Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’.…

Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600 billion a year US armed services. /1

The Russians and Chinese feel that absence of balance acutely. Even in my lifetime I remember a time, before the Soviet Union collapsed, when power was more genuinely balanced between worldviews. Unfortunately the Russian and Chinese response right now is…/2

…the old nationalisms, which are lethal. But they at least retain the idea of people having roots. In the West, drunk on enormous wealth and freedom, we see the world as a list of recreational travel destinations. We’ve lost most of the idea of being grounded in any way. /3

In a way it feels like another shift of empires. Ours is tired and has collapsed into ridiculous political philosophies of personal sovereignty, and we struggle to even control a virus killing our own people, let alone mobilise against global threats. Most of the Covid fight…/4

…has been against ourselves, with significant numbers of our own populations not even wanting to fight a pandemic. That’s common late-imperial thinking, where the realities of existence get completely out of whack with everyday life, which is focused on personal enjoyment. /5

Democracy itself is a problematic concept. Populism has led us to believe it’s about popularity, about majority rules. It was never supposed to be that. Rule by the people for the people never excluded the idea of a hierarchy of what is good and bad, for those people. /6

We deferred to hierarchies of expertise, in all areas of life. But now populism is sweeping much of that away, leaving only what is popular as the metric. Democracy in a way is more a holding pattern than a political system, it’s the system you have when there are no widely…/7

…shared beliefs. Pluralism, as we sometimes call it. But nobody actually likes that, despite the claims to the contrary. All of our actions make a lie of it. We recognise value hierarchies in every single thing we do, whether it’s which consumer goods we buy, or which school…/8

…we send our kids to. The West has to look deeply into its own soul right now, to decide what it still stands for, beyond individual freedom and self-enjoyment. The world is not a map to be travelled inside. Areas on a map are other peoples’ homes, not our travel playground. /9

We look on with justified worry at the way China and Russia are reasserting their ways of life. But some of that is our doing too, we emasculated both of them historically. They never forgot, as we wouldn’t if it was us. Our own indigenous peoples feel that every day,…/10

…and we ignore them. They still feel that rootedness to landscape, they don’t see land as a travel destination, or a map. Identity and territory have deep connections, that we in the West no longer grasp. Our worldview is literally a view - we ‘survey’ the world, as a map. /11

That’s the worldview of a conquering empire. Which is what we are, there’s no shame in it. But we tend to strip away the force that created and maintains that empire, and paint it as some superior personal characteristic we have - we’re more peaceful, and liberal etc. Uh huh. /12

Back to the balance of power. Peace is a balance of power, not an individual set of feelings or ideas. Just as justice is ‘weighed’. It’s the respecting of self-determination, and fighting - yes fighting, not just militarily, but in all ways - to maintain your way of being. /13

We can’t make all of the world the same, we shouldn’t want to. But that means there will always be conflict between competing views, and that conflict will be lowest when powers are roughly balanced. We find conflict of all kinds distasteful in the West now, domestically and…/14

…internationally. That’s our old imperial roots showing. We’re used to life just turning out the way we want it to be. The privileged always feel that, ‘let them eat cake’. The Russians and Chinese know this, and they’re testing it. They feel that (and they’re probably…/15

…right) we can talk the talk, but no longer walk the walk. That when push comes to shove, we won’t actually fight for our way of life. What is our way of life any more anyway? It’s fractured into libertarian freedoms of infinite variety. The pandemic, Exhibit A. /16

I don’t support aggressive Chinese or Russian nationalism, I support the West recognising that it’s the by-product of our own loss of a sense of what we’re here for. The loss of collective goals, of a collective vision of what we stand for, and why. We’re too busy living our…/17

…individual lifestyle lives. We ‘live with’ a lethal virus, ffs, rather than do anything collectively to get rid of it. We don’t want our lifestyles disturbed. Time for us to ditch that ridiculous navel-gazing political philosophy and get back to ‘we’ again. What is ‘we’. /end