The world around us …

… The Power Has Flowed Away | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The horror with Houellebecq’s work is that it’s not hard to see ourselves in his protagonists. They seem contemptible and rash—the children of hippies in Atomised, the French elites who sell out to Salafism in Submission—but he shows you how you, too, through a series of small concessions by small concessions, could join their ranks. It’s no different in Serotonin. The free-trade ideologues promised us a trade we couldn’t refuse. They promised us wealth beyond our wildest imaginations. They promised us opportunities that you couldn’t even conceive of now. They showed us all their economic models and assured us that free trade will eliminate “deadweight loss” and that if you opposed it, you’d just have to look at the models again. All we would have to do is trade our local goods for imported goods. What’s the difference between French and Brazilian milk, anyway, especially if the Brazilian milk is cheaper?