Why we need to talk about post-liberalism

A new era has already begun, but can still go in different directions

The fact that during the three years of the covid pandemic, so many people became activists for masks, lockdowns and vaccine passports was a remarkable phenomenon. It was a sign of people's yearning for purpose and community, an expression of a desire to do something for the common good, and a sense that focusing on the self and the individual was not enough to live a fulfilled life.

The breeding ground for this mass phenomenon is the atomised society in which we now live. Loneliness is a growing epidemic throughout the Western world as social interaction declines and more and more young people in particular now spend most of their time on the internet.

The tragic paradox is that lockdowns and social distancing rules isolated us even more from each other, children could not play with other children, old people were left alone for many months, and many old people even had to die alone because covid rules did not allow relatives to come near them. Feelings of social isolation and loneliness increased during the pandemic as face-to-face social interactions were significantly reduced or eliminated.

The sense of solidarity that seemed strongest at the beginning of the pandemic quickly faded - this was most evident when the discourse shifted from celebrating nurses as national heroes to angrily demanding that unvaccinated nurses be banned from working. What appeared to be a shift towards a more caring society turned out to be a shift towards a more totalitarian one. Large sections of Western society either actively demanded or at least accepted the rapid adoption from China of authoritarian surveillance methods that had not long ago seemed unthinkable in Western societies.

One factor most likely contributing to this dynamic is the sharp decline of religion in Western democracies in recent years. The void left by religion has led to a crisis of meaning.

Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist, argues that the crisis of meaning and social isolation increases the rate of depression in society and leads to what he calls 'free-floating anxiety'. He believes that these conditions make people susceptible to manipulation by propaganda and lead to mass formation: When people collectively find a cause that gives new meaning to their lives, they move from social isolation to massive social connection, feeling that they are waging a war against the cause of their collective anxiety.

We seem to be moving from one state of emergency to another. Many progressives saw the pandemic as a test of what could be done about climate change. Indeed, the current discourse on climate change bears many similarities to that of Covid-19. For example, the slogan "follow the science" has been used in both cases to signify adherence to specific dogmas, instead of embracing science as a process reliant on continuous efforts to challenge prevailing wisdom.

In addition, Western governments are increasingly embracing central bank digital currencies which, once introduced and widely used, will increase the power they have over their citizens, controlling their consumption habits through, for example, a personal carbon budget and policing behaviour not unlike China's social credit system.

Political and cultural elites in the West are increasingly resorting to illiberal means under the guise of defending liberal democracy against its enemies. This includes restricting freedom of speech and using emergency or terrorism legislation to justify almost any curtailment of civil liberties and rights. However, the (so far soft) totalitarianism that is manifesting itself across the West is not primarily initiated by governments, but the dynamics unfolding on Twitter in particular are probably just as important in creating the consensus-building and enforcement apparatus that we now see in operation on so many issues. Once established, everyone must follow the consensus or be castigated by the moral guardians, the elite institutions and the social media mobs. As a result, more and more people are self-censoring what they say in public on issues such as race, gender or immigration.