Para-Enlightenment: Our Current Misery and the Quest for a New Universalism

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described the “rules-based international order” as a “useful fiction” that has now come to an end. He did not say this just anywhere, but at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And he is not just anyone, but a former central bank executive and Goldman Sachs investment banker who was responsible, among other things, for the sovereign debt bond market in the Global South. On that stage in January 2026, the symbolic and socio-economic system of neoliberalism acknowledged its failure. It is worth quoting his excellently written speech in a longer passage:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition¹

This failure of neoliberalism raises, philosophically, the question of its own foundations. After the overall defeat of Marxism – be it in the guise of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR or social democracy in post-war welfare states – liberalism is the last standing political power that based itself in universalist notions of Enlightenment (Truth, Freedom, Equality). The defeat of liberalism thus is a defeat of universalism.

In the last decades we unlearned how to emphatically stand in for universal truths, how to even conceive them without the urge to wash off the smell of dogmatism, proto-totalitarianism, euro-centrism or intolerance. But one doesn’t want to go to the end – to neither end. One doesn’t want to abolish universalist claims altogether, but one doesn’t want to actually make them neither. I will call this Universalism of Delay. It’s the core vein of anything deconstructivist as well as anything related to fallibilist epistemology.

On the other hand, while it existed, such an emphatically standing in for universal truths was mostly not more than a thin ideological skin under which the worms of greed and cunningness were preying: colonial violence as the gift of civilization, wars for oil and influence as humanitarian missions, universalism for the few. I will call this Hypocritical Universalism. It is the good old Western bourgeois ideology used to justify all sorts of self-interests ever since the start of colonialism, philosophically disguised as liberal universalism and its offsprings in discourse ethics and others. But its time is over. It was thrashed by hundreds of attacks – from Marxist critique of ideology to nowadays critiques of euro-centrism, logo-centrism, phallo-centrism and all the etceteras.

Carney’s speech shows: Not even its main protagonists can be hypocritical about it anymore. But did the Universalism of Delay manage to live up to its task and offer an alternative foundation for truly just, truly global politics? No. In the place of liberalism’s failure we see an ‘(ethno-)pluralist’, New Right Cynicism emerging as the pre-dominant momentum of current politics in an ironically universal manner across the globe: civilization blocs each have their own truth and capital interests, which they must aggressively defend and secure. The theoretical foundations for this are explicitly anti-universalist – Schmittian geopolitics, Heideggerian calls for taking up the specific Geschick of one’s culture/Volk, Spenglerian laments on the decline of the West and other neo-romantic critiques of soulless modernity with its abstract universalism.

Opposing this are, (1) some capital factions in Europe and elsewhere, as well as desperate conservatives and liberals that still cling to the ‘helpful fiction’ of neoliberalism – the remnants of Hypocritical Universalism –, (2) a Left that clings to pre-neoliberal, national welfare state ideals, remnants of a twisted form of Marxism without international ambition (3) a Left that is stuck in ever new deconstructions and identity politics and clings to visions of ‘bottom-up’ power, the grassroot-rhizomatic networks supposed to undermine ‘the system’ from within.

All of them have their own points of convergence with New Right Cynicism. The first opposition force was, in the last decades, not straightforward hypocritical, but rather reflexively hypocritical. It knew that it was hypocritical – as Carney now openly admits – but it still kept the form of universality. Whenever pressed its protagonists would admit in private that, of course, they are not naive, universal claims of equality, justice and all the etceteras are mere tools of power and twisted and tweaked whenever necessary to sustain power. This is the form of cynicism that Žižek famously analyzed, following Sloterdijk.² It was sustaining Hypocritical Universalism on its way to the death bed that Carney laid out in Davos.

It is this old form of cynicism that may serve as an entry point to New Right Cynicism. In fact, New Right Cynicism is just the old cynicism – with a small twist that changes everything: While the old cynicism could – and in fact needs to – acknowledge the fakeness of its universal content in private, it just as much needs to uphold the universal form in public. In the eyes of the Big Other it could not be seen as hypocritical without disintegrating.

In other words: There was still shame involved. And this is what changes when entering New Right Cynicism. Suddenly the Big Other is met with a huge middle finger. The form of universalism is disintegrating, the simple ‘might makes right’ is not only acknowledged but celebrated. Everything turns into one big performance of shamelessness, the desperate attempt to prove to everyone, including oneself, that there is nothing to be ashamed of: “Grab ‘em by the pussy”, “Drill, baby, drill” and all the etceteras. Trump is the master of this “coming-out of the asshole society”, as Tadzio Müller ingeniously put it.³ The old cynicism can be an entry point into this: Finally breaking free from the constraints of shame.

Then, of course, there is the entry point for this first form of opposition that merely takes the form of Realpolitik. Once the end of the neoliberal mode of accumulation and with it the momentum of the New Right is acknowledged, one wants to get ahead of it. It doesn’t matter whether one actually believes, that every culture has its truth and one’s own is under attack by illegal migrants, gender-gaga is ruining our children and so on. Here, what matters are balances of power. Carney’s words are a confession that he himself would have little problems with playing a new game of hypocrisy if it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that in this new game the gamemasters see Canada not as player, but as ball. Hence, he concludes, one needs to unite all those, who once were players and now have to fear becoming balls – the “middle powers” that were the addressees of his speech. In other countries and under different circumstances the same Realpolitik may serve as an entry point into New Right Cynicism.

The second of our above mentioned opposition forces, the Left clinging to a pre-neoliberal welfare state, have their own point of entry. Since their notions of solidarity are exclusively bound to national borders and their main backing is the well-organized part of the working class in the West, they too rely on hypocritical universalism to ground their practice: What they preach, they preach for a small circle of elites when seen on global scale. Since they delve in the same form of hypocrisy, their entry point into the New Right Cynicism is similar to the liberal-conservative one – One can observe this strange social-democratic form of the New Right in parties such as BSW in Germany.

The third opposition force has its entry point as well and one is even tempted to conclude, that it was this force that offered the New Right Cynicism their main theoretical weapons. What unites this force is what we want to call Deconstruction in a very broad sense: The urge to see any universal claim or any definitive standpoint as proto-totalitarian, as a form of “epistemic violence”. The underlying idea is that there is a form of violence inherent in thought itself – an idea preached from Nietzsche’s critique of the “equation of unequal things” in any act of thinking whatsoever to Adorno’s praise of “the non-identical” and Derrida’s quest for making explicit any act of violence, of exclusions and illusions of static meaning in discourse, thereby producing new exclusions and the need for a new “deconstruction”. Nowadays, this procedure has changed sides: It is in New Right theorists like Alain de Benoist that we see the clearest and most consequential application of this urge: the universalist inheritance of the enlightenment itself is violent through and through.

Since none of the current opposition forces and none of their underlying theoretical instruments can serve as a catalyst for new forms of solidarity and emancipatory practice, the urging question is: Can there be a universalist discourse and practice in which “the strongest” do not “exclude themselves when necessary” and enforce “asymmetrical trade rules” – as Carney admits of neoliberalism? And can this universalism be something else then the ‘rats are fleeing the sinking ship’ that Carney offers – and that he exclusively offers to what he calls “middle powers”? Or is the idea of universalism itself merely an instrument of domination that now finally admitted its own brutal power games on public stage, so that other, ‘transversal’ forms of discourse and practice be required – as most of progressive forces still sailing in deconstructivist waters seem to think?

I’d say: Being able to answer those questions with “Yes”, “Yes” and “No” is the main theoretical task of our current conjuncture. What we thus need is a coherent framework of universal truth both in theory and practice that would put us into position to perceive universal claims without the guilt of epistemic violence, put forward and justify such claims and thereby systematize scattered seeds of universalist politics that undoubtedly exist. I will call this theory-to-come Para-Enlightenment. This blog is a platform to explore this idea in a not yet academically thought through format. Any collaboration, any comments, critiques and thoughts are highly welcome.

Title image:

1. Mark Carney, “Davos 2026: Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada,” Davos, January 20, 2026, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ (Abre numa nova janela). ↩

2. He did so ever since his first major success, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2008th ed. (Verso, 1989), 24–27. ↩

3. See Tadzio Müller, “Das Coming Out Der Arschlochgesellschaft,” Friedliche Sabotage, June 22, 2023, https://steady.page/de/friedlichesabotage/posts/35a6c56d-380c-49b6-ae88-cbebf595706d (Abre numa nova janela). ↩