Religious, Economic and Political Fundamentalisms of the Age of Disruption

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= Otto Scharmer analyses the crises as the emergence of 3 fundamentalisms: religious (jihadism), economic (neoliberalism), and political (Trumpism).


Discussion

Otto Scharmer:

ACT I: SEPTEMBER 11, 2001— GLOBAL TERRORISM.

"The On 9/11, the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania constituted a brutal opening act. Then came attacks in Bali, Mumbai, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and many more places around the globe. Since then, groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS have moved from fringe networks to central players dominating international politics and public attention. While terrorism existed long before 9/11, these attacks, characterized by their unique blend of local terror with global online amplification, are designed to spread fear, hate, and prejudice at a massive scale.

Over the years we have learned that the making of this toxic social pattern has a lot to do with our own history in the West. The founding generation of these terrorists were trained and equipped by Western intelligence services (the CIA, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan). Their recruitment has been boosted by the hopelessness that our economic and political systems have delivered for young people, particularly in the Middle East. Their deadly actions have been fueled and animated by a fundamentalist ideology that—courtesy of our Saudi partners—is bankrolled with our own oil money and is being exported to all major cities worldwide in the form of Salafist and Wahhabist teachings. Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters are the logical embodiment of these teachings by putting them to work. From this perspective, we in the west are complicit in the rise of global terrorism. When we look for the root causes of global terrorism, we must also look in the mirror at ourselves. Still, how should we understand the deeper essence of fundamentalist teachings – whether they appear in strands of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or other religions?


Fundamentalism is, generally speaking, a mindset that sees reality in terms of:

  • ONE Truth (one invisible God);
  • ONE Collective body or sense of Us vs. Them (us vs. infidels), and
  • ONE Fanatical will (that gives us permission to inflict violence on others).


These three principles are a closing of the mind, the heart, and the will. It also shows the five behavioral characteristics of a dysfunctional system that arise from these principles: denial (not seeing), de-sensing (not empathizing), absencing (disconnecting from one’s highest self), blaming others (unable to reflect), and destroying (inflicting violence on others and on oneself).


ACT II: 2008—THE ECONOMIC DISRUPTION.

In 2008, along came the second disruption—and the second wake-up call—in the form of the global financial crisis. As discussed in the previous column, at the root of the 2008 meltdown and the deepening social-economic divide is an ideology called neoliberalism.


Neoliberalism, in essence, is an economic fundamentalism that conceives of the economy and society according to the following three axioms:

  • ONE (invisible) coordination mechanism: the market (“one god”). Everything else (government, civil society) is not only not necessary but leads to a suboptimal allocation of resources (”thou shalt not worship any other god before me”).
  • ONE language: Money (“one collective body”). All social and economic activities are governed by the language of monetization (creating a huge disconnect between internalities and externalities, that is, the massive problem of social and environmental externalities); and
  • ONE ego-driven will: i.e., the assumption of given preferences (aka, homo economicus).

Just as the behaviors that arise from cultural-religious fundamentalism tend to be defined by blinding, de-sensing, absencing, blaming, and destroying, we see very similar characteristics when we look at the behavior of a social system that is driven by market fundamentalism aka neoliberalism: it is blind to environmental and social externalities; it is insensitive to the cruel effects on those who are weak and in need of help; it absences or disconnects vast numbers of people from their true sources of creativity; it blames the victims of these structural issues; and it destroys the ecological, social, and cultural commons without which no society or civilization can operate.


ACT III: 2016—THE TECHNO-POLITICAL DISRUPTION.

Then comes 2016: Trump, Brexit, and the rise of the far right. In Turkey, Poland, and Hungary, governments are openly undermining core democratic institutions. In Asia, Philippine President Duterte and other governments are gravitating in the same direction. It also seems no accident that the two countries in the West that were spearheading the neoliberal “Reagan-Thatcher Revolution” in the 1980s—the US and the UK—are now the first ones experiencing pushback from their disenfranchised grassroots working classes, thus giving rise to so-called “outsiders” like Donald Trump and the far right.

Yet it would be a mistake to blame this profound shift solely on economics. Look to the Netherlands, which has a perfectly working welfare state and yet a similar rise of the far right led by Geert Wilders. We see similar phenomena in Scandinavia. It’s a reminder to open our eyes to the non-economic roots of the political disruption. What are they? What is this third wake-up call really about?

There have long been problems with governance and democracy. Special interest groups have hijacked the political process in many places, not only in Washington, DC, where vested interests move the Founding Fathers’ vision of one man, one vote toward one dollar, one vote. Europe, as usual, feels somewhat superior to the political paralysis in Washington, without, however, delivering better results. Meanwhile China, whose system is much less democratic according to Western standards, has somehow been slightly more focused on actually addressing some of the big challenges, such as climate change.

That’s the old problem of democracy as we know it. With that problem still unresolved, we now have an additional issue at hand. The rise of Trump in the US and the rise of the far right globally has put on display another key vulnerability of our democracies—namely, that any democratic system is only as good as the political discourse that comes with it. In 2016, the political discourse—the public conversation—took a sharp downward turn, as if in a race to the bottom. The problem is, in two words, social media. Did Mark Zuckerberg enable Donald Trump to succeed?

To some degree, yes. It’s true to the degree that we see the rise of a tech fundamentalism that has some astonishing parallels with neoliberalism as it operates on the following axioms and principles:

  • ONE (invisible) algorithm that gives rise to amplification of fake news and the so-called post-truth politics. For example, the US presidential campaign virtually completely ignored substantive policy issues and was dominated by fake or semi-fake news designed to amplify prejudice, anger, hate, and fear. Towards the end of the election, the facebook engagement of the top 20 fake news sites outperformed the top 20 real news sites.
  • ONE filter bubble that shields us from disconfirming information and—through the massive use of micro-targeting, dark posts, and social “bots”—creates an echo chamber that reinforces our abstract sense of “us. vs. them.” A study at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute found that computer bots are responsible for a fifth of all tweets about the US election.
  • ONE autocratic (or oligarchic) will that uses media, social media, and public conversation as a tool to build tech empires for global dominance (in the case of tech giants like Facebook or Google) or as a tool to build propaganda machines that effectively manipulate the masses rather than promote dialogue, fact based journalism and public discourse (as in the case of Turkey, Russia, China, and the recent US election, just to name a few).

The crisis of democracy and governance is apparent at all levels of our societies today. Symptomatic behaviors, to use the US as an example, include denial (climate deniers, who will be running the Environmental Protection Agency starting next month); de-sensing (building a wall between “us” and “them,” amplified by our virtual echo chambers); absencing (showing no interest in the catastrophic impact of our collective actions on the whole); blaming others (the accumulated toxic impact of talk radio, fake news based social media platforms, and other mechanisms that operate on propaganda as their main business model); and destroying (eroding the very foundations of what used to keep our communities and societies together).


One Mindset—Three Fundamentalisms

So here is my larger point. Over the past 15 years we have seen three disruptions that gave rise to three problems and three forms of fundamentalisms. All three share the mindset that there is One Truth, One Collective Body, and One Will.


They are:

  • the cultural and religious fundamentalism that is fueling direct violence (terrorism);
  • the social-economic fundamentalism of neoliberalism that is fueling structural violence (unemployment, inequity, poverty);
  • the techno-political fundamentalism of giant tech companies that shape our lives using invisible algorithms (Facebook feeds, Google searches) and that refuse to accept accountability for denying basic digital rights to citizens and communities worldwide."

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2017trumpare-we-ready-to-rise_us_5861ea62e4b014e7c72eddf2)