Counter-Critique: So We Never Forget the Globalists Again

Have we forgotten — in this brief period of nationalism and the return of the traditional right — the control mechanisms of the globalists that shaped us for decades? Has the debate over how Western liberal elites control thought, culture, and creative expression through cancellations, terror, and surveillance come to an end? Orwell's Big Brother is something that never stops; rather, it draws its power from remaining in the shadows. Elections across the West have spoken to the public's exhaustion with that pseudo-liberal vision of human rights, one that has reduced understanding to a commodity and led to toxic positions on questions of identity. Wokeism is the offspring of those cultural battles. Even so, we cannot lose sight of the fact that these power structures never emerged from genuine social movements or an authentic drive toward emancipation.

But the electoral pendulum can swing back and place us in an even worse position, one in which the right itself serves as a rebound effect, allowing the Overton Window to hand us entirely over to the control of political laboratories. Polarization in Western countries around issues such as gender, sexual identity, migration, and sexual and ethnic minorities is, right now, the dominant concern. In fact, electoral battles are being built around these identity struggles rather than around projects of social transformation, public policy, or governance. Elections have become weapons of retaliation, through which anyone who loses is exposed to every kind of humiliation, persecution, and even the violation of their rights. We have seen this both with MAGA in power and with liberals aligned with newer identity trends: there are no limits when it comes to destroying a rival's reputation.

Big Brother is a construct that relies on the cracks within the system and operates through the technocracy at the top of major technology conglomerates. It is that Big Data which today shapes relations between countries and corporate movements. It is no coincidence that emerging powers such as China and India are working to build their own digital governance frameworks, based on rules that fall outside the globalist line. In other words, without the direct power of corporations, the design of this liberal-leaning global order would not be possible — much less its mechanisms of control and punishment, which exist to discipline those who step out of line in matters of thought. That is how power works.

Globalism is also a cultural product. It can be seen in Hollywood cinema through the infiltration of concepts such as false inclusion, diversity as illusion, and the bourgeois utopia of a perfect world. Nearly every American film made in the 1980s and 1990s included at least one scene depicting a family breakfast. Other recurring icons were the latest-model car, the businessman, the exemplary worker, the heroic soldier. In each archetype, the power structure had encoded a particular reading of the world shaped by its own interests. Today, cancel culture functions as a kind of network that pre-shapes social relations through the management of morality. Past works and lives are revisited, censored, and settled as a form of revenge against those deemed inconvenient. Big Brother has found in morality, and its discretionary use, a form of unlimited power. In this way, elites can be embroiled in the kinds of scandals we have already seen and still continue to govern, while ordinary citizens are bound by far more restrictive roles.

Perhaps a series that illustrates this point with particular clarity is the Spanish production Bellas Artes, a kind of ironic tour through the common tropes of cancel culture. A retired visual arts professor applies for a position at a museum and wins it against all odds. He carries what are, by cancel-culture standards, unforgivable traits: he is male, old, heterosexual, and an intellectual. The expected candidate would have been someone offering obedience, predictability, and conformity. Throughout the series, situations unfold that call into question the reigning dogma of the moment.

Even so, the story leaves a bitter aftertaste, since we know that regardless of what happens in a work of fiction, in the real world we remain subject to these mechanisms of power if we wish to survive. It was Foucault who described power as discourse — meaning that it is not only what is expressed through direct commands, but what substantially constitutes our world, what determines it at the level of essence. Power is not merely a tangible foundation on the level of phenomena, but a variable that is essential when analyzing the world through political philosophy and political science.

At a time when electoral uncertainty is spreading and we do not know which project will take hold in the coming months in the direction of the liberal West, understanding the essence of the globalist Big Brother and its variations allows us to remain aware of its implications on both a micro and macro level. It is a way of living culturally conscious of what we are — and what we do not wish to become.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff