The end of liberalism

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed.  We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate.  We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children.  We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera.  Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the growth of an encompassing state and transnational institutions that make innumerable decisions in politics and economics over which average citizens exercise no control. If this is the form of ‘liberty’ that protesters in Iran aspire to achieve, then any liberation is likely to prove Pyrrhic.