The decline and fall of the Third British Empire

Traumazone Yookay

‘Communism was more than just a system of economics; it was a paradigm, and a totalising one at that. It saw itself as scientific, the only way of understanding the world any reasonable person could hold unless they were bad, mad, or yet to be educated, and therefore saw its triumph as inevitable.’

So wrote Gerry Lynch at Slugger O’Toole, on how a paradigm can suddenly fall apart when people lose their faith. ‘Even before the system collapsed, people stopped believing in it. Without an inspiring vision, a credible paradigm, Soviet citizens considered their existing condition, which was often dreadful, and the prospects of it ever improving, which were remote…. Ultimately all societies are sustained by visions; when people lose faith in those visions, then politics and culture shifts, sometimes dramatically.’

Lynch sees the same thing happening today, with ‘the wilting of the progressive narrative in the face of various belligerent nationalisms’. He writes that ‘for well over a decade now, people have been losing faith in the worldview that many progressives seem to assume is the only rational one, because they’re asked to believe in stuff that often doesn’t work as advertised and sometimes is literally unbelievable.’