Drugs, Executions & Everything Else

Over the last few months, we have witnessed an almost unprecedented campaign to apply pressure on the Indonesian government not to execute a couple of Australian drug runners. It became an almost do or die struggle about moral and social values. It became a measure of the capacity of the local libertarian humanist establishment to galvanize social support and enforce its codes of behavior across national boundaries into a society where a substantial majority only shares those values to a very limited degree, at best.

Although the country has the largest Muslim population on the planet, Indonesia started life as a classically secular, democratic and modern state. However, its initial main focus on western democratic norms was quickly eclipsed by the secular struggle between the competing claims of nationalist and communist dictatorship. Once communism was wiped out in the middle to late 1960s, the subsequent nationalist dictatorship presided over a long period of political quiescence, enforced by the army and paramilitaries in much the same way as a lot of the Arab states did in the post-colonial period.

But, like much of the rest of the Islamic world, underneath the surface of this quiescence, Islam started to assert itself in ways that mostly slipped beneath the radar of the secular military administration, but not always. There was an Islamic military insurgency in Aceh, in Western Sumatra that started in 1975. That was only concluded in the wake of the fall of the Suharto dictatorship and the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami disaster, which gave the area political autonomy and the right to enforce Sharia Law. This represented a fundamental breach with the secular constitution. And the new democracy that emerged in the rest of the country brought in its wake the democratic participation of a much more aggressive Islamic constituency, in ways reminiscent of Pakistan.

Today, as is the case in much of the Islamic world, there is an emerging struggle between conservative and radical Islamists on the one hand, and their more modernist, tolerant and mainly urban educated liberal adversaries on the other. And, like elsewhere, it has to be said that the former have gained the initiative and are becoming increasingly assertive in trying to enforce traditional Islamic standards in the public as well as private realm.

All this may seem to be an arcane problem happening in a quaintly third world, ‘old fashioned’ ‘backward’ country, which is in cultural, if not geographical terms, irrelevantly far far away from us. It isn’t. This is deeply relevant for us and not just because we have an emerging Islamic Diaspora home growing these issues into our own backyard. What is going on in the Islamic world is a fair litmus test for the current standing and prestige of modern ideas, practices and institutions.

In my researches for this essay, whatever I Googled about Indonesian Muslim responses to the executions of our two drug runner ring leaders, there was nowhere to be found any real information on what was going on there in terms of their intellectual and ideological firmament, other than the prospective executions were generally ‘welcomed’. While there have been copious volumes of gushingly anguished and overwrought hand wringing condemnation in our media, one just cannot find anything either local or from anywhere else, let alone Indonesia, teasing out just how they feel about the Western liberal humanist perspective on all this.

Nobody bothered to ask the leading local Imams, who might be able to shed some light on what their fellow Muslims in Indonesia were thinking. But they were not volunteering to come forward either, which was not surprising. Last time (2006) a senior Muslim cleric in Australia by the name of Sheik Hilaly (He would be regarded as a conservative middle-of-the-roader in Indonesia) had the temerity to say what he and many other Muslims thought about secular moral values to broader Australian audiences, he was not only howled down, but forced into retirement.

Presumably those around him either felt Islam was nowhere near strong enough in Australia to take on its Libertarchic ascendancy, and/or he was too conservative for the not necessarily representative, but presumably politically necessary Waleed-Aly-Worldly-Wiseman types, who are the ‘urbane’, ‘acceptable’, ‘moderate’, ‘educated’ and ‘reasonable’ modern liberal face of Islam in western societies. (Waleed is a popular Muslim lawyer in the Australian media). And perhaps he was not the sort of man who was prepared to edit the truth for infidels and their Muslim collaborators. Elsewhere, as in Indonesia, that is likely a quality widely admired in Imams.

The only media item I could find that touched on the kind of discourse that is really going on inside Islam goes back to a couple of ABC ‘Compass’ episodes in 2006, called ‘Islam in Indonesia - Parts 1 and 2’. What came out was just how much disapproval there is for ‘decadent’ and ‘degenerate’ modern secularism and the poor behavior and lack of governance that it produces, as well as suspicion of the Muslim liberal apologists who are seen to tolerate it. The local, more ‘sophisticated’ Muslims are really struggling with that and are feeling somewhat under siege, in much the same fashion as their Arab counterparts.

And what that underlines is that the more secular middle class western educated elites in the third world have never been that big and have been cocooned in small and culturally isolated urban enclaves, well away from the urban slums and rural hinterlands, which have only ever been marginally affected by (let alone benefited from) modern trends and statehood. For the vast majority of people in places like Indonesia, the mullah and mosque is the center of their world, including education, social services, justice and social guidance, in some ways not unlike Europe was before the rise of secular institutions.

And what exposure to the modern world they are getting, they like no better than if you time traveled Europeans who had become a mature adults before 1914, into our world now. My bet is that they would start in awe and wonder, but would quickly come to hate it in exactly the same way as conservative Muslims do, and for very similar reasons. But the question remains, why are modern, secular, liberal, scientific and utilitarian ideas that have flourished and eviscerated everything in their path since the Industrial Revolution, fallen on such rocky times (and not just in the Muslim world) when only 40 years ago, not only did they seem to be an ‘inevitable’ part of the long march into the future, but that the religious ideas they were displacing were equally ‘inevitably’ bound for the garbage heap of history?

Why aren’t the Indonesian Muslim majority buying the liberal arguments on not just capital punishment, but anything? And why are some of them becoming so vehemently hostile, when similarly conservative constituencies were shoved out of the way with such ease after the First World War, but most particularly, after the second?

I think this trend represents much more than a traditional conservative reaction, because if it were only that, it would be on the defensive. Something has shifted in the fabric of modern times that has given its conservative enemies an opportunity they haven’t had before. I think the modern era is faltering at all sorts of levels and its enemies feel that they can get its measure. Their conservative views are no longer merely ‘premodern’, or even ‘anti-modern’ so much as ‘postmodern’; that is, a vision of the future that belongs to them, which just doesn’t reference modern ideas at all

This is feedback that should be giving western liberals some pause to reflect on where they are in the world, but it isn’t, because they aren’t listening anymore than the Western liberal media is. They (or should I say the left leaning political sub genus) are quick to skewer the obtuse corporate denialism about climate change and ecological unsustainability, but they themselves are also in deep denial about the sustainability and legitimacy of their own ideas and practices, as they have emerged most particularly over the last sixty to seventy years. It is not a good story and has civilizational consequences that are as bad in their own way as what is happening to the environment.

The kind of forced marched economic extremism that emerged from all out wartime armaments production of the 1940s started to be ‘civilianized’ in the 1950s. Markets began to be saturation ‘bombed’ with civil ‘ordinance’. The old social infrastructure was mown down, either deliberately or as ‘collateral damage’, as temporary wartime lifestyle arrangements became a permanent feature of an increasingly under siege civil society beset with rapidly escalating ‘production war’ propaganda, productivity and participation imperatives.

This was done on the one hand through the mass conscription of social effort for competitive production warfare that ‘liberated’ the labor force of the unpaid domestic economy and mobilized mass populations into 24/7 contract trench diggers and shop troops. On the other, there was the aggressive and militant laissez-faire libertarian social deregulation that systematically discredited the ‘oppressive’ old social order and then handed the now stripped down and totally defenseless social commons to the ‘the proud sponsors’, their public relations marketers, media masters, product spruikers, opinion arbiters and the Pied Pipers of Cool.

The very complex, demanding and central business of social reproduction was commodified into sex and absorbed into the pleasure principle that drives consumer markets. Women were ‘liberated’ into casual, exploitative and alienated sex-on-demand, that was a male imperative playing women off against each other, so that they could be maneuvered into willing collaboration as ‘equals’.

They have had their identity as people hijacked, redefined and reduced into the identity straitjacket of ‘sexuality’, which represents a not insignificant, but nonetheless small component of character.

They endured the indignity of seeing that sexuality being crassly objectified and rolled out as a central plank in the biggest and most protracted sales campaign in history.

And then to add injury to the insults, they were forced into an increased workload of both domestic and paid work. Someone forgot to tell the boys to pull their weight at home, where by far the most important product we make resides; our children.

Their new ‘freedom’ quietly and unobtrusively became slavery, for which they were expected to be not only grateful, but to on cue, wiggle their bums and vacantly smile with a glowing iconic brand satisfaction that says, “Come and get me…..”

The resulting casualty rate in the officially institutionalized reproductive industry sector is over 40%. Nobody knows what is happening on the irregular fronts, but it is probably worse. Although the casualties are mostly walking wounded operating in units that are at half strength, they are sometimes able to cobble together variously motley new formations. If this were a war, our operations structure would be profiling much the same as the German army was, in the last months of WW2; unable to gain the initiative or hold ground under pressure and struggling to maintain formation viability or coherent strategy.

For me, there was one of those awful moments of recognition of social dilapidation and surrender, when working as a chauffeur. I picked up a young woman from a police organized Blue Light Disco in Melbourne CBD, about a couple of years before Sheik Hilaly’s now ‘infamous’ comparison of immodest modern female dress to ‘cats’ meat’.

The female dress code outside the venue seemed to leave Melbourne's red light district St Kilda street walkers with nowhere to go, except naked. Many of the underage nymphets were wearing nothing much except the skimpiest of dresses and g strings. You could tell because if they bent over at all, the wardrobe malfunctions were plain to see, and difficult to ignore. And at near midnight, some of them were getting into cars full of young men, who were clearly not averse to a bit of ‘pedopet’.

I had to avert my eyes from looking at these aspiring Lolitas, because I felt I was being sexually jerked around by children whose parents had abdicated any sort of responsibility for their moral and physical safety. For the first time, I felt rage at the grotesque betrayal I had just witnessed.

And when I saw what happened to Hilaly, I felt very sorry for him, and anyone else who wants to enter the ideological arena without knowing how the game is played, how extensively and diversely defended the Orthodox Libertarchic ascendancy is, and how fast and easily their adversaries can put into a naughty corner, to be condemned with very nasty sounding names, for being in heretical league with ‘Dark Forces’. The system is well practiced, oiled, idiot proof and it works as well as any of its ideological predecessors.

But the destruction of the reproductive commons was just the beginning of an unpicking process that progressively disabled disciplined social reasoning across the board. Anything that might block the consumer marketing process of seduction and giving in to it was similarly attacked as ‘repressive’, because the sole object of socialization was to produce vulnerable, insecure, grasping and grossly inflated egos, for whom desire and slaking it, without much regard for the consequences, was the only paradigm left.

Those now executed young drug smugglers weren’t impoverished desperadoes. They were just the same as hundreds of thousands of other affluent first world kids, only with a bit more enterprise and nerve.

They shared the same kind of inconsequential values as the people at Merrill Lynch, who in 2008 were so colonized by blind greed, they sold their clients products they knew would fail, and then shorted them so that they would make a killing when the prices collapsed, and, along with large swathes of Wall St and the rest of the global banking and financial services sector, almost destroyed the financial system on which their own careers depended.

They shared the same values as the kids who went out on a really fun looting spree in London and other cities, two and a half years later, or the guys who snort a bit of meth with some martini chasers on a Saturday night and then smash someone’s face in, just for the larfs, or the young buck, who screws his two year old son while his woman lies in hospital after the beating he gave her, because that’s what happened to him and his mother…

Laissez-faire libertarian deregulation, whether we are talking banking systems and transnational ‘free’ markets or the social and reproductive politic and the libertarian cult of the individual, is simply an invitation to trash the biological and/or social commons. It means losing sight of what it is that holds our life support system in one piece, and us together as individuals or groups, and what in the end makes our enterprises, at whatever level, viable for the very long term. We can get away with it for a while, just like all scoundrels and dysfunctional organizations do when abusing the commons, but in the end, the truth and the consequences of it will out.

The vices that we see erupting out of the face of our culture do not represent exceptionalist malfunctioning so much as a trashed commons. They are toxic leaks from a much larger cultural reservoir that has lost its compasses, its governance infrastructure and therefore its capacity to control itself in a world without boundaries. It works beautifully for the marketers, but we do not live by markets alone; not even vaguely.

So, just for the purposes of argument, let us give the now departed Sheik Hilaly a virtual presence and a semi-secular translator, so that we can reframe his religious language in ways more accessible for unbelievers; so that we can come to appreciate why he and many of his co-religionists are taking a much tougher line on governance and why we are eventually going to have to come on board with them, at least in this respect. What might a more ‘secular’ Hilaly have to say, not just about the recent executions in Indonesia, but what is his counter response to the lather that Australians have worked themselves into on this subject?

He would first and foremost say that no one has an unqualified right to anything, including their lives. That is a well rationalized ideological construct invented after World War 2 that is qualitatively no different from the religious myths that predated it. Everyone has to progressively earn gradated and increasingly onerous licences, once they are sufficiently mature, trained and qualified to be able to responsibly manage them. And the social commons or part thereof, in which the issuance of particular licences is vested, can take them away at any time if that responsibility and the standards that they imply, are not met; including the licence to keep breathing.

He would then go on to say that the Indonesian state allows the condemnation to death for drug smuggling because it is just. And it is just because it accurately reflects the extent of the wrath, indignation, disappointment and sense of betrayal that such an intolerable crime should and does incur in a community of those who are faithful to the trust and goodwill placed in them.

He would not necessarily expect that the threat of severe punishment is sufficient to deter crime in a society that has lost its way. If people have not been taught shame or guilt for wrongdoing in the first place, punishment later on likely won’t fix it, because it is probably too late. The moral horse more often than not has bolted. But that isn’t Indonesia’s fault, or its problem. It is an Australian problem which it has to solve, if it wants to be around for long as a viable society.

He would reiterate that the Muslim system of governance works not just because terrible crimes get terrible punishment, but because from the time children start to learn to speak, they are relentlessly trained and constantly reminded of what is expected of them and what is right and what is wrong, inside a social structure that constantly reminds them of why they are here, what their purposes as human beings are and the need to constantly apply the goodness and virtue that makes life a wealth (and pleases the almighty), rather than an impoverishment (that makes the devil’s work).

He would say something to the effect that for these reasons, he expects that in the foreseeable future, Islam will become a strong contender for the loyalty and trust of our descendants, as Islam has already done all over Asia and South-East Asia, for over thirteen hundred years.

He would assert that this will be so because we only offer them the empty promises of things that skate across the surfaces of being, and render it vulnerable and prone to malfunction. We fill our lives with toys and games, and remain as children, so that the parent is almost as immature as the real child. We have thrown away all the templates and infrastructure that would have made our lives productive in the things that really matter, instead of wasting them on junk and gee gaws.

Islam he would say will give our descendants some moral capital to improve their lives. And by the time it has finished moulding them, they are going to regard their modern history as worthless and their ancestors, low life, full of the sort of palaver, excuses and acceptance of the third rate that produced the latest Indonesian firing squad fodder.

He has heard every excuse that can be imagined from people like us, but fully committed Muslims do not abide them because unlike us, Islam understands their capacity to disable and dis-empower. The better we make them sound, the cleverer we are at fooling ourselves; far cleverer than merely fooling others.

He hates excuses because the people under the most pressure, with the best reasons to use and the fewest resources both material and personal to resist, are the ones at most risk, most quickly and most damningly!

“The poor, the marginalized oppressed and spoiled brat alike are all the more victimized by the cloying self-help defeating indulgence that feeds their poor behavior. Their condition already brings out enough of the worst in them without that as well. Instead of honestly and uncompromisingly focusing on overcoming obstacles and being challenged to empower themselves to do right, they are taught to become expert at every kind of deceitful rationalization; the sort of rationalization that justified smuggling eight kilograms of heroin into Australia.

To get to that point, their failure, poor behavior and dysfunctional values are denied, smoothed away and not their fault. If it were their fault, they didn’t mean it. If they did, they couldn't help it. If they could, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Even if it weren't, it was just ill luck that it turned out badly. And if they are caught out, well they are terribly contrite, reformed and rehabilitated, aren’t they? So they have to be cut a bit of slack and given more chances, because they were 'disadvantaged' and/or 'misunderstood’ and/or misled and/or frustrated by ‘misfortunes’ beyond their control... like consequences.

No one is responsible because folly just ‘happens’. Accidents and lack of foresight, poor judgment and immoral thinking are an inevitable part of life that has to be endured rather than dealt with. Effective management is always just out of reach because no one is prepared for really tough confrontations that hold people to account, with no wriggle room. If that sort of regime had been in place for those young men, at home, at school or in the community, they wouldn’t ever have faced a firing squad.”

He hates excuses, particularly from the young, who should look to us for truthful guidance. They are completely at our mercy for what we give them to conduct their lives. They are cruelly betrayed at their very beginnings by the culture of excuse making.

He would say that, “those of us who are indulgers of excuses become complicit accessories to the lies and evasions that that every excuse carries. Worse, our complicity in the delusory pretense of others meshes very neatly into our own pattern of lying and evasion, whereby we can pass it off as ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ which then becomes the standard for all to use. Thus fairness and justice, which should be priceless treasures in any culture, become leering parodies to mock us in ours. Why wouldn’t the young smugglers regard ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ as a pulpy soft touch?

Those who have the temerity not to indulge excuse making, like the more robust parts of the Indonesian population, therefore have to deal with peoples and whole countries who have come to expect that the excuses and the right to a relatively soft landing (not being executed) for their ne'er do wells are legitimate. Ergo, anyone who denies this is by definition 'unfair'. Your young smugglers just couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever use the full force of the law to enforce its bottom lines. Everyone always gets lots of chances, don’t they? They are ‘entitled’ to them, aren’t they? “

He would opine that in Australia, no one is allowed to question the culture of indulgence. “Moral authority is denied. Even if it isn't, no one has the stature to presume to know what it is, or how it applies. Paralysis rules!” He would thump his lectern and sternly tell us that we would have to be morally asleep to accept such pusillanimous and evasive rubbish. “Clearly the young smugglers were, because that is what they were taught to be.”

He would observe that calling the bluff of people who have long been allowed to get away with poor behavior and shoddy values involves a lot of protest and indignation, especially if they have become culturally institutionalized. “Corruption of this kind has a way of ganging up on anyone who challenges it. And that is what the white trash of the South Pacific has been trying to do to its nearest neighbor.

Coming to grips with corruption always has to end in a fight, because no one willingly gives up illicit gains. And corrupt practice always has powerful friends. Anyone who confronts it is putting a lot on the line and can so easily lose if they are alone and outgunned. Happily the more robust parts of the Indonesian Muslim community aren’t in that position and it was the corrupt social product of its neighbor that ended up being gunned down. Get used
to it.”

He would then go on to further explore the corrupt and crumbling mechanisms of moral reasoning in Australia By this time he would be almost incandescent with anger and shouting spittle onto his beard as he raised his arms towards heaven and said:

“Those young men that were executed lived in a world that could no longer tell the difference between ‘humanism’ and an indiscriminate soft touch, ‘freedom’ and life without boundaries, ‘authoritarianism’ and firmness, ‘justice’ and sectional interest, 'fairness' and unconscionable moral leveraging, ‘tolerance’ and indulgence, ‘compromise’ and being compromised, ‘flexibility’ and weakness, ‘concern for ‘the value of human life’ and cowardice, ‘dissent’ and treason, ‘repression’ and discipline, ‘assault’ and chastisement and ‘abuse’ and toughness.

It is all but impossible for you people to distinguish between ‘disadvantage’ and dysfunctionality, ‘individualism’ and egoism, ‘plausibility’ and integrity, and excuse making and honest justification.

For you, desire and fantasy has become synonymous with ‘needs’, needs with ‘rights’, human rights with consumer entitlement, and ‘democracy’ with consumer satisfaction.”

He would wrinkle his nose with disgust and contempt at how ‘Love’ had been allowed to become conflated with lust and eroticism, ‘sexuality’ with identity, 'homophobia' with reproductive gender consciousness and sexual ‘alternativism’ with sexual corruption, parody, infantilism and/or cruelty.

“Homophobia!” he snarled. “The sheer cheek of it! The damned effrontery! What is that but a pseudo-psychiatric ancient Greek sounding bluff and crib that fudges perversion into normality, so that the reproductive commons can be colonized without as much as a whimper! The Soviet secret police used ‘psychiatry’ to turn the political opposition of the Muslim faithful into ‘personality disorder’, so that they could be removed to ‘psychiatric institutions’. ‘Homophobia’ is nothing but a malicious slander of the righteous which does not send them to prison, but Coventry instead; to make them an object of contempt and ridicule. I swear before God that these insults and abominations will be answered, in His Good Time…”

Slightly calmer now, but with almost equal disgust he went on to say, “‘Equality’ has been turned into ‘creative’ equivalencing for handy importuners. It legitimizes reward for the incompetent or lazy, promotion of the unqualified, penalty for the industrious and in the name of equality, the exploitation of the delusions of the unequal. It persuades them to play out of their depth against stronger players who rig the game against them, or panders to them to gain political advantage in so called democracies, where the real rulers, the enormously powerful corporatarchs, mediate that power through public relations machines, because the popular constituencies are so dumbed down and into their pleasures, they never have to talk to their subjects, except through minions!”

At this point he completely loses his temper. “You miserable worms and infidels! You are not capable of appreciating how preposterous and ridiculous your ‘morality’ sounds! When you have been chastened enough by the folly and arrogant presumption you have fallen into, you might learn some humility and ideological listening skills. Then I and my co-religionists might be able to teach you something worth knowing.

No one stays in the cosmological and social governance business for as long as Islam has without getting a few things right. Nor does it manage hanging onto a billion followers by whistling Dixie. And these days, it is as dynamic as it was in The Prophet’s Time. Peace Be Upon Him. And may the fear of his enemies and the wrath of His faithful servants be brought to a reckoning, that will save us all from the evil blasphemies against God, nature and man, which seems to be approaching, even as I speak.”

Of course Hilaly would not be able to (nor would he want to) articulate his position in this fashion. I have taken a lot of liberties with him, because his language of discourse is full of what I and most other seculars would regard as cosmological mumbo jumbo that refers to a mythical deity, the prophet of that mythical deity and the numerous layers of elaborately superstitious exegesis that have overlaid it for over fourteen hundred years.

However, and it is a big however, beneath that is a very well tried system of social order that secures individuals and communities against the worst parts of ourselves, by paying constant attention to the best bits, within a framework of values and practices that are known to work, because the system vigorously and proactively defends its boundaries and asserts its principles in every existential nook and cranny there is.

And if the punishments for breaching that system seem severe, it is because it is sending a completely unambiguous message about not just how poorly regarded those kinds of behavior and the attitudes that underpin them are, but also the bitter fact of a protractedly intensive, but wasted and spurned investment effort, that has gone into miscreants who turned out to be unworthy of it.

People who put a very high value on their standards of conduct are going to be commensurately tough about them. It goes with the turf. Only people who haven’t got any bottom lines worth fighting for will tolerate them being breached and retreat as soon as it looks like they might have make a more than minimally costly stand, like... the late lamented Iraqi military before the armies of The Caliphate....

Unless the scales that presently cover the eyes of laissez-faire libertarians are removed at some point soon, women who are supposedly the beneficiaries of an allegedly egalitarian and ‘liberated’ regime will be persuaded to move back to their traditional second class status, (in many ways they already have) if that is the only way they can bring up their children in a secure environment that doesn’t keep disintegrating and falling victim to asset stripping, malfeasance, sabotage and treason; if that is the only way to prevent whole generations from turning into social and existential garbage, which will then turn its own reproduct into the same, until the whole society is like those wretches who have just been shot by the Indonesians.

And if anyone wants to see what that looks like right now, look no further that chapter 4 of the 2007 ‘The Little Children Are Sacred Report’, put out by the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. It makes riveting reading, and not just because of the horrendous subject matter, but because it is emblematic for everything that is going on in those communities, or not going on; what happens when the social commons completely collapses and a woman is eighty times more likely to be hospitalized by domestic violence than her non aboriginal counterpart.

But anyone who thinks this is only an aboriginal problem is deluding themselves. There is almost nothing left to stop this awful contagion from spreading, and it is, because governance collapse has no respect for ethnic or even class boundaries. The particular vulnerability of aboriginal communities just makes them social canaries, in a cultural mine shaft that has a bad gas leak.

And when our Muslim brothers and sisters get amongt our indigenous ones, they will sort all that out in no time at all, because they will address the collapse of governance immediately and just won’t tolerate the bullshit. Once they reach a critical mass in an indigenous community, the unbelievers won’t know what hit them, as it begins to dawn on them that the dunghill they call their ‘community’ is under siege, by people who have some idea about the difference between right and wrong.

And imagine the irony of an aboriginal imam railing at us for polluting his culture with our feckless excuse for one, and telling us what a bunch of useless unbelieving losers we are. I may live to see it…Priceless…

If we do not wake up and start behaving as if we are in trouble across the board, we will rise and shine one day, but the sun won’t shine for us. We’ll find ourselves living in a dark time, run by shady and violent characters, with black agendas, presiding over a chaotic industrial and social disaggregation into militarized cantons. And there will be nothing that can be done about it because almost nobody saw it coming and no preparations were made, on any front.

Only those who had prepared the most robust ideological responses for the worst case scenarios might have the resources, resolve and discipline to shape our future and light its way. At this distance, it is hard to see if they might be carrying the flags of Islam, or a fundamentalist secular distant cousin to it. And it will be fair bet that none of the above is going to be particularly democratic, egalitarian or tolerant of the kind of muck that passed for social discourse in the late period of consumer capitalism.

Sheik Hilali and his mates won’t just get the last laugh. They may get everything.