Consistent with the work of dystopian social engineering, directed by the cosmopolitan overlords, the institution of Erasmus (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) fulfills, in this context, one of its specific ideological functions.
Erasmus, which was inaugurated in 1987, is in fact a project for the education and orthopedization of minds and bodies that imposes on the younger generations internationalist mobility, permanent expatriation, pleasant wandering, cosmopolitan posturing and general disorientation (i.e., the absence of territorial, historical and cultural roots) as reference values.
Orthopedizing minds forges and models the imaginary of young people in a liberal-libertarian sense, educating the “Bocconi boys” in the new moral order and the abandonment of any rootedness and of any national belonging, in fun without borders (with respect to which, study plays a completely secondary role), in the non-border story of globalism and in cosmopolitan inclusion.
From a different perspective, the Erasmus re-education program inoculates the new generations with the “ethics” of the time of de-ization, with the new cosmopolitan “provisional morality” centered on the figures of nomadism and deregulation, of expatriation and delocalization.
The Erasmus program, as a new compulsory military service for university students, operates in the sense of a mass disciplinary standardization in the codes of the society of the uninhibited and consumerist movement, making post-national wandering seem trendy, to which the very logic of the flexible accumulation of Capital intends to condemn the new postmodern plebs. What Marcello Veneziani has defined as the “unhappy condition of solitary masses living the anguish of a disintegrated society” is sublimated. Moreover, it is “transformed” from a condemnation to an emancipatory chance for the new generations of “neuroslaves” manipulated by the persuasive power of glamorous totalitarianism; in Pasolini’s words, “by the new culture of consumer civilization, that is, by the new and most repressive totalitarianism ever seen.”
The Erasmus student is to internalize and make his own the notes from Georges Bataille’s 1940 diary, which could plausibly be considered as the general framework of the postmodern era: “I just want to get drunk, to live.” And, again, “I no longer want to have any other passion than my free life, my rough, spasmodic dance, indifferent to all ‘work.’”
Without exaggeration, Erasmus is presented as the reproposition, in the cultural sphere, of the lifestyles of the new generations in integral cosmomarketing, of the new structure of global financial flows in permanent mobility, de-territorialized and always in search of better profit opportunities.
It is, strictly speaking, a program of forced re-education towards mobility and the globalism that generates it in its own image and likeness: the compulsory military service of previous eras has thus been replaced by the Erasmus program, its equivalent in the liquid society of the feminized mores of free consumption.
The aim is to train and, moreover, to orthopedize the new generations in flexible cosmopolitanism and disenchanted fideism in relation to the only model of organization of economic and social relations that they have been allowed to know.
To this end, it is worth recalling the hagiographic pamphlet published in 2016 by Sandro Gozi for the publishing house of the Università Bocconi in Milan, entitled, Generazione Erasmus al potere. Il coraggio della responsabilità (Generation Erasmus in Power. The Courage of Responsibility), and consecrated to the magnification of the “world without borders” and “without limits” for the new young people, condemned to nomadism without stability and fun without commitment, educated in the cosmopolitan and post-national values that underlie the processes of inclusion of the European Union as the decisive moment of the integral subsumption of the world of life under Capital.
Beyond the sweetened narratives for the beautiful souls, in the era of the demographic transition (that is, of the decline of both mortality and birth rate), Erasmus promotes that mobility of the new generations which is the necessary derivative of the mobility of labor markets and of the practices of delocalization; and that—it becomes necessary to insist—has nothing to do with the cultural experience of the training trip, with the research carried out abroad, nor with the historical form of the Grand Tour.
More precisely, the “experience”—the journey of the Spirit, as suggested by the German language that expresses it (Er-fahrung)—the inner path of the formative iter and “to become expert of the world” (Inferno, XXVI, v. 98), was not a creation created ex nihilo by Erasmus, nor does it exist only thanks to it.
Moreover, the formative journey—of a Goethe or, before him, of a Montaigne—ends, paradoxically, by being dissolved by Erasmus, which recalibrates it in the alienated form of coercion to the mystique of wandering and expatriation, whereby young people, instead of experiencing the multiplicity of the world, are educated in the absolute monochromatism of globalization and in a sort of idiosyncrasy against any form of stable and defined identity.
In short, they are indoctrinated in cosmopolitanism sans frontières and in the regime of the perpetual free movement of goods, based on the elimination of all physical and mental frontiers and on the repudiation of all spatial stability and of all existential roots (fixed job, citizenship, family, etc.).
The free circulation of goods produces in its image and likeness the free circulation of people, themselves degraded in their turn to the rank of commodities, who move on the smooth plane of the global market on the basis of the law of supply and demand which has become planetary; with the associated possibility, for the architects of globalism and for the standard-bearers of laissez faire, of maximizing the processes of valorization of value, always to the detriment of workers and the environment, of rights and security.
Thus mobility, extolled as the possibility of displacement and the opportunity to work, becomes a constraint to infinite circulation in the unlimited spaces of the global market. The theorem of the Heraclitean school, according to which πάντα ῥεῖ, “everything flows,” is annulled in the globalist axiom of “everyone flows.”
Erasmus is nothing more than the trendy and captivating face of the permanent delocalization and forced expatriation to which Capital condemns the peoples of the planet. The human-commodity of the Erasmus civilization circulates omnidirectionally, in the name of Capital, through the desolate lands of the world reduced to the condition of a market without borders and, therefore, with nothing alien to it.
Neoliberal think tanks, business schools with exclusive use of the English language and university campuses redefined as outposts of the unique thought of support to the really existing class imbalances and themselves connected with the main supranational institutions of the financial system (from the Bocconi of Milan to the London School), appear as the spaces of the marketized formation, reduced to a cognitive enterprise and forge of the globalist forma mentis for the young members of the Erasmus generation. With a play on words based on the ambivalence of the word “tank,” it can be said that the neoliberal “think tanks” are the “tanks” of the politically correct and ethically corrupt single way of thinking.
They educate to fight fiercely against the symbols of their own tradition and against the images of their historical civilization, to adhere with blind euphoria to the icons of the civilization of the commodity form and to the non-conformist styles imposed by consumer conformism. To the members of the Erasmus generation we can certainly apply the words of Pasolini’s Lutheran Letters: “the kids around us, especially the younger ones, the teenagers, are almost all monsters. Their physical appearance is almost frightening and, when it is not frightening, it is irritatingly unhappy.”
Outposts of the post-modernization of consciences, business-friendly Western university campuses propagate liberalism as the only ideology, culturally left-wing and economically right-wing. They surreptitiously call “training” the mass production of “missologists,” the despisers of the λόγος evoked by Plato, inclined only to fanatically repeat the order of the dominant discourse. They spread in unified networks what Joel Kotkin has defined as the hellish gentry liberalism, liberalism for the privileged classes, functional to the dominance of the ruling class and glorified by the complementary postmodern left. Just as the protagonist of Chaplin’s Modern Times is no longer free to free himself from the automated movements of production, so the man projected in the New World Order cannot free himself from the automatisms of the politically correct single thought.
The media circus, the journalistic clergy and the intellectual funambulists are, almost in their totality, infected with “neo-liberal papagayism”. Indeed, in support of the hegemonic neoliberal order, a whole ideological bloc has been generated or, if we prefer to express it with Gramsci’s vocabulary, a whole “intellectual caste”.
The media circus, the clergy of journalists and the intellectual funambulists are, almost in their entirety, infected with “neoliberal parroting.” Indeed, in support of the hegemonic neoliberal order, a whole ideological bloc has been generated or, if we prefer to express it with Gramsci’s vocabulary, a whole “intellectual caste.”
For this intellectual caste, vocationally demophobic, the national-popular classes have no real existence, except as a problem when they raise demands for wages and social rights, objections to neoliberal globalization and, from time to time, when they manifest themselves in inopportune forms of voting contrary to what the mercantilist elites have already sovereignly decided in their very blinkered Boards of Directors.
In these cases, that is, when the national-popular masses dare to abandon their passivity or, on rare occasions, take to the streets to demand issues other than those allowed (which are exclusively those that coincide with the rainbow rights of consumerist liberalization), then the intellectual caste is “activated” and “unchained” by the cosmopolitan Lordship: it intervenes giving lessons to the masses, re-educating them and making them feel guilty for their unhealthy populism, for their vulgar sovereignism and for their deplorable conspiracy-mongering; in a word, they orthopedize them, so that they realign themselves with the politically correct and ethically corrupt single thought, and thus better understand the rationality of what they daily have to suffer.
In essence, the foundational superstructure of the New World Order is consistent with the permanent cult of the globalist society of the integral individualistic liberalization of consumption and customs, all of this seasoned with humanitarian interventionism and ethical bombardments against peoples and governments that have not yet converted to it.
This is what is spread urbi et orbi by the academic secular clergy and the journalistic establishment, by the media circus, by the non-profit actors, by the Non-Governmental Organizations and by the opinionators with no other opinions than those supplied by the System. The union of the ruling class and the administrators of the superstructures—the “media field,” as Bourdieu called it—sets in motion what Michéa defined as “the Party of Media and Money.”
The ruling class itself is presenting more and more clearly the very face of the Erasmus generation: with its compulsively ostentatious youthfulness and with the permanently exhibited will to free itself from the old symbols of bourgeois society, among them the tie, the new de-territorialized ruling class becomes cool and, as the French are wont to say, goofy, open and dressed no longer as bourgeois, but as the eternal teenager in the manner of Zuckerberg, the founder of the colossus Facebook.
In the form of a mediatized and glamorous fashion, aimed at promoting the kosmopolitischer Blick (the “cosmopolitan gaze” evoked by Beck) and global nomadism as a positive habitus in itself, Erasmus tames the new generations and leads them towards flexible and postmodern lifestyles, imprinted by consumerism without nations and borders, by compulsive xenophilia and by idiosyncrasy against any residue of national instance, automatically assimilated, in a mechanical and unreflective gesture, to provincialism, nationalism, populism and xenophobia. Capitalism appears, recalling Pasolini once again, as a “new mode of production, which is not only the production of merchandise, but of humanity” or, rectius, of humanity in the form of merchandise.
In this sense, immersed in the apotheosis of the psychological mechanism of gregarious imitation, the Erasmus student is the alter ego of the young—and always praised in the media—start-upper who emigrated to America to open an innovative company and who, from the pinnacle of his individual success, gives a sermon to his contemporaries so that they free themselves from their roots in their homeland and become cosmopolitan entrepreneurs of themselves, exposing themselves fearlessly and with exultant joy to the competitive challenges of globalization.
Animated by the postmodern anarchism of unlimited desire and unmeasured caprice, the Erasmus generation finds its own anthropological figure of reference in the homo novus citizen of the world (i.e., stripped of all citizenship), who is everywhere at home (i.e., deprived of any fixed residence), adapted to the needs of the world, deprived of any fixed residence), equally adapted to any place (i.e., devoid of all roots), endowed with an open mind (i.e., lacking his own cultural identity and, therefore, “open” to all those that the consumer system wants to impose on him).
From Aristotle’ s Politics we learned, inter alia, that the slave is the one who lacks ties and a fixed position, being usable anywhere and in any way. The free man, instead, is—Aristotelianistically—he who maintains many ties and sustains multiple obligations towards others, towards the πόλις and towards the place where he lives.
The fabula docet that we infer is that freedom is not constructed as a kind of autonomy of the erratic atom, fast of ethical roots and territorial rootedness. Such a figure deserves rather the name of slavery, even if the chains that establish it are invisible. Such is the subalternity of the new dust of cosmic egoism and cynical monads in an uprooted world without a center of gravity. Freedom is built, however, through links with places and with people, and always exists as a relational nexus, not as a treasured property.
Also, from the Aristotelian lesson emerges the falsity of the current cosmopolitan discourse, which celebrates as peculiarities of the free man this wandering, this rootlessness and this absence of ties that, in reality, are the most specific features of slavery and its transformation of the individual into an abstractly omnipotent atom, because he is unbound, but really impotent, because he is completely subjected to the order of production and exchange.
Once again, capitalist logic makes emancipatory opportunities and chances appear as opportunities and chances which, on the contrary, are condemnations and curses for the underclasses of globalization, children of a lesser God.
This is what we could rightly label “Andrew Ure’s paradox.” Andrew Ure, as Marx recalled with merciless sarcasm in the pages of The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), contested the proposals to reduce the working day for children; and he set out to demonstrate “scientifically” that, by working twelve hours a day in factories and textile workshops, they would grow up healthier and more robust.
The Andrew Ure of the New World Order are those who today question any proposal for the reduction of labor and existential flexibility, but also of global competitiveness, adducing as hypocritical “scientific” demonstration the supposed harm that would derive from it for the dominated classes and, especially, for the new generations.
Stripped of their own future, the young people of integral capitalism are vulgarly happy in their own malaise made seductive and cool by the permanent media spectacle and by the diffuse practices of compulsive narcissistic enjoyment tending towards infinity. For the first time in the cosmo-historical adventure, as Ortega y Gasset prophetically recalled, the vulgar soul has the audacity to assert and ubiquitously impose the right to vulgarity.
Weak and fluctuating, destabilized both in existential practices and in the imaginary, Europe’s Erasmus generation finds its analogue on the other side of the Atlantic in what is known as the American Snowflake Generation, composed of precarious solitudes at both the material and immaterial levels, as fragile and inconsistent as snowflakes.
Suffice it to point out here that the teenagers of the fashion addicted Erasmus generation, with their added cosmopolitanism of unlimited desire, are constrained to mobility and, at the same time, are ideologically in favor of it in the alienated forms of the entertainment industry, of the transgressive high that violates all that is inviolable and of that nightlife that, on the one hand, erases the frontier between day and night for consumption and for the practices of hedonism and, on the other, inculcates the myth of Heraclitean dynamism and total mobilization, ideological culmination of the planetary mobility of capital, merchandise and people completely marketized.
The imaginary transgressors of the Erasmus generation are convinced that the rebellion against constituted authority and the status quo is consummated in the praxis of selfishness, of the movement of the unbridled rush and transgression in a rigorously consumerist key: their rebellion is, precisely for this reason, the apotheosis of the dominant order, whose confirmation is hidden behind an apparent negation. This allows us to reaffirm that the real antagonism is never the one proposed by the System, but the one established between this “official” antagonism and the one that the System prevents, since it is the latter the only one that really questions the dominant order.
Nightlife has become the new myth of the lifestyle oriented to leisure, to the lack of commitment and to the fun without postponements of life is now. With Pasolini’s syntax, it is the non plus ultra of the “hedonistic ideology of consumption,” ideal horizon of the glamorous totalitarianism of the market civilization, kingdom of the inauthentic where everybody has fun and nobody thinks about anything else.
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
