Moritz Bierling

I once said as a cool reply to someone commenting me complaining about something on twitter, asking me "which country did this happen in", and I said "there are no more countries, good luck". I mean that quite seriously. Not because there is an alleged evil one world government conspiracy that has evilly taken over each country, or even that everyone is becoming quasi American "globo mono culture", but, that there are no more countries, nations, in the sense that we use the term historically, because the social order has completely imploded, and no one today feels or thinks or experiences life in a way that makes the same word category, make sense. Even the most ardent nationalist is a Person, an Individual, before he is an American, and Englishman, a German, or anything else. Our language, terminology, is behind the times. We use these terms because they are handed down to us and we don't yet have any better ones - "well we shall make do until we find a better word". Our life experience is fundamentally different from that of every other era, because our life environment is radically different, because of technology and media. Where a frenchman in 1500 might have been a frenchman, today, he is a Facebook user, before he is French. To put it vulgarly, bluntly, to a sharp point. Kings, and prime ministers, do not wield power and are not sovereign, because they are not the kings of our Environment. The closest you get is people you don't know the name of and wouldn't recognise if you heard it, business and money and technology people. And even then it's only a vague comparison, exactly because they don't want to be known and recognised as powers. The game is fundamentally different, it's only to illustrate a point. The point is that liberalism won, and it won a long time ago, and even the world wars were just playing it out, it's just a matter of how many victims it's gonna claim. You can't put the cat back in the bag, you have been Individualised, individuated. And there is no going back. western thought inhereted the word politics from the Greeks, and it doesn't matter what you think about etymology, if you don't contend with etymology, then you don't know what you think. And politics is the Greek notion that the city is like the human soul, the philosophy of politics is to the city what the philosophy of ethics is to the man. That is, it rests on an assumption, a belief and an experience of life. That the city is man scaled up, that the city is human. The nation is a person. We no longer believe this, and as such it is nonsense to keep talking about politics. The greeks had politics, because they had a political experience. You do not, because you own a smartphone. You have a TECHNICAL experience. You are alone, and you are an individual, and you are looking at your phone right now. Our philosophy and language is an ongoing project of coming to terms with our, lack of a better term, evolutionary environment. The ancients had a primarily social environment. You have a primarily technological environment. Our language is coming to terms with our environment. Our environment has changed more radically in the past 100 years than in the rest of recorded history. The ancients had political opinions, you have ethical opinions.