Under arches of thorns
Oh, brother, we little arrows crawl
- Georges Trackl
But happiness is fragile, and when it is not threatened by people or circumstances it is surrounded by specters
- Marguerite Yourcenar
Grammar is the best thing in this world. It is able to give every sentence its meaning according to rules. Today, the new rule, the magic word in the bosom of media grammar, theory, publicity, everyday life, etc., is globalization. It is used to praise the New World, which is still to come, and also this world where we already live.
The waft of the future is already palpable. The media drive our ears deaf by repetitious news and take over all the other senses with images of those who rule the globalization process. September 11, mad cow disease, the discovery of the human genome, pollution of the environment, prostitution on the Internet, prostitution beyond the net, etc. Globalization has been depicted according to the genre belonging mostly to the descriptions of journeys or to the sweet talk of fairytales for children and adults around the family fireplace. There are almost all kinds of statistics available, and facts seriously thought about - more than none. But you can find so many fairytales, so many that they start looking as the advent of the transcendental idea of ‘general’, i.e., to turn themselves completely into the incontestable conviction of what’s possible, into ‘the best of the all possible worlds’, a recipe with a thousand year history.
Virtual globalization, informational globalization, political globalization, democratic globalization, economic globalization, etc. Everything is in a process of globalization. It takes the shape of an enormous container ruled by money and fed with money. Globalizing institutions see themselves as a senseless movement of human beings reduced to atoms, as a converted negative reflection of this same reality in which we live. Is there any other way to turn everything and everyone into a huge container of ‘signs’ without direction, without holding back into a system of values or norms?
This is a mill for humans. Although most people do not have any clear idea about the meaning of the word globalization they can already feel its consequences. But globalization is still not a sense of destiny hanging over us. The serious problem is that this term does not express any understanding, it does not explain anything, it only describes some part of what the entire phenomenon of modernity could mean.
This is my reason for thinking that this word is rather the key-term of a new ideology, of a new, all-embracing totalitarian ideology, which is not trying to seduce, but which directly corrupts by manipulating behavior in order to impose a new type of control and a new type of submission.