This column is drawn from notes that Chris Hedges wrote in preparing for a debate held today by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Hedges, speaking from Princeton, N.J., argued for the motion: “Be it resolved, politics isn’t working as usual. It’s time for a revolution.” Opposed was David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times who spoke from Washington, D.C. A podcast of the contest will be available later.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations led by those who believe they found a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that vision. History is replete with disastrous utopians — the Jacobins, the Marxists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.