Dark lights
"Dark Lights" is the name that Arnaud Miranda, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, in a recent book, gives to the new neo-reactionary thought that threatens Europe and democracies in general in this epochal shift that is the transition from industrial to financial and digital capitalism.
Miranda points out five determined characteristics of this conservative ideological revolution. "The conviction that natural hierarchies exist: insurmountable inequalities that structure human societies: social, racial, and sexual, from which a radical elitism is inferred".
A profound "anthropological pessimism". Violence as an inexpugnable component of the human condition, in line with the political realism of Hobbesian tradition which appeals to order as absolute and considers theories of social justice as a fabrication of deceptive idealism.
An absolute negation of democracy, seen as an inefficacious political form to guarantee security in the precariousness of the current situation, with the triumph of a corrupt elite through collusion between political, media, and intellectual circles.
This leads its promoters to claim the exit from liberal democracies. Clients who are exhausted and abused by their services – they say – have the right to leave them, in order to move towards the construction of a state without fissures.
And all this to surrender to techno-optimism. The hegemony of technology is the common aspiration of this revolution. Democracy and progressivism are "real brakes on the development of technocapitalism". And the reactionary transition is the path of acceleration towards a transhumanist future.
It is not difficult to understand where all this is leading us. It is palpable in the air. Last week's Financial Times Weekend dedicated a story by Gabriel Gatehouse to billionaires at the barricades. And it does not take much imagination to know who they were pointing to as the leader of the revolt: Elon Musk. “It is the power of the algorithm – writes the author–. Fear and rage come; nuance, not. That's why Musk bought X”. “Alexander III discovered that pogroms were a useful instrument to divert hatred and protect the old order”. Now “Musk supports the new British far-right (Restore Britain) and its inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants. It is not just ideology. It is a diversion”. A diversionary maneuver that threatens Europe with an accelerated turn towards the far-right. The explosion of this current, under the protection of new digital power, is a warning that, with each new election, it is gaining more traction, more incidence in society and a growing penetration into institutions, and it has the strength of this new transnational elite that Musk represents. The dark Enlightenment dreams of possessing us all.