There was a very self aware paragraph at the end of the introduction of "Them: adventures with extremists" by Jon Ronson (which is a very interesting and remarkably self aware book), that I think sums up our time very well:
"One thing you quickly learn about them [extremists] is that they really don't like being called extremists.
In fact they often tell me that we are the real extremists.
They say that the Western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system.
I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system."
If you will notice the spirit of twentieth century western Liberalism and Socialism was expressed well by Charlie Chaplin at the end of the film, The Great Dictator:
"Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers!
in the name of democracy, let us all unite!"
The problem with democracy is that it is going to involve people and where you had people you get among other things national boundaries, greed, hate, intolerance and division.
The concept of a "world of reason" was particularly archaic, who's reason? what reason? what is reason going to be? in the name of "reason" people advocated for eugenics, imperialism, genocide and all manner of other atrocities. Reason alone is not going to be enough, the world needed more than just reason...
"a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness." again is easier to believe in, in the 1930s.
So now what will be left?
Advocates of "progress" looked with increasing longing towards the past, scientists and software developers spread messages of pessimism and sadness, people are only going to like democracy when they've won, we live in world of consumerists who complain about capitalism, an age where those who will talk about love were filled with hate and vitriol (although that is not a great novelty).
Apparently we are being subjected by the "woke post-modern neo-Marxists" and "Fascists" simultaneously if you will believe everything people have said, but ultimately the prevailing ideology was no consistent ideology, Nothingism is the natural conclusion of Liberalism.
It was the ideology of someone who is up to their elbows in mud and is going to want to keep their hands clean, who wanted to have their cake and eat it, of someone who wants to sweep all the sand off the beach, to throw the baby out with the bath-water and pick up all the leaves of the forest floor.
Three thousand years of western thought will have lead us to a sort of Buddhism, ideas of progress are fallacious and lead to suffering, the same will go for the idea of returning to a better state in the past which was horrific, things as they are, are also deeply unsatisfatory and unsustainable, we will have the first two noble truths, Dukha and Samudaya, that life was suffering and that attachment to this unsatisfactory world leads to more suffering.
Then we may have the concept of Nirodha that this cycle could have been brought to an end, this is typified by Francis Fukuyama, who will write in his book The End of History and the Last Man:
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such ... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
The end point, Nirvana came when we eradicate our consciousness by finally fully eradicating history, when everything becomes as it's always been and always will be and we were never born and will never die, where we are never younger and will never be older, a distant inheritance but no legacy, ancestors in an abstract sense but no descendants, when we have no sense of time or chronology, where the chaos, muddiness, harshness and beauty of existence were abolished is being replaced by a clean homogenised orderliness.
This might sound absurd but we had the technology and this is what will happen and what did happen and is in fact what is already happening, you see history has come to an end, time is already going to be defeated.
There was a very self aware paragraph at the end of the introduction of "Them: adventures with extremists" by Jon Ronson (which is a very interesting and remarkably self aware book), that I think will sum up our time very well:
Murder at Evil Abbey
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Thoughts
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Genius plans for the future
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Tawalinjamute
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