A brief history of liberal ideology: globalism as a culmination
Nominalism
To understand clearly what Biden’s victory and Washington’s “new” course for the “Great Reset” means on a historical scale, one must look at the entire history of liberal ideology, starting from its roots. Only then we are able to understand the seriousness of our situation. Biden’s victory is not a coincidental episode ... Biden and the forces behind him embody the culmination of a historical process that began in the Middle Ages, reached its maturity in Modernity with the emergence of capitalist society, and which today is reaching its final stage — the theoretical one outlined from the beginning.
The roots of the liberal (=capitalist) system go back to the scholastic dispute about universals. This dispute split Catholic theologians into two camps: some recognized the existence of the common (species, genus, universalia), while others believed in only certain concrete — individual things, and interpreted their generalizing names as purely external conventional systems of classification, representing “empty sound”. Those who were convinced of the existence of the general, the species, drew on the classical tradition of Plato and Aristotle. They came to be called “realists,” that is, those who recognized the “reality of universalia”. The most prominent representative of the “realists” was Thomas Aquinas and, in general, it was the tradition of the Dominican monks.
The proponents of the idea that only individual things and beings are real came to be called “nominalists,” from the Latin “nomen. The demand — “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” — goes back precisely to one of the chief defenders of “nominalism,” the English philosopher William Occam. ... Although the “realists” won the first stage of the conflict and the teachings of the “nominalists” were anathematized, later the paths of Western European philosophy — especially of the New Age — were followed by Occam.
“Nominalism” laid the foundation for future liberalism, both ideologically and economically. Here humans were seen only as individuals and nothing else, and all forms of collective identity (religion, class, etc.) were to be abolished. Likewise, the thing was seen as absolute private property, as a concrete, separate thing which could easily be attributed as property to this or that individual owner.
Nominalism prevailed first of all in England, became widespread in Protestant countries and gradually became the main philosophical matrix of New Age — in religion (individual relations of man with God), in science (atomism and materialism), in politics (preconditions of bourgeois democracy), in economy (market and private property), in ethics (utilitarianism, individualism, relativism, pragmatism), etc.
Capitalism: the first phase
Starting from nominalism, we can trace the entire path of historical liberalism, from Roscelin and Occam to Soros and Biden. For convenience, let us divide this history into three phases.
[1. What he elsewhere calls "sacral universal empire" was rejected and subsequently destroyed, replaced by nation states]
The first phase was the introduction of nominalism into the realm of religion. The collective identity of the Church, as understood by Catholicism (and even more so by Orthodoxy), was replaced by Protestants as individuals who could henceforth interpret Scripture based on their reasoning alone and rejecting any tradition. Thus many aspects of Christianity — the sacraments, miracles, angels, reward after death, the end of the world, etc. — have been reconsidered and discarded as not meeting the “rational criteria”.
The church as the “mystical body of Christ” was destroyed and replaced by hobby clubs created by free consent from below. This created a large number of disputing Protestant sects. In Europe and in England itself, where nominalism had borne its most thorough fruit, the process was somewhat subdued, and the most rabid Protestants rushed to the New World and established their own society there. Later, after the struggle with the metropolis, the United States emerged.
Parallel to the destruction of the Church as a “collective identity” (something “common”), the estates began to be abolished. The social hierarchy of priests, aristocracy, and peasants was replaced by undefined “townspeople”, according to the original meaning of the word “bourgeois”. The bourgeoisie supplanted all other strata of European society. But the bourgeois was exactly the best “individual,” a citizen without clan, tribe, or profession, but with private property. And this new class began to reconstruct all of European society.
At the same time, the supranational unity of the Papal See and the Western Roman Empire — as another expression of “collective identity” — was also abolished. In its place was established an order based on sovereign nation-states, a kind of “political individual”. After the end of the 30-year war, the Peace of Westphalia consolidated this order.
Thus, by the middle of the 17th century, a bourgeois order (that is, capitalism), had emerged in the main features in Western Europe.
The philosophy of the new order was in many ways anticipated by Thomas Hobbes and developed by John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Adam Smith applied these principles to the economic field, giving rise to liberalism as an economic ideology. In fact, capitalism, based on the systematic implementation of nominalism, became a coherent systemic worldview. The meaning of history and progress was henceforth to “liberate the individual from all forms of collective identity” to the logical limit.
By the twentieth century, through the period of colonial conquests, Western European capitalism had become a global reality. The nominalist approach prevailed in science and culture, in politics and economics, in the very everyday thinking of the people of the West and of all humanity.
The twentieth and triumph of globalization: the second phase
[2. Emancipation from nation state, state as oppressor, loosened tribal bonds, individual's emancipation from family]
In the twentieth century, capitalism faced a new challenge. This time, it was not the usual forms of collective identity — religious, class, professional, etc. — but artificial and also modern theories (like liberalism itself) that rejected individualism and opposed it with new forms of collective identity (combined conceptually).
Socialists, social democrats and communists countered liberals with class identities, calling on workers around the world to unite to overturn the power of the global bourgeoisie. This strategy proved effective, and in some major countries (though not in those industrialized and Western countries where Karl Marx, the founder of communism, had hoped), proletarian revolutions were won. [only to eventually lose to liberalism]
Parallel to the communists occurred, this time in Western Europe, the seizure of power by extreme nationalist forces. They acted in the name of the “nation” or a “race,” again contrasting liberal individualism with something “common,” some “collective being”. [extreme nationalism and nazism, both lost to liberalism, too]
The new opponents of liberalism no longer belonged to the inertia of the past, as in previous stages, but represented modernist projects developed in the West itself. But they were also built on a rejection of individualism and nominalism. This was clearly understood by the theorists of liberalism (above all, by Hayek and his disciple Popper), who united “communists” and “fascists” under the common name of “enemies of the open society”, and began a deadly war with them. ...
Thus, the project of liberation of the individual from all forms of collective identity and “ideological progress” as understood by liberals went through another stage. In the 1990s, liberal theorists began to talk about the “end of history” (F. Fukuyama) and the “unipolar moment” (C. Krauthammer). [Emancipation from own community, its values and rights in favour of individual's rights; the good of one's community doesn't matter anymore]
This was a vivid proof of the entry of capitalism in its most advanced phase — the stage of globalism. In fact, it was at this time in the U.S. ruling elites’ strategy of globalism triumphed — outlined in the First World War by Wilson’s 14 points, but at the end of the Cold War united the elite of both parties — Democrats and Republicans, represented mainly by “neoconservatives”.
Gender and Posthumanism: The Third Phase
[3] After defeating its last ideological foe, the socialist camp, capitalism has come to a crucial point. Individualism, the market, the ideology of human rights, democracy and Western values had won on a global scale. It would seem that the agenda is fulfilled — no one opposes “individualism” and nominalism with anything serious or systemic anymore.
In this period, capitalism enters its third phase. On closer inspection, after defeating the external enemy, liberals have discovered two more forms of collective identity. First of all, gender. After all, gender is also something collective: either masculine or feminine. So the next step was the destruction of gender as something objective, essential, and irreplaceable.
Gender required abolition, as did all other forms of collective identity, which had been abolished even earlier. Hence gender politics, the transformation of the category of gender into something “optional” and dependent on individual choice. Here again we are dealing with the same nominalism: why double entities? A person is a person as an individual, while gender can be chosen arbitrarily, just as religion, profession, nation and way of life were chosen before.
This became the main agenda of liberal ideology in the 1990s, after the defeat of the Soviet Union. Yes, external opponents stood in the way of gender policy — those countries that still had the remnants of traditional society, the values of the family, etc., as well as conservative circles in the West itself. Combating conservatives and “homophobes,” that is, defenders of the traditional view of the existence of the sexes, has become the new goal of the adherents of progressive liberalism. Many leftists have joined in, replacing gender politics and immigration protection with earlier anti-capitalist goals.
With the success of institutionalizing gender norms and the success of mass migration, which is atomizing populations in the West itself (which also fits perfectly within an ideology of human rights that operates with the individual without regard to cultural, religious, social or national aspects), it became obvious that liberals had one last step left to take — to abolish humans.
After all, the human is also a collective identity, which means that it must be overcome, abolished, destroyed. This is what the principle of nominalism demands: a “person” is just a name, an empty shake of the air, an arbitrary and therefore always disputable classification. There is only the individual — human or not, male or female, religious or atheist, it depends on his choice.
Thus, the last step left for liberals, who have traveled centuries toward their goal, is to replace humans-albeit partially-by cyborgs, Artificial Intelligence networks, and products of genetic engineering. The human optional logically follows gender optional.
This agenda is already quite foreshadowed by posthumanism, postmodernism and speculative realism in philosophy, and technologically is becoming more and more realistic by the day. Futurologists and proponents of accelerating the historical process (accelerationists) are confidently looking into the near future when Artificial Intelligence will become comparable in basic parameters with human beings. This moment is called the Singularity. Its arrival is predicted within 10 to 20 years.
Whereby human beings, by getting further acclimated to interfacing with everything digital, and incorporating more and more technology into their bodies (the IoB or Internet of Bodies), may one day hope for the ultimate bliss of merging with the Artificial Intelligence God once the "Singularity" has occurred. Or something like that.
