgeoise capitalists, and generals serve any useful social purpose.40 However, if we were more attentive to history, we could have realized that, while domination often takes the form of military might or popular uprisings, the essence of domination is general obedience to the well-being of the dominant group, which is always obtained through control of subjects’ minds (to which collective subjectification owes its potency). This often-neglected fact is why many revolutionary movements of the modern era have lavishly wasted their enormous gathered energy on misplaced targets, replacing one oppressor with another.41 While these movements often began with an emotional response based on temporary sentiments of rage, often

40 Even in this case, De Mesquita and Smith warn us about the fallacy that tyrants

can tyrannize unilaterally, and that removing them would eliminate their domination: “No leader is monolithic. If we are to make any sense of how power works, we must stop thinking that North Korea’s Kim Jong II can do whatever he wants. We must stop believing that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan, or anyone else is in sole control of their respective nation…All of these notion are flat out wrong because no emperor, no king, no sheikh, no tyrant, no chief executive officer (CEO), no head of family, no leader whatsoever can govern alone” (De Mesquita & Smith, 2011, p. 1). 41 The notion that a revolution often does not achieve its stated goals has been introduced for quite some time. A few students of comparative revolutionary movements have examined cases of revolutionary failure and some of occasional success. For instance, see Skocpol (1979) and Greene (1974).

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justified by the derivatives of domination (e.g., the wickedness of perpetrators) the pale reason for dominance, the collective subjectification of the common man, is his mental enslavement to power; hence, he falls into a highly wasteful “dethroning and throning” cycle with no end in sight.42 Orwell’s Animal Farm underlines this exact flaw, as he felt revolutions often replace one tyrant with another, a recycling motion that is destined to fail. The author of Vindiciate contra Tyrannos (Defense [of liberty] against tyrants), writing about the responses of people to their kings in 1579, explains: “Tyranny may be properly resembled unto a hectic fever, the which at first is easily to be cured, but much difficult to be known, but after it is sufficiently known becomes incurable. Therefore, small beginning are to be carefully observed, and by those whom it concerns diligently prevented.”43 Furthermore, except for struggles against external domination (e.g., colonialism), revolutionary movements in the modern era, particularly in non-Western regions of the world, have formed around ideas and ideologies that, for the most part, were conceived and gradually became dominant in public and intellectual discourses in the Western hemisphere: “pamphlets, not muskets, ignited the revolutions that swept through America and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century” (Polasky, 2015, p. 17). This epigram-worthy sentence captures the essence of my argument. While the fetishized idea of liberty from bondage travels freely on folded papers, small enough to fit in a pocket and powerful

42 One of the manifestations of such a cycle is what commonly takes place in a postdethroning period when the residue of control and domination is exercised again by self-styled cultural elites of the intelligentsia, taste-makers, academics, etc., who often take their ideological cues from sources that are mainly responsible for the colonization of their mind. It is worth noting that Marxism sets the primary forms of domination in an evolutionary sequence where each one is driven by a specific stage and historical event (e.g., Asiatic Mode of Production). Combating and eliminating such localized domination with thoughts that were conceived elsewhere, according to utterly different past events and cultural values is optimism unsupported by history. 43 As cited in Latey (1969, p. 299). Moore (1978) perhaps offers a persuasive articulation of the point: “…one main cultural task facing any oppressed group is to undermine or explode the justification of the dominant stratum. Such criticisms may take the form of attempt to demonstrate that the dominant stratum does not perform the task that it claims to perform and therefore violate the social contracts. Much more frequently they take the form that specified individuals in the dominant stratum fail to live up to the social contract. Such criticism leaves that basic functions of the dominant stratum inviolate” (p. 84).

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enough to invoke their readers to rise and revolt against their oppressors, such papers are inept at yielding meaningful and sustainable results in distant lands (e.g., to free men from the monolithic, dominationoriented conception of power over society and culture). This is because, I argue, that these ideas are not applicable universally, since they came about as a result of the specific historical circumstances and cultural evolution of specific vicinities and their broader geographic whereabouts (the Western hemisphere). Therefore, they inherently bear qualities unique to their perceptions of the world (e.g., the Renaissance, the rise of modern formation), specific diagnoses (e.g., the religion of papacy, the Inquisition, feudalism, aristocracy, etc.), and ambiguous remedies (e.g., individualism as the nursery of freedom, democracy, and liberalism).44 Most of these conditions, situations, and offerings had been unknown, even in Europe’s previous history.45 In this context, an emancipation movement can only succeed if its principal idea is linked to and reflects local conditions and cultural settings. Approaching domination in this manner enables subjects of power to trace 44 See an informative article in Encyclopaedia Britannica (2020); see also Spencer (2018). 45 Although, one may argue that domination of one group over another has always been part of human history and is endorsed by a set of beliefs that explain and justify that domination; ideas that will guide a man to free himself from the wickedness of domination must be considered universal, irrespective of where and when they were conceived. While I addressed this issue in some detail in this chapter, here, I limit myself to a brief response. First, while the idea of a typically non-Western politico-economic system fundamentally distinct from European and Western forms of social and political development has been seriously undermined by liberal intellectual circles of the past hundred years, a common observer of history would tell you that when the Greeks began to categorize political systems more than three thousand years ago, they introduced the idea of a political system specific to Asia, that of Oriental despotism (see Sawer, 1977, p. 4). European theorists explained this sort of domination, before the present century, in terms of various ethnographic, geographic, and historical factors held to be specific to the East. Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production and Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism are two ample examples of such tendency. Today, however, this has transformed into more open and straightforward demonizing with terms like “Islamic terrorism,” to the extent that the assassination of a prominent member of one of these alleged terrorists (Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani) while he was visiting another Muslim country, which was about to be a democracy, is considered as an act of self-defense by the most prominent state in the free world. Indeed, the domination by the assassin country manifests in a different manner to all others. Furthermore, even in European history, the notion of domination invokes different narratives and lessons. For instance, Napoleon’s attempt to dominate Europe is perceived as totally different than Hitler’s try for similar power.

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the interconnected relationship between the actuality of the circumstances in which they live, and the narratives they use to make sense of the world they encounter. The premise here is that developing a localized idea is more productive than extrinsic thoughts because it is associated with an intrinsic common sense that resonates with the inhabitants, thus enabling them to recognize and connect with it as their knowledge. Only then does an idea gain the potential to effect meaningful change that encompasses an entire society.

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CHAPTER 4

Revisiting the Dominant Paradigm

A new man… must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur1

International Regimes A broad inquiry ought to clarify, however briefly, why a specific ideology rose to such prominence in the Western world and spawned international financial institutions (the IMF and World Bank) and organizations like 1 A cited in Rosenberg 1960/1994, p. 9.

The concept of “paradigm” will be used in a somewhat broader sense in this study than it is used in a purely cognitive and epistemological character defined, for instance, by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Throughout this study, I insist on the fact that we have often overlooked and are likely to continue to forget—culture is not luxury. In slightly exaggerated terms, culture is a question of life and death for human society. It provides us with the protective shield of knowledge and insight, myth and tradition, values and belief against all adversities and apprehensions. And when it is impaired, a social crisis often followed. The same is true of the various “paradigm” within the history of civilization. The concept of the paradigm is used here in the sense of a structure of ideas, values, and norms, which, when combined, direct and prompt people to experience and view the world in a specific manner. In this light, a paradigm shift implies relinquishing such a structure, as the flaws of its ideas, values, and norms are revealed. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_4

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OECD, to the extent that today it subdues all other possible ideas.2 Before we proceed, it is imperative to point out this study does not claim there are no common interests between the prosperous Western nations and the less-fortunate rest or that cooperation among them is impossible and unwarranted. Far from it: there are convincing reasons that cooperation and discourse are necessary to secure broader and more effective development for the latter group. There are areas where common interests are more significant than ever before, which should be explored sooner rather than later. Still, it is impossible to overlook the contradiction between the prevailing lyrics of the global economy, which promote wider economic and political interdependency, and observers’ assessments, which often portray world politics as “a competition of units in the kind of state of nature that knows no restraints other than those which the changing necessities of the game and the shallow conveniences of the players impose” (Hoffmann, 1965, p. viii). This is an anarchic world, according to Waltz (1959), that does not need an absolute authority, such as global governance, to endorse standard values and enforce rules of behavior.3 To achieve their objectives and maintain their security, says 2 Several financial institutions such as the China New International Financing Institution, and international organizations such as ASEAN are excluded from these global groups. For instance, for Chinese institutions, this is mostly due to their structural makeup. As Elgin-Cossart and Hart (2015) point out, “In recent years, China has moved into development finance in a very big way. In July 2014, China took the lead in bringing together the major emerging national economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—known as the BRICS—to form the New Development Bank, or NDB, an international lending institution that will provide at least $50 billion in development funding to emerging markets. Then, in June 2015, China led a group of more than 50 nations to launch the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB, another China-led development bank that plans to invest at least $100 billion to build new infrastructure projects across Asia. The AIIB launch was a major coup for Beijing because it was not just a developing country initiative. Multiple G7 nations, including France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, rushed to join the AIIB as founding members. Importantly, the United Kingdom joined despite reported objections from the United States, which chose to stay out of the AIIB and openly criticized the United Kingdom’s decision to join. With the AIIB, China is now playing a leading role not only among emerging nations, but among major developed economies as well.” 3 This view of world politics may seem incompatible with what we have been told these days about Western political values. However, its roots appear in the Enlightenment era. In a summary of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s peace plan, Hoffman (1987) says, “Rousseau analyzed the special bonds that history, legal institutions, and religion had forged among European nations. Precisely because of these bonds, he remarked, the condition of these nations was worse than if no European society existed at all. It is his [Rousseau] same concern for moral oneness, his same insight that it is better to be isolated (and thus

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Waltz (2010), “units in a condition of anarchy—be they people, corporations, states, or whatever—must rely on the means they can generate and the arrangements they can make for themselves. Self-help is necessarily the principle of action in an anarchic order” (p. 11). In other words, to achieve a favorable outcome from the prevailing fundamental conflicts of interest, each state must rely on its own devices. John Adams offered a similar interpretation when he observed, “a war with France, if just and necessary, might wean us from fond and blind affections, which no Nation ought ever to feel towards another, as our experience in more than one instance abundantly testifies” (As cited in Waltz, 1959, p. 159). Conflict and war are natural occurrences, as each state assesses its objectives and use coercion to carry out its judgments. Provided that is the case, why is there an international insistence on close cooperation between countries, particularly between the prosperous West and non-Western nations? The essential part of the answer to this question lies in identifying what constitutes cooperation between nations and diagnosing the reason(s) for its formulation. Collaboration occurs when common interests are identified. Post-WWII’s contemporary history indicates this realization has mainly prevailed among the victors of the war (e.g., the Western advanced economy countries and the Soviet Union and its ideologically-bounded nations, known as the communist bloc).4 While the latter coalition is no longer relevant, one indication that the former group’s countries share common interests is that they hold relatively similar views about their economies’ proper operation.5 They engage in relationships of interdependence with each other. Their cooperation, more often than not, is cordial; possible conflicts of interest among them bear far less political and economic friction and hostility than they do with all others. The anarchic view of world politics underlined above cannot be applied indiscriminately across nations for this apparent reason: “If international politics not experience the agonies of moral choice) than to be dependent on others (and thus be unable both engender and frustrates)…Rousseau’s refutation of the ‘common-interest’ argument, and his conviction that commerce only exacerbate greed and the competition among nations and among men, thus led him to reject a view that Kant and liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found too attractive to resist—that commerce breeds peace” (pp. 33–35). 4 An example of a realization of common interests for the latter group is the formal organization and functions of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CEMA). 5 Here, relative, as an adjective, implies similarities that are at least in greater than the differences between them and most others, including non-market planned economies.

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were a state of war, institutionalized patterns of cooperation [among the advanced Western economies] based on shared purposes should not exist except as part of a larger struggle for power. The extensive patterns of international agreement that we observe on issues as diverse as trade, financial relations, health, telecommunications, and environmental protection would be absent” (Keohane, 1984, p. 7). One explanation for this discrepancy—relatively less antagonism between cooperators—is World War II and its aftermath. It should be noted that coordination of state economic policies after the war was more extensive among the Western advanced economy countries than it was between the two world wars or in the century before 1914. However, interdependence, particularly among nations that have each claimed their supremacy over their neighbors, can be complicated. But reality always sorts things out, as it did back then. Seventy-five years ago, Germany and its allies were crushed in World War II. The settlement that followed defeat was perceived as ruinous only for Germany, not her neighbors. However, the expectation that removing Germany as a significant player in the European balance of power could help her rivals’ positions was grossly overstated. In defeating Germany, Europe destroyed itself; millions lost their lives. Millions became wanderers in the wasteland; most European countries suffered from shortages of food and essential raw materials; many thousands were homeless, and many more were jobless. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States experienced phenomenal economic growth known as the Golden Age, and the war was viewed as the main factor that brought prosperity back to the United States. This economic expansion was perceived by many both inside and outside the country as the foundation that helped the country consolidate its position as the leader of the “free world,” which in the late twentieth century, after the disintegration of the communist bloc, transformed it into to a hegemonic power. However, America’s ascension had consequences for Europe. In June 1947, General George C. Marshall, the Secretary of State, announced a plan to give massive amounts of aid to war-torn European countries for reconstruction.6 One year later, the Organization for European Economic 6 One can argue that the rise of international regimes to their present status is related to the extensive engagements of major Western European governments in their economic affairs (e.g., massive state interventions) to protect the states as well as their citizens from possible impacts of the postwar reconstruction and subsequent volatilities in the world economy (see Judt, 2006; Lowe, 2013). In direct contrast to the present, this was when

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Cooperation (OEEC) was established, and in 1949 the American government advocated economic integration between the OEEC countries to secure a return on its investment, promising to give additional aid if the OEEC countries removed trade restrictions between themselves. In 1957, the Rome Treaties initiated the European Economic Community, and the Convention on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was drawn up to reform the OEEC. Thomas Dilorenzo of the Wall Street Journal observes: The main purpose of the Marshall Plan was to provide a veiled form of corporate welfare for American businesses through the practice of “tied aid” transfers linked to an agreement that the money would be used to purchase U.S. products. Tied aid enriched many American businesses but was devastating to some European industries. For example, American tobacco exports to Europe, paid for with Marshall Plan funds, caused Greek tobacco exports to fall to 2,500 tons in 1948 from over 17,000 tons in 1947. The industry never recovered. A similar crowding out of European business occurred in many other industries. (DiLorenzo, 1997)

One billion of the US $13 billion grants of the Marshall Plan were spent to promote American tobacco in Europe (Milov, 2019; Stern, 2019). Antony Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research points out that military assistance to Britain and France, as part of the plan, was designed to help them continue their colonial wars against African and Asian independence movements (Mueller, 2018). According to Yanis Varoufakis, the former Finance Minister of Greece, the OEEC was a continental planning commission established by the victorious United people were viewed as the most valuable capital of a nation, and governments were not demonized as an integral part of national malaise. Remobilization and restoration of the national economy gave convincing reasons for investment in human capital. Education was affordable, health insurance coverage was extensive, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions were generous, cultural activities were subsidized, tax policies were deliberately designed to promote greater social equality by transferring income from rich to poor. However, faced with this daunting expenditure, European colonizers of the not-so-distant past sought to shift the burden of the renovation of their countries onto others, or “at least to avoid having them shifted onto themselves” (Keohane 1984, pp. 6, 243). In large part, this is because for every Marshall Plan dollar the United States gave to a European government, that government had to enlarge its government sector by an equivalent amount by spending on “public works” or other government projects. Even today, the tendency to pass on the cost to others is explicitly part of the European Union’s imposed conditions for partnership programs (Mammadova, 2017).

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States following the successful model of the planning commissions of the New Deal.7 In this context, one can see the Euro as a quasi-gold standard designed to divert speculation attacks on the US dollar, as well as unifying European nations by driving them apart.8 There are many ways to interpret and understand the importance of events and the conditions under which they occurred, and the post-WWII era is no exception. In this chapter, however, the main emphasis is on two significant and interrelated developments: (1) the creation of the super-economic foundation that shaped the world, and (2) the mix of coercion and voluntary economic integration that occurred in Western Europe, which over time transformed into broader institutional settings. I argue that these developments created the circumstances that gradually helped the United States consolidate its power and reconstruct itself into a modern nation-state hegemonic power, epitomized by today’s motto, “we live in an increasingly interconnected world.”9 7 See Varoufakis (2016). He also characterized the economic philosophy of this commission as Keynesian. 8 To understand the monetary system in the post-WWII era, one must review the history of the downfall of the last hegemonic currency before dollars, namely British sterling. We start this history in the nineteenth century when “the British coinage standard introduced in 1816 was not only a symbol of Britain’s economic ascendancy. It was also a gilt-edged metaphor for the immutability of private property and bourgeois value. The stability and apparent permanence of the pound sterling for a century after 1816 was a convincing illusion which the material culture of Britain was based…. The Twentieth century witnessed the rapid dissolution of the British Empire, along with the end of British economic and industrial hegemony. Although Britain emerged victorious from both World Wars, the staggering costs and economic disruptions sapped the country’s strength. The gold standard abandoned in 1914, was restored in 1925 only to be left again in 1931…No longer the premier standard of value in the world, it was eclipsed even in Europe by the German mark” (Van Wie, 1999, p. 54). 9 To avoid possible conceptual vagueness throughout this study, hegemony is defined as a situation when “one state’s holding a preponderance of power in the international system, allowing it to single-handedly dominate the rules and arrangements by which international political and economic relations are conducted” (Goldstein & Pevehouse, 2017, p. 49). One must accept that the formation and various impacts and effects of the modern version of hegemony differ significantly from those of the past hegemonic powers. We may share characteristics common to any human community, but today, the world differs vastly from 200 years ago, or even 50 years ago. The following analogy perhaps conveys the magnitude of the changing world. Imagine, if you would, that Steve Jobs was born in Russia and the invention of the iPhone, which he wouldn’t let his child have, coincided with the rise of communist ideology and the October Revolution of 1917. Considering the various prevailing impacts of the iPhone, wouldn’t you give credence to the scenario that we could all be communist now? Today, hegemonic power is different

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On the one hand, this hegemonic form serves the United States. To a lesser extent, its prosperous Western allies espouse the global process of standardization and the collection of rules called international regimesunder which the erosion of the sovereignty of a state no longer seems anomalous. According to Goldstein and Pevehouse (2017), An international regime is a set of rules, norms, and procedures around which the expectations of actors converge in a certain issue area (whether arms control international trade, or Antarctic exploration). The convergence of expectations means that participants in the international system have similar ideas about what rules will govern their mutual participation: Each expects to play by the same rules (This meaning of the word regime is not the same as that referring to the domestic governments of states, especially governments considered illegitimate, as in regime change.) (pp. 76–77)

The hegemonic structure leaves no breathing room, no possibility but the diffusion and promotion of standardized policies by international regimes such as the EU, the WTO, and the IMF,10 propelling tailormade objectives and conformity to the forefront of policy agendas around the world.11 In other words, it originated in the post-WWII era, was polished and groomed in the 1970s, and bloomed when the communist bloc was disassembled. International relations have become unipolar; these regimes serve crucial functional necessities to sustain the United States’ predominant power and further subordinate and control other countries’ economics, politics, and culture. These regimes are products of the distinct historical development that reminds us, “the post-war dream of prosperity for all had come to naught for so many” (Polhemus, 2012, p. 251). In corollary, economic reasonings behind prescribed policies are no more than self-perpetuating rationalizations that have no validity and merit except in the world described by their proponents. In this context, I argue that adopting and implementing regimes’ prescribed because its tools have dramatically changed. Hence, the traditional criteria are inept for tasks that intend to recognize a hegemon or depict and analyze its impacts. As the actress with a bewildering poster realized in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of OZ , “Toto: we are not in Kansas anymore.” 10 For discussions about IMF and International Regimes, see Babb (2007). 11 For an informative discussion of this topic, see Kagan (2012) and The Economist

(2012).

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policies without considering local institutional, economic, and political conditions is not only erroneous but often counterproductive. Imposing preconditions and tedious campaigns to present these policies as universal reaffirms of this observation. The promotion of democracy, for instance, has become the primary policy objective of international organizations, given their mandate to play the role of the agent of change for achieving these ends (Christopher, 1995). Little attention is paid to the possibility that democracy, assuming it is appropriate and feasible, ought to be the outcome of a long and hard-fought domestic political process, not the intervention of outside actors (see Pevehouse, 2002). In another case, privatization aims to reshape the national reach of a state by transferring ownership of an inefficient and loss-making state-owned enterprise (SOE) to the private sector, often non-national and outside the domain of the state, to make it efficient and profit-making. When an enterprise is privatized, it is not essential who buys it, and little attention is paid to the fact that a SOE is not intended to make profits but to walk in the footsteps of industrialization. By the end of the Cold War, when this project reached maturity, neoliberalism had gained currency as the chosen discourse of the postcommunist era. Not surprisingly, international regimes came under its surrogate custody and gained legitimacy, broadening its reach. Those who first grasped this sponsorship portrayed neoliberalism as an ideology and wrote idealist histories of it. For instance, Foucault’s governmentality argument perceives neoliberal tendencies already present in the eighteenth century in Kant’s idea of perpetual peace; it sees in regimes the early seeds of a peaceful world through a federation of world states.12 However, what is left out is the glaring contradiction between the alleged assertion of cooperation based on mutual interest (interdependency) and the neoliberal worldview of a zero-sum game of winners and losers that normalizes perpetual hostilities and conflicts. According to neoliberals, states are individualistic or “rational egoists,” who define interest in terms of individual gains and not mutual gains. A non-zero-sum game, on the other hand, suggests that all states can benefit peacefully and simultaneously by comparative advantage, which dates to the nineteenth century and David Ricardo’s analysis of trade between England and Portugal. However, since it is a zero-sum game, in which 12 Foucault (2008) explicitly cites Kant’s essay on perpetual peace in the January 24 lecture of his 1979 Collège de France course (pp. 57–58).

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one state gains another state’s losses, states have to compete rather than cooperate to increase their benefits. Mutual interest is null. Montesquieu epitomized this ideology when we claimed, “the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace. Two nations that trade together become mutually dependent: if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and all unions are based on mutual needs” (as cited in Hirschman, 1977, p. 80). In fairness, Hirschman also reminds his reader that, “Actually Montesquieu’s praise for commerce was not without reservations. In the same chapter in which he commends commerce for its contribution to peace, he regrets the way in which commerce brings with it a monetization of all human relations and the loss of hospitality and of other ‘moral virtues which lead one to not always discuss one’s interests with rigidity’.” (Ibid.) Today, this view still dominates the mindset of international regimes, highlighting the impoverished brainpower of the institutions given the leadership role in policy decision-making processes worldwide. The impoverishment of regimes’ intellectual capacity is due to all possible dialogues being excluded from policy discourses. They insist on neoliberalist rules, which are not conceived in the abstract; they respond to a perceived world structure. This dire situation is unlikely to improve due to an innate fixation, the self-righteousness of almost all hegemonic powers that eventually leads to their downfall. This is not an issue unnoticed or ignored by contemporary analysts. For instance, recently, Christopher Layne observed, “The key grand strategic issue confronting U.S. policymakers today is whether the United States can escape the same fate that has befallen the other great powers” (Layne, 2006, p. 7).

The Post-WWII World Structure The one uncontested lesson we can draw from the post-WWII period is that the United States,13 which stayed relatively unharmed during both of 13 Throughout this study, the United States has been singled out as the point of reference and the main subject of analysis. This inclination should not be seen as antiAmericanism but as a reality due to its self-proclaimed status as the leader of the free world. This status alone renders the reason to hold the United States to higher standards. American values and attitudes, modest and less original as many may be, do matter in the daily relations between nations because of the status of the United States as an unprecedented military power and the driving influence of American business and culture. However, the United States’ exceptionalism is America’s problem, not so much because

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the world wars, progressively gained the power to “make and enforce the rules for the world political economy,” as one scholar puts it (Keohane, 1984, p. 37). This power came, we are told by conventional narratives, out of the historical circumstances, some of which are: • While the rest of Europe lay in utter ruin, American resources and capacities were at their peak. • The magnitude of devastation among European economic and political powerhouses made them vulnerable, and consequently, they had no bargaining power. • The Western blockade of the entire communist orbit on top of exhaustion of valuable resources during the Cold War ended the brief communist experiment after three-quarters of a century. In this respect, the United States gained a platform and the might to sway others as the consolidation of power always strengthens the ability to retain order and stability. Charles Kindleberger captures this point when he says, “For the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer, one stabilizer” (Kindleberger, 1986, p. 304). This view has been furthered by the uncontested American power over the world economy. When the world’s economic powerhouses gather for their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, they often schedule a debate on the question, “When America sneezes, does the rest of the world catch a cold?” The reasons are abundant. For instance, today, the sheer value of the U.S. economy is over 20% of world production. Since WWII, the United

Americans are different from others, but because it is self-declared; any dissimilarity in attitudes or values is magnified by the United States’ place in the world, and others are often bewildered by those differences. Two aspects of the American character—nationalism, and hubris—significantly influence how the United States conducts itself in the world. On the former, Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated, “…the growing unease with the United States should be seen as a powerful global backlash against the spirit of American nationalism that shapes and animates U.S. foreign policy” (Pei, 2009). Peter Beinart interpreted the latter as Icarus syndrome in which as “The wings crumble, revealing him [Icarus] to be mortal after all. And he plunges to his death, into the sea” (Beinart, 2010, p. 4). I believed it is important to acknowledge how our complacencies and neglect to realize our deficiencies have led to a growth of those very flaws we often claimed to denounce. It is this United States that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent article in the London Review of Books, is nothing less than “a menace to itself and to mankind” and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized as the world’s major terrorist state.

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States has enjoyed monopsony power14 over all countries in the world. Another example is that the U.S. dollar has been the world currency for almost a century. Or, for more than a half-century, the United States has engaged in thirteen wars outside its territories with no direct threats or provocations to its sovereignty (Infoplease Staff, 2017). One of the detrimental symptoms of this effect, particularly among elites and those in positions of power in non-Western nations, is cognitive paralysis, by which I mean an inability of policymakers to select a policy outside the frame of indoctrinated narratives, even when there is no coercion or conditionality involved. Briefly browsing over chosen policies around the world, particularly in non-Western nations, confirms that these narratives ruled over sensibility and common sense by claiming that, for any society seeking to progress and elevate itself from its status quo condition, there is no alternative but a market economy and a democratic political system (Fukuyama, 2006). Paradoxically, engraining these narratives in the West was far from a smooth ride. American domination, European devastation, the establishment of the OEEC, and related events led to a settled resentment among European colonial powers, which ultimately manifested as an urgent desire to reconsider their centuries-old liberal ideology of capitalism. Bertrand Russell echoed this bitter taste among European men of the pen when he said, “America is affecting Europe in so many ways, and at so many levels, that it is difficult to know where to begin, or what kind of influence to regard as the more important” (Russell, 1951, p. 3). The postwar period’s main lesson—“the winner took all and imposed its will on all”—reminded Europeans they no longer resided in the colonial era. It also reiterated to others the necessity of servitude to the new power. For Europeans, however, the message that “the feast is over” arrived 14 The term monopsony represents a case in which there is a single dominant buyer [monopsonist] in a market consisting of many sellers. This means a monopsonist raises its welfare or utility by restricting its demand for the product and forcing the sellers to lower their price. Monopsony power, therefore, implies:

1. A monopsony has buying or bargaining power over others in a market. 2. This buying power means that the United States can exploit their bargaining power with their suppliers (e.g., China and the E.U.), to negotiate more favorable terms of trade (e.g., lower prices). 3. This power increases relative profits for U.S. firms, but not the U.S. population.

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rather unexpectedly, especially when one considers what they endured during the two world wars. Enough feathers were ruffled in intellectual circles that the liberal view was subjected to intense criticism. Mercantilists and many who subscribed to the realist ideology,15 for instance, insisted that unfettered economic exchange can undermine national security. Even Albert O. Hirschman, economist and resistance figure, in the words of the New York Times,16 was compelled to point out that the gains from trade rarely accrue to states proportionately and the distribution of these gains can affect interstate power relations.17 Many also noted that shifting power relations after the war should be widely regarded as a potent source of military conflict.18 Although it did not reach fruition until after WWII, the groundwork for this international system was laid earlier as some theories were conceptualized in direct response to the chaotic order that prevailed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. As is the case today, many unfavorable political, economic, and social judgments were manifestations of circumstances laid beneath them. Furthermore, there were different interpretations of the prevailing disorder instigated by liberal views of the world. Still, they were all committed to preserving capitalism and the capitalist system. One of the early works was a series of lectures delivered by David Mitrany at Yale University, later published under the title The Progress of International Government. A year later, in 1934, Fischer William, in his review of the book, described it as “a book which reveals itself as the fruit of no little learning and which should be read and meditated on by every student” (Williams, 1934, p. 102). Mitrany’s work can be viewed as pioneering thought in the formation of the normative order. 15 According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “In the discipline of international relations there are contending general theories or theoretical perspectives. Realism, also known as political realism, is a view of international politics that stresses its competitive and conflictual side. It is usually contrasted with idealism or liberalism, which tends to emphasize cooperation. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states, which are concerned with their own security, act in pursuit of their own national interests, and struggle for power. The negative side of the realists’ emphasis on power and self-interest is often their skepticism regarding the relevance of ethical norms to relations among states. National politics is the realm of authority and law, whereas international politics, they sometimes claim, is a sphere without justice, characterized by active or potential conflict among states” (Korab-Karpowicz, 2018). 16 See Yardley (2012). 17 See Hirschman (1945/1980). 18 See Gilpin (1981), Levy (1989, pp. 209–313), and Mearsheimer (1990).

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According to Rosenboim (2013), Mitrany developed “functionalism” to explore the diffusion of practices from the private to the public sphere. The private domains of business and entrepreneurship offered successful models of global cooperation that performed a unique social function in the nascent welfare state. Mitrany claimed that the diffusion of collaborative practices from the private to the public sphere established the foundation for transforming international relations19 and European unity. Mitrany’s original “functionalist” theory can shed light on the role of private corporations and organizations in enhancing the interdependence we witness around the world. However, due to the typical characterization of international politics as an anarchic structure marred by inequalities between countries, Mitrany (1933) maintained that his core concern was with “the working of a possible new international system rather than with its ethics” (p. 145). Later, he claimed that “if an international Government were to rise…the employment of force by such Government would be comparable to its employment by the minister of justice within a State” (Mitrany, 1933, pp. 151–52). What is promoted here is obvious: nationstates had to be replaced by a system of functional international regimes that assumed their functions and authority. Ernest Bernard Haas introduced more recent theoretical work supporting the international regime. Hass was a rationalist who insisted that rigor and reason must be an essential part of political analysis. Although “he [Haas] never believed in the rational choice enterprise which ascribed a narrow form of rationality to the interest of political actors” (Haas, 1964/2008, p. 6), he believed in the promise of the Enlightenment that common reason and learning should replace the small calculation of national interest, political passion, and nationalist bigotry in decision-making. In Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization, Haas (1964/2008) focused on the generic role of international organizations in a broader historical view. He approached the subject of international regimes by asking how the usual aims and expectations of a nation can be related to the growing inclination toward global interdependency and what kind of international organization is required to maximize this process (Haas, 1964/2008, pp. 8, 713). In considering these questions, he draws upon the International 19 In the sense that his theory highlighted the diffusion of concepts, institutions, and practices like “human rights,” “democracy,” and “welfare” from the private to the public and back.

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Labor Organization (ILO) experience.20 This is due to the compatibility of several of ILO’s features with his perceived model. First, Haas treated loyalties as being created by a function, and hence changes in adherence could result from the transfer of the function. Second, he distinguished pursuing power from pursuing welfare. Third, he separated various governmental tasks into discrete elements (military/defense vs. economic/abundance tasks). Fourth, he made a crucial distinction between political and technical domains. Finally, ILO’s uniqueness is related to its long and unbroken history and its programs and structure that tightly fit the requirement of what he regarded as a “model,” ironically signified by the motto “workers of all countries, unite!” In this respect, an argument can be made that the essence of Haas’s thinking is more related to socialism than capitalism. This may seem a plausible contention if one also erroneously believes that Marx’s theory of capital was based on socialism rather than capitalism. I say erroneously because the entire three-volume of Marx’s Capital is an in-depth analysis of capitalism.21 In retrospect, we can draw two relevant lessons. First, the dominant post-WWII theoretical developments of international relations are historically and socially constructed, rather than inevitable outcomes of human nature or other eccentric features of world politics. They are contextbounded, products of the distinct history and culture within which they were conceived. Second, the envisioned systematic order at the international level, through permanently transferring functions and authority from states to international bodies, entails internationally compatible institutional settings to enforce the standardized rules and behaviors across continents that adhere to international institutions. Proponents of international regimes have viewed institutions—correctly, I may add— not as the mere formal structure of arrangements but more broadly as “recognized patterns of practice around which expectation converge” (Young, 1980, p. 337). These patterns of practice are significant because of their effects on state behavior. To explain this observation, we must 20 This may explain why so many scholars working on the European Union (EU) have referred exclusively to his earlier work, The Uniting of Europe, even though Beyond the Nation-State provides a much more explicit version of the neo-functional approach. (See Haas, 1964/2008, p. 1). 21 For instance, David Harvey, in A Companion to Marx’s Capital, has stated that the three volumes of Capital provide one of the best and most eloquent bases for the understanding of contemporary capitalism (Harvey, 2010).

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start with the obvious that cooperation does not always prevail. This uncertainty means that it is up to a local/national institutional setting to convey to a state what constitutes its interests, and more importantly, to convince state policymakers to adopt particular policies to realize these benefits. A fruitful example of such a process is the fundamental proposition of economic integration that requires harmonization of behavior through standardization of local institutions and rules to adhere to international standards (e.g., accounting practices) promoted by international institutions. However, the necessity of internationally compatible institutional settings exposes one of the significant differences between the West’s advanced economies and the rest of the world, particularly non-Western economies. This category also includes those economies that adopted certain principles of market economies like support for the private sector or curtailing a state intervention in economic affairs but left out its most fundamental tenets like individualism, security, and right of private ownership, or a price mechanism for allocation of resources in a national economy. These economies attached themselves to an expression of market-oriented reform. In reality, they created a contradictory case of Jekyll and Hyde that is sometimes characterized by silly adjectives like Asian value—the principle of collectivism—or a country run by an extreme religious nationalism government like Modi in India. Other categories are Western-oriented regimes and non-Western oriented regimes, e.g., Eastern oriented regimes. In the former, reform usually takes a smooth path, while in the latter, it often leads to another totalitarian regime. One of the designated roles of international regimes is reconstructing local institutional settings, values, rules, norms, principles, and decisionmaking. This typical reconstruction from a distance is known as institutional transplantation (hereafter IT)—“the deliberate, rapid and forced exportation of institutions from one location (the donor environment) to another (the recipient environment)” (Lecce et al., 2017, p. 5). An analogy can be drawn between IT and a medical procedure, organ transplantation, in which an organ is removed from one body and placed in the body of a recipient, to replace a damaged or missing organ. However, a closer and more relevant parallel is called xenotransplantation, which is the transplantation of living cells, tissues, or organs from one group to a different group. Applying this transplantation to the present discussion starts with the word “xeno-” meaning alien (or foreign, strange),

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which underlines the transplantation of an entity or an object different in origin. Donor institutional roles and legal codes are conceived in different environments than recipient environments. Also, there is an obvious and telling contrast between these two types of transplantation. In organ transplantation, the procedure can fail because of mismatched organs, when the recipient’s immune system detects that the toxins or harmful foreign substances (antigens) on the cells of the donated organ are different or do not match. However, in xenotransplantation, a more aggressive defense mechanism called “hyperacute rejection” occurs rapidly when tissue is not recognized as the same type as the recipient. This is a natural immune response to preserve one’s life. IT, under consideration here, alters and converts the formal institutional setting of a recipient country (e.g., judiciary system), including constitutional, organic, and other legal frameworks, to the best practices in the donor countries for the overall betterment of the recipient country. The apparent shortfall of such transformation is that “state sovereignty”—that is, the ultimate source of national authority—is further eroded because the state is now bound to comply with internationally recognized norms and values.22 Nevertheless, this is an attractive proposition if one entertains a casual reading of history and argues that a shortcut to reaching social development, economic prosperity, and political stability is to copy similar ideologies and policy ideas adopted and implemented in prosperous nations (Jacoby, 2000). Government, Jerold Waltman declared over forty years ago, is “like any other organization…national governments behaving like business, firms, schools, hospital, labor union, and so forth, frequently copy the policies of other nations” (as cited in Jacoby, 2000, p. 9). The same temptation may even compel one to defend this mimicry by looking across history and geographical boundaries to Japan’s Westernization. The Meiji restoration ended the landlords’ domination of the Edo period. The Tokugawa military government (shogunate) restored imperial rule to Japan in 1868 and launched a popular rights movement by introducing Western liberal ideas that called for a constitutional government. These efforts at modernization required Western science, values, and technology. Wholesale Westernization was pursued in the 1880s; however, a renewed appreciation of traditional Japanese values emerged. Such was the case in the development of a 22 To the extent that there will be no immunity from prosecution for an incumbent, or previous, head of state.

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modern educational system that, though influenced by Western values, stressed the traditional values of samurai loyalty and social harmony. The same tendency prevailed in art and literature, where Western styles were first imitated, and a more selective blend of Western and Japanese tastes was achieved (See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). In contrast to a more rounded and gradual approach that considers variations in cultural traits, historical development, and institutional tendencies, the shortcut mimicry proposition is innately interest-driven. It compels subjects to conform to an adopted ideology and its espoused values. In this context, transferring the legal codes of more prosperous economies to less wealthy nations has been part of the debate in comparative internal law for some time. By the end of the twentieth century, however, this idea rose to new heights as the Soviet-style system collapsed and the communist bloc broke up (Stolker, 2015, p. 270). International organizations and financial agencies, such as the IMF and the World Bank, increasingly saw the importance of a well-functioning legal order. To defend their approach, a narrative was formed: it is challenging to implement a transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy without an adequate legal structure, contract or property law, or security for private ownership. It seems plausible that the immediate concerns of transition were the institutional framework and the efficient allocation of resources, signified by the legendary motto, “getting the right prices.” We were told that transaction costs and the risk of doing business should be predictable, government interference should be minimized, and the private sector must guide a significant portion of economic activities, relying upon valid and enforceable laws that were absent. These claims needed an innovative theoretical framework so that they could be disseminated and circulate around the world. Expectedly, one such conceptualization was furnished a few years earlier.23 In 1974, in his classic study, Legal Transplants , Watson (1974) argued that borrowed legal rules, norms, and systems could succeed, even if the host or recipient’s circumstances differed from those of the donor. Watson, one of the most distinguished comparative legal scholars of his time, believed that 23 During the same period, the 1970s, the gold standard was abandoned as Nixon’s administration changed the dollar/gold ratio. Significant Western banks began to expand their branch networks, followed by widespread deregulation of financial institutions in the West.

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the law possesses life and vitality of its own. Without a clear relationship between law and society, national characteristics play no part in the transferability of legislative solutions and institutions. In his view, the law is not embedded holistically in the local culture, and hence assimilation of foreign ideas and legal, institutional settings is not problematic. This practice, particularly in the form of forced adaptation under colonialism, has a long and controversial history.24 However, as a mechanical process, perhaps IT is an effective means to establish the West’s rule of law. IT is a ready-made procedure in the conventional global-governance toolbox, which can facilitate the implementation of compatible international legal codes and practices in a recipient country’s institutional setting. IT is an exported format to legislate change instead of a legitimate change. Like all similar mechanisms, it convinces its subjects that a means to legislate change is needed across the board and guarantees that the change will occur. Several issues must be clarified to make an argument supporting or against this course of action. First, what do we mean by institutions? In general, institutions are the arrangements that prevail in the social domain; they make up conduct rules in a formal or informal setting. These are bounded by specific historical experiences and cultural standards to facilitate members’ interactions and community activity. In other words, institutions are the local mechanisms of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions. Language, government, pedagogy and schooling, family, individual relations and bonds, marketplaces, and bazaars are examples of such institutions. The distinction between formal and informal institutions must be made, particularly in IT, because it is precisely that tension that comes into play. Formal institutions are 24 For example, the caste system in India: According to Chakravorty (2019), “The ‘ethnographic state’ created by the British erected a knowledge structure for ruling and control in which Hinduism was the foundation and caste the reinforced steel that held it together. This idea—that the caste system held Hindu society together, that without it the society would have fallen apart and taken with it the British Empire too—was widely held, as was the completely opposite belief that the caste system created such fissures that Indian society could never come together as a whole to throw off the imperial power. According to both interpretations, to intervene in caste would lead to the ‘loss of India’, but for opposite reasons. Whether caste was the steel in the mortar or the crack in the foundation, the British Indian government found multiple justifications for not intervening in what they considered to be an ancient social system of bias and injustice. Their ‘civilizing mission’ had its limits. By the time they intervened—two decades before independence—it was, if anything, a tactic to delay the end of the empire.”

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the legal rules of interaction, production, and consumption, designed to convey who is allowed (or not) or obligated (or not) to undertake what actions and under what conditions.25 Informal institutions like the bazaar-centric informal economy, by and large, are social practices and rituals based on underlying cultural values and norms. Formal institutions mainly concern competencies and obligations, whereas informal institutions deal with the modes of behavior considered appropriate in given circumstances. Together, formal and informal institutions make up the whole of the institutional complex: the rules of the game and their practice. Now, to return to the IT process, one can see that institutions have deep cultural roots, so they are an integral part of transforming society as a whole. Accordingly, any scheme designed to alter local institutional structures needs to consider with great care their relations to historical and cultural specificities. Without a doubt, institutions as living segments of social life are agents of change either through a bottom-up stream process or a top-to-bottom trickle-down transformation. These routes should be considered minor concerns compared to the clarity of reason of these alterations (de Jong et al., 2002, pp. 3–6). Second, according to Andrew Finch, the former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the U. S. Department of Justice, the rule of law “is about notice and reliance” (Finch, 2017, p. 5). Hence, to administer and sustain the rule of law, there must be an entity and structure to enforce the law and apply it indiscriminately. To ensure these provisions are met consistently, the necessary conditions are legal stability and predictability, both of which are a fundamental part of “what people mean by the Rule of Law,” in Schwarzschild’s words (Schwarzschild, 2007, p. 686). In the absence of stability and predictability, citizens, economic agencies, and political actors experience difficulties managing their affairs effectively. Citizens lose trust in the lawfulness of the system and eventually its guardian, the state. Perhaps this explains the prolonged suspicion and distrust of government and the state in most countries, including advanced Western economies. The reader should note these prerequisites should not be viewed as absolute tenets; as Lindquist and Cross point out, 25 Laws are a significant example of formal institutions. For instance, governments in the United Kingdom officially mandate that automobiles drive on the left side of the street, or that the Pound sterling is legally used as money, or that May 6th is celebrated as an Early Bank Holiday. Each of these institutions affects individual interactions, production, consumption, and exchange.

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“Absolute legal stability would produce a rigid legal paradigm impervious to changing societal norms and practices. Because (with a nod to Holmes) experience rather than logic vitalizes law, stare decisis has developed as an informal norm that may occasionally bend to changing circumstances” (Lindquist & Cross, 2010, p. 1). As IT applies the rule of law to legislation in general, it also applies to specific domains (e.g., competition law). Here, an antitrust regime is an instance of a promoted rule of law, which must enforce the law as written and interpreted by a judiciary institution (e.g., a court). This is problematic in recipient countries since adopted legal codes (e.g., antitrust laws) are often incompatible with the local environment; hence, they are commonly perceived as imposed laws: extrinsic, not acquired.26 As such, compliance is a rarity. The entire transplantation process exacerbates this legal intrusion by considering the best legal practices and codes as an end rather than a means. This can obstruct any constructive and meaningful partnership and dialogue among sovereign nations and small communities, groups, or individuals. To be effective, even as means, the law must embody and reflect the environment in which it rules. For the law to gain such footing, it must be sympathetic to its subjects’ needs and norms if they comply. However, sponsors of IT seldom bother to take time to understand the factors that provide a fertile ground for fulfilling their objectives. Finally, based on the literature on the topic, Western academics, policymakers, and international institutions perceive the rule of law as an absolute notion. Hence, it is believed to have universal applicability, regardless of philosophical merits. This position has been part of international organizations’ policy toolbox, despite its ambiguity and the skepticism and even outright rejection of the value of the universality argument. Let us begin by asking the following question: should we consider law and its rule as an ideal or an ideology? Speaking in a pejorative tone, ideology does not bear legitimate neutrality because it 26 Beside cultural differences, one can also point to various managerial structure gaps. For instance, there is no compatibility between the local managerial structure of firms and the external corporate and institutional setting in which firms often intend to operate. This incompatibility is easy to see and particularly acute within the global value chain, where a miniscule local managerial structure is facing a giant corporate governance structure. This incompatibility is the justification of IT. The point I am trying to make is not the legitimacy of IT but the manner (e.g., ideological) in which IT is conceived and implemented across the board.

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is incapable of transcending cross-cultural concerns; it should not be regarded as “worldview.” In this light, considering the rule of law a universal principle overlooks the fact that law is inherently fallible in the sense that it may be an instrument of tyranny, injustice, and inequality. In proclaiming law’s virtues, Rousseau in the Discourse of Political Economy implicitly underscores a similar point and acknowledges that law does not always live up to its claimed ideals: It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty…It is this celestial voice which indicates to each citizen the perception of public reason…It is with this voice alone that political rulers should speak when they command; for no sooner does one man, setting aside the law, claim to subject another to his private will, then he departs from the state of civil society, and confronts him face to face in the pure state of nature, in which obedience is prescribed solely by necessity. (Rousseau, 1755)

Here, Rousseau only echoes the teacher Aristotle, who sees the rule of law as a practice of political power, springing from practical prudence that combines reason and desire (Frank, 2007). Leslie Green points to a similar reading when she observes that, to Aristotle, “The rule of law is a comprehensive ideal of the rule of reason in politics. Its indicia are the rational and impartial judgment of the wise; its value rests in its contribution to the health of the polis and, through it, the good life for man (though not, of course, for women or slaves)” (Green, 1986, p. 1025). Montesquieu concurs by claiming, “Law in general is human reason, to the extent that it governs all the peoples of the earth. However, Montesquieu notes the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only particular cases of the application of human reason” (Richter, 1990, p. 114). He elaborates on this point: Laws ought to be so appropriate to the people for whom they were made that it would be highly unlikely that the laws of one nation could suit another. Law should be relative to the nature and principle of the government that is established, or that one would like to establish. Such relationship ought to be present, whether they constitute a government as do public law (loix politiques ), or maintain a government, as do civil laws (loix civiles ). Laws should be relative to the physical characteristics (au physique) of the country, to the climate, whether freezing, burning, or temperate; to the quality of the terrain, to its location and extent; to the style of life of its inhabitants, whether farmers, hunters, or shepherds; the

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laws should be relative to the degree of liberty permitted by the constitution; to the inhabitants’ religion, inclinations, riches, number, commerce, mores (moeurs ), and customs (manieres ). (Richter, 1990, p. 114)

The implication of Montesquieu’s observation, as I read it, is that law, as an instrument for political, economic, and social change, is an ideology that is context-bound. Therefore, insisting on the rule of law and attempting to reform a country’s formal institutions without being attentive to local history and culture (informal institutions) is the behavior of those who perceive law as an ideal. Such an attempt, for instance, would fail to transform local institutions and culture. It is blended with the fixation of ideology and presented as a categorical imperative but can only succeed if its aim is mainly transitory. Those who insist upon the rule of law as a universal know of its visible shortfalls. In retrospect, the general lesson drawn regarding the sequencing and pacing of compatible institutional building is twofold. First, we need to re-evaluate the temptation of convergence observed across non-Western countries, which emphasizes legal and institutional transplantation from advanced Western economies to improve the national economy’s overall conditions. Second, instead of “institutional convergence,” a new mindset on institutional renovation may consider, first and foremost, the issue of context in formulating choices to better the overall conditions of a society. I end this section with an observation. For centuries, and particularly in modern history, powerful Western nations have been engaged in making “the world in their own image,” to use Marx’s phrase. Central to this thesis is the realization that, since a society cannot alter all at once, the state in its multitude of forms should not only be an instrument of social control. Instead, its influence should be broader and more pervasive. The state has been given the role of remaking the citizen as a subject and creating new kinds of subjectivity. For instance, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer point out that the embourgeoisement in modern state formation is a Western “cultural revolution” that creates “new ways of relating, new social identities—a new moral order, a new kind of civilization, different socialization” (Corrigan & Sayer, 1985, p. 207). From a broader perspective, this theme of modern colonialism has turned into a relentless mission of civilizing others—moral regulating—that has gradually evolved into moral anxiety that seems unwilling or unable to learn a lesson from its perpetual failures and disastrous outcomes. Various representatives of the

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establishment openly espouse imperial (moral regulating) ambitions; we can observe repeated attempts to bring back the “white man’s burden” argument. In the closing pages of his prize-winning book, The Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot, a former editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal and current Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes this case by stating, “The 1920s, [Haiti] spent under marine occupation, saw one the most peaceful and prosperous decades in the country’s long and troubled history. Of course U.S. administrators, in the manner of colonialists everywhere, usually received scant thanks afterward. As Kipling wrote: Take up the White Man’s burden— And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” (Boot, 2015, pp. 361–362)

Boot’s 428-page glorification of the white man’s burden, the alleged duty of white and Western people to manage nonwhite/non-Western people’s affairs, has been praised and rewarded numerous times.27 Boot, and many of his like-minded mates, who insist that Kipling was right, that “colonists everywhere, usually received scant thanks afterward,” epitomize an apprehensive segment of the Western culture that intends to extoll the colonialist mindset that entitles them to the resources of others.28 The melancholy of the establishment should serve as a reminder of what Jean-Baptiste Karr said: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” In contrast, William Easterly, in The White Man’s Burden, offers a different interpretation of the white man’s burden by pointing 27 For instance, the Best Book of 2002 Award from The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times; it also won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for the best nonfiction book about Marine Corps history. 28 The story behind Kipling’s poem is hugely illuminating regarding this colonizing tendency. In November 1898, Rudyard Kipling sent his poem “The White Man’s Burden” to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had just been elected Governor of New York. Kipling aimed to encourage the American government to take over the Philippines, one of the territorial prizes of the Spanish-American War, and rule it with the same energy, honor, and beneficence that, he believed, characterized British rule over the nonwhite populations of India and Africa. In September, he had written to Roosevelt: “Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears” (Brantlinger, 2007, p. 172).

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out the tragic failures of Western white men’s misguided and ideologically bounded aid: “The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria death. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still did not get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion, and Amaretch [Ethiopian wood collector child] is still carrying firewood and not going to school” (Easterly, 2007, p. 4).

The Proliferation of Crises Under the present circumstances, no one should be surprised to face the current world and see perpetual crises as states are disintegrated in the name of liberation; corporations and banks’ shareholders are prioritized over the public in all rescue package. Simultaneously, people are denied assistance and forced to go back to work during the pandemic. The police force has become the main instrument of public policy to silence legitimate public dissent. This blunt disregard for people has been brewing for decades in the repressive dominant ideology, which explains why the public’s trust in their institutions has been eroded. People have lost trust in their institutions, communities, and governments who have become governing bodies saturated with members and officials who are mostly confined to rubber-stamping decisions and canvassing voters in the run-up to elections.29 This dissolution of ties is a clear reflection of the bewildering social and political order in the making, which generates wide swings from Tony Blair’s oxymoronic “New labour neoliberal” to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” It is also not far-fetched to say that the average citizen worldwide is convinced that this series of crises will continue indefinitely. Since the end of WWII, we have witnessed over fifty economic crises,30 a tenfold rise since the first four decades of the twentieth century. As the golden age of capitalism ended in the early 1970s, the world has faced more frequent 29 See Spring 2019 Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey, Q50e: “Democratic Rights Popular Globally but Commitment to Them Not Always Strong”. See also Levitz (2020) and Marlière (2010). 30 See List of economic Crises in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_c

rises.

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crises. For example, the energy crisis of the 1970s resulted from an oil price hike, which has accelerated significantly since the end of the Red Scare and the Western triumph over the “evil empire.” The 1980s recession was caused by the Federal Reserve’s contractionary monetary policy and excessive state spending in the late 1970s. The crises of the 1990s underlined the critical role of financial markets. The financial crises of the 2000s onward served as a reminder that financial institutions (banks) are too big to fail. This trend of crisis proliferation is perceived as either an inherent dysfunctional part of the dominant mechanism or a phenomenon that those in positions of control and power have no clue how to stop. While the former is a fixed frame that offers no comfort and is accompanied by the government authorities’ suggestions (“get used to the crisis” or “we are not going back to where we were anytime soon”), the latter is a mere strategic means to neutralize public opinion and defuse accumulated frustrations collectively. However, this condition of perpetual crisis behooves us to look deeper by scratching the surface of conventional wisdom. Aside from the inertia of habits and convention, what else could explain the present dysfunctional system? Why do we—any of us—accept it, support it, or allow our practice, our thought, and our lives to be shaped by it? Let us follow Lewis Carrol’s advice in Alice in Wonderland and begin at the beginning and go on till we come to an end, then stop. We all know that every crisis has a different cause according to its surrounding circumstances and historical settings. However, the conventional approach to characterizing a crisis inserts certain implicit undertones otherwise not perceived. In other words, the orthodox categorization establishes the parameters in which a crisis is understood. For instance, the term “financial” suggests that a crisis was caused by how activities and assets in the economy were valued and how capital was allocated to fund them (Bjerg, 2014, p. 2). The term “crisis” suggests that the situation should be understood as a normal, temporary glitch in an otherwise workable system. This explains why most conventional descriptions of crises of the past several decades are not different from those formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are all identified as part of a cyclical alternation of boom and bust, which has been the defining feature of capitalism’s history and is therefore inherent in the capitalist mode of production. In capitalism, an economic breakdown or crisis is always depicted as a result of distortions (e.g., market imperfections, mischief behaviors) that will eventually be overlooked by the annals

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of business history. Accordingly, it is always assumed that stability will be restored because underlying disturbances are temporary and correctable. In some crude sense, this conception is understandable since the whole construction of the capitalist economic theory is based on “the premise that the capitalist system is self-regulating,” and hence the main task of conventional experts is “to identify the minimal condition under which self-regulation will be maintained so that any breakdown will be identified as the result of exceptional deviation from the norm” (Clark, 1994, p. 1). Subsequently, it is easy to recognize these diagnostic methodologies as interest-driven schemes with a “visible hand” that solely aims to convict foolish economic agents, irresponsible governments, and everything in between to forgive the system that creates them.31 In other words, these analytical practices are ideologically blindfolded, in the sense that no vision outside their framework is devoted to understanding the problem at hand. Hence, they are undoubtedly susceptible to “missing the forest for the trees.” Joan Robinson, the prominent Cambridge economist, captures this essence when she states, “It is the business of economists not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles” (Robinson, 1962, p. 21). This significant weakness, inherent in all ideological-based diagnoses, is not unique to conventional economic analyses but is widely prevalent in social science disciplines and the intellectual mindsets of national and international institutional organizations. They all persistently turn deaf ears to Cassius’s advice (in Julius Caesar): “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Today, this neglect has inspired reaction and criticism, but it is mainly directed toward derivative factors, such as a divisive president, police brutality, Facebook, etc. It has been proven detrimental to both capitalism and inhabitants of capitalistic societies worldwide in the sense that efforts to correct its faults have been misplaced. Hence, society has failed to free itself from conditions and means that produce and reproduce degenerating disorders. There are plenty of examples that confirm this observation. For instance, Facebook is now held responsible for the irreversible damages it has inflicted upon the mechanism that unleashed it

31 One of the main characteristics of interest-driven methodology is the error of mistaking a justification for an explanation.

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and explicitly helped transform its platform into an entity that resembles a rogue state, beholden to no laws or conditions. In this respect, lawmakers’ attempts to regulate Facebook resemble a delayed effort to apply an antidote after venom has already taken effect. In other words, the dominant structure has also fallen victim to its demented ideology. Another example would be the widespread view among those with less affinity for either the former U.S. Administration or the president that argue the current state of affairs—the rise of racism, and the discontent or contentment, depending on your view, of a significant portion of the population—are mere outcomes of a rift among Americans, or the flawed Electoral College process by which the country elects the president. For one thing, the office of the Presidency is one of three branches of the governing body alongside the Legislative (making laws), Executive (carries out and enforced laws), and the Judicial (evaluates rules). The power of the Executive branch (president, vice president, cabinet, and most federal agencies) solely lies within the limitations outlined by the Constitution. In this context, history does not concur with the validity of the Electoral argument. Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency was decided by the House of Representative and not the majority vote; Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were second-place winners; Abraham Lincoln’s name did not even appear on the ballot in 10 southern States; in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 525 electoral votes (out of 538), and it was the largest total ever received by a presidential candidate. On the broader view, it is tough to argue that the man elected by seventy million-plus votes is a mere blip, an unwanted accident. Perhaps, what makes the former president a divisive character for those who oppose him is his demeanor, which makes him unacceptable as a leader of the free world. Not because he lies, as American politicians are not accountable for their lies. The president undermines the qualities advertised to the rest of the world as American qualities, but not the deep-seated qualities he has disclosed. My argument here is that Trump and his Presidency are not an anomaly but part of the underlying system. So why are these distorted analyses so prevalent? For one thing, they are a practical necessity to guide and navigate the public’s mindset through events that otherwise would be impossible to ignore. How else one could describe the destruction of the environment as a necessary price to pay for progress? The main objective of these probes is to depict expert opinion as a medium so that interlocutors interpret reality according to the conventional views, conform, and become null actors in the sense

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of closing their imaginations. In other words, these experts’ analyses significantly curtail our ability to imagine new ways to organize society, address issues of social justice, and seek an ideal future (Hawkins, 2019, p. 137). More important, these falsifications are ideological. They disseminate particular views to sustain an organization of the state that reflects social relations where a minuscule portion of the population has declared itself a ruling class. This class no longer sees its interests as intertwined with the smooth operation of the state, but has become a dominant body that demands to be served at the expense of others (Gramsci, 1971/1997, footnote 5, p. 55).32 When in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan stated, “Government is not the solution to our problem, the government is the problem,” he explicitly underlined the plan to reconfigure the relationship between the elite and the state. Margaret Thatcher also highlighted this plan as she stated, “In Western countries, we are left with the problems which aren’t poverty. All right, there may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character—personality defect” (As cited in Quote in Graham-Leigh, 2015). Scratch the surface of this intent, and we see two distinct developments. On the one hand, the difference between the present and the nineteenth-century organization of the state, which Marx described as “protector of the bourgeoisie,” is that today, capital has been transformed into a transnational category to the extent that all national affiliations of capital have disappeared. More than 150 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, capitalism stands globally in a more cohesive form than it ever has before. But the common theme of twenty-first century and eighteenth-century capitalism is that capitalism inherently leads to crises because it always produces inequality and violence. Modern architects of capitalism depict these qualities as the strengths of capitalism. For instance, Keynes (1919/2010) claims: The new rich of the nineteenth century were brought up to large expenditures and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasure of immediate consumption. It was precisely the inequality of wealth distribution, which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and 32 Therborn (1978). For a short but comprehensive theoretical discussion of the state’s reflective organization, see Willyard (2015). On the topic of “academics serving the elites,” see Bloch et al. (2018) and Vedder (2018).

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capital improvement that distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a regime intolerable, but like bees, they save and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect. (p. 15)

The audacity of the master, however, demands a proper response, which Robinson (1971) furnishes: Even if the crises [of capitalism] that are looming up are overcome and a new run of prosperity lies ahead, deeper problems will still remain. Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going…The success of modern capitalism for the last twenty-five years has been closely bound up with the armaments race and the trade in weapons (not to mention wars when they are used); it has not succeeded in overcoming poverty in its own countries. Now we are told that it is in the course of making the planet uninhabitable even in peacetime.33 (p. 143)

33 What needs to be said about Joan Robinson is that her devotion to Keynes may well have been a barrier to her being appropriately appreciated by many on the noncapitalist spectrum of intellectuals. This is mainly because Keynes was inclined to reject any alternatives to capitalism (e.g., socialism) and his declared aim was to save capitalism. It should, however, be noted that his perception of socialism was formed around Stalinism, and “the capitalism he had on offer if his advice was heeded was one that would give a heart attack to the ‘new labor’ and ‘new democrat’ politicians of today. He had no sympathy for allowing the economy to be in thrall to the casino of international finance, and saw the socialization of investment, to stabilize the level of new capital goods creation at a high level, as a necessary characteristic of any capitalist economy that would survive” (Walsh, 2001, p. 231). However, his main shortfall was that he saw no contradiction in capitalism that would inevitably lead to its downfall. He thought, erroneously, that such a mechanism could be tamed and humanized. This sentiment was shared by most of his contemporaries—foes and apprentices. Robinson has not received proper appreciation because her thoughts disarmed her counterparts and deprived them of what they often perceived as entitled status. For instance, she observed, “Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were” (Robinson, 1962, p. 79).

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Nevertheless, history is the right way of getting to grips with capitalism’s viciousness and its disastrous consequences.34 Taking a broad view of history, the half-century before WWI has remarkable parallels with our crude global times, as sizeable institutional capital flows, forced mass migration, expanded trade, vast wealth disparities, and social disorders set the stage for a backlash that drove nationalism and conflict, and ended in the catastrophe of the First World War (See James, 2019). The reader should also note the series of revolts against the European establishment, known as the Revolutions of 1848, which began in Sicily and spread to France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. They all, however, ended in failure and repression and were followed by widespread disillusionment among liberals. More narrowly, the United States provides plentiful examples of the contradictory nature of capitalism since its conception: The Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay, red-skins tomahawked them. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand. (Marx 1867/1990, pp. 917–918)35

Another telling example of how capitalism and its offshoot liberalism values lives is vividly apparent in Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts and writings.36 The clearest exhibition may well have come in 1792. According to Henry Wiencek: 34 This history is also vividly prevalent in Western literature. A contemporary example is Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. 35 For a better understanding of the Puritan role in shaping capitalism, see Valeri (2014). For a comprehensive, rarely encountered, study of wicked American History, see Zinn (1999). 36 This wicked assessment does not only rest in Jefferson’s thoughts but, as argued throughout this study, is an inherent vice of the system and liberal views that quite deviously claimed the ownership of the guide to the promised land. This deception is

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Jefferson set out clearly for the first time because he made a 4 percent profit every year on black children’s birth. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four percent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” His plantation produced inexhaustible human assets…In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides present support bring a silent profit of from 5 to 10 percent in this country by the increase in their value.” A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. David Brion Davis sums up their findings: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide.” The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers, and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson used—"their increase”—became magic words. (Wiencek, 2012, pp. 8–9)

These narratives are all reflections of the Western ideological mindset that assembled commodified structures, which required normalizing exploitation (colonization) and assigned monetary value (monetization) manifested in the Declaration of Independence, written by slaveowners, and institutionalized legal slavery in all thirteen colonies at the beginning of the independent American uprising. This is why Samuel Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negros?” (Johnson, 1775). David Brion, however, reminds us that such hypocrisy is deeply rooted in the Western psyche: “…from the time of the first discoveries Europeans had projected ancient visions of liberation and perfection into the vacant space of the New World. Explorers [i.e., Columbus] approached the uncharted coasts with vague preconceptions of mythical Atlantis, Antillia, and the Saint Brendan Isles. The naked savages, living in apparent freedom and innocent, awakened memories of terrestrial paradise and the Golden Age described by the ancients” (Davis, 1988, p. 4). However, the reader should note that the New World was not vacant but populated by close to 112 million in the pre-contact period but decimated by so-called explorers (see Denevan, 1992).

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to natural resources and human lives, as commodities.37 While commodification validates possessing, using, and discarding everything as objects, it also entails making value assessments in monetary terms to underline objects’ exchange value and allow for the separation of production, circulation, and consumption over time and space (Prudhum, 2005, p. 124). This monetization process, by definition, was devised to convert all societal value into the frame of monetary worth, to the extent that money has become the measure of everything.38 This conversion has indeed transformed our world into a realm dominated by one idea by neutralizing our ability to think outside the constructed domain of money. This is a classic case of money fetishism 39 in which one is incapable of realizing anything except what is featured on the menu for sale. David Harvey alludes to this blindness when he states, “Once you can hang a price tag on something. You can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul” (Harvey, 2010, p. 71).40 The manifestations of this “everything is up for sale” attitude range from the right to immigrate41 and the right to shoot an endangered black rhino42 to auctioning off one’s virginity43 and buying the presidency.44 Many factors are involved in this process that compels us to submit to such a standard. Here I only outline two that bear significant implications. One is that commodification activates a structure that is oblivious to the lives of impoverished populations and devalues them, as though they were destined to remain destitute by the natural world—in other words, investing in low yields negative returns. This explains why most social policies are formulated to mitigate rather than eradicate poverty. 37 For an informative discussion of this topic, see Mrozowski (1999). 38 See Cook (2017). 39 Herman Daly provides an excellent discussion of the term and its general implications

in his book, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (see Daly, 1996, pp. 38–40). 40 Harvey also hinted at the connection between Western Christianity and money fetishism by pointing to the Catholic Church’s medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) (Ibid., p. 72). 41 See Brown (2011), and Reddy (2011). 42 See Borrell (2010). 43 See Taylor (2013). It is noteworthy that all these examples appeared in business

journals. 44 For excellent analysis of this topic, see Sandel (2013).

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Any attempt to eliminate poverty mandates removing the commodification principle, one of the fundamental principles of the present dominant system. This would mean dismantling the system entirely. Also, as the poor are explicitly given a negative monetary valuation, a commodified society automatically disqualifies them as equal community members, particularly in light of social rights and the social contract.45 This view was articulated and publicized in the last days of 1991, when Lawrence H. Summer, the chief economist of the World Bank, in the so-called Toxic Memo, argued that exporting pollution to developing nations of Africa is a prudent policy because “underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted.”46 Fast-forward to the present, and we can observe the dire consequences of this view as the pandemic is disproportionally affecting the poor and members of marginalized communities around the world. Thirdly, more importantly, commodification is intrinsically designed to establish domination by sketching contours of ownership: those who retain ownership possess ultimate power over nature, resources, human life, etc. In these circumstances, everything is inevitably perceived through the prism of profit and loss, so that our abilities and needs are converted into money-making opportunities. In effect, the modern era is infatuated with fetishizing things.47 45 Fortunately, this observation is no longer viewed as unorthodox and trivial but is now shared by the most conventional social critics and international organizations (e.g., the World Bank). Fleurbaey et al. (2018) explicitly highlights that the poor’s exclusion and marginalization have led to widespread inequality, which indicates both vertical and horizontal inequalities. These issues are also examined on broader scopes that include socioeconomic, governance, and cultural issues. 46 The memo was written by an American development economist, Lant Pritchett, but signed by Summers, who later joined the Obama administration as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council, perhaps to strengthen the president’s “Yes We Can” motto. 47 Historically, the idea of the fetish has a particular presence in the writings of many contemporary Western scholars from the nineteenth century onward (or from the Enlightenment to Modernism), including Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Baudrillard. Generally, the term implies a particular form of a relation between humans and objects for these theorists. For Kant, the term indicates a lack of judgment and anesthetic incapacity. He categorizes superstitious fanaticism as mere fetishism that renders man only capable of “pseudo-service” (see Pomerleau, 2020). Hegel describes it as progressing from the perception of oneself as master of nature (associated with unmediated magic aimed at power over single things) to the intuition of self-consciousness as the object of worship. For him, fetishism (and animal worship) is the beginning of a dialectical relationship, as fetishism places before the human being some independent power. Freud views the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object and explores how objects are desired

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The relevancy of fetishism to this study is twofold. First, materialism (to which it is bound) is commonly displayed as pseudo-religious or psychic fixations historically embedded in Western cultural values and institutional settings.48 Even critics of capitalism (e.g., Marx) retain materialist properties as they perceive ideals as “material reality as translated in the human mind” (Adler, 2019, p. 60). The mental translation of material reality is the chief vehicle of the prevailing economic materialism. The second property is the active relation of the fetish object to the individual: fetishism is to submission to a controlling agency constructed and expressed by a power outside the affected person’s will.49 This compliance is commonly viewed as a necessary step in the smooth operation of the inherently contradictory and dysfunctional system in which the subject (affected person) is disempowered, trivialized, and subjectified. Marx’s well-known differentiation between living and dead labor underlines the point. Living labor, human laborers’ work is objectified in the machine (i.e., in dead labor). It is how “what was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of machine…labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human and consumed. Writing during the Industrial Revolution, Marx argues that people focus on the relationship between people and commodities in a commodity-obsessed society and ignore the underlying and crucial social relations and values that connect people and allow commodities to be made. He calls this created obsession commodity fetishism: “For Marx, the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities that became a universal category of society as a whole” (Margrain, 2019). The information technology revolution and social networking is an example of this tendency and process. Following Marx, “Jean Baudrillard applied commodity fetishism to explain the subjective feelings of men and women towards consumer goods…the cultural mystique (mystification) that advertising ascribed to the commodities (goods and services) to encourage the buyer to purchase the goods and services as aids to constructing his and her cultural identity” (Cryer, 2020). 48 For instance, as G. Ger and R. W. Belk point out, the literature on consumerism

indicates that materialism arose in Europe and the United States between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to stimulate modern imaginative hedonism in these countries. They also suggest, based on the literature, that materialism in non-Western regions of the world directly results from “emulating images of the western lifestyle.” The proposition that followed this observation is that “the have-nots want more than the haves because they feel a keener sense of relative deprivation…Therefore, paradoxically, there is some reason to expect less affluent nations to be more materialistic” (Ger & Belk, 1996, pp. 57– 58, respectively). To see the link between Western Christianity and fetishism, see Böhme (2014). 49 There is much research on this topic. For instance, see Jhally (2014), Kaplan (2006), and Edelkoort (2013).

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being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production proves itself…he [labour] steps to the side of the production process, instead of being its chief actor...Nature builds no machines…they are organs of human brain, created by human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified” (Marx, 1857/1973, pp. 623–626). In this respect, “the fetish represents a subversion of the ideal of the autonomously determined self” (Pietz, 1987, p. 23). In other words, the fetish indicates a problem to which the solution is demystification: understanding that objects do not have agency and the autonomously determined self—the self as necessary and embodied—is the ideal. This is one of the main flaws we must resolve. This observation can be easily dismissed by claiming that humans are imperfect creatures and fetishizing things is an innate quality. Therefore, some faults we carry within us began at the dawn of civilization; all we have gone through are only parts of human experience. While we are social creatures, we have not learned the most essential lesson of “peaceful coexistence” both within the human community and with nature. Hence, all talk of human progress is pretentious. On this note, Guy Debord ironically declares: “The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord, 1967/2012, Chapter 1). The spectacle “in all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as an advertisement or direct consumption of entertainments,” is “a social relation among people mediated by images” (Ibid.). As such, “the society of the spectacle is the absolute fulfillment of the principle of commodity fetishism.” It is impossible to understand the present dire conditions as an unfortunate glitch that happened in a vacuum or a democratic scheme that went sour through the high-tech manipulations of public mindsets and disturbed heads of states. We have been warned many times to be aware of the inherent defaults of the mechanism we hold so dear. Nietzsche, in his unsettling thesis, observed that “the democratic movement is the heir to Christianity which is itself linked to herd morality; it is a form of monarchism, the democratic mindset that is opposed to all forms of authority; and it represents a form of political and physiological degeneration” (Drochon, 2016, p. 80). Another example is Martin Heidegger, the central figure of Existentialism in the twentieth century, who made a claim in his landmark book Being and Time (1927) that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of

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what it means for something to be—to be present for us before any philosophical or scientific analysis. He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy, Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis—our decline toward nihilism—was intimately linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is revealed might save modern Western man. He also insisted that terms such as anxiety, care, resoluteness, and authenticity were for him, elements of the “openness of being” in which we find ourselves, not psychological characteristics or descriptions of human willfulness, as some existentialists understood them (Blitz, 2014). Throughout this study, I argue that our world has been drifted by way of idolization of concepts, by which I mean when an idea is considered without its context. In this case, an idea transformed into an empty shell drained from its essence and meaning. The present world is the result of, in part, the infiltration of these types of ideas. As such, an idea is a mere rhetoric: a figure of speech, a clever turn of the phrase instead of a genuine conviction, a thought-through idea, or a concrete action (Spencer, 2018, p. 181). Just as one asked a rhetorical question and sought an effect rather than an answer, a rhetorical idea is less concerned with thoughts and meanings than using its rhythm or reverberation. As a result, a rhetorical idea bears two effects; its rhetorical feature is sounding brass, and its assumed conception is pealing bell. Nevertheless, as a general rule, formulation of a rhetoric idea is misleading since it inherently misconstrues how effects and how genuine works, presuming that the former is possible without the latter. This misunderstanding, however, does not prevent rhetoric ideas from being authoritative. They might have lain in hollow phrases, but their authority rests in the power of the dominant paradigm that sponsors and propagates them.

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Reddy, S. (2011, June 7). Program gives investors chance at Visa. Wall Street Journal. Richter, M. (Ed.) (1990). The political theory of Montesquieu. Hackett Publishing Company. Robinson, J. (1962). Economic philosophy (Vol. 415). Transaction Publishers. Robinson, J. (1971). Economic heresies. Some old-fashioned questions in economic theory. Macmillan. Rosenberg, H. (1960/1994). The tradition of the new. First Da Capo Press. Rosenboim, O. (2013). From the private to the public and back again: The international thought of David Mitrany, 1940–1949. Les Cahiers européens de Sciences Po 02. Rousseau, J. J. (1755). A discourse on political economy. https://www.originals ources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=RZT17JVP7VLEQ6G. Russell, B. (1951). The impact of America on European culture. Beacon Press. Sandel, M. J. (2013). What money can’t buy. Penguin. Schwarzschild, M. (2007). Keeping it private. San Diego Law Review, 44, 677. Stern, S. W. (2019, September 25). How war made the cigarette. The New Republic. Stolker, C. (2015). Rethinking the law school: Education, research. Cambridge University Press. Spencer, N. (2018). The evolution of the west. Westminster John Knox Press. Taylor, A. (2013, January 2). Another Brazilian teen attempts to auction virginity online. Business Insider. The Economist. (2012, February 2). The stakes of American hegemony. New York Times. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2012/02/ 02/the-stakes-of-american-hegemony. Therborn, G. (1978). What does the ruling class do when it roles? Verso. Valeri, M. (2014). Heavenly merchandize: How religion shaped commerce in Puritan America. Princeton University Press. Van Wie, P. D. (1999). Image, history, and politics: The coinage of modern Europe. University Press of America. Varoufakis, Y. (2016). Europe’s crisis and America’s economic future—And the weak suffer what they must? Nation Books. Vedder, R. (2018, April 8). Why do progressive support elite universities? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2019/04/08/why-sho uld-progressives-support-elite-universities/?sh=51b7b463235d. Walsh, V. (2001). Review: The economics of Joan Robinson. Science & Society, 65(2), 229–235. Waltz, K. (1959). Man, the state and war. Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. (2010). Theory of world politics. Waveland Press. Watson, A. (1974). Legal transplants: An approach to comparative law. University Press of Virginia.

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Wiencek, H. (2012). The dark side of Thomas Jefferson. Smithsonian Magazine, pp. 266–274. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-ofthomas-jefferson-35976004/. Williams, J. F. (1934). The progress of international government. International Affairs, 13(1), 102–103. Willyard, K. (2015). Classical theories of the state and their reinterpretations. http://www.katewillyard.com/academic-blog/classical-theories-of-thestate-and-their-reinterpretations. Yardley, W. (2012, December 23). Albert Hirschman, optimistic economist, dies at 97. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/bus iness/albert-o-hirschman-economist-and-resistance-figure-dies-at-97.html. Young, O. R. (1980). International regimes: Problems of concept formation. World Politics, 32(3), 331–356. Zinn, H. (1999). A people history of the United States. HarperCollins.

CHAPTER 5

Concluding Remarks

Some time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round and seeing the western sun gilding the sign of its decline on the wall, I asked, “What am I to do?” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

It is plausible to assume that when Martinus Beijerinck discovered contagious living fluid (contagium vivum fluidum) in 1898 and used the term virus for the first time to describe it, he could not have imagined that such an entity could paralyze the twenty-first century human world. Fortunately, the itsy-bitsy COVID-19 has ended the lavish party of the post-Cold War era by exposing glaring truths that were lost in the levity of the triumph over the “evil empire.” Today, however, there is no place to hide, and no powerful state, union of nations, or president can find a way out of the present predicaments with the usual nonsense narratives regurgitated by experts and politicians. The era of duplicitous politics seems to have reached a dead end.1 1 There are people who are less enthusiastic about this observation, particularly in the United States. For instance, Brittany Bengert offers an insightful observation as she states, “To be sure, politics has never been a gentleman’s game. The Congress of the United States has seen men beaten with walking sticks, men stabbed, and outright brawls on the floor of the institution. Perhaps most famously, Alexander Hamilton was shot and killed by Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804. Our nation’s history is rife with violence in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_5

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In this context, this study opens a dialogue about how we arrived at this bewildering present world to guide us to reverse our destructive course and embrace different paths in which we place people and social rights above all else.2 We must “split the celling of the skies and try a new design!” in the words of the Persian sage, Hafez. This task may seem extravagant or impossible to achieve according to the prevailing mindset of many Western nations, particularly Anglo geographic and cultural clusters. Many factors and circumstances have contributed to this view: an entrenched mindset that believes change and progress is possible through a mere election; an institutionalized dominant pedagogy that ingrains contradictory instruction, depicting capitalism and liberalism as “holy grail” ideologies that meet humans’ needs, longings, and claims of exceptionalism. By contradiction, I mean a history that depicts opposite claims: the land of the free, which also turns out to be the world leader in imprisonment; the first country to embed inalienable human freedom in its Constitution but was also founded on the brutal enslavement of an entire race; a government with a Congress, but no one seems actually to debate there; a capital city whose inhabitants have no voting power in Congress. In this book, I have argued that what is needed is a wholesale change that replaces the structure of present power and dominant ideology and alters how we live our lives, connect with each other, and view the world. Here, I remind the reader of the essence of my argument. In defense of my case, I only appeal to common sense. First, following Virgil’s advice to Dante at the gates of hell—"Here you must give up all irresolution; All cowardice must here be put to death"—I reject the mainstream history-making approach that persists in its addiction to great power and

government as ideology naturally intertwines with personality, things are taken personally, and tempers flare. That this is our history means that we shouldn’t be surprised at the vitriol shouted by politicians of every political party, yet we continually loathe the negative campaigning while sometimes gloating when our chosen candidate lands a punch in the political arena. We are participants and viewers of this fight all while lamenting our own role and that of our elected representatives. The duplicity here is engrained within us and the political system” (Bengert 2018). 2 Social rights include the rights to an adequate standard of living, affordable housing, food, education, an equitable health system, and social security based on respect, not sanctions. Social rights are emancipatory and position us all as rights holders, not service users.

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often subscribes to the Grand Narrative. This reductionist3 approach proclaims there is only one tale: namely, a secular Western/European metanarrative. Therefore, no competing narratives, interpretive analyses, or canons can co-exist with it. While there is no question about the merit of dominant Western ideas and their effects on world history, considering competing historical interpretations can counter narrow, context-bound inferences. It can widen our understanding of human history, as every society convening a history follows its own experiences, its own tacit, fundamental way of seeing things, its own values, and its perspectives (See Langer, 1980, p. 6). For instance, Americans’ interpretations of the invasion of Iraq differ from those held by Iraqis.4 The traditional Western narrative that the West rose to prominence due to its intrinsic advantages is challenged by other readings of history, which show that Western advances were largely due to colonial looting. Hence, the dominant narrative becomes yet another assertion of power. Therefore, the two narratives contradict each other, and the interplay of contrasting rival analyses furnishes us with a more rounded perspective. An additional benefit is to evoke the old imperial motto, “history is written by the victors,” and hence disqualify prevailing narratives that intend to impose victors’ versions of events which, by definition, contain broad fallacies, half-truths, and glib generalizations. The problem with a half-truth is that the other half is a lie. For instance, while many around the world have been told that liberty is the fundamental pillar of Western progress, this obscures the truth that liberty grew in the West because it served the interests of power that colonized the rest of the world (See Gress, 1998, p. 1). The outcome of this compliance is the curious mechanism by which neoliberalism had reinforced its dominance since the mid-twentieth century, when talk of 3 “Western Reductionism” is a working term for the idea that “everything is dissectable” (see https://wiki.c2.com/?WesternReductionism). It is a strategy to conquer nature rooted in the Enlightenment era. In contrast to the Holism specific to Eastern thought, reductionism believes that human behavior can be reduced to or interpreted in terms of the lower animals. Ultimately, it can itself be reduced to the psychical controlling the behavior of inanimate matter. Pavlov with dogs, Skinner with rats, and Lorenz with greylag geese all used lower animals to depict instinctive behavioral patterns that can only by analogy be correlated with some aspect of human behavior (see Flew, 1979, pp. 300–301). 4 Besides the apparent different views of the invasion, the contrast between conqueror and conquered, there is no shortage of critical analyses of the invasion and its dire consequences that created these opposite interpretations. For instance, see Van Buren (2012) and Shehata (2005).

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human progress was replaced by discussion of conspicuous consumption and technological innovations, so that “we sit back and enjoy the ride,” in the words of Alex Callinicos, expressing his significant discontent at the artifact of late-twentieth-century Anglo hegemony.5 The second basis of my argument is related to transience. This essence of the idea is simple: the brevity of our world compels us to know impermanence in nature. This is the fundamental existential truth, as Nietzsche reminded Franz Overbeck in 1887, “I am grieved by the transitoriness of things” (As cited in Hayman, 1982, p. 304). The realization that life is temporary has been with us since human consciousness began6 ; in the Buddhist analysis of existence, all things arise and perish through dependent origination; they are impermanent, without substance, and continually subject to change (Hull, 1998). Greeks gave it philosophical vitality as Heraclitus brilliantly observed, “Everything is in flux” and “You can never cross the river twice.” Conceptually, the temporality of power became one of the main qualities of the eighteenth century, alongside the Enlightenment, as a different vision emerged by reconfiguring the dominant paradigm of modernity.7 In contrast to Cartesian mechanics and 5 To understand the context in which Callinicos commented, the reader should note that it comes at the end of Callinicos’s section on Talcott Parson, in which he says, “Parsonian [Talcott Parson] sociology provided the conceptual framework within which American theorists of ‘modernization’ sought to persuade newly independent countries to adopt a Western model of development. Where Weber had surveyed the formation of modernity with deep foreboding, Parson now suggested we sit back and enjoy the ride” (Callinicos, 2007, p. 245). 6 According to Feuerbach, “Religion is the first form of self-consciousness of man. Religions are sacred because they are the tradition of the primitive self-consciousness” (Feuerbach, 1890 [2014], Chapter XXVII, 27). In a similar vein, psychologist Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, suggests that “human consciousness is only about 3000 years old. Before humans mastered language— meaning we understood metaphors, comparisons, and differences of perspective—we didn’t have what we recognize today as primary consciousness or self-reflect. Instead, Jayne says, thoughts occurred to us, and we obeyed the thoughts without question, believing we were receiving orders from some higher authority” (Brown, 2017). 7 This parallel version of modernity—the Counter-Enlightenment—has furnished us with better analytical tools and critical philosophy to understand many of the social and political problems afflicting modern societies, particularly in the West. These problems cannot be appropriately understood by dominant approaches if the inquiry disregards the historical conditions and national circumstances of a particular society, especially in non-Western regions of the world. These approaches generally regard the problems of modernity as the common condition of human existence in all contemporary world societies. For instance, modern problems include: the fragmentation of the social world; the

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Enlightenment rationalism, this parallel vision embraces transience, the wisdom of uncertainty, and the unknowable, present notions of “difference” and “reflexivity” so central to the contemporary worldview (Lash, 1999). It is a platitude of modern skepticism8 that our ideas and theories are never more than transient holders of our scientific esteem, soon to be refuted and replaced by newer, incompatible ideas and theories (Sklar, 2003). In this context, we can either chase butterflies, believing that colorful things—the idols—are here to stay and, therefore, worth pursuing and desiring eternally. Or we can see the reality with clarity of mind as it dances in front of our eyes and recognize that, sooner or later, all things end. The idol’s center of gravity always collapses under its excessive weight. I have chosen the latter because all ideas, however great, bloom for a season, wither, and are replaced. Yet, the question must be asked: how and when do people notice this decline? I respond to this question with the following analogy: think of your well-being. When you are healthy, you are not aware of any problems; your awareness is of being healthy. It is only when something goes wrong that you learn of a problem. However, how can one explain the dire situation of the world today? Perhaps we are addicted to denial as we find ourselves in a corner or are inclined to resolve our most urgent predicaments within a fixed frame of thought. Perceiving certain beliefs, values, and ways of life as a flawless system has been a common theme in human communities throughout history. We seem inclined to idolize our thoughts, images, and creations, even when they lead to our demise and degeneration.9 Humans have been

absence of universally accepted values and norms of behavior; the paramount role of the selfish individual as a prototype for human existence; the public display of private obsessions transmitted through the imagery of chaos, terror, dream, and fantasy; the swift succession of “fashions” in intellectual and cultural matters; the collective feeling of superiority toward the past and ancient cultures; and the widespread predisposition for disorder, disruption, and disobedience (Schabert, 1979). 8 See Neto et al. (2009). In contrast with ancient skepticism, modern skepticism is not concerned with fixed criteria of truth but with fluid, qualified knowledge. 9 This observation does not imply that the human race has not made progress. Indeed, we have. We are not living in caves anymore; we have reached the moon and beyond, split open the atom, and mapped the secrets of life. However, we have failed to collectively achieve any meaningful progress. We have been unable to eradicate widespread hunger and poverty and seem incapable of co-existing peacefully with our fellow men. We have

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killing one another for thousands of years because, more or less, one community has believed in the superiority of its beliefs over all others.10 For instance, for members of Abrahamic religions, a false god is any god other than theirs. A more contemporary example is the War on Terror, which has played a significant part, according to Eagleton, “as cultural affinities, ethnic identities, and religious convictions billowed into today’s global political domination discord” (Eagleton, 2016, p. 150). These blind convictions are mere ideological confinements that have hindered man’s deliverance from his mental slavery across time. Ironically, what we ignore when we idolize ideas is that the essence of thought is the enterprise to salvage man, not to bind him to his own created images and institutions. However, it is important to recognize that this fallacy depends on being beholden to misconceptions and the impermanency of idols.11 Perhaps T. S. Eliot’s brilliant observation—“You are the music while the music lasts”—conveys the point. The question is how to show this fallacy (Eliot, 1942, p. 216). My approach to attain this awareness is less theoretical and more practical, with a wish to reach beyond conventional formal limitations. For clarity, the following example outlines the essence of my approach. Recall

mindlessly devoured everything in our path, to the extent that we are running out of the most abundant resources (air, water) which make the earth habitable. “We consistently overlook the highly political nature of issues such as land ownership and rights and access to natural resources. The result is our biodiversity maps and plans that sketch out sweeping agendas for land-use change may unwittingly contain the seeds of their own failure. We need to re-imagine everything—rethink and challenge everything we do, how we do it and who does it” (as cited in Vidal, 2019). 10 In recent times, the cry of “Never Again” regarding the Holocaust conveys the

meaning of this repeated violence among people. Is it the genocide of millions based on religion; is it the manner in which such barbarism took place; is it the silence of other Europeans (e.g., Britain, U.S., Australia, etc.) which allowed it to happen; is it the selfclaimed superiority of one group over others; or it is the act of aggression against people that should never happen again? “Never again” has a history of happening again, and sadly, victims also become perpetrators of crimes. 11 Who could have thought in the sixteenth century that the most significant state in Europe at its conception (1569), the Rzeczpospolita (the Commonwealth of PolandLithuania), would have disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century and few people today would have even heard of it? Excellent and informative discussions on this topic are provided by Davies (2012).

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the prophet Abraham’s illuminating ancient narrative when he destroys his father’s idols to show the people they have no power over their lives.12 Therefore, I argue that the time has come to smash the present idols and re-imagine, rethink, and challenge everything we do, how we do it, and who does it. We can either take responsibility for our fate or let nature do it for us. We must abandon romanticism13 and sacrifice our material, physical creations, recognizing them as perceptions that no longer benefit even those who cling to them. The question is: how effective would it be to ask the same mechanism that established and sustained inequality for centuries to reverse course? This inquiry is pursued by those who have no intention to change the dominant paradigm or power structure. George Orwell articulates this point when he describes the Labor Party progressive platform: It has never been able to achieve any major change, because...it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade union, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the critical years, it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism. In particular, it was interested in the maintenance of the British Empire, for the wealth of England was drawn largely from Asia and Africa. The stand and of living of the trade union workers, whom the Labour Party represented, depend indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. (Orwell, 1941 [2018], p. 58)

It is unreasonable to say a governing system can be improved without replacing the power structure that supports it. The malaises of society 12 It began after an older woman came into Abraham’s father’s shop carrying a bowl of fine flour to give to the idols as an offering. Abraham took a stick, broke all of the idols, and placed the stick in the one remaining idol’s hand, the largest one. When Terah, Abraham’s father, returned to the store, he asked his son, “Who did this to the gods?” Abraham told Terah about the woman who made the offering. “When I offered the flour, one god said, ‘I will eat first.’ Another god yelled, ‘No, I first.’” Abraham described the argument that ensued until the largest idol became angry, grabbed a stick, and broke all the other idols into pieces. “Idols don’t get hungry. Idols don’t speak. And, idols don’t break each other. They’re simply idols,” replied Terah. Abraham smiled and said, “Oh, Father, if only your ears could hear what your mouth is saying. Why, then, do you worship them?” (Howard, 2013). 13 Here, the term refers to the doctrine of autonomous, isolated singularity, which imagines a world in which nothing is connected to anything else. In this context, romanticism is rooted in a specific political ideology: namely, the liberal tendency that, more often than not, tends to substitute personal discussion for political (Schmitt, 2007, p. xiv).

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cannot be redeemed by innovative trickeries (e.g., an appeal to identity politics). We need to address the fundamental issues head-on by identifying the innate contradictions of the economic and political system, its total disregard for most basic social rights, and environmental degradation. Failure to recognize these basic necessities has driven the majority into a state of ignorance and helped the ruling elites make delusional declarations. An illuminating example of such an assertion is the John Hopkins’ 2019 Global Health Security Index, which ignored the fundamentals of health security and presented the United States as #1 globally even though it ranked # 175 on healthcare access.14 Sadly, it took a disastrous pandemic to underline their blunt error in judgment, rooted in ideological biases that emphasize the capacity of health systems instead of highlighting access to health services as a fundamental social right. However, I argue that the music has stopped for Western ideological supremacy. America is liberalism’s standard-bearer and resembles the classic boast of the Good Book: God created man above all else.15 Just as the human race has failed to live up to this standard, America’s manual of the good life has emerged as a failed prophesy. While in the current state of the world, we seem to be running out of time to save ourselves from our deeds, this study argues that we are on the verge of a new era. This enthusiasm is based on the notion that present conditions have driven humans to a state in which we no longer have the luxury of religious-like justifications nor interest-derived explanations but must accept the degenerative circumstances we have created. The repressiveness of the dominant ideology may not be apparent to everyone. The dominant ideology has shaped public opinions and mindsets and has transformed the masses into oblivious bystanders or divided subgroups who solely pursue their narrow interests. Even the eminent thinkers of the Enlightenment who believed in benevolence, justice, and humanity have not been immune to this transformation. They showed no sign of inner reflection on external affairs (e.g., dreadful colonization). Emboldened by this indifference at home and unfazed by erratic 14 https://www.ghsindex.org/country/united-states/. 15 And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them

have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26).

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sparks of indignation abroad (the exterior of the periphery), the arrogance of domination continued to ride high only to face the inevitable end, the collective failure of humanity (WWI, 1914–1918 and WWII, 1939–1945), which most notably annihilated Europe and took close to 100 million lives in the world. The destructive effects of modern domination were never hidden from its perpetrators or its subjects. We may choose to go back to a philosopher of pessimism, Schopenhauer—or to Nietzsche, Burckhardt, or Chamberlain (1912), who writes: “Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese not show us another example of the same nature? Do not all historians tell us that the Semites and halfSemites, in spite of their great intelligence, never succeeded in founding a State that lasted?” (p. 543). We thus discover how our world has become a place without meaning where, “as Siegfried Kracauer argued, reality was a mere construction, there was a strong temptation to aestheticize violence, thereby discovering a sense of transcendence in a world without God, so that the mindless violence of warfare might be infused with some semblance of meaning” (Kitchen, 2014, p. 2).16 This is the world of militarized societies dominated by Freikorps (German for “Free Corps”), Fascists, Nazis, and others, in which authors like Ernst von Salmon (author of the hugely popular autobiographical novel Die Fragebogen, or The Questionnaire), Emilio Marinetti (author of the first Futurist Manifesto and the Fascist Manifesto), and Gabriele D’Annunzio (who inspired Fascism in Italy and briefly ruled Italy in the twentieth century) regard violence as “a transcendental quality that exists well beyond the realms of morality, history or reasons” (Kitchen, 2014, p. 1). Indeed, well before the world collapsed in the disarray and slaughter of the sequential wars, “the self-confident certainties of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism had begun to crumble” (Kitchen, 2014, p. 2). One can also reflect on the present conditions in many Western and non-Western countries and note similar absurdities, from India and Brazil to Great Britain (which soon, after the possible departure of Scotland and Northern Ireland may only be called England plus), Italy, Poland, Hungary, the United States, etc. This outcome is not unexpected or anomalous because the world is nothing more than an interconnected collection of human communities. Hence, the dire consequences of imperialism could not be confined

16 See also Hoberman (2012).

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to certain, isolated localities but rather spread and infect the entire world. Today, we have more or less reached this state; the inevitable is now apparent to mass audiences because the severities of the prevailing domination are witnessed and experienced by all. Yet, and despite the numerous calamities that we are facing today, including climate change, global polarization, mass exodus, the prevalence of vulgar and outright illiterate national leaders, fraudulent intellectuals, and epistemic communities that have no answer but references to centuries-old notions and demonizing others to legitimize Western destruction, we are still entertaining the very ideas that drove us into such chaos. Today’s central message is that we need a wholesale change and embark on a new path quite different from past experiences. We can no longer expect global institutions to change clothes and support human sustainability rather than growth. We can no longer expect that changing heads of state or recycling politicians will make any difference. A clear mind is needed to recognize that slogans, such as sustainable growth or millennium development goals, are merely contradictory empty catchphrases. Considering the resources at their disposal, they have achieved close to nothing. Also, they are oxymoronic terminologies. For instance, the term sustainability implies the normative requirement that economic growth and development must not be pursued to the detriment of human wellbeing and the environment. Yet, today, Americans are told to celebrate double-digit economic growth while 50 million people are hungry to the extent that they have to line up for food. The ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus deserves an important place in this book. Sisyphus betrayed the secrets of the gods to mortal men. For this, the gods condemned him to push a massive stone to the top of a hill; as he neared the peak, the effort became too much for him, and the stone rolled down to the bottom. Sisyphus then had to begin his task again, but the same thing would happen, and Sisyphus must labor with his stone for eternity. The myth of Sisyphus serves as an unwelcome metaphor for the current state of affairs in the world. State after state has willingly chosen—or been advised—to pursue Western ideals only to realize that the intended goals cannot be achieved. So the experiment must begin all over again. I argue that such adherents resemble one of the most overused clichés: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” This book, therefore, suggests that such insanity should stop.

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In retrospect, we have a “choice” to make rather than a “target” to select and critique. As mentioned earlier, we can either submit to the status quo and retain our present fixations, which delude us to the bitter end. Or, realize that the prevailing festive phase of prosperity for a few has reached the end of its lifeline. This time we should replace singularity and individualism with the pluralism and collectivity that have been an integral part of the human community since our ancestors vacated caves so long ago. This choice requires total withdrawal from the present state, which we must endure with mental agility because pegging one’s hopes and aspirations to a mere fixation, like all similar endeavors, is incapable of steering us down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of Oz. More importantly, it cannot fill the void of the present absence of thinking that has paralyzed our ability to think of new ideas for the betterment of our world or our fellow men for centuries, particularly in non-Western countries. There are already signs of cautious optimism that we, as a human community, have already begun to divest from predictable fixations and invest in mass-based movements intended to alter the overall nature and structure of the national and internal governing system. The prevailing environmental movements, one of which Greta Thunberg inspired, the brave and brilliant 16 years of Swedish school-girl,17 are great signifiers that mass awareness for an overall change of the system is on its way. The only way to move forward is to look inward as a catalyst for a home-grown paradigm of change and respect each country’s rights equally. In doing so, we are obliged to respond on three fronts. First, we must confront the present reality head-on and realize that the status quo means repeating the same mistake but expecting a different result. Second, we must recognize that the present compels rigorous scrutiny of the underlying principles (e.g., universality) and summons us to find a broader vision that comprises an inclusive world and resonates with Aristotle’s axiom: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts .”

17 I invite everyone to listen to Greta’s inspiring interview at https://www.democracy now.org/2019/9/11/greta_thunberg_swedish_activist_climate_crisis.

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Third, people must stand firm and recognize the cultural heritage that defines them, thus activating the enormous untapped potential to elevate themselves on their own terms, endowed with humanity, decency, and integrity.

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Correction to: Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics

Correction to: E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1 The original version of this book was previously published with the World Bank copyright statement in the copyright page, which has now been removed. The book has been updated with the change.

The updated version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1_6

C1

Index

A academia, 42, 68, 94, 108, 110, 136 Adams, John, 27, 119, 143 Affluent Society, 14 Afghanistan, 28 agency, 24, 64, 65, 91, 133, 135, 143, 150, 151 America, 26, 53, 106, 110, 120, 125–127, 139, 140, 166 American businesses, 125 Animal Farm, 110 anthropology, 106 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 25, 101 Asian capitalism, 48, 97 Asiatic mode, 8, 110 B bad politics, 22, 23 bargaining power, 127 Beijerinck, Martinus, 159 belief, 1, 8, 11–13, 21, 22, 29, 37, 39, 44, 61, 72, 86, 88–90, 100, 103, 104, 106, 111, 117, 134, 163, 164

Bisson, Thomas N., 64 Blake, William, 5 bourgeoise capitalists, 109 British Empire, 50, 122, 134, 165 C capitalism, 37, 42, 61, 87, 94, 97, 108, 127, 128, 130, 140–142, 144–146, 150, 160, 165 China, 4, 26, 77, 96, 97, 118, 127 Chinese capitalism, 97 Churchill, Winston, 2 climate change, 168 cognition, 4, 47, 87, 100 cognitive rigidity, 52 cognitive science, 8, 38 Cold War, 60–62, 124, 126 collective subjectification, 109, 110 colonialism, 50, 64, 77, 110, 134, 138 colonization, 12, 21, 40, 62, 76, 103, 147, 166 colonization of the mind, 103, 104, 110

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) under, exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. G. Carayannis and A. Pirzadeh, Culture, Innovation, and Growth Dynamics, Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14903-1

173

174

INDEX

communism, 6, 42, 48 consciousness, 45, 50, 57, 65, 105, 162 consensus-building, 29 Constitution, 24, 26, 28, 138, 143, 160 contemporary history, 119 context, 5–11, 16, 20, 37, 42, 45, 46, 49–52, 57, 60, 71, 76, 77, 92, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 104, 111, 122, 123, 133, 138, 143, 152, 160, 162, 165 context-bounded notion, 4, 44, 88, 130 context of an idea, 5, 52 Counter-Enlightenment, 162 COVID-19 pandemic, 17, 24, 159 creativity, 67 critical theory, 109 critical thinking, 29 cultural evolutions, 111 cultural history, 5, 37, 39, 42, 46, 49, 86, 90, 95, 100, 110, 133–135 cultural propaganda, 78 culture, 2, 7, 8, 46, 49, 52, 53, 58, 61, 77, 78, 91, 101, 106, 111, 117, 122, 123, 125, 130, 134, 138, 139, 163 cultures of fetishism, 150 culture specificities, 5, 37, 49, 135 cyber propaganda, 53 D Dascal, Marcelo, 103, 104 Davies, Norman, 60–62, 164 degeneration, 60, 102, 151, 163 democracy, 1, 2, 20, 22, 27, 29, 37, 39, 40, 48, 49, 51–53, 58, 61, 62, 67, 87, 93, 104, 111, 124, 129 democracy solution, 107 demos, 48

Descartes, René, 2, 70 dialogic text, 50 diversity, 44, 49, 56 divided nation, 20, 21 dominant ideology, 1, 7, 87, 107, 140, 160, 166 dominant paradigm, 14, 24, 39, 152, 162, 165 domination, 10, 23, 38, 43, 52, 59, 62, 77, 87, 102–104, 106, 107, 109–111, 127, 132, 149, 164, 167, 168 Douglass, Frederick, 41 Durkheim, Emile, 21 E East Asian democracy, 49 economic growth, 92, 96, 97, 120, 168 economic problems, 39, 42, 44 economics, 5, 7, 8, 13–15, 19, 23, 25, 27, 53, 57, 62, 66, 67, 75, 77, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 118–124, 126, 128, 130–133, 135, 138, 140–142, 166 economic systems, 19, 111 education, 24, 59, 61, 66, 76, 92, 95, 103, 105, 121, 160 eighteenth century, 7, 8, 12, 20, 43, 47, 54, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71–73, 76, 110, 124, 144, 162, 164 England, 14, 30, 44, 124, 146, 165, 167 Enlightenment, 7, 21, 22, 47, 60, 64, 67–71, 73–77, 118, 129, 149, 161–163, 166 entropy, 96 environment, 59, 70, 86, 87, 89, 91, 95, 97, 101, 103, 131, 132, 136, 143, 168 epistemic authority, 103, 104

INDEX

epistemology, 11, 16, 65, 88, 117 ethics, 16, 88, 129 Europe, 6, 7, 12, 43, 57, 60, 62, 64, 66, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 87, 105, 106, 110, 111, 120–122, 126, 127, 150, 164, 167 European Union (EU), 60, 121, 123, 130 evidence-based policy, 98–100 evidence-based policy making, 101 existential crisis, 97, 162

F fake news, 53, 66 fetishized ideas, 50, 110 foreign policy, 126 formal institutions, 134, 135, 138 Foucault, Michel, 21, 47, 48, 53, 72, 102, 124 Founding Fathers, 26, 40 free world, 105, 111, 120, 125, 143 French Revolution, 74 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 74, 75, 149

G Galbraith, John Kenneth, 14, 15, 101 Germany, 6, 44, 69, 93, 118, 120, 146 global politics, 106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 16, 52 good governance, 95, 98 good politics, 22–24, 28–30 government, 2, 25–27, 29, 40, 75, 76, 91, 95, 98, 106, 120, 121, 123, 129, 131–135, 137, 139–142, 144, 160 Gramsci, A., 41, 144 Grand Narrative, 161 Greece, 27, 43, 69, 73, 121

175

H Haas, Ernest Bernard, 129, 130 Habermas, J., 73 Hafez, 160 Harvey, David, 93, 94, 130, 148 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 149 Heidegger, Martin, 151 Heisenberg, Werner, 55, 56 herd mentality, 53 historical context, 5, 6, 46, 54, 56 historical experiences, 134 history, 2, 8–10, 12, 21, 37, 38, 43, 46, 51, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 73, 74, 94, 95, 98, 102, 106, 109–111, 117, 118, 122, 124, 130, 132, 134, 138, 139, 141–143, 146, 159–161, 163, 164, 167 human behavior, 58, 161 human communication, 77, 147 human community, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 56, 66, 86, 102, 107, 122, 151, 163, 167, 169 human consciousness, 162 Hume, David, 2, 45, 67, 68, 70, 76 Huxley, Aldous, 42, 43 I idea of the West, 58, 61 ideas, 1–10, 14, 17, 19, 25, 37–39, 41, 42, 44–59, 62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 73, 78, 87–89, 91, 93, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 110–112, 117, 118, 123, 124, 132–134, 148, 149, 152, 161–164, 168, 169 ideas as a medium, 37 identity, 8, 11, 24–26, 62, 65, 107, 138, 150, 164 identity politics, 24–26, 166 ideology, 2, 6, 21, 29, 38, 39, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 58, 67, 69, 85–91,

176

INDEX

93–95, 99, 100, 102–104, 107, 110, 117, 122, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133, 136, 138, 143, 160 individualism, 8, 70, 71, 87, 93, 111, 131, 169 industrialization, 7, 66, 124 Industrial Revolution, 6, 14, 66, 150 informal institutions, 134, 135, 138 institutional settings, 5, 49, 54, 62, 90, 98, 101, 104, 122, 130–132, 134, 136, 150 institutional transplantation, 131, 138 institutions, 1, 7, 38, 39, 41, 49, 51, 56, 74, 89–91, 94, 95, 99–101, 105, 117, 118, 125, 129–131, 133–136, 138, 140, 141, 159, 164, 168 interdependency, 63, 120, 124, 129 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 94, 117, 123, 133 international organizations, 95, 118, 124, 129, 133, 136, 149 international regimes, 117, 120, 123–125, 129–131 international relations, 27, 44, 106, 123, 128–130 Iraq, 28, 38, 53, 161 J Jefferson, Thomas, 27, 143, 146, 147 justice, 23, 41, 43, 77, 93, 128, 129, 137, 144, 166 K Kant, Immanuel, 68–71, 119, 124, 149 Kindleberger, Charles, 126 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 30 Kipling, Rudyard, 63, 64, 139 knowledge, 3, 4, 13, 19, 27, 43, 45, 47, 48, 52–54, 57, 64, 66, 69,

70, 74, 77, 78, 89, 90, 98–100, 112, 117, 134, 151, 163 Koch brothers, 58 kratia, 48 L language, 4, 6, 21, 37, 38, 49–51, 77, 90, 134, 162 Latin America, 49 law, 4, 11, 17–19, 26, 27, 43, 55, 56, 61, 77, 86, 96, 97, 99, 100, 128, 133–138, 143 Legal Transplants , 133 liberal democracy, 8, 106 liberal ideology, 97, 127 liberalism, 8, 42, 87, 93, 106, 111, 128, 146, 160, 166, 167 liberty, 10, 21, 26, 43, 47, 53, 71, 72, 110, 137, 138, 147, 161 liminality, 106 Lindqvist, Sven, 135, 136 linguistics, 49, 50 literacy, 66 Locke, John, 3, 4, 8, 21, 67, 70, 75 M market economy, 19, 87, 127, 131, 133 Marshall Plan, 121 Marxism, 110 Marx’s Capital, 69, 130 Marx, Karl, 6, 8, 30, 43, 54, 57, 111, 130, 138, 144, 146, 149–151 materialism, 150 material reality, 150 mental content, 73, 103 metanarratives, 161 Middle East, 26, 61 mimicry, 62, 63, 94, 132, 133 mindset, 1, 5, 10, 12, 17, 21, 40–43, 52, 63, 65, 86, 94, 95, 104, 109,

INDEX

125, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 151, 160, 166 miracle economies, 97 misinformation, 53 Mitrany, David, 128, 129 modern, 6, 13, 44, 46, 47, 54, 63–65, 67, 73–75, 77, 104, 106, 111, 122, 133, 138, 144, 145, 150–152, 162, 163, 167 modern era, 109, 110, 149 modern history, 138 modernity, 73, 106, 162 modernization, 132, 162 monetary phenomenon, 91, 99 monologic text, 50 monopolies of knowledge, 53, 54 Montesquieu, 8, 47, 125, 137, 138 morality, 73, 151, 167 N nation, 7, 12, 23, 24, 27, 29, 39, 40, 43, 44, 59, 62, 66, 67, 72, 76, 77, 89, 90, 95, 97, 100, 101, 106, 107, 109, 118–122, 125, 127, 129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 149, 150, 159, 160 national identity, 77, 97 nationalism, 77, 105, 126, 131, 146 national sovereignty, 7, 77 nation state, 44, 60, 106, 129 naturalism, 4, 7, 12, 21, 25, 50, 54, 67, 70, 119, 125, 132, 148, 164 natural law, 12 natural right, 8, 77 nature, 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 27, 45, 47, 48, 56, 60, 64–66, 71, 75–77, 86, 88, 97, 100, 103, 109, 118, 130, 137, 146, 149, 151, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169 neoliberalism, 42, 93, 94, 124, 161 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 107

177

Newton, Isaac, 67 Newton law, 55, 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57, 70, 71, 107, 151, 162, 167 19th century, 6, 14, 43, 72, 122, 124, 141, 144, 149, 167 non-contextual thought, 7 non-Western society, 127, 162 non-Western state, 58, 96 non-zero-sum game, 124 O Obama, Barack, 28, 39, 40, 149 one-size-fits-all, 42 ontology, 11, 65 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 121 Oriental despotism, 111 Orwell, George, 44, 63, 110, 165 oxymoron, 97, 140, 168 P Pascal, Blaise, 65, 66 path dependence, 89 people, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9–12, 14–20, 22–24, 26, 27, 30, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46–49, 51, 56, 58, 59, 63, 65, 66, 71, 73, 75, 76, 87, 95, 101, 102, 104–108, 110, 117, 119, 121, 135, 137, 139, 140, 144, 147, 150, 151, 159, 160, 163–165, 168, 170 perpetual peace, 124 phenomenology, 99 philosophers, 3, 10, 47, 66, 71, 72, 77, 167 philosophical anthropology, 85 philosophical concepts, 51, 65, 68, 74 philosophical theories, 57, 65, 128 philosophical works, 152

178

INDEX

physical universe, 55 policy decision-making, 125 policy resolution, 95, 98 policy toolbox, 91, 136 policy transfer, 89–92, 94, 96, 97, 100 policy translation, 91 political activism, 102 political culture, 104 political doctrine, 8, 61 Political Economy, 27 political ideologies, 87, 88, 165 political interdependency, 118 political movements, 75 political philosophy, 65, 74, 162 political polarization, 20, 21 political science, 96 political spectrum, 85 political systems, 19, 96, 111, 127, 160, 166 political theory, 29 politics, 15, 19, 22, 24, 26, 29, 53, 55, 63, 75, 77, 89, 94–96, 98, 118, 119, 123, 128–130, 137, 159 politics of imperialism, 63 positions of power, 19, 21, 85, 94, 127 postmodernism, 71 post-WWII, 94, 119, 122, 123, 125, 130 poverty, 17, 22, 25, 29, 144, 145, 148, 149, 163 power, 21, 22, 26–28, 30, 40, 44, 46–48, 50, 52–54, 56, 63, 76, 77, 85, 86, 88, 97, 101–105, 108–111, 120, 122, 123, 125–128, 130, 134, 137, 141, 143, 144, 149–152, 160–162, 165 predetermined framing, 98 prescribed policy, 90, 94, 123, 124

private property, 7, 27 private sector, 124, 131, 133 privatization, 93, 96, 124 promised land, 108, 146 propaganda, 88, 151 psychology, 65, 70 public policy, 140 public sector, 90 R racism, 143 rational egoists, 124 reality, 1, 4, 9, 16, 21, 25, 29, 30, 37–40, 44, 45, 50, 52, 54, 65, 71, 73, 86, 88, 89, 100, 106, 120, 125, 131, 143, 163, 167, 169 religion, 14, 43, 50, 74, 86–88, 103, 111, 118, 138, 162, 164 Ricardo, David, 54, 124 Romer, Paul, 23 Roser, Max, 22, 23 ruling elites, 52, 104, 166 S Said, Edward, 63, 64, 77 Sapere aude, 68 science, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 23, 37, 38, 46, 55, 56, 72, 98–100, 132, 142 scientific method, 2 scientific modeling, 98 scientific theories, 4 slavery, 12, 21, 75, 147, 164 Smith, Adam, 5, 7, 54, 66, 67 social conditioning, 10–13, 15, 20, 24 social consciousness, 57 social control, 1, 15, 138 social institutions, 7, 39, 134, 135, 146 socialism, 6, 130, 145

INDEX

social malaises, 53, 66 social movements, 6, 132 social philosophy, 72 social psychology, 7 social relations, 44, 144, 150, 151 social systems, 58, 103, 134 sociological theory, 57 sociology of knowledge, 13 Socrates, 85, 108, 109 South Asian democracy, 49 sovereign nations, 27, 136 sovereignty, 15, 106, 123, 127, 132 state-owned enterprise, 96, 124 status quo policies, 93 subjected community, 108 subjectification, 21, 104 subjugated knowledge, 48, 52 subjugated thought , 47 symbols, 3, 88, 122

T technological innovation, 162 terrorism, 10, 11, 108, 111 theoretical philosophy, 57, 65, 128 tiger economies, 97 totalizing approach, 51 Toynbee, Arnold, 8, 47, 60 transplantation, 131, 132, 136 Trump, Donald, 20, 22, 39, 40, 58, 59, 107, 140, 143 truth, 3, 9, 22, 39, 45, 48, 50, 64, 65, 68, 74, 159, 161–163 Twain, Mark, 5 20th century, 7, 9, 13, 120, 122, 128, 133, 140, 151, 162, 167 tyranny, 29, 110, 137

179

U Uncertainty Principle, 55 United States (US), 11, 12, 20, 26, 27, 38–40, 44, 59, 61, 89, 93, 95, 97, 105, 118, 120–123, 125–127, 146, 147, 149, 150, 159, 166, 167 universal ideas, 8, 42, 56 us versus them, 41 Utopia, 43 W Wealth of Nations, 5 wealth tax, 19, 20 Weber, Max, 16, 17, 162 Weil, Simone, vii, ix West, 8, 12, 21, 46, 49, 58–62, 64, 72, 87, 95, 119, 127, 131, 133, 134, 140, 161, 162 Western civilization, 61, 62, 152 Western Europe, 60–62, 122 Western history, 12 Western ideas, 42, 58, 97, 101, 161 Western paradigm, 96 Western philosophy, 93 Western state, 96 White House, 26, 107, 149 White Man, 13, 14, 64 white man’s burden, 139 World Bank, 23, 91, 94, 96, 99, 117, 133, 149 world economy, 23, 120, 126 world political economy, 126 World Trade Organization (WTO), 123 World War, 106, 120, 122, 126, 128, 146