Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
Pankaj MishraRead
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Globalization aims to create uniformity, yet it intensifies social and economic disparities.
This quote by Pankaj Mishra highlights the paradox of globalization, where the promise of a homogenized world through global brands is contradicted by the emergence of significant differences and inequalities created by uneven economic development. While people may have access to the same products, the socio-economic divides between them can become more pronounced, leading to a deeper sense of difference rather than unity.
Themes
GlobalizationSamenessInequalityEconomic GrowthDifference
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on economic disparities, I referenced Mishra's quote to illustrate the impacts of globalization.
More from Pankaj Mishra
All quotes βAs a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
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Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.
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The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.
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The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
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Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.
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