* Current Western liberalism is a condition I call empathobesity. Briefly, just like obesity is a result of a generally healthy affinity for food gone mad, emapthobesity is a suicidal excess of an otherwise useful instinct of empathy.
The ironic thing is that for a long time, the ascent of the West has been the consequence of an impulse towards empathy and egalitarianism. Thus we see a gradual trend in the West towards a broadening of the circle of political empowerment. In England, where this trend seems to start first, we have the Magna Carta in 1215, Habeas Corpus (formally in 1679 but a convention for centuries before), the English Civil War which ended with Charles I beheaded (and which included distinctly leftist egalitarian factions like the diggers and levellers), the various reform and representation acts of the 19th and 20th century culminating in universal adult franchise, feminism, the sexual revolution of the 60s, gay, animal, transgender rights, gay marriage, illegal migrant rights and possibly chimpanzee/cetacean personhood in the near future etc, etc.
Thus we see that power has been diffusing outwards from the king, to lords, to powerful commoners, to middle class commoner men, to all men, to all adults, sexual minorities, animals etc.
For the first few centuries, this trend helped expand the proportion of educated and empowered people able to push back the frontiers of science and technology. It is no coincidence that England, where this egalitarian trend first manifests, also underwent the industrial revolution before other nations. Thus for centuries, a leftward shift was both a cause and consequence of scientific and technological progress.
In my view, this egalitarianism has been a trend in the West for so long that it is now a reflex action, a secular religion.
However, around the early/mid 20th century, this impulse has run into diminishing or even negative returns as power/respectability has now started to diffuse to demographics whose participation is fraught with unintended consequences or who are wholly irrelevant to scientific/technological progress.
This hypothesis succinctly explains both the rise of the West over the past few centuries, and it’s decline in the past few decades.
See tarkmarg.blogspot.com especially here.
