This toot sparked off some thinking – A blinded assumption of modern Western liberalism has been that there is an automatic connection between free enterprise, liberal democracy and economic and technological progress. The story was simple that open markets create wealth, wealth creates a middle class, the middle class creates democracy, technology and progress naturally follow the same path. This became more than an economic theory, it became a “common sense” worldview – a belief that every successful society would eventually converge on the same path (this nasty mess is 50 years of #deathcult worshipping).
The assumption was that countries like China would either fail to catch up, or that if they did catch up economically, they would inevitably become more like the West politically. That assumption has now been challenged in the #mainstreaming thinking, not only by China’s rise, but also by the internal crisis of Western systems themselves. The rise of oligarchic politics, authoritarian movements, and the return of far-right nationalism inside liberal democracies has exposed something uncomfortable:
What we learned in the past and what we are learning today is that capitalism does not automatically produce democracy and that economic power can concentrate into forms that undermine democracy. The history of the early 20th century already showed this pattern, that in periods of crisis, concentrated wealth and political instability produce authoritarian outcomes rather than democratic renewal. It should by now be easy to see that the #mainstreaming mythology was always more fragile than it appeared.
The blindness of a single story – The problem was not only that the West misunderstood China. The deeper problem was the inability to imagine different paths. The dominant “common sense” story said “There is one successful model, everyone else is either behind or secretly becoming like us.”
This made it difficult to see what was actually happening. China’s development strategy did not emerge from copying one simple Western formula. It drew from multiple sources, one influence was the experience of the Soviet Union’s industrialisation. The Soviet five-year plans brutally transformed an agricultural society into an industrial power. The human costs were enormous, but the speed of industrial growth challenged Western assumptions during the 20th century.
The shock of events like the launch of Sputnik was not only technological, it was the fear that a different economic and organisational path was capable of producing rapid scientific and industrial progress. A second influence came from observing East Asian development, countries often presented as examples of “free market success” were much more complicated. South Korea’s industrial rise had strong state direction, industrial planning, protected markets, and coordinated investment. Singapore – often misunderstood in Western political debates – developed through a path of authoritarian public ownership, state planning, and strategic intervention.
The lesson is not that one system is automatically superior, the lesson is that reality is always messier than blinded invisible ideology. Successful societies have always borrowed, adapted, experimented, and mixed approaches.
The danger is the belief that there must be one correct path. This is the same cultural problem we see across technology, politics, and social organising. A single dominant path becomes so normal that alternatives appear impossible. But societies are not machines, they are ecosystems, they grow through relationships, institutions, culture, trust, experimentation, and shared knowledge. Diversity is not weakness, the value of alternatives is not simply that one alternative will “win”. The value is that diversity creates resilience.
A forest with one species is fragile, a network with one path is fragile, a society with one accepted model is fragile. Different communities, different approaches, and different experiments create the possibility of learning. This is one of the core lessons of the #openweb. The power does not come from control, the power comes from linking different nodes together.
#4opens federation works because diversity is a feature, different servers, different communities, different cultures – connected through shared protocols. The alternative is the #closedweb model: one platform, one algorithm, one owner, one business logic – that is efficient for control, but fragile for society.
The future needs linking, not convergence. The mistake of much modern politics is searching for the final answer. The better question is, how do we create systems where many answers can coexist, communicate, and improve each other?
This is the #OMN approach, of not replacing one dominant ideology with another, to create another closed system, But building networks where alternatives can exist, connect, and evolve.
To come back to china, the lesson from history is not “capitalism failed” or “state planning succeeded”. The lesson is that no single path owns progress. Human creativity comes from diversity, the future will not be built by everyone becoming the same. It will be built by creating the conditions where different paths can connect, learn, and grow.
OMN #openweb #4opens #alternatives #federation #diversity #nothingnew