ANDIs 2022 the best year ever? It is almost commonplace to point to the current year as the culmination of a general trend of progress. In fact, that’s not the case.
Advertising
On the one hand there are always aspects in which this progress can be observed, but there are always others in which the trend is negative. For example, although there has been a trend towards a lower incidence of wars since the wars of the first half of the 1900s, the invasion of Ukraine is an earthquake on Europe’s doorstep which could have aftershocks in the old continent, and also in Asia. If China sees that the West accepts the aggression of a second-rate power like Russia, it will know it has a free hand to make all of Asia its own. On the contrary, since the West cannot allow it, he is forced to bring Putin to his knees, but it is not clear whether public opinion accepts this.
Outside of politics, society, infinitely connected, which cooperates in a thousand ways, creates wealth and uses it to improve living conditions, continues to make progress.
On the other hand, there are always moments of descent into hell. Let them tell Europeans from the first to the end of the Second World War. No one will deny that we are able to maintain a much larger population than that of the Roman Empire, in the same area of land, with a better quality of life and an incomparably superior knowledge of the world and science. But there is no doubt that the so-called fall of the Roman Empire was the result of an economic and institutional regression, and that it passed from an economically connected society, with trade between the borders of the Empire and from it with other neighboring areas up to arrive in Asia, to a society of small self-sufficient production centers, where the division of labor had become simpler and more superficial. These periods of decline occur in history and it would be naïve to think they will not occur.
It is less naïve to consider the possibility that we advance, as it were, saw-toothed. In any case, the concept we have of progress is relatively recent. Excuse the three thick brushstrokes, who dare to paint an intelligible picture, albeit without nuances, but it can be said that each era has had its own idea of u200bu200bthe future of mankind.
In antiquity the idea of decadence predominated. The passage of time, as happens with fruits, causes society to lose its original form and decay. And it moves further and further away from a mythical golden age. In the Middle Ages man lay between the emptiness that precedes his birth and the eternity that awaits him after death, and goodness is identified with the maintenance of fragile earthly life. Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spread as reality and promise, inextricably intertwined. This idea is so ingrained in today’s man’s way of thinking that we hardly realize we own it; we think about it as casually as we breathe.
It is true that, after verifying that socialism is a failure, and this long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the left and from the forces that oppose free societies, society has breathed a black breath of unease with culture . Progress cannot be recognized unless it leads to socialism. So the whole struggle of socialism in the last decades has been against the idea of progress.
It is true that it has achieved resounding success where it has prevailed: where it has set foot it has caused hunger and destruction, obedience and death. Where it has not yet prevailed, or has only half succeeded, it has at least succeeded in asserting itself as an official ideology. He wants to bind us with a chain that links capitalist life to greenhouse gas emissions and these to climate catastrophe.
Yet free societies, even if only partially, continue to thrive. This year we exceeded 8,000 million people in the world. Great news. We face the dilemma of being many and rich or few and poor. In fact in 1990 we were 5,280 million people. Extreme poverty (set the threshold in $2.15 a day’s rent), affected 2,000 million people then, nearly 38% of those living then. Today that poverty affects fewer people (648 million), despite the fact that we are many more. The percentage dropped to 8.44%. Although the latter data is from 2019, the trend has been the same for decades, and the fact that it has not been possible to account for it does not mean that it cannot be said that it has not broken in the last three years.
And, really, we could just leave it there. Poverty is not a problem; that’s the big deal. But poverty forgives where freedom triumphs. And while it’s rarely a good year for her, the protests in China and Iran have given us cause for joy. In China they have relaxed social, non-health policy measures, under the name of “covid zero”. In Iran, the regime is forced to deny its responsibility for the death of Masha Amini. I could give you an example of what can happen to those who dare to violate morality, but you have to hide, pretending to assume the reasons for the indignation of the Iranian people.
And outside of politics, society, infinitely connected, which cooperates in a thousand ways, creates wealth and uses it to improve living conditions, continues to make progress. We are so wealthy that we live several decades longer than our great-great-grandparents, who had gained only a few more years of life expectancy millennia ago. Our bodies defy the dictates of evolution and acquire new diseases. We can now start thinking about one of them, Alzheimer’s, in the past, thanks to a recently discovered medicine.
Socialism, in all its forms, is waging a crusade against all technically and economically viable forms of energy. He has developed all kinds of fuzzy speeches against hydrocarbons and against nuclear energy. None of them would be against cold fusion: it has inexhaustible fuel, leaves almost no residue, the reaction is perfectly controllable in an imperceptible fraction of time, and it produces as much CO₂ as the trucks carrying the fuel and the necessary components from side to side. This year, for the first time, it was possible to produce more energy than was consumed by the generation process. The next steps are the construction of a prototype and, subsequently, the creation of commercially viable plants. But once the technological barrier has been overcome, the economic one is much easier to overcome.
The enemies of the free society are very powerful, but the forces of progress are even more so.
Photo: Razvan Chisu.
please read this
Disidentia is a totally public-oriented medium, free from any partisan servitude, a space of freedom of opinion, analysis and debate where there are no dogmas or politically correct impositions. Ensuring this freedom of publication is up to you, dear reader.. Only you, through small patrons, can safeguard that freedom so that in the panorama of opinion and analysis there are alternative, different, dissident media, such as Disidentia, which open the debate and promote an agenda of true public interest.
