[LINK] "Radical Ideogies Of The 21st Century"

[rfmcdonald]

One thing that I, and other people, have said about the Canadian elections is that there's a lack of vision, a lack of innovation. This can be a good thing: Over at Sublime Oblivion, Anatoly Karlin comes up with his own suggestions as to future ideologies, many of which wouldn't be pleasant at all.

Though I’ve written a lot on technological, energy, and geopolitical futures, this has largely been to the neglect of ideology. Part of the reason is that making accurate predictions on this topic is far harder, because of the inherent intangibility of belief systems. Nonetheless, it is necessary, because of their overwhelming influence on the historical process; for instance, the 20th century would have been totally different had Communism, fascism, and Islamism failed to overtake major states such as Russia, Germany, or Iran.

Furthermore, I do not think it is an impossible endeavor. While forecasting specifics such as Stalinist central planning or the mystical millenarianism of Nazism would have been impossible for an observer in 1911, entertaining the possibility of the emergence of such regimes was entirely possible by drawing on the main strands of contemporary intellectual thought on new types of politics and society, which at the time resolved around Marxism, utopian socialism, Social Darwinism, and futurism.

What trends would a similar exercise reveal for today? I would argue that the equivalent themes, largely marginalized now but with the potential for explosive growth under the right conditions of socio-political stress, include: the Green movement (ranging the gamut from local sustainability activists to authoritarian ecosocialists); the technoutopians (include the open-source movement, Pirates, technological singularitarians, Wikileaks activists); and a revival of fascist, far-right thought in the guise of ethnic chauvinism and various Third Position ideologies. Bearing in mind the profound instability of today’s world order, we may be seeing some of these ideologies coming into political fruition sooner rather than later.

It's an interesting exercise in speculation, and certainly there is some contemporary basis for his predictions.

Go, read.