“Ah, the utopias of yesteryear came true. More than kings could dream of. We have connected the world. We have ended great wars. We have conquered the moon. No longer starvation. Equal citizens of all races and creeds come to the same place to get all they could possibly need and hope for: an abundance of food, clothes, and appliances of technological wonder.

They all arrived here in ‘chariots that move with unspeakable force without any living creature to stir them’, as Frier Roger Bacon once said. Nobody cuts in line; they are all polite and let you go about your day. You have arrived… at Walmart.

Under the fluorescent light you choose between deep-freeze chicken and deep-fried ribs. Both are on sale. Somebody walks past you; her eyes swollen after long office hours and grabs the chicken. The freezers give out a monotonous electric sound. You have to make up your mind, which will it be?

Ah, freedom at last.”

Since the late 18th and the early 19th century, there have been critics of modern society. As soon as modern society matured into its early industrial form, the critics followed. At first, these were few individuals—intellectuals, artists, even mystics. But in time, the many springs gathered and grew into a flood: Marx’s romantic death sentence to capitalism, major philosophical schools—like phenomenology—that sought to emphasize the spiritual and existential sides of life, and finally full-blown student revolts in Paris and on US campuses in 1968. And lately, mainstream culture has itself become critical of modern society: you have major Netflix shows that treat feminism, homosexuality, ethnicity, police violence and the prison-industrial complex, all steeped in irony and pop-cultural references.

In the progressive countries of the world, the establishment competes to display the most counter-cultural values, as being the most critical of a society that does not treat the environment well. In schools values are taught that would have been seen as rebellious and ultraliberal only a few decades ago.

Postmodernism is on the march. Against Wall Street. Against the superficial freedoms of a society that ultimately amounted to Walmart and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

(From Hanzi Freinacht’s upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History)