Week 6: Mainstreamers Walked Straight into a Trap of Biblical Proportions

Dear all,

Speed, intensity, persistence. The blitz. So much we can learn from this last month—not so much from the intent behind the actions committed, but rather in relation to how they were executed across the board. This is something we have not seen in a long time and certainly not in peacetime.

There is a certain level of admiration for this lunacy in some media outlets around the world, especially in the U.S., but also in Europe. Comments like “Yes, this is a crazy idea, but it should not be disregarded” or “There is something to this, although it is borderline” are fairly common in some places. The level of disruption is so intense that neither the media nor politicians, for that matter, can process the sheer volume of it and make sense of what is happening—let alone ordinary citizens, who are fed a diet of sensational headlines and contradictory messages.

People retreat into the necessities of life, to safe spaces they can understand and control—or at least where they can find some comfort and solace. Meanwhile, democracy is being beaten in the streets by a handful of well-organized groups of wealthy individuals whose sole intent is to bury it and take control over the livelihoods of millions. And citizens, for the most part, are merely passing by, going about their daily business. The last 70 years of transforming citizenship into homo consumicus has paid off—we are consumers more than anything else. Our freedom has been reduced to discounted merchandise, now being sold to the lowest bidders.

The collapse of institutions in the U.S. and other parts of the world at this speed will likely be the subject of future books—if books still exist. Institutions collapse when we stop believing in them. Neoliberalism had one last chance to reinvent its purpose, to reset its engine through sustainability. That was the last train. And as we now know, sustainability was never truly embraced by neoliberals around the world. Yes, it was accepted on the margins—a nice-to-have—but always kept away from “real business.” Wrapped in glossy brochures, barking but never really biting, sustainability was and still is the last resort for neoliberals before darkness.

The very failure of the neoliberal world order—now mocked by the traditionalists running the biggest political circus in the U.S. and beyond—has created the conditions for the autocratic forces we are facing today. Neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises to the masses. From trickle-down economics to inequality, security, and stability, it has fallen short. I have written about this before, and perhaps now is a timely moment to reiterate that 300 people on this planet own more than 3.5 billion others combined. And now, they have taken off their gloves.

At its core, sustainability seeks balance, accountability, and predictability—it also seeks unity. It offers an alternative approach to what could be done and how. Yet, for years, many hard-core neoliberals—the mainstreamers—viewed sustainability as just another restriction, another burden for business, another unnecessary obstruction to free markets. Blinded by pride and power, these elitist neoliberal mainstreamers walked straight into a trap of biblical proportions—one that is currently unfolding across the world.

They never took the rise of traditionalists seriously as a real danger, never understood that they would be held accountable by the masses for the promises they made. Counting on the ancient economic covenant—commercial interests above all else—they completely ignored values and utterly misjudged their own place in the food chain. Today, most of the bullies running the world are traditionalists, from Putin to Trump to Xi, with less powerful gang members like Orbán and Erdoğan. Traditionalists have one enemy: the neoliberal world order and everything that comes with it.

In this context, sustainability is seen as a dangerous ideology, one that enables the neoliberal mechanism to reinvent itself—to provide a soul to the machine, another way to win the hearts and minds of the masses. Regardless of the optics and the chaotic media events unfolding daily, the real fight here is ideological. And given that neoliberals have no real ideology—at least none beyond transactional commitments to the values they depend on (democratic rule of law being one of them)—their struggle has become laughable.

The hidden mainstreamers are now walking out, condemning the sustainability efforts of their own companies, proclaiming the “insanity” of the burdens placed on businesses, and reaffirming their full commitment to Mammon—without realizing that sustainability may well be the only branch on the tree they could cling to when the traditionalists are about to wipe out the entire forest.

Traditionalism condemns ideas that most people celebrate—ideas like faith in progress, the hope that human reason can meaningfully advance society both materially and morally, modern politics’ focus on economics and wealth distribution, the value of individual freedom, and the notion that certain facts and values are universally valid. These ideas form the often-unspoken political consensus that unites the left and right in liberal democracies. Traditionalists want nothing to do with them. Their goal is not to create a new future but to return to the past.

They reject individualism and the possibility of universal secular truths. Instead, they believe that the only good to be found in modern “progress” is that it will eventually self-implode, returning society to eternal values that cannot be improved upon—only regained. It is this faith—that the destruction of the modern world will necessarily lead to something good—where we find Traditionalism’s signature in politics. And that is exactly what we are witnessing today.

Populists may fetishize national borders and rigid gender identities as tokens of order, but Traditionalism goes deeper. It celebrates strict social hierarchies within a society, condemns global economic systems, evangelism, and universal frameworks for establishing facts. In the Traditionalist vision of a better society, men are distinct from women, national borders are meaningful, and different groups, nations, or castes have their own methods for determining truth. It is a world of differences—across every possible dimension.