We might benefit from a unifying perspective that fills the vacuum that nationalism and religion once did. Western culture offers tolerance and stories where plot plays second fiddle to individual growth. Yet, ironically, although cultural limitations continue to melt away, economic and physical realities threaten to corral us all. We are collaborating in waste and oppression, and disagreeing only about the meaning we find in how we go about it.Žižek: Tolerance is not a solution there. What we need is what the Germans call a Leitkultur, a higher leading culture that regulates the way in which the subcultures interact. Multiculturalism, with its mutual respect for the sensitivities of the others, no longer works when it gets to this "impossible-à-supporter" stage. Devout Muslims find it impossible to tolerate our blasphemous images and our disrespectful humor, which constitute a part of our freedom. But the West, with its liberal practices, also finds forced marriages or the segregation of women, which are a part of Muslim life, to be intolerable. That's why I, as a Leftist, argue that we need to create our own leading culture.
Stories of a collective plot play second fiddle to individual plot (self-actualise yourself, but you are self-actualising yourself in a nightmare). Actually, there isn't even a collective plot anymore. Fundamentalists want to hide in their stupid past-world. Transhumanists want to hide in a computer. Here I think post-modern multiculturalism is in fact a view that itself produces fundamentalism because it gives us no direction - then people just stupidly cling to a non-existent past or a non-existent future.stories where plot plays second fiddle to individual growth.
Interested point. It's interesting to think of liberal multiculturalism as a monoculture that suppresses push influences upon society, but tolerates pull influences. By that avenue, capitalism wins, unions lose. Success is 'giving the people what they want'. It is fashionable to obsess about the means, but not about the ends. We have a cultural litmus test for the means, not the ends.