Roots of the New World

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, May 28th, 2005

20^th century’s first half witnessed the rise of planned economy; the second saw its fall, followed by the appearance of an even more ambitious domination plan: planned culture. Culture transcends and includes economy: it includes the entire range of human creations, language and imagination, values and feelings, intimate life and unconscious reflexes. The widening of the objectives shows that the activist intelligentsia learned from the eight decades experience an opposite lesson from that of classic liberal and libertarian economists: the latter believe that socialism’s failure proved Giant Government’s intrinsic madness; the former learned that Giant Government failed for not being gigantic enough.

Socialism’s final aim, as Hannah Arendt observed, is the modification of human nature. The Lenin, Stalin and Hitler generation imagined that socialist economy would create this new kind of men. The deeper socialist thinkers – Gramsci, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School – saw in this a dangerous economicist mistake. The soul of the “new man” would not be born from socialism, but should come before it and create it. This idea sounded heretical to Marxist orthodoxes of the time (although, on the other side of the socialist range, it was not totally alien to the Nazi-fascist theoreticians). It has spread only in the last decades, providing the basis for the formidable expansion of internationalist leftism, which survived even Soviet economy’s fall, and has reached its peak precisely in the years following USSR’s breakup. Today’s international socialism looks less for socialist regimes creation and more for the installation of a global complex of mutations in civil society, in morals and in family relations. The change in the order of priorities caused a harmonic change in the strategy and choice of means. Formerly, the revolutionary movement’s essential tool was an ideologically monolithic party. Today, it is a variety of leftist parties only apparently disconnected, it is the international NGOs’ networks, it is the “social movements”, it is the large international organizations. Their unity of action can only be grasped from outside by those who are aware of the cultural war’s subtleties, infinitely more complex than the older open conflict between pro-capitalist and pro-communist parties.

Once the strategic line of action is understood, it becomes easy to follow the players in the game, from the public debates’ apparent confusion to their common origin in strategic planning offices invariably linked to the UN and to a certain number of billionaire foundations with which they are associated, as well as to some national States which, discretely and not without ambiguities, give support for the process. Today there is not a single “cause”, a single revolutionary fight or “social change” slogan that has not originated in technical and consultive committees outside any popular and electoral control. These ideas are then spread throughout the many nations as if they were spontaneous products of the impersonal historical movement, if not of the divine providence itself. Feminist revolt, abortion rights, racial quotas, the gay movement, agrarian revolution, indigenism, environmentalism, antismoking campaigns, legalization of heavy drugs – all the fight flags waved in the world can be traced back from the public scene to their discrete origins on the circles of enlightened internationalism. And to spread them there are not only the “networks”, extending up to the infinite, but a whole millionaire bureaucratic system: the UN has even college courses to form technicians in “creation of social movements” in the Third World. All of them spontaneous movements, of course, and by spontaneous miracle harmonized in the conception of a whole new civilizational order.

The bibliography about this holds documentation that exceeds reasonable doubt by far, but, protected by the masses’ natural intellectual laziness, it will take some centuries to become object of common knowledge. And by then humanity will have no interest in knowing its origin: for it will have become the “new humanity”, drunken by the illusion of having created itself by way of the spontaneous forces of Progress and the Lights.

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: John Ray & Alexander Gieg