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.
Pankaj MishraRead
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.
Pankaj MishraRead
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.
Pankaj MishraRead
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.
Pankaj MishraRead
Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.
Pankaj MishraRead
Similar quotes
First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany's case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts although these...sometimes led her to walk into doors.
Terry PratchettRead
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
James A. BaldwinRead
The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.
Seneca The YoungerRead
Two days overdue, THE WORLD'S WORK has not reached me. Pray make a note of this. I would rather not have to resort to violence.
Mark TwainRead
Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.
G. I. GurdjieffRead
Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July.
Ronald ReaganRead