The crisis of liberalism is not first a crisis of institutions. It is a crisis of character.
Liberalism presupposes a certain kind of human being: disciplined, inwardly serious, morally self-governing, capable of freedom without dissolving into appetite, resentment, or mass psychology. It requires people who can live with liberty because they possess enough inner form to give liberty meaning.
That is precisely where the modern West is failing.
Many people today are still searching for transcendence. They still want elevation, purification, moral drama, and contact with something higher than the self. But having lost the religious vocabulary through which such longings were once disciplined, and lacking the inward moral strength demanded by serious philosophy, they now search for transcendence in politics, identity, history, and collective belonging.
This helps explain the strange renewed attraction to Marxism, post-colonialism, and other totalizing social theories.
They offer what ordinary liberal life no longer seems able to provide: meaning, guilt, redemption, enemy, community, and a path of ascent.
In this sense, the modern radical does not really abandon Plato. He relocates Plato.
The Platonic ideal is no longer sought through the difficult moral refinement of the soul. It is no longer pursued through virtue, or contemplation of the good. Instead, it is projected outward into history, society, class, race, gender, empire, and power.
This is the great inversion.
Iris Murdoch understood that the moral life depends upon attention: the painful, patient, inward work by which the self learns to see reality more truthfully and less selfishly. The good is not achieved by slogans, but through the purification of vision. Karl Popper, from the other direction, warned against placing abstract ideals inside grand historical projects. Once the perfect society becomes the aim of politics, human beings are quickly treated as material to be shaped, corrected, reeducated, or sacrificed.
Our age has done exactly the opposite of what wisdom required.
It has abandoned the Platonic ideal where Murdoch sought it - inside the soul, and placed it precisely where Popper feared it most: inside history, politics, and the collective. The result is identity as worship.
The “I” depends on a social rubric, recognized by others, in order to become real to itself. Now A person no longer asks: How do I become better? He asks which identity grants me moral meaning? Which group gives me innocence? Which enemy clarifies my existence? Which collective struggle allows me to rise above myself? This is where the new Marxism meets the old Marxist instinct.
Class struggle has been replaced by identity struggle, but the structure remains familiar. There must be an oppressor, an oppressed, a false consciousness, a required awakening, and a process of transformation. The old economic revolution becomes a cultural and psychological revolution.
Here the Maoist element is crucial.
The genius of Maoist politics was not merely economic. It was educational. It understood that the revolution must enter consciousness itself. People must not only obey new rules; they must become new people. They must undergo correction, confession, ideological purification, and permanent moral mobilization. That is also the logic behind much of what is now called “woke” politics. Everyone is summoned into a new consciousness. Within that consciousness, the individual may supposedly rise to a higher moral state. But this ascent always requires an enemy. The self becomes clearer only through struggle against the impure, the backward, the privileged, the reactionary, or the unenlightened. The “I” and the “we” are purified together through conflict.
This turns the social condition into a total condition. Society becomes the arena in which the self receives its highest meaning. The other person becomes not merely a neighbor, citizen, or opponent, but a necessary witness to my own moral realization. And through this purely social act, the world is supposed to be redeemed. That is why this ideology takes such interest in education.
Every totalizing movement eventually discovers the classroom - because education is where the human being is still unfinished.
The purpose may not always be explicit conversion. Sometimes it is softening. But the deeper purpose is always the same: to make the population available for transformation.
The new ideological classroom asks the student to awaken.
There is a religious structure here, even when the content is secular. There is sin, confession, conversion, heresy, ritual language, moral purification, and collective redemption. This is why certain forms of radical politics can resemble religious movements more than ordinary political programs. This also explains the strange relationship between modern radicalism and transhumanism.
At first glance, they appear different. The social radical seeks transformation through politics, identity, and collective struggle. The transhumanist seeks transformation through technology, biology, and a new iteration of existence itself.
But both begin from the same dissatisfaction with ordinary man. The radical says: man must be socially remade. The transhumanist says: man must be technologically surpassed. Neither is content with the small, morally struggling, finite human being who must work upon himself within the limits of nature, tradition, family, and mortality. Both offer a shortcut to transcendence. And both risk weakening the very person they claim to liberate.
Every grand idealist system eventually flatters the little man while reducing him. It tells him he is powerful, awakened, historic, chosen, oppressed, liberated, enhanced, or future-facing. But in practice, it often captures only one part of his life and expands it into a total identity.
The rich may be tempted through guilt and moral vanity. The poor may be tempted through promises of bread, status, or revenge. The lonely may be tempted through belonging. The educated may be tempted through theory. The anxious may be tempted through certainty. The mechanism is parasitic because it feeds on the work, guilt, fear, loneliness, and moral confusion of ordinary people.
And this crisis is not ending soon.
It survives by producing permanent extremity. There must always be a new emergency, a new enemy, a new awakening, a new category, a new demand for transformation. The system cannot rest because rest would return the individual to himself — and the entire structure exists to prevent that return.
This is the deeper crisis of liberalism.
Liberalism cannot survive merely by defending procedures, courts, markets, elections, and rights. These are necessary, but they are not enough. Liberal civilization requires a kind of person capable of living freely without seeking salvation in the crowd.
That person is becoming rare.
The West did not stop believing in Plato. It only placed Plato in the wrong place.
It stopped seeking the good through the discipline of the soul and began seeking it through the purification of society.
That is why politics has become so religious, identity has become so sacred, and disagreement has become so unbearable.
The modern world is not suffering from too little transcendence.
It is suffering from transcendence misdirected.
