Description
According to the ideas expressed in The Return of Myth, myth confronts history, which puts an end to posthistory. This is a new threat to totalitarianism, whose ambition is to “complete history”.
In a nutshell: its deep roots should be sought in schism, in the western version of Christianity, and then in the Reformation, which, in the end, produced Protestant fundamentalism. It’s natural and logical completion is the “consumer civilization”, embodied in today’s USA or EU, which is apparently forming on the American model, and this is a technocracy where man is only the “consumer” or customer, an addition to large technological systems. In this sense, it really is possible to speak of the “end of history” (of course, in a way different from that of Marx or Fukuyama).
“Posthistory” differs from history in the fact that man here really is not a sovereign or lord; he becomes a toy in the hands of unknown forces. In a mature historical period, man ruled himself and history was a consequence of his acts, thoughts, passions or will. Now something completely different is looming on the horizon: it is a technocratic utopia, totalitarianism in its final form, and what it actually is and how it will evolve in the future we can discern through the contemporary United States of America or the European Union. Its political expression occurs through Liberalism.
It should be underlined that neither the US nor the EU has been created on the basis of an idea, but instead as a mere market – not out of courage and strength, but out of selfishness, cowardice and weakness. That is, in the last instance, solely the result of the internal capitulation of modern man.
All this implies deep changes in art, and in culture in general, which is gradually turning into a “subculture”, a kind of commercial activity or social engineering which will have the effect of anesthesia on its consumers or drugs that relieve the utopian fantasies of the masses.
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