The slide towards one kind of fascism serves as a counter to a different kind of fascism; ask anyone on the left or the right and they'll easily point out the fascism they're opposing while blind to the facism they're proposing; the inherent problem being the ever-evolving progressive-regressive cycle of humanity that runs every show and is constructed of infinite combinations of counteracting incentives.

It's absolutely in line with your article that you describe western culture like this. Not that you're *entirely* wrong, mind, but that reading this statement out of context serves as a black-and-white Rorschachian accusation against western civilization, and western liberal values. If we compare western civilization to all the available alternatives (the BRICS countries, in particular, with their communist and/or theocratic agendas and zero concern for individual rights), we can see that western liberal values are the best of breed, a moral peak of a trough of disturbing shit humans have managed to come up with throughout the ages. And, like Rorschach, we have to make a choice of whether to accept the morally grey areas of our ideologies.

That's the biggest joke of all, really. The one civilization which allows and welcomes criticism is the one that gets the most of it from its own people. We're so well taken care of - the majority of us who are managing to get by, that is - that we've got time to grind our axes and quibble over artificially constructed nonsense rather than be grateful for and defend the fact that we have the means to grind those axes in the first place, hopefully in a way that will bring positive change to the systems that we subject ourselves to.

May this period in history be a stepping stone to even more enlightened ways of living, and not be relgated to a pleasant memory of "good old days" in a dystopian future that we bring about ourselves.