Forecasting the future course of
events is famously and notoriously hard. Some clever people (Keynes) failed at
it. Some slightly less clever failed at it spectacularly (Marx, regardless of the fawning article about
his prescience recently penned by Louis Menand in the New Yorker: Salvaging Marx; regarding which I can not avoid
pointing out that a) no, Marx was empathetically NOT a philosopher, as much as
he would have liked to… too many descriptions of contingent reality and too few
considerations of necessary truths in his works; b) no, Marx was empathetically
NOT a subtle & deep chronicler of early capitalism, as he could only
describe, in a most disfigured way, only a portion of what happened around him
whilst missing a lot of the underlying currents of why society was choosing and
coalescing precisely the set of values it did by mid XIX century; and c) no,
Marx was empathetically NOT an exemplar thinker and human being, as he didn’t
love Jenny enough to stay true to her, he didn’t love his children enough to
abandon his daydreaming and idle theorizing and investigating in his office and
get a real job, however deadening and boring, to adequately provide for them
and he didn’t love workers all the world over enough to leave aside his petty
squabbles with other socialist “leaders” and forge a truly universal , viable,
not cult-of-personality oriented movement to actually improve their lives). I’m
pretty sure I’m failing at it right now and making a lot of predictions which
will never come to pass. Such is the lot of the self-anointed prophet, and the only
way of never being wrong is never saying anything empirically testable at all.
All this was my as usual convoluted
way of stating that I don’t make predictions about Western civilization
imminent downfall because I see it as my duty (the first and foremost
explanation of any behavior for a Kantian like me) or because I think it will
somehow hasten the occurrence of events already foreordained and thus it will
facilitate the advance of the world-spirit, or of reason knowing itself, or of
human conscience realizing more of its potential and thus liberating itself
faster. Probably I just do it for fun, and because it helps me make sense of
the apparently chaotic reality we live in, and because guessing what may be in
store for us creates an illusion of meaning and purpose about the everyday
events that, without such illusion, would make of history just the
unintelligible succession of “one damn thing after the other” in which from any
set of facts anything could follow. I once talked about Collingwood’s understanding
of history as the systematic effort to put ourselves in the head of the main
characters of past deeds, and to think and feel as they thought and felt back
then. Similarly, a good prognosticator is he (or she) who can foresee how the
future actors may think and feel, and how the decisions they will make will
look like from their very particular and idiosyncratic point of view, a point
of view made by a dominant reason (a set of accepted desires, an understanding
of what a life well lived consists in and a
criteria for bestowing social recognition) and by a shared cornucopia of
ideas, common places, narratives and cultural artifacts (songs, movies, fiction
books and even iconic clothes). All of which points to the fact that you
shouldn’t take my predictions of doom too seriously, as a new golden age may be
just around the corner as well.
However, in my last couple of posts
I wasn’t exactly betting on a sustained improvement of the world’s economic
conditions (except for some developing or already half-developed countries like
China and India, which could still expect to see significant rates of
productivity and total output growth just by implementing social technologies
that the advanced West developed a good four or five decades ago). My hunch
still points strongly towards a long period of stagnation in that same West, as
the source of its original creativity (a dominant reason extraordinarily suited
to elicit the maximum production of material goods and services from every
single individual, not so much for making them happy or helping them live
fulfilling lives) had already exhausted its historical cycle and had become
inimical to that very same goal, so now all it could produce was rent-seeking
(that will be sold as protection of innovation, albeit an innovation less and
less capable of improving the average guy’s living standard), political
polarization, repression along racial and class lines, a tighter grip on the
total social product by a self-perpetuating elite and increasingly suboptimal arrangements to deal
with the increasing pressure of a changing landscape. I have already explored
the most benign scenario of how such exhaustion may play off (think Japan, in
which a population ages into oblivion without much fuss, and the decreasing
total output translates into less per capita wealth so slowly that nobody
really much cares), and in this post I want to explore the much more unpleasant
alternative of how things may be sped up by a major disruption of the relations
that underlie the functioning of our society.
There are so many alternatives from
which to choose one such disruption that I’ll just list a few to give my
readers a taste of what I’m talking about:
·
A
nuclear device is detonated on a major Western city, after which martial law is
indefinitely imposed for the first time in an advanced democracy since WWII,
and there goes your democracy, rule of law and the like (if you think
Government power over its citizens grew inordinately after Sep/11th after
a bit over 3,000 deaths think about the same dynamic on steroids after 3
million). Once a “reference state” (most likely the USA, because honestly, what
would you bet was the most likely target of most of today’s terrorist
attempting such a coup, be they extremist Islamists, North Koreans, narcotic
smugglers, crazy environmentalists or white supremacists?) suspends statutory
guarantees (habeas corpus, the right
to challenge one’s imprisonment in court, the right to be publicly judged and
the like), free press and likely elections (who thinks about voting in a state
of total war and with such level of carnage so recent) my prediction is that
the rest will quietly and discreetly go down the same route without the need of
such a heinous act in their own motherlands. We’ll expand on the effect of the
lack of democracy later on, as it will turn out to be a common thread of most
catastrophic changes.
·
All-out
war breaks between two major powers. As only the USA and China qualify as such
for the near future, basically that means a new Sino-American war, most likely around
the annexation of Taiwan (that China will attempt as soon as it economic growth
seriously stalls and it stops being able to buy its excess population with
additional make-believe jobs, thus resorting to aggressive nationalism to
bolster the legitimacy of the CCP). Of course for the USA to take the bait and
retaliate seriously after such China movement it needs to have previously excited
the anti-China feelings of its own excess population to a frenzied pitch, which
doesn’t require really a great leap of the imagination seeing how easily they
did it against Japan in WWII. There are a number of horrific wars that may
happen apart from that one (between Russia and the EU, between China and Japan,
China and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, India and Pakistan, etc.) but none of
them have the potential to destabilize the global system and send markets
crashing down everywhere, catapulting all of us in a new Dark Age (maybe the
first one would be the closer to achieving it, which makes it even less likely
than it already is).
·
Social
revolution and breakdown of any semblance of law and order in a major Western
power, devolving into civil war and major economic disruption. There are only
two major powers in risk of breakdown (or rather, there are two powers were
such breakdown seems more imminent, as if it happens and global economic
conditions deteriorate in all the rest, sooner or later they will also become
ripe for major upheaval): USA (see my post on potential outcomes after Trump
loses the current election: the coming NAWNSP)
and China once it stops growing above 5-6%, which is dangerously close to its
current rate (that is the widely assumed rate needed to keep adding enough jobs
to the labor force to absorb the masses pouring into the coastal cities
escaping rural misery and underdevelopment). You may object to such analysis
that the USA, albeit apparently riven by party and racial animus is a stable,
well stablished democracy with more than two and a half centuries of pacific
coexistence, that has weathered previous storms (like the protests against the
Vietnam war and the racial riots in the seventies) and came out unscathed. I’m
sceptic, as not all those centuries have been so peaceful (remember the
bloodiest conflict they’ve experienced was their very own civil war in the
second half of the nineteenth century) and there are two important differences
between the present and any previous period of their history: the insane amount
of firearms in the hands of a significant portion of the population (over 300
million guns, almost one per citizen, regardless of legal status) and the
continued period of self-segregation and isolation in ever more self-contained “information
bubbles” enabled by the rise of social media and the Internet. We will see the
destabilizing effects of such tendencies after the loss of the election by
Trump is confirmed and some of his followers accept as valid his delirious
narrative of the cause being the illegitimate manipulation by a “rigged system”
that has stolen what is rightfully theirs.
In any of those scenarios we would see an
abrupt stop of life as we have come to know it, and a collapse of the rule of
law, free trade and democratic rule. It has to be noted that in all three I see
democracy being thrown under the bus to maintain the appearance of normalcy and
basically to keep the shelves of supermarkets stoked and the economic engine
purring. That is, what they show us is that the greater risks to our current
social compact do not derive from the difficulty of aggregating the preferences
of the many (something that has been difficult since the system was invented in
Athens a bunch of centuries ago), but from the attempts of the few to keep its
economic rules, even if that can only be achieved by sacrificing the political
participation of the masses.
Not that surprising, as Dave Graeber
has been maintaining for years that every time that capitalism has been
presented with the choice between evolving towards a greater inclusiveness
(relaxing the rules of competition or increasing redistribution for the sake of
greater efficiency, say) or become more exclusionary and unequal in order to
maintain the status quo it has chosen
the second alternative. Indeed, the common thread that runs through much of the
neoreactionary thought is that democracy has failed and should be rolled back,
and what such rolling back intends to achieve is the continued functioning of
the markets as we know them (nicely illustrating the validity of Graeber’s
dictum).
I don’t know you, but if I had to
choose between capitalism and democracy (as I see we will collectively have to
do sooner rather than later: Sophie's Choice)
I would probably give it a lot of thought, rather than blindly decide for the
continuation of the first even if that meant renouncing to the second.
However, it may well be a false
choice, as capitalism in its current (cybernetic, post-industrial,
information-technology dependent) form requires a façade of democracy to draw
legitimacy from, and to ensure the consent of the many that are not deriving
any material benefit from it (that’s what a dominant reason is for: ensuring
the acquiescence of the masses to a global system that is not specially favorable
to them). I have few doubts that in the coming years we will witness a global
weakening of democratic institutions, and an overall degradation of the until
now widely accepted standards of what constitutes “common rule”. Such evolution
will be greatly accelerated in case any of the disruptive events I described in
the beginning of this post comes to pass, which would push the affected society
even faster into openly totalitarian terrain. But such change is unlikely to
revive the fading fortunes of our economic system, as an oppressed populace is
no more likely (and may very well be even less) to participate in the currently
imposed way of life as a free one. You may impose on them martial law, suspend
elections, erect barriers to trade and to people’s movement, even convert
current countries into homogeneous ethno-states, under permanent surveillance
and strict censorship, but it won’t make them want to a) work more and b)
reproduce again above maintenance level.
The reason they won’t work more is
because our current system has already maximized the output that could be
extracted from a given set of the population, a set whose optimal size may have
very well been reached in the 70’s, and is already going down a blind alley of
virtualization and immediate gratification for a minority that absorbs their
attention and efforts during the most productive part of their lives and then
discards them like empty shells when there is not much they can do about it.
The reason they won’t reproduce is because under the current value system their
life, although potentially rich in material possessions (although even that can
not be taken for granted, being replaced by “virtual” possessions that is still
unclear that can effectively play the same role) is ultimately poor in what
makes human lives worthy of being lived, and a neo-fascistic, neo-nationalistic
dystopia (doesn’t matter how racially homogeneous) is not going to get their
juices flowing again and change the direction of their gonadal vote. Dominant
reasons come only once, and that type of value package (it’s called romantic
reason for all of you boys and girls not stepped enough in my terminology) was
tried once, and found wanting.
A more interesting question than “can
authoritarianism pull it off”? (whose answer is “obviously not”) would be “what
changes in the set of values (in the dominant reason) would need to happen for
the society adopting them becoming viable enough?” or “what should we change in
the whole package to revitalize and re-energize the social system?”. I’ve
attempted at various kinds of answers, from a (more or less) comprehensive
manifesto (Anarcho Traditionalist Manifesto I
and II
and III
and IV
and finally V)
to an idyllic vision of what an utopian future would look like, regardless of
how we got there (Our sunny future I
and second installment
and third and last),
so it’s not like I haven’t devoted much time to thinking about it. However, I
also humbly recognize none of my ideas have the tiniest sliver of a chance to
ever become even remotely real. What revolutions bring is misery for all and a
global degradation of the material conditions of living of most. And
revolutions is what we have coming our way, so better be prepared…
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