Home / EU-World / The Anglo-Saxon World of the 21st century: a return to feudalism, by Frédéric Beaugeard (updated 3 March 2013)

The Anglo-Saxon World of the 21st century: a return to feudalism, by Frédéric Beaugeard (updated 3 March 2013)

When it comes to understanding the Contemporary World in order to analyse its possible future evolutions, it must be said that the apparent principle of synergy between the different elements of the Contemporary World was only a misleading appearance. The main actors of Modernity, Europe, Russia-Soviet Union, and 19th and 20th century Japan in competition, will gradually submit to US imperialism whose theoretical basis is based on an association with its model of economic liberalism, mainly for its benefit, accentuated by its technological and military hegemony. Now that Anglo-Saxon propaganda in its neoliberal form, in the midst of a hubris, using the notion of a happy globalization, naturally following the Western one of progress (CF : utopias, colonization), cracks on all sides, following a gradual but strong reduction in social redistribution since the 1970s, growth through debt, aggravated in the 1980s by a risky financialization of its economy (like England in 1880, in monetary war and almost bankrupt in 1914) and the relocation of its means of production, we are witnessing the economic expansion of new geopolitical actors and their economic, political and cultural claims. The different civilizational zones are differentiated by rediscovering their historical heritage. The divergence of interests even of their unequal allies is increasing, as they are no longer in a hurry to join on their side in a possible new Cold War. It is opportune to retrace the historical creative journey of an Anglo-Saxon world in a process of isolation, certainly redefining itself initially on its own ethnocentric bases (with supposedly essentially conservative values), withdrawing or choosing to flee forward, to predict its evolution. This evolution may take the form of a Christian and neoliberal “moral revolution” (CF: Republicans, Evangelists, Tea Party, Libertarians, far-right, corporations, and military-industrial complex).

The basis of relationships between individuals in Anglo-Saxon society is the principle of inequality, resulting from an unfinished exit from the monarchical model in England. After the fall of Cromwell, the restoration of a previously bankrupt royalty that had created a parliament (CF: Charter of Coronation in 1100, the Great Charter and Habeas Corpus constituting a sling of the nobility in 1215), hoping in return to raise new taxes, continued the gentrification of the aristocracy, while helping the bourgeoisie to access the aristocracy (CF: Bill of Rights 1689). The expulsion of the British Isles from the poor Scottish and Irish peasants to the overseas possessions, coupled with the physical reproduction of its Protestant clergy, bastards and aristocracy servants, will create a particular society over time, focused on private property and the business, authority and exclusivity of the ruling classes. The convergence of English Empirical thinking with the experience of Continental Europe in the Enlightenment (CF: Universalism of Human Rights and French social contract, the German idealist), will decline as it becomes a global hegemony. The work of J. Locke, and T. Malthus, by giving a central role to the economy, will destroy the notion of natural law, money alone now allowing the individual to exist. Profit became the sole operating value of society (CF: Commons Tragedy: failure of the English community movement, 1649). Economic and social pragmatism, centred on practical implications, action, immediacy and relativism (in itself, non-critical), then taking precedence, especially in the USA, over moral issues (CF: materialism, consumerism, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, O. Morgenstern, J. Von Neumann 1944, and Metagames N. Howard 1971, R. Rorty “Ironism” 1989).

The territorial, political and fiscal autonomy already in the 14th century of the City of London, banks, stock exchanges and shipping companies will be favourable to the development of liberalism in England, according to the Dutch semi-democratic financial model, then in the USA (CF: creation of New York). The Baltic trading cities that may have promoted a different model of international trade will be destroyed with the creation of modern Russia, those of Italy will decline inexorably since the discovery of the new roads to India and the customs greed of the Middle East after the crusades and the fall of Byzantium. The nascent industrialization will follow the establishment of large agricultural production strongholds in the conquered Scottish and Irish lands capable of financing speculation, new means of production, and exploitation of wealth in England, then in an empire made up of private trading companies taking on sovereign military and administrative functions. The English poor classes will provide soldiers to the army, which will be financed by banks to open new resources and markets to industrialists. In the same way, to the detriment of the Amerindians, large, rapidly mechanized exporting farms will be established in the United States, which will drain European peasant populations that cannot produce as much on their reduced agricultural land. Some of these immigrants will provide the workforce of the factories mainly to the rich English who left for the Americas to increase their wealth (CF: WASPs, La Grande Hémorragie in Quebec). Metallurgy. Textiles: wool UK and Australia, cotton USA. Mining: coal, metals, potash: South America at the beginning of neo-colonialism (Suez Canal and Panama). Slavery was abolished in the British Empire thanks to mechanization making it too expensive, and to the trafficking of entire populations of Asian immigrant workers changing the composition of local populations (a method that was later adopted by the USA: Chinese railway workers in the 19th century, Hawaii plantations, Latin agricultural workers). The Civil War that abolished it in the United States was triggered for reasons of economic competition and benefited the banks of the north. The modern, so-called 19th century, northern banks are now being reestablished in China. Domesticity requiring more education, and cooperation, will persist in England and in the colonies. It was even brought up to date by Margaret Thatcher, bringing the working class into line, and thus closing a socializing period in the middle of the 20th century, after the exhaustion of coal resources and the relocation of metallurgical factories. Jobs (especially part-time and reduced trade union rights, home on computers, or paid by the task), will then be transferred to the services category, and to speculative asset management with the ruling class, thanks to the North Sea oil revenues and the City’s development in the money laundering sector in the tax haven branches of its UK and Commonwealth islands (tax evasion of multinationals and individuals, money laundering by the mafia, dictators and corrupt elites in the Third World). With finance in England now, the state, in the hands of its aristocratic, industrial, commercial, commercial, financial, and international elite (Bush-Father Honorary Citizen of the City can vote there and thus have priority access to the London Parliament). Similarly, the social and trade union achievements of the New Deal in the United States are currently being strongly challenged. Multinational companies have recently gained individual status, enjoying the right to freedom of expression, and can anonymously finance political parties (CF: 1886 Santa Clara vs. South Pacific Railroad corporate citizen right, trusts, monopolies, Barons, 1929 crisis). Contributions to the financing of political campaigns are poorly regulated and the funds are unlimited. The richest candidate is often the winner by “buying” the election with the help of the media.

It is not surprising that neo-liberalism perfectly fits this Dutch communitarian model of tolerance, but not of mixity (Holland being at the hinge between the “mixed” Roman Empire, and the “uni-racial” Anglo-Germanic World). The USA will be segregated, England the cult of social hierarchy, the creation of modern eugenics (F. Galton, knighted in 1909), and its contempt for the Celtic populations, Germany Nazism. It looks like Indo-European classes/castes. The clergy close to the power and moral guarantor of the system, the noble warriors in an army of trades and mercenaries, and the workers-craftsmen-farmers-slaves. The aristocrats appropriating the attributes of a group foreign to this civilization: the merchants, while giving it an imperialist conqueror aspect. Sociopathic behaviour and reckless risk-taking are encouraged (cult of the leader: aggressive CEO, unconscious traders, hostile takeover, predilection for cocaine, prostitutes, VIPs and happy Few, distance from the realities of the real economy and social or legal responsibilities). Thus, with the collectivist temptation collapsing with communism, and the advent of technologies supporting individualism, we are back in the Anglo-Saxon world to a fragmentation of society along this divide. The Spanish and Portuguese empires favoured a medieval agrarian system, the export of natural resources, and the hoarding of precious metals (CF: bullionism). The capitalist aristocracy in Germany will not survive its military-industrial adventures during its various authoritarian regimes from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Centralizing France, periodically decimated during its European wars, will settle the issue with its two revolutions and the loss of its colonies. The nation state and the republic, following two World Wars partly triggered by its industrial and financial elites, will give rise to the model, in these two countries, of “collectivist” social democracy, equal rights and justice, and a certain pooling of wealth, to be democratically organised according to the principle of social fraternity. In the Anglo-Saxon World, wealth is always in relation to power through relationships of dominance. There is a struggle between groups and social classes (CF: the ennoblement is still in progress there!), and democracy is still outside this system. According to the economic-historical context, it serves to pacify the caste of servant workers, to organize its exploitation and productivity, to help the aristocratic warrior-industrial caste to conquer new wealth, and in its relations with different countries-economic systems or various foreign castes, Allies or enemies to manipulate (Manifest destiny/Alamo-Texas, market openings – gunboat diplomacy and 19th century Spanish-American wars, US colonization of the Philippines, forced free trade and decolonization in exchange for the liberation of Europe from Nazism: Lend-Lease law and the Atlantic Charter in 1941 -, forced privatisation of foreign economies – Latin America, the Arab world after the fall of communism -, attracting investment – for 30 years, before the Euro, 50% of the profits made in France will be invested in the USA, or to buy their treasury bonds -, attract outside brains and technologies, stir up international larvae conflicts, foment coups d’état and install dictatorships – South America, Iran, Congo -, sell weapons and their protection, practice espionage – the UK’s Echelon system against the Eastern Bloc but still active -, militarise space and cyberspace). As well as to safeguard the system in place, for example by protecting a Protestant clergy at the orders whose leaders will be mainly from the aristocracy, then from the bourgeoisie (CF : creation of an Anglican church/opportunity to practice usury), decentralized and organized in chapels, which prefers to emphasize charity rather than equity (submission to authority, moral guilt of the poor, glorification via the free will of American individualism, Manicheism, moral clearance of capitalist enrichment by making professional success a sign of divine election, America: a nation blessed by God “God-bless America”, moralising social pressure, discrimination against atheists, evangelical churches in French-speaking Africa and Latin America, promotion of creationism in the Muslim World/Turkey, etc.). In the American spirit, the Social Security retirement program for the most modest instituted by F. Roosevelt is a social assistance program primarily charitable and ultimately, and not a shared retirement plan incorporating the most disadvantaged, such as the European participatory collective security systems (examples: food stamps, Medicaire, Tax Refund by G. Bush). And also to disentangle the different possibilities in the ruling caste. The search for profit and power are the driving force of the elite for itself, and therefore of the society that imitates it; thus destroying, except for a small minority of lucky or aggressive sociopaths according to the “winners/loosers” social model, its hopes of achieving a better common fate.

It is necessary to differentiate between the liberalism of previous centuries and the neoliberalism of the mid-twentieth century. Originally, liberalism still needed the state to promote trade, develop colonization, build infrastructure, establish social peace and protect trade routes, and similarly, as in the 19th century with Napoleon III and Bismarck, to deal with social engineering to increase workers’ productivity (private banks will mint the currency in England, and the US Federal Reserve will be a private central bank). This is no longer the case: infrastructures are in place, neo-colonialism is in full swing, the masses are pacified by a consumer society accessible to most, robotics, Latinos in the USA, and workers in emerging countries increase productivity, and the Pax Americana is established (CF: British Empire). Colbert style dirigisme, socialist, or authoritarian dirigisme of the state capitalism of dictatorships, or even the European Union’s planning, does not hinder it. The business class no longer needs the state, or at least only to guide regulations in its favour (CF: by promoting the predation of banks through shameless usury with student loans, suppressions and derivatives, by covering various bubbles – Internet, real estate, etc.). – and Ponzi schemes, the manipulation of accounts for years of companies like Enron, by manipulating the stock markets and Libor, privatizations-mergers-acquisitions with questionable profits, the creation of casinos in all directions, financial products on state debts and speculation betting up or down, of opportunistic loans and mortgages), or by undermining public services by gradually cutting off their funding (post office, health and retirement system for the poor elderly, public school, hospital system in England). The Anglo-Saxons have operated more than elsewhere, via a number of tax niches, from tax cuts to the richest and the multinationals. To avoid the shipwreck, and to be competitive again, American companies, like local authorities, are going bankrupt by reducing the pensions (private in the USA) they should have had to pay. The business elite organizes the corruption of politicians, trade unions, civil servants, the media, and academic and scientific experts. Neo-liberalism, which is inherently selfish, is now predatory, with new profit margins to be taken from the revenues of the state (privatisations), communities (tax cuts), and individuals by denying their social rights (and even individual rights on a moral basis: anti-contraception and abortion, homosexual rights), against the common good, democracy, the state, and even the notion of the nation state if necessary. Only new competition from emerging countries, prolonged deflation of industrial products, or the depletion of energy and food resources leading to high inflation, debt default, or a fall in the dollar (CF: end of petrodollar), will make the state partly necessary again, but as in 1914, by the war. The USA and England continue the relationship of vassality-seigneury in their international relations (South America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea), to be compared with the principle of cooperation of the European Union. English colonialism, and US neo-colonialism via the very British economic power given to the local elites (CF: Roman Empire already), is far from the attempt (often hypocritical unfortunately), to educate colonial peoples in the French way (CF: differences in colonization: English, American, German, Dutch, Belgian/ the “Congo of the King of the Belgians”, Portuguese and Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and now Indonesian in Irian-Jaya). The establishment of a neoliberal transnational aristocratic oligarchy governing from blocks to cultural blocks (Shadow Banking System), or on a global scale, is also to be considered.

Since the 2007 financial crisis, to avoid the shipwreck, and to be competitive again, American companies, states, like local authorities, have been going into false bankruptcy by reducing the pensions (semi-private in the USA), which they should have had to pay. The state, as in England, replenishes its banks and car industry with taxpayers’ money, produces liquidity and debt through the Federal Reserve by rotating the banknote plate with multiple Quantitative Easing[devaluation-inflation-war currency], these liquidities going mainly in loans towards financial speculation (financial and real estate bubbles in emerging countries, speculation on energy, raw materials, and agricultural/cFT products: Arab Spring), and thanks to a policy of reduced rates devalues its currency and the purchasing power savings of retirees (whose retirement age is increasingly being pushed back or impossible/ lower life expectancy), while buying or even redeeming its treasury bills that the world no longer wants. Banks are tearing down houses resulting from personal bankruptcies to support the real estate market. Subsequent legal proceedings and fines relating to the sale of fraudulent financial products (including their purchase by the FED during the bailout), and money laundering of South American drug traffickers, are largely to the banks’ advantage, without radically challenging these practices. A coordinated undertaking by financial circles, rating agencies (CF: 1931 rating downgrades of Bolivia and Greece will be lacking), politicians, the FED (end of transatlantic loans to Europe…) and the European Commission: The problem of interbank liquidity and corporate lending), and the media, will even attack, to create a diversion and always pose itself as the economy to the most dynamic system, the Euro Zone and the European Union (CF: attracting investment, financing its debt, supporting and manipulating its stock markets, military and economic dominance, diplomatic and cultural influence). Its cultural and socio-economic fundamentals, by favouring neoliberal structures, mean that the Anglo-Saxon world is increasingly moving away from its democratic aspirations, which are part of the Common Law of the English Middle Ages, the declaration of independence and the American constitution, the anti-slavery struggle and civil rights, and F. Roosevelt’s socializing revolution in the New Deal.

Following this individualistic and multicultural system (of immigrant populations in the Third World who accept it with a certain sectarianism to preserve their identity), where separatism is strongly encouraged within society, it is worth noting that the starting point for the fragmentation of the United Kingdom with the creation of regional parliaments, was launched by politicians (CF: Current Third Way of Tony Blair, an ideologically defeated Labour), during the triumph of neo-liberalism, not by the Scots themselves. The English people themselves are in favour of creating their own regional parliament without the Scots. Cameron will quickly follow this process of state disengagement, with his Great Society project scuttling the country’s collective and democratic organization (after the privatization and regularization of the finance of Mr. Cameron’s Big-Bang). Thatcher: investment banks-hedge funds/ Repeal of Glass Steagall in the USA), replacing them with links between autonomous communities with special interests without common tools for transformation or protection (such as social services, generational solidarity facilitating social advancement, labour rights, access to justice, progressive taxation[in the French constitution], education, (CF : commodification of education and application of the business model, No Child Left Behind, absence of a national curriculum in education in the USA), media devolution (CF: R. Murdock, presse-internet-radios-télévision, The Sun, Fox News), the protection of culture(s) (CF: exception and Franco-Quebec cultural diversity against the commodification of cultural goods), financial regulations, public transport, the environment – OMG, pollution, contamination, shale gas, Monsanto, patents on life, coal, pharmaceutical industries and”junk food”, etc. -The aim is to protect consumers, access to health, etc.), in order to bring them into line with the “Laws of the Market”. The ruling power largely benefits from the disintegration of possible strong oppositions to the system from which it benefits and organizes. In short: “Divide and conquer”, according to a very accommodating “minority dictatorship”. Positive segregation in education, a kind of reverse racism, set up after the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, only favours a racial minority at the expense of the vast majority of the poor, regardless of their ethnic origin, who should have enjoyed the same rights (at least financial for education). Racist fears could, coupled with the widespread carrying of weapons, if challenged, lead to a self-defence, self-defence insurrection from the far right (CF: Klux Klux Klan, white supremacist literature of the 1970s, Preppers, New Black Panthers, anarcho-libertarians, neo-Nazi rock, territorial claims of the Chicano movement). In Canada, an English-speaking Conservative government will reduce Quebec to one “nation” among others (CF: Amerindian reserves created by the English after the conquest of the Province). Quebec, a particular cultural fact, which will alone oppose American multinationals seeking to be cleared of environmental regulations there, has a “different social project for North America”. In the United States, the attacks on the federal “Big Government” and the return to the States of federal powers, or the announced abolition of departments dedicated to aid and national cohesion, are the work of the Republicans, but also of the Democrats who have supported a neoliberal policy since the 1960s in order to enrich the business community (CF: financial deruralization of B. Clinton pursuing R. Reagan’s policy). The recent demographic transformation of the capital Washington (from a historically black to a white city), due to the highly lucrative transfer of services previously provided by the state to the private sector, is an illustration of this (CF: collusion and conflicts of interest in policies, corruption of federal ministries and agencies, banks, Wall Street, the Fed, and the media, lobbies and subsidies to companies and banks/loans at reduced rates). England is privatizing its streets (many parks were already privatized), its roads, its public health system, and partially its police. In the USA, private prisons by contract benefit from a 90% occupancy clause to be filled by judges and sheriffs elected there. The US military uses the private security agency Black-Water, outsources its intelligence services, and operates its drones in universities. Following the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, the militarisation of the police (uniforms, attack helicopters, drones, and tanks), the place given, already historically, in society to the army (CF: Hollywood and self-censorship, disappearance of the social criticism of the 30s and 40s in the cinema), messages in the very patriotic media in films such as Starship Troopers or Robocop), and security and spying measures (CF : Witch hunts 1951, repression of African-American Marxists affiliated with Civil Rights and the People’s Temple Sect, Homeland Security/war on terrorism/NSA Psy Center Utah domestic espionage via the Internet, wiretaps, and DNA testing without a judicial warrant, targeted extra-judicial assassination of American citizens abroad), are potentially dangerous. The United Nations uses mercenaries in Somalia. This seizure of power in the USA is favoured by an 18th century survival of mistrust of elitist power towards its people, the president is not elected by universal suffrage, and there is only one round of elections ejecting all small parties, without possible coalitions, not playing the game of the system. The extreme right not politically represented most often operates insidiously within the governing bodies, the army, and the administration, mixing economics with politics, the judiciary with religion and ethnic or class racism, despite various anti-discrimination measures (CF: school desegregation laws being dismantled against public school/charter schools), the military with education, the religious with finance, the media with the army, the army with education, etc. The “pursuit of happiness” enshrined in the constitution (which is sacred in the USA) is purely individual, and now corresponds only to the notion of free enterprise (CF: American Dream, the novel Atlas Shrugged). The United States, of English culture, is anti-revolutionary and anti-socialist in the French way (competing universalism, French Bashing). With their sense of exceptionality (CF: Reagan: “America is a shining city upon a hill”, Doctrine Monroe 1823, propagation of democracy and free trade), they are also against the UN, the International Court of Justice, and only use NATO and the WTO in their own interests. They are Dutch communitarians (promotion of multiculturalism among European immigrant cities/US embassy in Paris). Tolerance is not conviviality: individualism, racism, and classism are shared by all groups (CF: identity withdrawal of the African-American community, Neighborhood Watch and residential suburbs fortresses, riots in Los Angeles 1992, Real American, Rednecks, White trash, and Hillbillies, xenophobia against Latin immigrants). Minorities did not vote B. Obama in 2012, only to protect and develop their rights, and for fear of the Tea Party. Feudalism finds its main expression in a system of trade guilds (pensions, health care system, and trade union rights, individual by branch), and commercial or industrial guilds, organized as lobbies with a billionaire government as in England (CF: disguised protectionism against foreign / especially French companies). Pensions (financialized on the stock market), and the health system (even B. Obama’s), will remain private. A formal system of letters of recommendation, salary declarations, banking and judicial status is often still in place to find a job. In addition, there is a proliferation of confidentiality and exclusivity contracts, excessive insurance, which is detrimental to the exercise of employees’ individual and trade union rights (historical repression against trade unionism, police…): internment camps for strikers minors and martial law Cœur d’Alene Confrontation 1892-1899, Bloody Thursday 1934; corruption of trade unions; judicial: Palmer Raids 1920, use of scabs (within the company itself, subcontracting); limitation by branches of the right to strike, possible only during renegotiation at the end of the contract. Marxism is now nothing more than an old lantern of original university originals, and students (Occupy Wall Street). Thus, the general discontent (unemployment, debt, corruption, bonus, administration, etc.), is recovered by the ultra conservative, who name the guilty: the unions, and the moral decadence of the socializing liberals. Generally a social problem, which would be dealt with by politics in Europe (legislative code, Romano-Germanic civil law), in the Anglo-Saxon world is solved by a landmark court decision (Common Law, Equity). It is the army that is currently tackling the obesity epidemic, and the lack of creditworthiness resulting from student loans! In the long run, the risk is that the state retains only its repressive powers towards the population (police state, strong social pressure, politically correct, single-media thinking, Freedom Fries, republican novlangue, rigid administration and justice), the army, and a semblance of diplomacy, in the style of Third World countries, or the decadent Middle East, whose high point was reached in the 12th century (CF : destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols, gradual disappearance of the Greek and Persian heritage). Multinational companies formed as clans of political mercenaries (positions of power within them that are increasingly hereditary and inter-family) are more than elsewhere dissociated from their national substratum (CF: tax havens + relocation). Anglo-Saxon citizenship is particularly fragmented and armed (CF: National Rifle Association-pension funds, culture of violence, aggressive and frightening video games and television, hard drugs – including meta-amphetamines at work to do several part-time jobs daily -, cuts in the budget for mental health programs, and the computer connection/syndrome of Asperger’s loss of empathy), and limited to its racial, ethnic or religious group. Cronyism and nepotism are the rule. The survival of real ghettos as in the Middle Ages is still relevant, and still in formation (impoverishment of city centres and no-go areas). Racial and ethnic censuses are still ongoing. This means that despite a recent increase in mixed unions (intellectual elite, currently thanks to an over-representation of Asians in expensive and extremely competitive universities and their access to positions as administrators close to the system, and in the lower classes often by a need for protection in disadvantaged areas due to the demographic growth of minorities), mixed children are still sent back to their respective ethnicity and community, according to the principle that a drop of black blood for example disqualifies you as a Caucasian (CF : immigration and citizenship: United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923, Melting Pot optimism). B. Obama registered as a black only, not from multiple races. The official return of Jewish and Muslim customary legal rights in England is observed (Big Brothers phenomenon in the USA). In addition to the gradual disintegration of the person into a falsely free individual, a simple consumer and subject to market forces, there is also a fragmentation of the common social and identity fabric.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not completely postmodern like that of Continental Europe, with regard to the religion that continues to grow there (CF : evangelist giant churches with their media, leisure centres, hospitals, charities and conversion missions abroad, the increase of Mormons and Amish, the newly acquired right to discrimination of employees according to their religion for employers of religious organizations and companies, the increase in illegal religious funding of election candidates, anti-atheism and messianic neomilitary conservatives in the army), or in its relationship to science (CF : anti-evolution, soft sciences and pseudosciences, esotericism, Wiccan religion, Vegan vegetarians, paranormal, extraterrestrial, Christian kidnapping and the end of the world diverse, state paranoia, entertainment society, sects, tastes for conspiracy theories. Gender: “the invisible hand of the market”, “Free Market”, or “creative destruction”, and algorithms detached from reality applied to the economy and speculation). This may also be due to the English language itself, which is flexible and creative, but poorly articulated (random precision of word/concept relationships). Fortunately, the American open society at the Baby Boom did not produce a generation of young Red Guards, but it should be noted that far from the blissful European idealism, American music has been, and still is with the current black and Latino gang music, and unfortunately also neo-Nazi, often a rebellious reaction towards a violent, unequal, and deeply conservative society, whose only alternative is an unbridled consumerism. Grunge and Gothic music being particularly depressive and self-destructive. Rap, originally with political and social demands, having mostly sunk into commercialism. Particularly, and despite the presence of public education (private education being promoted), different forms of the English language, depending on social class or ethnic origin, are transmitted from generation to generation. Various tribal fashions thrive there, the blogosphere of the Internet and social media, and their commercialization, giving it only an ephemeral semblance of common cohesion.

The impassable societal horizon of 21st century Anglo-Saxon culture, without external cultural contributions, could be the return to feudalism that it has never really completely left, capitalism having perhaps arrived too early. The capitalism of the precursor Italian city-states was of the order of large families perpetuating the senatorial Roman heritage, or that of Northern Europe, of free cities and guilds were by essence less elitist. The decomposition of the USA into a “modern 19th century India”, which was still feudal despite the English administration (or, again, because of its influence…), seems to be on the march, probably also due to its young nature, and countries of world emigration (CF: creation of national myths and fantasy mythologies, Americanism and divergence from reality, J-P Sartre article 1947: Americans and Their Mythes). It is interesting to note that the intuitive expectations of Anglo-Saxon science fiction, apart from those resulting from the post-war period and the collective European collective unconscious following the experience of fascism and communism (CF: dystopia: 1984, Le Meilleur des Monde, Fahrenheit 451, and the political theorization of neoliberalism: Société du Mont-Pèlerin, 1947), or those of the 18th century, are without utopian projects. The universe represented is necessarily a medieval society, like the Far West where the law of the strongest reigns (CF: Social Darwinism, to be compared with the notion of cooperation of Soviet anthropology), non-egalitarian and without notion of meritocracy. At best, a plutocratic democracy, as the middle class shrinks, becomes an oligarchy fighting for its hold. The state, with its fascinating tendency, is conquering and highly capitalist. Its society is industrious and very elitist, as was fascism, without its totalitarian aspect, in short. It is generally the work of large corporations exercising absolute power over their subjects, sometimes technologically transformed physically or pseudo-spiritually, incidentally by drugs or the influence of the virtual, without any more semblance of democracy, by using their powers of coercion or perversion, based on the appropriation of socio-economic structures (CF: Corporate America, the visionary Philip K. Dick). Leagues of private interests, sometimes with their own repressive forces, subjugate a schizophrenic society in decomposition, absurd, and reduced to the rank of an object, in the style, in short, of a very Anglo-Saxon Heroic-Fantasy (CF: M. Moorcock, English aristocracy of the interwar period seduced by Nazism). The myth of the hero, of noble ancestry, prevails, generally without a better society project. Only improbable extraterrestrial encounters bring a critical reading of the human society that makes it up. These considerations would not have any consequences if a major race for humanity was not already underway for new resources and technologies (hypersonic aircraft), such as lunar helium-3, between the future blocs and different incarnations of capitalism (the ITER international cooperation project in France for nuclear fusion is an alternative). Similarly, spectacular breakthroughs in the sciences of increasing life expectancy, and the upcoming arrival of their therapies, will raise the question of the links between the various components of society and the legitimacy of our systems. Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world will be diametrically opposed to each other on the basis of their distribution to the populations, against a backdrop of greatly heightened North-South tensions, an increased politicization of Islam, and an increase in China’s power.

Beaugeard Frédéric

Illinois, USA, 2012

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