The cultural singularity
I think this will assume a bit of stream of consciousness that a trip away for three weeks has given me the opportunity to develop. There will be other posts that fit in loose ways.
Wandering around Copenhagen and it was just like a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. Right until you got to the main shopping street and then it appeared as though i’d bee transformed to any other city in any western nation on the planet.
The Zara, Lush and H&Ms of the world just seem to have blanded out so many parts of the world. Add in the McDonalds and KFCs and you are in for a nothing burger of diversity for many things in any given country.
The problem for me is that this seems to be bleeding into the wider culture of any given western country. It seems that it is becoming a smorgasbord patch work quilt of a bit of culture here, a bit of culture there, but nothing unique that makes a country stand out. Nothing that makes you want to visit there as the culture is so unique.
There maybe certain things, architecture, countryside, that is worth visiting but an ever diminishing aspect of the culture of a country.
But where this becomes insidious I think is the singularity of many aspects of politics in some of these countries being simplistic mirrors of others. We are getting to the point that there are just pastiches of politics that exist in each country. It seems we throw around labels at will and it sticks as left, right, fascist, racist, or some such variance.
And it is all based on a political body that has self reduced to be a competition between who can stay in power, rather than starting from a perspective of the people of a country and working to solutions that work for many, most or all of the population. We have political responses that are so transparent about staying in power than being the right thing for the long term future of the nation.
I’ve always pitched that one of the US or China will under go a revolution as their inherent contradictions break the bounds of control. Now I think that there will be second order nations that will too break apart and undergo fundamental transformations of governance.
And that is without contemplating what Russia, Iran and North Korea are potentially in for.
I think some of the global glue that has kept things in stasis since the fall of the USSR has finally dissolved enough to allow the underlying problems to shine through and cause the hoi polloi to seriously question how and why they are being controlled the way they are.
Going to be a wild ride in 2024.
Hey ho.