/lit/ - Literature

>A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”

>“Rather than seeing the accumulating catastrophe as evidence of our failure to live up to liberalism’s ideals, we need rather to see clearly that the ruins it has produced are the signs of its very success.”

grim book

the thread about post-liberalism and literature about it that had an interesting discussion going on got deleted, so please continue it in this thread

I am not sure whether to look at the world today as a set of contradictions that will lead to a slow collapse or an endless stagnation where we retread the same problems because we can't think of anything beyond our current state. Is Deneen right? Or is Fukuyama right? I almost want to say that both are.

This book is right and wrong at the same time. I don't get it. Everyone can see the cracks in our system starting to show but nothing appears to be collapsing or getting replaced. Are we just trapped in purgatory?

I've disavowed this book. I've stopped believing in all "2 more weeks" doomer propaganda. I've accepted that the issues of the 21st century are not design flaws, they're features. They're here to stay and I have to live with it. I suggest you stop coping and do the same.

This book is wrong. Pretty much everyone is wrong. Liberalism being unable to fulfill its promises isn't evidence of its failures, it's actually the entire reason that Liberalism has succeeded so much in modern history. Liberalism doesn't create freedom and democracy, it only requires that the masses believe in those abstract concepts. People like Francis Fukuyama are able to admit this but conservatives like Deneen are still hopelessly obsessed with creating "true" freedom and democracy as if they even mean anything.

At some point we need to stop pretending as if the West has reached terminal decline because the people in power have betrayed the values of modernity. It's the polar opposite. We are witnessing the pillars of the modern world reach their pinnacle of power and success, but this success will bring nothing but decay because modernity is evil. It's that simple. Liberalism hasn't failed because liberal countries are atomized imperialist police states, atomized imperialist police states are exactly what liberalism seeks to create in the first place. The West is still winning! And it's bad that it is.

>>20203042
Liberal?

I admit that this book only becomes more convincing as the days pass. Everyone knows it will all come crashing down sooner or later. But what comes after? That's what this book fails to answer, as do most critics of Liberalism.

This book is good but I hate how it convinced so many people to whine that liberalism is dying. How can people say it's dying when the global population is only becoming more liberal? Virtually every young person raised on social media today is politically progressive. Most countries are homogenizing into the same mass culture of consumerism. Most of the world speaks English, most of our media directly comes from America. It’s true that Liberalism is decaying, but that doesn’t mean it’s being replaced. No matter how chaotic things are today, we are still arguing with each other using a liberal vocabulary of freedom, equality, liberation, democracy, individuality, etc.

This is still ultimately Liberalism reinventing itself regardless if people brand themselves as “countercultural” like in the 60s or “radical” and “woke” today. Nobody is actually disagreeing with the core tenets of liberalism or trying to implement an alternative to it. For the time being, we are in a degenerate purgatory — not quite at the end of history, but a revolution or an armageddon aren’t in our future either.

The real blackpill of this book isn’t that Liberalism is a fundamentally broken system, it’s that we’re incapable of creating an alternative to it in spite of how bad it is

I find it fascinating that most people still use politics to discern what is wrong with the world when books like this prove that our philosophical basis for modern life is broken and self-destructive from the start. We need to create something new if we want to save ourselves.

So from what I understand from this book, the system is doomed but no one is creative enough to present an alternative to it. Grim.

After reading this book I've been unable to shake off the anxiety that we're all living in a ticking time bomb

I'm looking for some contemporary philosophers/books that are either anti-liberal or would be considered right wing. I'm trying to avoid socially stigmatized stuff like Evola, Spengler, Alain de Benoist etc. Preferably they'd be published by a university press. The only two I can find are Lasch and picrel. If anyone knows of anything else it would be much appreciated but I'm guessing these kinds of books are very rare in today's universities.

I don't enjoy anything about the world after reading this book

Any books that explain why the current system is so incapable of instilling loyalty in populace? I have been thinking about how in the past millions of people were willing to die in WW1 and WW2 but if there was a conflict on such scale now I dont think anyone would even lift a finger to save liberal democracies.

>>18876349
This is probably the best book on the matter written in recent years. America was always fated to decline because Liberalism is self-destructive and never works in practice.

So basically... we’re doomed?

I haven’t been able to enjoy anything ever since I read this book, the collapse seems imminent

I'm scared that this book is correct and everything is about to get much worse

This will be the most prescient book of the century when the implosion eventually occurrs

What is /lit/ opnion on post-liberalism?

Why is there so much arguing about the state of the world today? This book already answers it. Liberalism is its own undoing because it was a flimsy philosophical system from the very beginning, and we're currently just watching it commit suicide

Everything just makes sense today when you realize Liberalism is devouring the world but can’t sustain itself. Where do we go from here?