What happens when social cohesion unravels?

By Chris Trotter*

Earlier this year, motivated by an increasing sense of the world being out-of-kilter, I returned to the literature of my youth. I scoured my bookshelves for two fantasy novels which had left a deep impression upon my younger self: Ursula Le Guin’s “The Farthest Shore”, and C.S. Lewis’s “The Last Battle”.

By re-reading these books I was hoping to reconnect with their authors’ powerful invocation of a world in the process of unravelling; of being undone. A world in which, as Le Guin puts it: “The spells no longer work.” Or, as Lewis, a devout Christian, framed his tale: a world fast approaching its end – Narnia meets the Book of Revelations.

Common to both novels is the dislocation, deception, disillusionment and despair that accompanies the abandonment and/or corruption of socially-cohesive beliefs. Both writers lay bare the consequences of this fundamental loss of faith, and describe the evils that rush in to fill the resulting vacuum.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the world’s response, seem to have been fashioned to confirm the grimmest of Le Guin’s and Lewis’s visions: that the light is failing, and that the spells no longer work – or, at least, not the good ones.

Closer to home, the bloody culmination of Tom Phillip’s four-year-long repudiation of social norms and statute law provided similar confirmation that stepping away from, and stepping outside, society’s rules almost never ends well.

The problem, of course, is that when the magic no longer works and worlds end, what are we to do? Where are we to go? When all that gives meaning to human existence is rendered unpersuasive, what, if anything, takes its place?

Looking around the Western World, the answer would appear to be – money. Providing there’s not too much of it in circulation, money is reliable. Money works. To those who possess enough of it, money also offers, at least temporarily, a potent substitute for the communities of feeling that are falling apart.

Like all expressions of effective power, money simplifies. When our complex institutions, fashioned over centuries to draw in and fix the human individual securely in overlapping webs of moral, social, political, and economic obligation and reward begin to break down, the organisational clarity of money becomes their confident replacement.

Not for everyone, obviously, but, in a way, that is the point. For those with insufficient money, the acquisition of additional resources immediately becomes the individual’s primary obligation. The egoistic determination and ruthlessness attendant upon achieving economic security is not, however, costless. Great wealth almost always comes at the price of aggravating the loss of social cohesion that inspired its acquisition.

The fate of those who lack the will and/or the skill to make themselves financially secure is unenviable. If every working day confirms an individual’s lack of independence, along with his/her inability to do anything about it, then the attraction of ideas and activities promising the opposite: self-sufficiency and personal power; are huge.

The “Sovereign Citizen” movement offers its followers a world in which the “ancient” rights of the subject/citizen remain not only intact, but also superior to the laws enacted by any latter-day powers seeking to extinguish them. All arguments to the contrary are dismissed as the special pleading of the enemies of free men and women. Accordingly, attempts by “improperly constituted” authorities to enforce “unlawful” impositions upon their persons and property may be resisted by any and all means – up to and including deadly force.

The tragic events in rural Victoria, of which the equally tragic events in rural Marokopa supply a grim echo, reveal the fatal implications of such political solipsism. The state, like the casino, always wins. And, all-too-often those involved – guilty or innocent – are required to pay with their lives.

For those who reject the option of marching into the wilderness of the unmoored self, the alternative is hardly more enticing. Traditional leftism, which attempted to supplant the centuries-old verities of Christianity with the secular faith of socialism, has gone the way of traditional religion. In its place, a socially disintegrative preoccupation with ethnicity, gender and sexuality has given birth to a movement which defines itself against the “crimes” of the exploitative West. The wilful refusal of these “white supremacist” nation states to acknowledge the universal claims of equity, diversity and inclusion is construed by this “New Left” as an invitation for the West’s foreign and domestic victims to rise up against them.

That this new left-wing ideology pits a “progressive” minority against what it regards as a morally bankrupt majority renders it sceptical, at best, of the claims of democracy – at least as it is generally understood. To shield themselves from this rather unpalatable truth, its partisans typically characterise their opponents as dangerous supporters of the “Far Right” – or even as outright fascists. By this desperate application of political jiu-jitsu, these “woke” sceptics of democratic practice transform themselves into its principled defenders.

Amplifying every aspect of this growing global anxiety, the algorithms of social media continue to exacerbate the emotional hunger of the sad and lonely, the angry and ambitious, the cynical and even the downright pathological.

It is doubtful, however, whether even the prodigious imaginations of Ursula Le Guin or C.S. Lewis could have conceived of the pure evil of the Internet criminals calling themselves “accelerationists”. Wishing only to hasten the collapse of civilisation as we know it, they scour the world’s chatrooms for the socially and psychologically vulnerable and lead them by the darkest paths to the point of complete psychic disintegration. Recently designated as terrorists by the US Department of Homeland Security, these accelerationists are suspected of being behind the extraordinary spike in school shootings and political violence across America.

What struck me most forcefully upon re-reading Lewis’s novel was his description of how easily the Narnian’s were gulled into believing in a false saviour. What I liked the least was the way he ended his creation. Because the corporeal Narnia, the Narnia that has delighted so many generations of children, comes to an end. The last battle is lost.

Le Guin, on the other hand, allows her hero to close the hole in the world through which the light is slowly escaping. On the farthest shore, beyond the wall of death, the future of Earthsea and its peoples is wrestled from the hands of the enemy. The cost of this victory is very high, but isn’t that true of all the victories that truly matter?

The point, surely, is to join the fight.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.