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Once you stop believing the official rhetoric that liberal society is "natural" or "what happens when people are free", etc, the question becomes: "What the hell is this thing for?" Why have we created this bizarre, atomizing, alienating, transgressive society?
What you have to do is look at the 'other' that liberalism constructs, the thing it takes itself to be the opposite of. The liberal 'other' is what I call 'techno-statism'. It is an organic, functionally-organized, hierarchical, technological state.
Liberal democratic political organization is aimed at concealing hierarchy. Atomization, alienation, etc, are aimed at concealing functional organization - i.e., the labor contract conceals the part-whole relationship you play in collective projects by framing it as an exchange.
Transgression and perversion are also aimed at undermining functional relationships. Gender roles, families, sex, etc, all serve social reproduction. They play a functional part in realizing the good of the whole and liberalism subjectivizes and conceals these basic relationship.
None of this is happening by accident. It's all part of an elaborate containment strategy aimed at suppressing 'techno-statism', both at home and abroad. Within liberal states it operates as concealment and suppression; for everyone else: coercion, subversion, propaganda, war.
Liberalism is 'self-aware' to a certain degree, in the sense that if you describe 'techno-statism' to them they'll recognize it as Bad Thing (nowadays it'd be 'fascism', in an earlier age it would've been 'absolutism') and acknowledge the need to suppress it at home and aboard.
However, no liberal really understands that there's nothing to liberalism other than containment. It's a purely negative doctrine. It aims at avoiding an outcome and nothing else. Because of this, it's extremely dangerous: it 'wins' in scenarios where civilization-as-such loses.
Liberalism wins if there's a civilization-ending nuclear war, liberalism wins if the Earth becomes uninhabitable before we become space-faring, liberalism wins if peoples and ideologies that are incapable of high-tech civilization become dominant (even if they're not liberal).
