Bhabani Shankar Nayak
In society, the insidious politics of crony capitalism is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, supported by the reckless growth of AI and other technologies designed to dominate, domesticate, and dehumanise people and their societies. Alongside this, an illiberal politics of cowardice is emerging to aid this broader project of dehumanisation, amid growing imperialist wars and conflicts across the world.
The push-button culture of digitally displayed keyboards is shaping social media networks into a disconnected, individualised, Hobbesian society, where the puritan pursuit of self-interest is becoming central to human existence. In such a condition, the hollowness of social life and the alienation of individuals are normalised as merely personal problems, disconnected from their social, cultural, religious, economic, and political roots— roots fundamentally shaped by capitalism—where performance replaces creativity.
Civic space erodes under the politics of cowardice, where secular and scientific convictions are treated as weaknesses, while the monetisation of time, a culture of performance, and exploitative profit-making compliances are celebrated as success.
In politics, moral and ideological convictions are increasingly replaced by a merely project-driven approach, where propaganda-oriented policymaking undermines social, political, economic, and cultural trans formation along a progressive path toward liberty, equality, and justice. Idealistic opposition to war, exploitation, inequality, and injustice is branded as hollow utopianism—the pacifi sm of the weak. Politics is no longer a tool of social and political change but a project of powerful.
Politics that breeds conflicts and wars to serve ruling-class interests is reframed as nationalism, where risks are socialised while the safety of life and property of the governing class is secured. The politics of cowardice produces authoritarian leadership devoid of reason and accountability. It abdicates responsibility, avoids challenges, ignores facts, and governs through fear—the fear of the “other.” “Othering” becomes a central weapon of reactionary forces, enabling them to sustain power while producing and reproducing inequality and exploitation in various forms. It divides people in the name of caste, race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalism to sustain the exploitative system. In culture, consumerism absorbs the exploitative system and takes over the material, social, and spiritual interactions of people, where moral outrage is replaced by a culture of pragmatism in which “all forms of compromise” are branded as the best “survival skills.” Collective cultures are dismantled or replaced by an insidious individualism, where the consumption of everyday “utility, pleasure, and satisfaction” shapes individual actions in pursuit of a supercilious form of self-actualisation—resembling a quasi-religious logic of emancipation after death.
In religions, individuals learn to institutionalise their spiritual practices, reducing them to customs and traditions that often serve to assert the supremacy of one over another. All in stitutionalised religions—and their agents and agencies—frequently act as intermediaries for governing classes, reinforcing capitalism as a system. All social, political, economic, cultural, religious, and legal institutions—and their practices—are designed in ways that discipline labour, as well as the processes of production, consumption, and distribution. Families, states, governments, and society—through their institutions, traditions, customs, and practices—condition individuals in pursuit of goals not necessarily aligned with their own passions or interests. Therefore, individuals are, to a significant extent, products of their society and upbringing.
Breaking out of such systemic processes is a difficult choice, requiring radical consciousness and a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives and experiences. All these forces shape individual lives in such a way that individuals end up merely working all life for basic survival, while also being blamed for the many evils of contemporary society. In reality, individuals are trapped within patriarchal, feudal, and capitalist structures and processes of power controlled by governing classes. From the idealisation of pragmatism to the culture of performance, these systems are designed to domesticate individuals and undermine the collective foundations of their lives and survival.
Therefore, it is imperative to break away from such constructed systems and processes, which exist to discipline and domesticate individual lives in the service of capitalism in all its forms. Capitalism produces cowardice and kills ideals of all human values and their collective foundations. It is time to reclaim the collective foundations of individual freedom—so that people can truly pursue their own dreams, desires, and lives.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
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