The title refers to the stripping of any sense of citizenship in the New World Order.
In all these cases whatever happens to social life - suspension, dissolution, balkanization, implosion, a state of emergency - what happens to normal citizens is that citizenship (bios) evaporates. But ruling elites - political, economic, financial - don't care about citizenship. They're only interested in passive consumers.Escobar demonstrates in this piece that he is not only the world's premier journalist, but also a highly educated profound thinker. If you are like me, you will find yourself scrambling for an (online) dictionary and googling strange authors to find out what they've written. In other words, you will have your mind stretched to follow along with his attempt to make sense out of our current world.
After taking us on an intellectual tour through a tunnel of neoliberal horrors, he ends this deep essay ironically where he began in his satire of Burt Bacharach's famous pop song.
How cozy it would be to summon the retro-spirit of Burt Bacharach to define our geopolitical future and start singing, "What the world needs now / is love, sweet love".Maybe that is all we have left to fall back on in our struggle for survival.
