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The economy rests прежде всего on ethics, not, as Marx assumed, on the means of production. It is no coincidence that the USSR declared the need for a “new man.” The economy is, above all, the organization of shared existence and the distribution of goods. The functioning of any economic system is impossible without stable rules of behavior in society. Another example of how dependent the economy is on ethics is the difficulty migrants from countries with a different social order face when integrating into the economic system of Western countries. Cultures in which loyalty to the community, or to a religious or family clan, carries greater weight have a harder time integrating into the impersonal ethics of corporate or state administration.

Classical capitalism rested on Protestant ethics. Weber showed this convincingly in his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestant theology presupposes the absolute will of God over man, which means that God already knows whether a person will be saved or not. Accordingly, signs of future salvation can already be found in one’s present life. Protestantism encourages frugality, modesty, discipline, and hard work. Combined with the ideas of the free market, the successful entrepreneur is not simply a person who has achieved material success, but also someone marked by God during life, bearing an almost sacred meaning of justice.

Ayn Rand’s objectivism (Atlas Shrugged) shifted this ethical form somewhat, partially desacralizing it while adding pathos. In her view, the entrepreneur is not marked by God and saved in advance, but a servant and priest of the idea of progress, who, almost like Prometheus, sacrifices himself for the sake of humanity while receiving only a small portion of reward for that sacrifice.

The ethics of classical capitalism are the foundation and a key part of the entire system. The world order, the universe itself, rewards the entrepreneur for his virtues: hard work, the ability to take risks, talent, responsibility, and respect for impersonal rules and contracts.

Post-capitalism outwardly resembles classical capitalism, yet differs from it fundamentally precisely because of its different ethics. Ethics in postmodernity are flexible and fluid, based neither on religious ethics nor on the ideas of modernity, but above all on the current needs of business, using the classical values of capitalism as a set of symbols and semiotically assembling from them locally relevant meanings.

In late-modern capitalism, roles and ethics are already separated. The entrepreneur is expected to possess the talent of an inventor, personal strength, willpower, and, as a just reward, possible power and money. The wage worker is a person of average or below-average abilities who, within the system, is expected to conscientiously perform relatively simple labor. In return, the system offers stable demand for his skills and compensation ապահովing a basic level of survival.

In postmodernity, however, a mixing of roles emerges. The wage worker is expected to possess entrepreneurial skills: the ability to negotiate, self-presentation, innovativeness, a willingness to take risks, and hyper-motivation. At the same time, the double morality and division of roles remain: the worker must be devoted to the cause and to the company, and must be passionate about the work, while for the company he is an impersonal human resource, above all a source of profit and, above all, someone who satisfies the requirement of rapid interchangeability.

The startup industry works in a similar way. Symbolically, the classical scheme is still in place: the entrepreneur brings innovation to the market and, if successful, receives deserved reward. But the meaning of what is happening is inverted. It is unprofitable for corporations to invest money in engineering and market research, so the risks are shifted onto millions of young entrepreneurs who independently create a product and test a business model. If the basic model is proven, corporations simply buy the business at nominal value, leaving the founders with a minimal share while saving enormous sums on their own fruitless experiments. The founders have no other choice, since distribution channels are often already monopolized.

It is worth noting here that mass culture also adjusts itself in a timely way to the needs of the market. For example, in the late 1980s the image of the “street girl/boy” was popular and embodied in popular music and film characters. The rapid shift in IT is especially revealing: in the early 1990s the image of the punk/hacker was popular; in the 2000s, the successful yuppie bank worker; in the 2010s, the urban resident/hipster — because at different stages of market development, different types of labor resources were most needed by the market.

Current labor-market demands also change ethical and value demands. The young factory worker cheerfully spends time in a nightclub after his shift, whereas the social isolation and immersion in the work process of the “hipster” is idealized and emotionally presented as being “not like everyone else.”

There is no need to look for a conspiracy here — producers of media content were simply reading the current cultural layer. The cultural system sustains itself, and even on the lower social strata people uphold the values of their own stratum for the sake of self-actualization and self-identification. More often, it is harder to fall out of a social model than to remain fixed at its bottom.

In modernity, the nation is an instrument for legitimizing the state and power. In modernity, the nation is a multitude of people united—almost sacralized—on the one hand by a single language and by what is called folk culture—fairy tales, mythology, tradition, and the territory they inhabit—and, on the other hand, by shared economic, almost corporate interests that bind them into a state.

In this sense, Nazism was neither a malfunction nor an accident, nor some evil brought in from outside, but one of the terminal trajectories of modernity. Nazism is the ideas of modernity taken to their limit: the nation declared the highest value. Formally, it proclaims a cult of rationality, science, and technology—including through the demonstrative sacrifice of humanism, the treatment of the human being as a biological object, an animal, the adaptation of Darwin’s ideas to politics, and their transformation into racial theory and Social Darwinism. For Hegel, history is the self-unfolding of world spirit, moving through peoples, through Volksgeist, through concrete nations as if along the steps of a ladder. “The existence of the state is the march of God in the world; its foundation is the power of reason actualizing itself as will.” The Nazis push this idea to its political extreme, asserting the myth of the Thousand-Year Reich and of Germany as the culmination of this “divine march.” It is no coincidence that they enlisted Martin Heidegger as an ally, since he saw himself as the culmination and the “midnight of Being,” realized through Western philosophy and the German language.

At the same time—paradoxical only on the surface—the elite preaching cold rationalism is also drawn to mysticism, runes, Aryan myths, and rituals. This is not accidental, because myths and folk culture in modernity are instruments for legitimizing the nation and the state.

The modern liberal-conservative tradition claims that the “spirit of the West” is individual freedom. Yet Hegel—one of the key thinkers of the West—writes in the Philosophy of Right: “Freedom is recognized necessity.” That is, a person is free precisely to the extent that he consciously subjects his will to the rational will of the state/people (Volksgeist). So one of the central accusations against Nazism—the suppression of individual freedoms for the sake of a common goal—is also one of the central ideas of Western thought, carried through to its extreme.

It is important to note here that every viable thought, every effective ideology, is total. This means that it unfolds across all levels of the social system—some parts logically support others. Of course, most people do not sit with a philosophical or economic handbook and check their own logic of decision-making against it; rather, these are automatisms operating within the field of the thought’s own unfolding.

The history of the trials of Nazi criminals is revealing in this regard. They appeared rather confident in court, convinced that the very possibility of such a trial undermined the idea of the state as the basic unit of world order. Thus, the idea that citizens of a country acting in its interests could be put on trial seemed to them not merely debatable, but something that undermined the order of the world itself and therefore weakened the authority of the victors rather than strengthened it—making them, in their own eyes, potentially beyond judgment.

Nevertheless, they were prosecuted with full severity, which was, of course, not the cause, but one of the early symptoms of the decline of modernity. Soon afterward, Hannah Arendt proposed the concept of totalitarianism—humanistic and liberal in itself, but one that became one of the key instruments for the moral delegitimization of the enemy and for the reordering of the world. The enemies of the free world were no longer seen as полноценными competitors, but as less legitimate ones.

And yet, viewed more broadly, total orders had existed before as well: in the age of tradition, the world also subordinated the human being—his way of thinking, morality, economy, power, and private life in their entirety—through religion, sacred order, and ritual. The difference from modernity is that totality was derived not through rationalized meaning, but through religious sacrality. Postmodernity arises precisely at the peak of modernity, when it discovers there a residue of tradition not yet fully overcome. Interestingly, the West seems to place its own “children”—Nazism and communism—in brackets and declare them something external, something that was supposedly never really part of it.

Globalism belongs already to the age of postmodernity, when the idea of the state is overcome not through direct abolition, but through the highly productive instruments of postmodernity itself. “Suspicion toward grand narratives” renders any more or less fully articulated meaning too total, and so meaning is increasingly replaced by plastic form.

The concepts of nation, borders, and sovereignty do not disappear, but become plastic, playful, mobile instruments. For example, in Ukraine slogans appear such as “Ukraine above all”—an obvious calque of “Deutschland über alles,” with playful allusions to Nazism—while Nazism itself comes to be defined above all as “an attack on other countries.” On the one hand, it is said that Ukraine is a country for Ukrainians and that every effort must be made to ensure that the Ukrainian language is the main and only one; on the other hand, that the country must integrate into a broader common system. Ukraine is not a singular example: at one and the same time, both the priority of national legislation and national interests are proclaimed, and the conviction is maintained that “international law” has priority over national law. This is not necessarily hypocrisy—it is the normal logic of postmodernity, where contradiction ceases to be a malfunction and becomes an operating mode.

The key point here is not isolated contradictions, but international cooperation. Intercorporate ties and interests begin to compete with interstate ones not only in meaning, but in actual force and effectiveness. It is often no longer possible to determine unambiguously what strategy a given state is pursuing or whose interests it is serving.

The contemporary world order is neither a supranational government, nor a shadow center, nor a single headquarters. It is distributed. Yes, powerful centers of force exist, but they do not form a single vertical hierarchy. Interests are simultaneously contested by states, corporations, the global interests of various industries as communities of professionals who service them, theological concepts, ways of organizing society such as Islam, and secular adaptations of theocracy such as Zionism. For the most part, there are no global analytical centers. There are no concrete globalists in the form of specific individuals, secret societies like the “Freemasons,” or “Epstein clients.” Global financial companies also do not belong to any one particular person; rather, they form a network that includes owners of financial assets with a wide range of interests. The system unfolds itself according to its own internal laws, in which form productively dominates meaning. In globalism, there truly is no single coordinating center, no stable final meanings, and no ultimate goals.

Globalism sustains itself because it corresponds to the interests of an enormous number of people. Most of the industries that today provide labor and capital for the masses—education, production, capital itself, work processes, corporate culture—can exist at their present scale only globally. That is why globalism replicates and reproduces itself not only through external forms, but through the very practice of thought itself.

Every strong thought is total. The difference between epochs lies not in the presence or absence of totality, but in its mechanism. Modernity totalizes through meaning—nation, state, history, progress. Postmodernity totalizes differently—through form, network, procedure, compatibility, and the productive absence of a single obligatory meaning. Globalism, therefore, is not the disintegration of order, but a new, more flexible and more effective total assembly of the world.