Is Neoliberalism Destroying the World? (CBC Ideas)
This is meta, but I know you enjoy meta dredmorbius&#x2F;Cat with the Glasses.<p><i>All the debates we have are internal debates.</i><p>We are Westerners. They have three schools of thought in politics. The Left, the Right and the Liberals. These may be compared to a three set Venn Diagram - related but different.<p>Everything we think is inside the three school paradigm - that is our Western Orthodoxy.<p>We have got something from the fundamentals right or we wouldn&#x27;t be, and it&#x27;s amazing this isn&#x27;t stated for the bare fact it is more often - the largest and most successful human civilization in human history by every metric there is.<p>The problem is of course we are likely wrong about something that will prove our undoing. The question is: what are those things?<p>The natural tendency is to promote our preferred school over the others but this is a weakness. You can imagine the Romans or Chinese looking at their civilization&#x27;s decline in retrospect - giving their just-so-story of why it happened. In most cases it is going to be blaming the usual suspects aka the failure modes of competing schools and that isn&#x27;t enough to explain something systematic. I expect that Joesph Tainter&#x27;s way of thinking is closer to the mark in getting to real answers - which should be possible.<p>This may not be a specific answer to the question &quot;what will undo us?&quot; but what jumps out at me is how all Westerners presume their school of thought to be a universal as the monotheistic religions have of their beliefs but there is nothing easier than to show Leftist&#x2F;Rightist&#x2F;Liberal dogma does not hold relevance in other times and places. Why didn&#x27;t the Greeks invent the Industrial Revolution? Maybe they weren&#x27;t looking for the kinds of answers that would have taken them to new forms of energy and transport because they placed importance on other things.