People want to return to the viking age, pagnism, the Roman Empire, the crusader era, all the way to monke.
All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified, where you could be something that wasn’t a commodity, but all of those societies are dead, murdered, butchered up, commodified, and the lifeless remains for sale to you. There is no bringing them back, they’re dead forever, which is the fate of all societies and communities that fall under capitalism, the cultural remains endlessly recycled on product boxes to evoke faint ideas of what used to be. Nothing new can grow under this superstructure, only the endless parade of the corpses of what used to be.
There’s a good essay on Marxism in Tolkiens universe that tries to understand it’s near-universal appeal. It basically comes down to nostalgia for an idealized feudal past without forced labor, poverty, famines or plagues. There’s even a section on this in the manifesto :
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society…In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history…
All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified
I have found, through discussing politics and world events with friends and family, that most people have a similar idea of what a fair and good world looks like.
Most people want their neighborhood to look like the Hallmark cards, not asphalt carbrain dystopias.
Most people think it is wrong to live off the work of others.
Most people want their work to have meaning, to be part of a greater purpose; to advance humanity in the abstract, as one species and not as individuals.
Ironically on this latter point, the military actually sort of offers this. If you join the military you won’t be rich, but you will be taken care of in a quasi-socialist fashion. You work toward a greater common purpose. Yet most in the military do not realize this, how the “real” economy is far more precarious for most workers.
