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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

If I had to use one phrase to describe the West since the end of the Cold War, it'd be: Dispossession sold and marketed as liberation.

First of course citizens were transformed into consumers and we all had to hand over sovereignty to this beast called GDP, which became our new god, even after decades of worship showed that 90% of the gains went to 10% of the people (if not fewer); then to keep GDP appeased we had to submit to mass immigration (sacrosanct and mandatory despite its unpopularity), which also helped the market state destroy social solidarity and subject our societies to constant churn and constant new demands about accommodating the needs and views of newcomers; then there are other factors like the politicization of education, the monetization and financialization of everything, and now (except for the cities that were flooded with money) we're left with a rotted-out landscape and a deracinated populace that knows and believes in nothing but their own desires and what's flashing across their screens in the moment.

We've past the Age of Affluence and are somewhere in the middle of an Age of Decadence, so I guess what comes next is an Age of Dissolution. But, hey, look at how many billionaires have been minted!

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Mike Hampton's avatar

Doomsaying has become truthsaying, sad times, indeed. You could have called this An Ode to 'Free' Britain, or 'The Epicedium to the Indebted'.

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