How will history remember 2021? My dear friend, we both know the answer to that. It wasn’t the best of years, as an understated British vicar might say. More realistically, it was a terrible year. It was the year things began to fall apart.
2021 was made of a number of devastatingly ominous mega trends and a series of institutional failures. Let me take you through them if I must, and steel yourself, because this isn’t going to be pretty.

历史将如何记住2021年?我亲爱的朋友,我们都知道这个问题的答案。正如一个低调的英国牧师可能会说的那样:这不是最好的年份,更实际地说,这是糟糕的一年,就在这一年,一切开始分崩离析。2021年是由众多灾难性的大趋势和一系列的制度失败组成的,如果有必要的话,请允许我带你回顾一下,坚持住,因为这不是什么好事。
原创翻译:龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


The overarching political megatrend was what political scientists call “democratic backsliding.” That’s a polite way not to have had say out loud: fascism and authoritarian rose and resurged. Here’s how one thinktank — a better one, not an American one, so unafraid to tell the truth out loud — put it:
“The world is becoming more authoritarian. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.”

首要的政治大趋势就是政治学家所说的“民主倒退”,用一种不必大声说出来的、礼貌的方式说是:
法西斯主义和独裁主义的崛起和复兴。
以下是一个智库 (一个更好的智库,而不是某个美国智库,他们不怕大声说出真相) 的说法:
“世界正变得越来越专制,连续第五年,走向专制方向的国家数目超过走向民主方向的国家数目,事实上,朝着威权主义方向发展的国家数目是朝着民主方向发展国家数目的3倍。”

Why was that resurgence taking place? Why was democracy weakening? For a very simple — a profoundly simple — reason. Both sides of contemporary politics had failed. Liberalism and conservatism represented to an increasing number of people two sides of the same coin — greedy, corrupt, malicious elites, who preyed on them, and profited from misery, despair, and poverty.

为什么会出现这种复苏?为什么民主被削弱了?有一个非常简单又深刻的原因,当代政治的两方都已经失败,对越来越多的人来说,自由主义和保守主义向越来越多的人展示了同一枚硬币的两面:贪婪、腐败、恶毒的精英阶层,他们掠食贫穷阶层,并从苦难、绝望和贫穷中获利。

Our civilisation hadn’t quite figured it out yet, history will say, but we had reached the end of a political era and paradigm. Liberalism and conservatism both failed. Conservatism denied there were existential threats to civilization — from climate change to mass extinction to pandemic. But while liberalism acknowledged that there were, it said the solution to those was to put society’s entire pool and stock of capital, talent, imagination, labour, effort, dreams, and aspirations…in the hands of…insatiably greedy billionaires like Bezos and Gates and Musk.

历史会说,我们的文明还没有完全弄清楚,但我们已经到达了一个政治时代和范式的终点。
自由主义和保守主义都失败了。
保守主义否认存在对文明的生存威胁——从气候变化到大规模灭绝再到全球性大流行。
自由主义承认这些威胁的存在,但它认为解决这些问题的办法就是把社会的全部资金、才能、想象力、劳动、努力、梦想和抱负.......都交到贪婪的亿万富翁手中,比如贝佐斯、比尔盖茨和马斯克。

LOL.
It didn’t take a genius to see that neither of those approaches was working. On the one side, there was denial, and on the other, greed. In this swirling maelstrom of stupidity that was called contemporary politics, what was the average person to choose? There were really only two choices left — backwards, into the brutality and violence of fascism and authoritarianism, or forward, via the only political system which worked at all any longer, which was social democracy.

呵呵。
不需要多天才就能看出这两种方法都没有用。
一边是否认,另一边是贪婪。
在这个被称为当代政治的愚蠢漩涡中,普通人该如何选择?
其实只剩下两个选择——倒退,进入法西斯主义和独裁主义的残暴和暴力,或者向前,通过唯一的政治制度前进,也就是社会民主主义(social democracy)。

The problem, though, was that fascism is always an easier temptation. It’s much easier to mindlessly scapegoat some weaker social group for your problems than it is to really grapple with the intricacies of everything from climate change to pandemic. And so it was fascism which grew — not social democracy.

然而,问题是法西斯主义总是一个更容易的诱惑,把一些较弱的社会团体作为替罪羊来解决你的问题,比真正解决从气候变化到流行病等各种错综复杂的问题要容易得多,因此,是法西斯主义发展起来了——而不是社会民主主义。

That brings me to the next megatrend, the cultural one, or rather it is the cultural megatrend. Fascism grew to the point where it was normalized, accepted as a social norm, around the world. In America, death threats against everyone from teachers to local officials — for the sin of purportedly teaching kids racism existed — became commonplace. Intimidation and violence became local scale features of everyday life. In India, meanwhile, under the eye of the state, armies of religious fanatics were taking pledges to vow to kill ethnic minorities they hated.

这让我想到了下一个大趋势,文化大趋势,或者说是文化大趋势。
法西斯主义发展到了一定程度,在全世界范围内正常化,被接受为一种社会规范。在美国,针对从教师到地方官员的死亡威胁已经变得司空见惯——因为据称他们在教育孩子存在种族主义的罪过,恐吓和暴力已成当地生活的日常。
与此同时,在印度,在政府的眼皮底下,大批的宗教狂热分子发誓要杀死他们憎恨的少数民族。

Fascism was spreading at light speed. It was the political pandemic of the age. And yet there was little, if any, resistance to it — just local groups, brave as they were, who could hardly stop a global megatrend. That is the first great megafailure of 2021. It’s political and cultural. Democracy was simply allowed to fail. There was no global plan or agenda to revitalise democracy. There was just a…virtual summit….held by Biden. But actual resources invested to defend, nurture, and protect it? Missing. Absent. Megafailure. So the fascists kept on winning.
法西斯主义正以光速蔓延,法西斯主义就是这个时代的政治流行病,然而,几乎没有人反对这种做法ーー只有一些地方团体,尽管他们很勇敢,却很难阻止一场全球性的大趋势。

法西斯主义是2021年的第一个巨大失败,这是一个政治问题,文化问题,民主呢,人们任其失败,没有重振民主的全球计划,也没有相关的议程,只有一个由拜登主持的虚拟峰会.... 有没有实际的资源投入到捍卫,培育和保护它?没有,完全缺席,彻底的失败,因此,法西斯主义者继续获胜。

Why was that the case? Let’s come to the economic trends of 2021.
The average person by now had begun to believe, a little bit or a lot, that conservatism and liberalism were two sides of the same coin. Why was that? Increasingly, their lives were stuck, or going backwards. Meanwhile, billionaires were growing richer by the year.

为什么会出现这种情况?让我们来看看2021年的经济趋势。
普通人到现在已经开始或多或少地相信,保守主义和自由主义就是一个硬币的两面。
为什么会这样呢?越来越多的人,他们的生活陷入困境,或者说在倒退,与此同时,亿万富翁的财富逐年增加。

America and Britain exemplified these trends. The world’s leading liberal democracies, mostly run by conservatives. The idea that politics could ever be anything beyond either of these poles was anathema. What was their economic plight? They had destroyed themselves. The average person had fallen into hopelessness and despair. In both societies, income, trust, happiness, and longevity had all flatlined. And that was before the pandemic hit.

美国和英国就是这一趋势的典范。世界上主要的自由民主国家,大部分由保守派领导,那种政治可以超越这两极中的任何一极的想法是令人厌恶的。他们的经济困境是什么?他们已经摧毁了自己,普通人已经陷入了无望和绝望,在这两个社会中,收入、信任、幸福和寿命都在下降,而这是在疫情爆发之前。

So what happened when the pandemic hit? Those fatal trends — stagnation and inequality — exploded. The average person only survived the pandemic in economic terms because economies went full-on socialist. State support, generous amounts of it, were given to businesses and households. In some nations, debts and mortgages and rents were paused.
The average person only survived the pandemic economically because they were now living — at least temporarily — in a social democracy. But they didn’t know it, at least in America or Britain. They still despised the idea.

那么,疫情爆发时发生了什么?
这些致命的趋势——停滞和不平等,爆发了,普通人只是在经济方面幸存下来,因为经济走上了完全的社会主义道路。政府给予企业和家庭慷慨的支持,在一些国家,债务、抵押贷款和租金被暂停。
普通人之所以能在经济上幸存下来,完全是因为他们现在生活在一个社会民主国家 ( 至少暂时是的) ,但是他们心里却并不知道——至少美国人和英国人并不清楚,而他们仍然鄙视这个想法。

Meanwhile, billionaires grew so much richer during the pandemic that the numbers were shocking and disturbing and incredible. 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% — it just kept going. This was while the average person struggled to put food on the table, wondered how they’d make ends meet, worried that life would never be the same again. Was it any wonder that faith and confidence in politics had collapsed, when stagnation and inequality had reached such proportions that the average person needed state support just to make it, but billionaires grew trillions richer?

与此同时,疫情期间,亿万富翁们变得更加富有,这些数字令人震惊、不安和难以置信。
30% ,40% ,50% ,60%....就这样继续着...
这一切就发生在普通人挣扎着养家糊口的时候,在他们思索如何维持生计,并担心生活再也回不到从前的时候。
当经济停滞和不平等达到如此程度,普通人需要政府支持才能实现目标,而亿万富翁却变得更加富有,人们对政治的信心和信念已经崩溃,所以这有什么奇怪的吗?

That’s the next megafailure history will record. Stagnation and inequality had now reached pandemic proportions, too — threatening the social fabric of civilisation itself, causing a widespread loss of confidence in politics.And that loss of confidence in politics wasn’t fiction. Remember democracy “backsliding”? Let me try to say it again. Conservatism was about denying problems existed. Liberalism was about “solving” them by putting societies in the hands of billionaires.

这将是历史上的下一个重大失败,停滞和不平等现在也达到了“大流行”的程度——威胁到文明本身的社会结构,导致人们对政治普遍丧失信心。
而这种对政治信心的丧失心并不是虚构的,还记得民主“倒退”吗? 让我再说一遍,保守主义就是否认问题的存在,而自由主义则是通过把社会交到亿万富翁手中来“解决”这些问题。

The average person was beginning to believe all this was just a rigged game, both sides corrupt, mendacious elites who largely hoped to profit from and prey on misery and poverty and despair. And they were right — at least that’s what the statistics said.
How so? That brings me to the most shocking mega failure history will record.
The world was now divided between conservative and liberal approaches to the pandemic. In some nations, like Boris Johnson’s Britain, the pandemic was allowed to deliberately “rip,” with catastrophic consequences for death and hospitalisation rates. More or less the same was true in America.

普通人开始相信所有这一切只是一个被操纵的游戏,双方都是腐败、虚假的精英阶层,他们大多希望从苦难、贫穷和绝望中获利,他们是对的,至少统计数据是这么说的。
怎么说呢? 这让我想到了历史上最令人震惊的巨大失败。
现在世界上对这一大流行的处理方式为保守派和自由派两大阵营,在一些国家,比如鲍里斯 · 约翰逊领导的英国,大流行被故意“撕裂”,给死亡率和住院率带来灾难性后果,美国的情况也大致如此。

Meanwhile, the West had decided to take a liberal approach to solving what was now the world’s most urgent, pressing problem — vaccinating the planet. Vaccines were swiftly privatised, appropriated from creators by politicians, licensed to gigantic pharma companies in sweetheart deals where the public wasn’t even to be paid back royalties. What happened next? The world didn’t get vaccinated.

与此同时,西方又决定采取一种自由主义的方式来解决目前世界上最紧迫的问题——全世界接种疫苗,疫苗被迅速私有化,被政治家从创造者手中夺走,并以优惠交易的方式授权给大型制药公司,甚至不向公众支付版税,接下来发生了什么?世界并没有获得疫苗的接种。

The development of vaccines by early 2021 was one of history’s great achievements. But equally, the failure to actually get them into the world’s arms was one of its greatest failures. Because by the summer, a new wave of the pandemic had hit, which sent the world into panic and chaos all over again. That happened again in the winter. If the world had been vaccinated, obviously, all that would have been averted.

2021年初疫苗的开发是历史上的伟大成就之一,但同样,未能让疫苗真正进入世界的怀抱,也是美国最大的失败之一。因为到了夏天,新一波的大流行袭来,使世界再次陷入恐慌和混乱,这种情况在冬天又发生了,显然,如果全世界都接种了疫苗,如果世界已经接种了疫苗,这一切都可以避免。
原创翻译:龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


Meanwhile, by now, each of the world’s richest 24 billionaires could have single-handedly afforded to vaccinate the entire world.
The average person was entirely right to be losing confidence in democracy — because if this was what it yielded, well, the results were indistinguishable from disaster. The conservative approach had been to deny the pandemic existed, and to tell people vaccines didn’t matter.
But the liberal approach to vaccinating the world was to effectively hand them over to the private sector, and turn a blind eye when nothing much happened except profiteering, to pretend it was OK and shrug when the world didn’t get vaccinated.

同时,到现在为止,世界上最富有的24个亿万富翁中的每一个都可以单枪匹马地负担起为整个世界接种疫苗的费用。
普通人对民主失去信心是完全正确的——因为如果这就是民主的结果,那么,其结果与灾难无异,而保守派阵营的做法是否认大流行的存在,并告诉人们疫苗并不重要。
但是,为全世界接种疫苗的自由主义做法实际上是把疫苗交给私营企业,当除了牟取暴利之外没有发生任何事情时,他们选择视而不见,当全世界没有接种疫苗时,他们就假装没事,耸耸肩。

Meanwhile, it was precisely because societies were falling apart that billionaires were getting richer. Bezos was making a fortune every day because now everyone needed to have basics delivered — and this was just after, for example, Britain had privatised the Postal Service. Zuck was making a fortune because people were desperate for any kind of information about the pandemic, because they were worried about their friends and constantly checked in. And so forth. Billionaires really were preying on misery and despair.

同时,正是因为社会在分崩离析,亿万富翁才会越来越富有,贝索斯每天都在大发其财,因为现在每个人都需要有基本的投递服务——而这恰好发生在英国将邮政服务私有化之后,马克扎克也大赚了一笔,因为人们不顾一切地寻找关于大流行的信息,因为他们担心他们的朋友,并不断联系他们,诸如此类,亿万富翁们实际在通过苦难和绝望进行掠夺。

The proof of that pudding was that the average person’s life wasn’t exactly getting better — they were barely surviving at all. And then the pandemic hit, which placed more or less everyone on life support from the state. But people only needed life support because by now life had become so precarious that who really had savings? A steady, lifelong income? Emergency funds? Nobody much, except perhaps the richest few percent. The average person’s life was now a thing of insecurity — about to climax during the raging chaos of the pandemic.

可证明这一点的是,普通人的生活并没有完全变好——他们几乎无法生存,然后,大流行袭来,使得大部分人或多或少依靠国家维持生计,但人们需要的就是维持生计,因为现在的生活已经变得如此不稳定,谁真正有储蓄?稳定的、终身的收入?紧急资金?没有人,也许除了最富有的百分之几的人,普通人的生活充满了不安全感——这一状况在大流行肆虐的混乱中即将达到高潮。

So, again, was it any real surprise that people across the globe were losing confidence in democracy? In a system of “liberal” versus “conservative” where both sides appeared to be slightly different flavours of fatal folly? Conservatism had failed so badly that it denied everything from the pandemic before your eyes to the mega fire down the street was a problem. But liberalism? Maybe it was worse. It asked you to believe that literally handing society over to billionaires was going to end in something other than your own exploitation and ruin and poverty.

那么,全球人民对民主失去信心,这是否真正令人惊讶?在一个“自由主义”与“保守主义”的体系中,双方似乎都有着致命的愚蠢,只是略微不同,保守主义已经失败得如此之彻底,以至于它否认了一切,从你眼前的大流行到街上的大火都是个问题,但是自由主义呢?也许更糟,它要求你相信,真正把社会交给亿万富翁的结果,不会是你被剥削、毁灭和贫穷。

People were entirely correct to lose confidence in democracy — because it wasn’t working. Or, to put it another way, the only people it was really working for were billionaires, cronies, and elites — just as the worst suspicions of the average person were now. And sadly, they were entirely correct. The world had fallen apart — but elites had never done better. Yet that fatal bargain is the kiss of death for any form of consensual political system.

人们对民主失去信心是完全正确的——因为它不起作用,或者,换一种说法,就像现在普通人最怀疑的那样,它真正为之工作的只有亿万富翁、裙带亲信和精英,可悲的是,他们是完全正确的,世界已经分崩离析,但精英们却从未在乎,然而,这种致命的交易对于任何形式的共识性政治体系来说都是死亡之吻。

I haven’t even mentioned climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse. I don’t have to. Precisely the same logic holds. Conservatives deny them as problems. Liberals preach the by now idiotic position, which only a fool would really believe, that somehow, handing a society over to the richest and greediest and most ruthless and predatory is going to fix them.

我甚至还没有提到气候变化,大规模灭绝,生态崩溃,因为不需要,同样的逻辑也适用:
保守派否认它们是问题,自由派鼓吹的是现在看来极其愚蠢的立场,只有傻瓜才会相信,在某种程度上,把一个社会交给最富有、最贪婪、最无情和最具掠夺性的人就能解决他们的问题。

Nobody sane left really believes any of that. The options are stark. In the vacuum, fascism rises — as people seek scapegoats for their plight, like in Brexittania and America and India and Russia, or people are simply driven mad by the trauma of it all, like in parts of Europe. Or social democracy rises. But social democracy did not rise, because it is much, much easier to divide people with hate and rage and distrust than it ever is to unite them — even during a pandemic, which gives some indication of how difficult the problem of human unity really is.

神志正常的人都不会相信这些,选择是严峻的,法西斯主义横空崛起——人们为自己的困境寻找替罪羊,就像英国脱欧、美国、印度和俄罗斯那样,或者人们被这一切的创伤逼疯了,就像欧洲部分地区那样,又或者社会民主主义崛起,但社会民主主义没有崛起,因为用仇恨、愤怒和不信任分裂人民比团结人民要容易得多——甚至在大流行期间也是如此,这在一定程度上表明了要人类团结是多么的困难。

That, of course, is my next megafailure — societies didn’t unite to fight the virus, at least most didn’t: they turned against themselves, divided into Covidiots and the sane. And because societies were busy infighting, humanity as a whole could not fight the virus. The failing liberal-conservative machine was therefore left to dodder on, as societies broke into bitterly divided factions of Covid hawks and doves. Nobody vaccinated the world, the machine busy profiteering, telling people all that was the only possible world there was.
So who was really going to do anything about larger problems, like climate change or ecological collapse? They were just “profit pools” and “profit opportunities,” too. Hence, carbon emissions rose at startling paces. The seasons kept on changing, and extreme weather continued to normalise, like megafires and megafloods.

当然,这就是我要说的下一个巨大失败——社会没有团结起来对抗病毒,至少大多数人没有:他们转而对抗自己,分化为抗议者和理智者两个阵营,由于社会忙于内斗,人类作为一个整体无法对抗病毒,因此,失败的自由主义-保守主义机器被留下来躲躲闪闪地运转,社会分裂成令人痛苦的派别,即Covid鹰派和鸽派,世界上没有人接种疫苗,机器则忙于牟取暴利,告诉人们那是世界唯一的可能。
那么,对于更大的问题,比如气候变化或者生态崩溃,有谁真的做了些什么呢?
它们只是“利润池”和“获利机会”,因此,碳排放量以惊人的速度增长,季节颠倒,极端天气继续常态化,如特大火灾和特大洪水。

The system wasn’t working. No wonder the world was losing confidence in it.
In all this gloom, this darkness, this stupidity, there were three bright spots, which were the world’s remaining social democracies. Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. They exemplified a deeper problem, though. How do you start a new one? Can you? Or is the day and age where you could begin to be a social democracy now over, the world too troubled and divided and poor? The world needed to know. Because now the choices were stark. Fascism, or social democracy.

这个系统没有发挥作用,难怪全世界都对它失去信心。
在所有这些阴暗,黑暗,愚蠢中,有三个亮点,那就是世界上仅存的社会民主国家,加拿大,欧洲和新西兰,然而,不过,它们例证了一个更深层次的问题,如何开始一个新的生活?你能吗?还是说,你可以开始成为一个社会民主主义者的时代已经结束,世界已经陷入了太多的麻烦、分裂和贫穷?全世界都需要知道,因为当前的选择是严峻的,要么法西斯主义,要么社会民主主义。

Those were the lessons of 2021. Politics had failed. Liberalism and conservatism were merely two names for human folly at this point. They had failed so badly that they couldn’t solve the problems they were creating. So badly that they asked people to believe in obviously false and fatuous myths, like “place your lives in the hands of the billionaires who are getting richer while you’re getting more insecure — they’re not going to prey on you, they’re your friends and guardians and allies!” LOL. By 2021, only a fool or a member of the establishment’s callow elite would believe that. Everyone else? They were left swirling in the gyre. It was a maelstrom which was beginning to feel a whole lot like the end of the world. It wasn’t quite that bad, though.
It was just the end of a civilization.

这就是2021年的教训,政治已经失败,自由主义和保守主义在这一点上只是人类愚蠢的两个代名词,他们失败得如此彻底,以至于他们无法解决他们所制造的问题,糟糕到他们要求人们相信明显错误和愚蠢的神话,比如 "把你们的生活交托到亿万富翁的手中,他们越来越富有,而你们却越来越没有安全感——但他们不会掠夺你们,他们是你们的朋友、守护者和盟友!" ,呵呵,到2021年,只有傻瓜或建制派幼稚的精英们才会相信,其他人呢?他们被留在漩涡中打转——这是一个大漩涡,让人深感整个世界末日的到来,不过,也许没那么糟糕:
这只是一个文明的终结。