Finding Our Way

Patrick Lawrence explains the need to understand the details for how modern global capitalism plays out in our lives.

A state of ignorance prevails, and I do not resist the thought that this is just as intended.

Lawrence presents Edoardo Nesi's personal experience with a shifting economy.

“At the heart of our civilization we find a huge problem,” Nesi reflected when I met him in New York a couple of weeks ago. “We have lost our way, haven’t we?”

The daily grind of the news seems to have the effect of protecting the system from any meaningful change simply due to the shear volume of preposterousness. A trade war looms in which Republican voters might get hit hard and yet they would likely hold their leader blameless. The GOP will take a hit in the next election and yet the political divide will remain largely unchanged. The administration seems intent on taking advantage of such an implausible amount of corruption that they can escape accountability and sow the seeds of doubt by hounding press reports as "fake news". Lost our way, indeed.

Lawrence says it's not a matter of going back to correct the mistakes.

Globalization and the post–Cold War “order” — here I insist on the quotation marks — were fated from the first to fail because they were fashioned fraudulently and in the interests of too few. There is no going back from where we find ourselves, in my view. The project is to begin again and anew. I have always detested nostalgia as a form of depression, I should add, and consider now the very worst time to indulge in any.

“I’m very afraid, I’m very pessimistic,” Nesi said as we finished conversing. “I don’t think there’s any way forward.” One understands this, too. But pessimism prevails only when looking back. Face forward, and there are no more grounds for pessimism than for optimism. The future, by definition, will take whatever shape we in the present choose to give it. This we call history. The making of history is up to us.