Civilizations That Cannot Be Civilized

In the last two issues of the journal Economics and Society, I wrote articles examining income and wealth inequality. In the first , I examined inequality in a historical context. In the second , I focused on the problem of inequality through current data. These two articles form the basis of the topics I will discuss in this article.

Inequality peaked after the advent of industrial capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with two world wars in between, and inequality does not appear to have increased from the post-World War II period until the 1970s.

With the global developments that emerged in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, inequality began to climb again. Thus, inequalities that once again reached their historic peaks emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

We are faced with the fact that globalization accelerated before both processes in which inequality increased almost 100 years apart. A similar globalization to that seen after the 1980s also occurred in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Of course, the increasing inequalities in the process of industrial capitalism are not the only reason for the globalization processes that accelerated and then collapsed or declined approximately 100 years apart. However, in both processes, the significant increase in inequalities after the beginning of industrial capitalism played a critical role in triggering many political, economic and social developments.

The previous experiment in globalization ended in wars and the rise of autocratic regimes. The developments that led Karl Polanyi to write The Great Transformation in 1944 and Hanna Arendt to write The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 were products of recent history at the time these books were written.

The world has been in a process that bears similarities to what Polanyi and Arendt described. Populist and autocratic regimes have spread all over the world. Countries such as Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, China, and Argentina are moving away from democracy despite their need to get closer to it, while countries such as the USA, Austria, Germany, England, and France may face the threat and possibility of moving away from democracy at different levels.

After World War II, the world moved towards the Cold War. The relentless struggle between the Western Bloc led by the USA and the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union began to end with a conservative revolution, as Amin Maalouf often calls it in The Decline of Civilizations . The conservative revolution began with Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister of England in May 1979 and would later be known as the Iron Lady.

The conditions that brought Thatcher to power began to emerge, especially with the oil crisis of 1973. The cause of the oil crisis was the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973. England was experiencing significant social unrest with power cuts, strikes and riots. British historian Andy Beckett described England in the 1970s in Lights Out .

The Iron Lady received great support from Ronald Reagan, who became president in January 1981. Reagan did not see the concept of government as a tool for solving problems. He saw the government itself as a problem .

In contrast to the works of Polanyi and Harendt, another work that has become a representative work of the Thatcher and Reagan understanding was published in 1957: Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged . The work recounted the rebellion of employers tired of excessive regulation.

The conservative revolution had its origins in the right. Socialist/communist regimes that stood as an alternative to capitalism represented regimes that were inefficient, dogmatic, where immoralities such as bribery were widespread, produced autocracy and an unfounded bureaucracy, and were unable to provide welfare and happiness to their citizens. Capitalism, which sought to win against these regimes and won the victory it desired, would cause other problems with Thatcher's conservative revolution.

The conservative revolution's findings had some truth to them, but the methods it adopted in practice destroyed the social aspect of man.

The practices of Thatcher and Reagan created a system that ignored union rights and was willing to cut taxes and make public sector savings mainly through social spending. This process also brought about inequalities.

While the West, under the leadership of England and the USA, tried to spread its own ideology, it also betrayed the values it created. While they tried to raise concepts such as democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression to a higher level in their own countries, they failed to do so, but on an international level, they played the game dirty.

Some of the dirty tricks include the CIA's attempt to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, the overthrow of Dr. Mossadegh's regime in Iran, allegations that Reagan approached the Iranian regime in order to be elected president, and the illegal supply of weapons to the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua through Iran.

In the process that started in the 1980s, support for radical Islamist groups was added to every method that was seen as permissible for capitalism to triumph over communist regimes. This support eventually caused great trouble for the entire world.

Jimmy Carter's national security advisor , Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a Pole. He demonstrated a supportive strategy for Cardinal Wyszynski during his 1977 visit to Poland with Carter. In 1978, John Paul II of Poland became the first non-Italian to ascend to the papacy in nearly 450 years, and introduced the ideas of the conservative revolution to the Catholic world. The new pope had been raised in a communist regime but loathed communism.

Above, I tried to present the historical process regarding the point that world civilization has reached today in a very compressed summary and of course within the framework of developments that I consider important from my own perspective. What we are experiencing today goes back decades with chain economic and political developments.

Humanity has stumbled again, and again from the same philosophical starting point. Both starting points resulted in countries and people drifting apart and becoming polarized. Even with wars.

There was talk of system convergence for a while. Instead of the wild capitalist world advocated by Ayn Rand, a free market order with a social aspect would be desirable.

Today, we are in a world where personal gains are preferred to social benefits and state mechanisms prepare the ground for this. Global unhappiness is visible. Equality and justice have spread to the world as if they were values that should not be defended. It will take decades to get out of here, but what will the point be?

An Italian who was intent on bringing the systems closer together once appeared on the political scene. Radical leftists killed him in 1978: Aldo Moro .

If I were to be inspired by Reagan's words about the state, the problem is not in the systems that people invent, but perhaps humanity itself. Could this be why civilizations cannot become civilized? What is the solution? It is still being sought.