These last weeks have given us more
examples of the demise of traditional parties, and the rise of groups that the
MSM likes to portray as “extremists” or, until recently, “fringe”:
·
The
Brazilian presidential election has been won by Jair Bolsonaro, widely depicted
as the local version of Donald Trump because of his incendiary declarations
condemning homosexuals and darkly warning of the dangers of a “communist threat”
that, after almost 14 years of PT (workers’ party) government, probably existed
only in his fevered head
·
Two
consecutive regional elections in Germany (in Bavaria and in Hesse) have seen
the collapse to its lowest levels since WWII of the traditional center-right (the
Christian-Democrat CDU and its Bavarian variant, the CSU) and center-left (the
social democrats of the SPD), and the concomitant rise of the far-right
Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Greens (considered not long ago to be
far-left, but in these confused times who knows how they are classified any
more)
Those electoral tidings that resonate with
a number of similar ones (the election of Donald Trump in the USA, the victory of
Brexit in the UK, the formation of a government dominated by the Lega Norte in
Italy, the ascent of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the
consolidation in power of the authoritarian forces coalescing around Erdogan in
Turkey, Orban in Hungary and Kaczinsky in Poland, etc.) which I already analyzed
in a previous post The allure of populism
.
In this post, I want to provide a
further explanation of why those forces are in the ascendant, why we can expect
to see many more of them winning elections, governing and consolidating their
hold on power, and why, far from preventing the collapse I mentioned in my last
post (Decline and fall, indeed
) they are the surest sign of its inevitability. We won’t avoid “this” collapsing
by electing extremists and letting them try (foreordained to fail) alternatives
to the current social compact, we will rather ensure that “this” goes to hell
in a swifter, speedier fashion, as those “alternatives” promising easy fixes to
complex problems, once given the chance to actually spread their fairy dust
over the electoral body, will miserably fail and only hasten the demise of “this”.
“This”, of course, being our current
socioeconomic system, and its dominant reason (the ideological underpinning
that both justifies it and keeps it humming along by indoctrinating every
member of society to play by certain rules that, although noxious for each
individual, happen to be great to smother any alternative that may be
presented). To understand why the failure of the “extremist” or “populist”
alternatives is unavoidable, let’s quickly summarize the problems that affect
every single one of today’s societies, stated as succinctly and pithily as
possible (so do not expect any of my usual rhetorical flourishes in the
following enumeration):
1. Demographic collapse of advanced
(and middle-income) economies, with number of births in all of Europe, America
(North and South), Oceania and North of Africa and Asia below replacement
levels (not yet in India, but getting there surefootedly), and increasing life
expectation causing a ballooning of unfunded liabilities in the most advanced
economies in the form of medical costs and social security for retirees that
the new generations will be unable to provide
2. Demographic explosion of Sub-Saharan
Africa, that increasingly depends on the rest of the world to feed a population
that keeps growing (as the increasing amount of international help barely
compensates the increase in mouths to feed, they stay at about the same level
of poverty, that in turn keeps the incentives for having as many babies as
possible in place… for a notably delirious and pigheaded analysis of the
problem see Douthat: all of Europe's problems would disappear if womin went back to having seven babies each
)
3. Increasing intra-country inequality,
somewhat compensated by a shrinking inter-country one. But at some point,
Chinese peasants will be more riled up by the differing fortunes between
themselves and rich city-dwellers than by the joy of seeing the diminishing differences
between them and rust belt Americans. And who knows? May be rust belt Americans
will stop being assuaged by the fact the blacks and Latinos still have it worse
than themselves, and will in turn be riled up by the fact that all the improvements
in wealth production of the last fifty years have been vacuumed up by the
richest 1% between them
4. Environmental degradation, caused by
the increasing pressure of a growing/ much grown population on a finite planet.
Such degradation takes the form of shrinking wild habitats, loss of
biodiversity and, the one with the biggest potential for worsening our quality
of life, anthropogenic climate change
5. Technological stagnation or, rather,
technological development of the “wrong” technologies: we do not invent much
that help us produce more material goods with less effort (thus, we are getting
significantly worse at generating energy, extracting less and less Megawatts
from each megawatt devoted to the production of the required infrastructure,
ditto for transportation, agriculture, residential building and space
exploration), but such lack of inventiveness and technological development is
clouded (and people are kept ignorant about it) by the stupendous development
of technologies to capture our attention and entertain us (aka dupe us, fool
us, lie to us, deceive us, delude us, distract us and whatnot)
Those are serious problems. Because
of them, the generation that today have between 0 and 15 years in the advanced
economies will have the dubious honor of being the first, since the collapse of
the Roman Empire of the West, to enjoy a life materially worse than their
parents’ (the Chinese and Indians and Latin Americans may get a bit more
mileage from playing catch up, in their case may be its two generations down
the line that will have that same distinction). They will have ubiquitous
Internet access and will enjoy almost for free any entertainment we can dream
of, but Alas! That entertainment will be dismal, crappy and despondent. How do
I know? Because dying, decadent societies are unable to create great art. Creating
durable, inspiring, arresting art requires believing there are things that
really matter, identifying oneself with great narratives bigger than us, being
able to sacrifice one’s own comfort for the good of others or for the sake of
self-expression, or believing in sources of meaning outside of the material
world. And almost nobody in the West or in the East, in the Northern hemisphere
or in the Southern one, truly believes in that any more. They can only be
cynical, post-modern, self-referential, jaded, detached. More Banksy than
Michel Angelo. More Jay Z than Beethoven. So yep, they will populate the
noosphere (or the memeplex, or whatever idiotic name the clever studious of the
virtual reality want to concoct) with catchy images and catchy tunes and
catchy, snazzy ideas (expressed in less than 140 characters, who has time for
more than that?) that will go viral in ever shortening times, and be consumed
by ever increasing amounts of rapt audiences, only to be forgotten as fast, in
the perpetual pursuit of the latest fad and the latest trend, all equally
perishable and equally fast forgotten. What’s more, that deluge of empty entertainment
will not make us a iota happier, will not make our life a iota worthier, and
will not, thus, make us want to propagate it a iota more than now (which is not
much, see problem #1).
But before we get there (the nuts
and bolts I mentioned in the title, more about them in a moment), let us review
what answers the “traditional” (i.e. non-populist) parties, the representatives
of the majority of the people (according to the establishment) are offering to
those serious, seemingly intractable problems:
·
From
the right, we hear that
o
1.
Is no problem at all: less people? More riches to enjoy between the remaining
ones! And if we really want more people (i.e. if we took the demographic
suicide of advanced and not-so-advanced economies seriously) all we would need
to do was ban abortions and limit access to contraceptives! (never mind
European societies have been successfully controlling their reproduction rates
since the XVIII century, when abortion was as effectively banned as the most
traditional conservative could dream of and no contraceptives existed)
o
2.
Is a convenient excuse for more socially regressive policies: those dark guys
pouring over our frontiers are the source of all our social problems, give more
weapons to the police to keep them out and send back those who seep inside!
o
3.
Is a blessing: inequality spurs innovation and incentivizes the right behavior
by rewarding the industrious entrepreneurs that create wealth for all and
punishing the lazy, undeserving poor
o
4.
Is a temporary blip: if we keep on incentivizing those same industrious
entrepreneurs they will come up with technology-based solutions to those problems
(clean energy technologies! Carbon capture to reverse climate change! Cloning to
retrieve extinguished species! Age-reversing medicine to make us immortal!)
o
5.
Is not happening at all: thanks to Moore law, technological change has not only
not stagnated, but is still accelerating. What if TFP is not increasing as it
used to? It is surely a measurement error, and we are one expansive cycle away
from reaching a post-scarcity society where we will be able to tie dogs with
sausages!
·
Whilst
from the traditional left we receive the following messages regarding the challenges
we face:
o
1.
Is no problem at all: less people? Less pressure on the sacred Earth! We humans
are a cancer on the planet, anyways, so the less of us there is the better!
o
2.
Is a convenient excuse for more redistribution: those unlucky individuals are
not responsible for being born in the wrong place (true), so they have as good
a claim as us to the collective benefits our society bestows on its undeserving
members (false, if their enjoyment of such benefits would make said benefits
disappear both for them and for us, as is sadly the case), thus we have to
welcome as many of them as possible, in order to force the rich to give more of
their illegitimately accrued wealth to the rest
o
3.
Is a temporary blip that can be corrected with a bit more of social engineering
and state intervention (although it is unclear how that intervention is
supposed to work, after in the 90’s and aughts social democrat parties in
Europe essentially subscribed to the neoliberal creed and lowered taxes,
deregulated protected industries and committed to balanced budgets regardless
of business cycle): the modern left agrees with the modern right that the first
imperative is to grow the economy with low inflation, and only after that has
been achieved may some (very minor) redistribution be considered. If there is
no growth, no redistribution will be abetted (see Greece for the last ten
years)
o
4.
Is not happening at all: the only environment to be concerned about is the
social environment. There is no such thing as nature, only what we create with
our labor (and labor relations can only take the form of class conflict,
because we all belong to a class, namely exploiters or exploited, rapacious
capitalists or progress-bearing proletarians), so animal species disappearing
or the planet warming is of no consequence, other than by its potential
influence on what class finishes on top in the centuries long struggle
o
5.
Is a blessing: that so-called technological advance was a source of disruption
and stress for the weakest members of society (the blue-collar workers that
constitute the majority of the membership of leftist parties), so the less
there is of it the better. Lowbrow culture available to all is great, as all
that snotty highbrow was a conspiracy of the elites to identify their own members
and collectively disregard the good, honest entertainment of the subjugated
masses
So traditional parties may switch
some message here and wiggle some answer there, but what both the left and the
right have in common is a complete lack of solutions to our society’s most
pressing problems. Instead of solutions, they offer the following (what, for
lack of a better term, we may call distractions, or more directly, canards):
·
The
great lie of the right is that we are not yet rich enough, our economy is
simply not producing enough goods, so the first imperative is to make it grow
even faster. Some good things (more individual freedom of choice) and some very
bad ones (less solidarity and a more frayed safety network in the form of less
guaranteed, mandatory health and unemployment insurance) are presented as the
necessary price that it is reasonable to pay in order to achieve that
accelerated growth. Look, I get that growth in the West has been, until now, a
very considerable net gain for almost everybody. I see that there is an
airtight, super-strong case for growing the economies of Botswana, India, Bangladesh
and Vietnam (among many other) before considering how that growth is
distributed. But Germany? Sweden? The good ol’ US of A? If they had to choose
between producing more goods and enjoying more leisure time, or producing more
goods and ensuring everybody has health insurance and nobody goes bankrupt
because of an unexpected serious illness… I know very well what morality would
unabashedly demand: bring on the vacations and the socialized medicine! Even if
they require higher marginal taxes for individuals and/or corporations, which
in turn cause a bit less growth (a causal relationship that is in no way as
firmly established as its proponents would like you to believe). The case for
the opposite is looking more and more morally suspect, as the Republican party
of the USA makes more apparent every passing day.
·
The
great lie of the Left is that we all belong to some oppressed minority, and
that only through collective action can we redress such oppression and improve
our sad lot. Women? Victims of the hideous patriarchy that single-handedly
explains why there aren’t as many female CEOs as male ones, plus of the almost
universal prevalence of rape and sexual harassment, to which 99% of them are
daily subjected. Homosexuals? Victims of permanent and widespread homophobia
that marginalizes them and silences them and physically harms them through
countless hate crimes. Immigrants? Heroic, hard-working saints in pursuit of a
better life, animated only by their desire to improve their descendants’ lot in
life and unfailingly respectful of their host countries traditions and norms. Racial
minorities? If they are not all millionaires it is because society is rife with
racism and discrimination, they are given no opportunities at all, the system
is uniformly rigged against them and the police and the judicature conspire to
keep them down, massively (and unjustly) incarcerates them, when not downright
guns them down. Transgender people? As homosexuals but on steroids regarding
how brutalized and attacked they have been (so deserving an extra dose of
sympathy and support, that in the USA apparently starts and ends with signaling
the bathrooms they can use).
Those elements, so prominent in the public
discourse of the traditional parties, are finding less and less enthusiasm, and
are less and less able to mobilize their dwindling bases because they appeal to
non-existing problems (or to problems that few people, outside of the think
tanks and university campuses from which those parties recruit their cadres, consider
relevant). In the meantime, the real problems, the five problems I enumerated,
are either ignored or given false solutions, condemned to fail. And as long as
they are not solved, which would probably require the reformulation of the
dominant reason that organizes social life (something that I’m afraid no single
human being, doesn’t matter how enlightened or persuasive or convincing, can accomplish),
they will keep getting worse. And all of us will be worse off because of them,
trundling along in a society that is more inimical to human flourishing, where
we spend more time in school/vocational training/ university (online or
otherwise) but we learn less and less, where we eat worse quality food, we live
in lower quality buildings, we breathe lower quality air, we wear lower quality
clothes, we go from one uninspiring place to the next more slowly, in a less efficient
vehicle (doesn’t matter if it has an internal combustion engine, like current
cars or planes, or an electric one, like many current trains, which only displaces
where the pollution is generated). But boy, will we be entertained in the way! By
ubiquitous screens, absorbing our attention every single second with a steady
flow of trash that will make current reality TV look like Socrates discourses
during the Athenian enlightenment in comparison.
Maybe we will still vote, maybe we will
give up on democracy altogether, because we finally realize all options on
offer are but aspects of the ruthless defense of the same hapless plutocracy,
intent on corralling every last atom of material wealth produced and siphoning
it towards the lucky few that consume the same crap (ideological or otherwise)
than everybody else, only in greater abundance and with one small twist: they
will delude themselves believing they somehow deserve their superior riches, their differential access to those
material goods everybody is so unhappily producing, whilst paying them a
pittance, the bare minimum to keep them alive and servile enough to tend to
their every whim in exchange for the scraps of their continuous feasting. They
will try to convince everybody else of that same mantra, of course (that is,
they will keep on selling the ideological justification of such inequality: the
meritocracy myth and all that), and for some time they will succeed (see the
current state of the USA and UK politics if you need an illustration of how
such a society may look like) but I have a strong hunch that at some point they
will stop pretending, and just cancel the whole charade and keep the masses
subjugated through (stale) bread and (high-def, VR enhanced) circus, without
giving them a say on how they are governed (too complex and technical, you
know, to leave a bunch of rubes decide on such substantial issues).
Until that final state (universal
dictatorship supporting appalling levels of inequality) is reached, the three
key aspects to pay attention to in how the decline of the current social order
plays out are:
-
Corruption
as the symptom of the disaffection between elites and the rest (that thus
becomes a proletariat in the Toynbeean sense), and as the common theme of
dissatisfaction with established parties and experts from all disciplines.
Perceived corruption of all the political choices on offer will be (as it has
usually been in the past) the final argument for the abolition of democracy and
popular participation in the decision of how society is governed and what laws
are enacted. Expect, thus, higher and higher levels of corruption at all
levels, ceaselessly denounced by the free press (while there is such a thing,
being a useful tool of justification of the rule of the few) until nobody cares
any more about it and it is widely accepted as just the usual way of doing
business.
-
Lack
of legitimacy of all the institutions (political parties, unions, established churches
that align themselves with the temporal power, even civic institutions, that
end up also aligned with one tribe or other), derived from the fact that they
are (correctly) seen as answering to non-existing problems while ignoring the
real ones. Again, what today would be perceived as an illegitimate form of
government (a military dictatorship, say) may not be so once every other option
has been similarly discredited. Expect the army to be one of the last
institutions to be discredited, and thus at some point to be the one the
oligarchy (that’s me and my pals, in case you have forgotten) turns to in order
to buttress a collapsing social order.
-
Remember,
finally, how according to Toynbee in the collapsing phase of every
civilizational unit the proletariat always finds a common narrative,
alternative (and typically despised by) to the one embraced by the elites, to
give meaning and make sense of their condition. A new universal religion still
has to take shape and inspire the proletariat to overthrow the current elite
that is hoarding all the economic growth (the future that has indeed arrived,
but unequally), and at this point I for one has no clue about what shape that
universal religion may take. It may be (my preferred option) a revival of the
existing one, cleansed of its most unsavory elements. It may be something
entirely new we still have not heard of. Be it as it may, we will contemplate
it with dismay, we will despise it and accuse its followers of irrationality and
fanaticism and bigotry and idiocy. But they will teach it to future
generations, while the values we cherish will be seen as corrupted and false.
In summary: expect the five big
problems to get worse, democracy to wither away, corruption to balloon (even from
its currently stratospheric level, to be soon dwarfed by what is to come) and
finally, some obscure sect propounding barely intelligible nonsense to catch
the imagination of the masses and finally to overturn our current order.
Whatever comes next, I have no clue, and I can only pray it is not worse than
what we have now in front of us (or than the last five thousand years, which have
been dismal enough).
