Until quite recently, the idea that the global economy might reverse – my preferred term is inflect – from growth into contraction lived in the realm of radical and unwelcome theory.
But this has been the year in which theory has been borne out by experience.
Much as astronomers deduce the existence of invisible objects through their gravitational effects on other bodies, we can see the effects of economic inflexion in everything from social discontent and the “cost of living crisis” to deteriorating international relations and worsening financial fragility.
The causes of the ending and reversal of growth can be summed up in the single word depletion.
Fossil fuel energy has been depleted to a point where its material costs, measured here as the Energy Costs of Energy (ECoEs), are becoming unaffordable.
Non-energy natural resources, too, such as minerals, agricultural land and accessible water, have been depleted, as has the finite ability of the environment to absorb the effects of human economic activity.
1
It has turned out to be perfectly possible to measure, interpret and anticipate these economic processes, and that’s been the aim of the Surplus Energy Economics project from the outset.
But two centuries of industrial expansion have been quite enough to render economic reversal very nearly incomprehensible to most people, and almost entirely unacceptable.
Our first collective responses have involved simple denial, based on the ‘infinite growth’ promises of an economics orthodoxy firmly rooted in pre-industrial conditions, when none of today’s resource challenges were even conceivable.
Our second resort has been to hubris, manifested in the idea that human ingenuity, implemented as technology, can resolve all of our energetic, material and environmental problems. This can, supposedly, offer a seamless, with-growth transition to alternative energy sources, and perhaps even “de-couple” the economy from the use of energy.
The snag here is that the potential scope of technology is bounded by limits set by the laws of physics. The looming failure of technology is going to come as a gigantic shock to the system.
We’ll look at this impending failure shortly.
Reality, meanwhile, is breaking through, as it always does. Few voters now believe that their economic conditions have been improving in recent times, that the current extent of inequality is justifiable, or that soaring living costs are either fully reported or are traceable to one-off bits of simple bad luck. They’re increasingly attracted to scapegoating foreigners, who might be immigrants, or dishonest trading partners.
The authorities, meanwhile, have been drawn towards the ‘extend and pretend’ of reckless credit expansion, to ‘getting their retaliation in first’ against rising popular discontent, and to trying to skew the patterns of international trade to their own national advantage.
Before we judge them too harshly, though, we should remember – in this season of goodwill – that the process of inflexion itself is entirely outside their control, and that, one by one, all of the supposed “levers” of economic management have broken in their hands.
2
The formal commencement of the industrial economy can be dated to 1776, when James Watt completed the first truly efficient device for converting heat into work.
But this was to be no sudden revolution. Even in Britain, where this process began, battleships were still made of wood, and powered by wind, into and beyond the 1850s. Industrialization began quite slowly in Europe and North America before extending, again gradually, into all corners of the world.
This said, and with a tiny scattering of exceptions, even the last countries in which industrialization took hold have been living with assumed economic growth for well over a century.
The ending and reversal of growth is, therefore, a profound culture-shock, up-ending generations of almost unchallenged expectation.
It’s a revolution far more sweeping in its implications even than the removal of absolute monarchy, or the arrival and subsequent failure of communism in the USSR and its satellites.
This means that we need to start looking for the practices, systems and institutions that will be swept aside by this revolution – and, conversely, at what might replace them.
3
It helps us to know that two assumptions, above all, will be overturned by the ending and reversal of growth.
One of these is that each generation will be more materially prosperous than the one before.
The second is the notion that economic expansion is coterminous with progress. If somebody opposes the bulldozing of farmland or the destruction of historic artefacts for the building of a retail mall, motorway or factory, he or she is portrayed as an obstacle to progress. The word Luddite entered the English language as a term describing futile, unreasoning opposition to the unstoppable march of modernity.
The ever-perceptive Charles Hugh Smith has explained that a lot of what we continue to think of as ‘progress’ has in fact become Anti-Progress, a concept which he has connected to the collapse of quality. Your new domestic appliance, for example, might be wi-fi connected (”progress”), but won’t work as well, or last as long, as the old one (“anti-progress”).
4
We can look at this, quite reasonably, as the product of misaligned incentives, where it’s more profitable to sell the customer a new and inferior product every five years than a higher-quality, more repairable one every twenty-five.
But there are structural factors involved as well.
In pre-industrial times, raw materials were costly, in the sense that their supply required large amounts of human labour. In these conditions, it made far more sense to use hard-won, costly timber to make furniture or buildings that would last for generations than to construct shoddier alternatives that would require replacement in a small number of years.
The advent of cheap and abundant energy changed all that, making possible a profit-incentivized shift to an accelerated cycle of creation, disposal and replacement. This is how the energy-dissipative economic model of the past became the dissipative-landfill commercial system of today.
This system will unravel, not as a matter of commercial practice or social preference, but because of changes in the productive-replacement equation itself.
5
Contrary to the quaint notions of orthodox economics, the central processes of the economy are material, not monetary.
The defining purpose of the economy is to supply physical products and services to society.
Services are no less material than goods – we can’t run an e-commerce business without vehicles and warehouses, or supply on-line services without cables and computers.
Since a society without a history is as disconnected as a person without a memory, we can safely assume that history will continue to be taught and studied, long after economics has been subsumed into the sciences of thermodynamics and the characteristics of materials.
These historians of the future will be amused, as well as baffled, by contemporary notions that we could build an immaterial economy based on services, or somehow “de-couple” the energy economy from the use of energy. They’re likely to laugh out loud at the notion of ‘infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet’.
The material economy works by using energy to convert non-energy resources into products. These then wear out, and are abandoned and replaced. Critically, the speed at which this cyclical process operates is determined by the relative costs of the necessary inputs.
These inputs are human labour, energy and raw materials.
When each of these inputs was costly, the lifespans of products were extended as far as possible. Cheap and abundant energy made each of these inputs less expensive – production required less human labour, the cost-efficiency of resource extraction rose sharply, and the cost of energy itself was low.
In consequence, life-spans of products became ever less important, and the relinquishment-replacement cycle was accelerated. The creation of the dissipative-landfill system has been a product, not of fashion, or even of incentive, but of evolving material circumstances.
Because this process has been material in its characteristics, nobody has been able to call a halt to it, any more than the advocates of a more human-scale approach could halt the takeover of England by “dark satanic mills”.
6
The lesson to be learned from this is that prevalent commercial practice, far from being driven by the latest vogue in business-speak or the most recent pronouncements of management text-books, is determined by material conditions.
And these, as we know, are now changing rapidly. Raw materials, like energy itself, are fast ceasing to be cheap. The balance of cost and scarcity between human labour and exogenous energy is tilting rapidly from the latter to the former.
The ultimate exponents of the rapid-replacement model aren’t manufacturers, or suppliers of services broadly understood, but the behemoths of the “tech” sector. Their business models are tied, to a quite remarkable degree, to the already-failing presumption of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’.
These business models are, to a greater or lesser extent, based on the assumptions of ever-cheaper raw materials, ever more abundant energy, and ever-expanding consumer discretionary affordability.
Yet these assumptions are already becoming twentieth-century notions, preserved in aspic.
The context, looking ahead, is set out in the following charts. In America, as elsewhere, top-line economic output – adjusted to exclude credit distortions, and known here as underlying or “clean” output (C-GDP) – has long been decelerating towards contraction. Meanwhile, the first call made on output by ECoE has been widening the gap between output and material prosperity (Fig. 1A).
Fig. 1
At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities have been rising, such that the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services, shown in blue in Fig. 1B, is subject to relentless compression.
The United States has been chosen to illustrate these trends because of the differences between Figs. 1C and 1D.
Over a very long period, as the rate of discretionary expansion has fallen below the rate of increase in the population, the average American has experienced a continuing, but gradual, reduction in the affordability of discretionaries (Fig. 1C).
But aggregate discretionary affordability has carried on creeping upwards even as its per capita equivalent has drifted downwards.
This seems to have left many businesses wholly unprepared for the impending rapid decline of discretionary affordability.
The acid-test of vulnerability to these effects is the extent of exposure to discretionary compression. On-line retailing can continue pretty solidly, though it will tilt away from discretionaries and towards staples. EVs have a future, but only as niche products, since the replacement of all (or even most) of the World’s 2bn cars and commercial vehicles is a material impossibility.
On the other hand, anything dependent on advertising or subscription revenues, or on the mass sale of non-essential gadgets to the public, is heading over the Niagara of contracting discretionary purchasing.
7
The way in which energy-hungry behemoths turn into dinosaurs will have a critical bearing on how society and the financial system adapt to the ending and reversal of material economic growth.
Embodying a law of diminishing returns, each new iteration of “tech” is more energy-intensive, and seems to add less material value, than the one before, and the sector is already starting to feel the headwinds of a decelerating replacement cycle.
This is typified by smart-phones, where annual units sold peaked back in 2015. The first cell-phone was a major breakthrough, as were the first smart-phones, but subsequent developments have added ever less valuable capabilities at ever increasing costs.
AI, the latest passing vogue in “tech” circles, exemplifies the pursuit of energy-intensive innovation for the sake of innovation itself, and for some very short-lived financial gains. Everybody seems to accept that AI will make enormous demands on energy, but nobody seems to be really clear about how it will add value.
The general (though rather vague) notion seems to be that AI will make profits by replacing human labour. In fact, though, human labour will be increasingly abundant as the economy contracts, whilst ever-higher thresholds will be set for the prioritization of energy use.
Some suppliers of energy-intensive tech services are already giving thought to investing in their own energy sources, typically small modular reactors, which might enable them to cool as well as power their sprawling data-centres.
What this idea overlooks, however, is the impossibility of re-energizing the economy in which their customers reside.
With no such capability possible, a combination of decreasing prosperity and ever-costlier necessities has already started to exert an ever-tightening stranglehold on the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.
8
What, though, will be the wider implications of technological disillusionment for the broader human endeavour?
The word “technology” has two distinct meanings in contemporary parlance. To scientists and engineers, it means the implementation of human ingenuity in the material world. To investors and business bosses, it means a hugely successful sector that rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the dot-com bust.
To the general public, it probably denotes a combination of the two, a phenomenon which is both enabling and threatening, and something whose unstoppable advance only a card-carrying Luddite would seek to halt.
Humanity, and perhaps every sentient creature, seeks to alter its environment to conditions most favourable to itself. The human project has coined the word “technology” to describe our efforts in this regard.
Hitherto, we’ve been able to look back at the history of technology as an ascending march of progress. Noteworthy names in this progression include Watt, George and Robert Stephenson, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Karl Benz, John Logie Baird, Frank Whittle and Robert Watson-Watt.
We’ve learned, too, from our failures, as when Capt. Cowper Coles’ inherently unstable turret-ship HMS Captain capsized off Finisterre, and when John Blenkinsop invested in spiked wheels on the grounds that railway locomotives with smooth wheels wouldn’t be able to move.
9
The critical point about technology, though, is that it has to work within the envelope of material and energetic possibility. Orville and Wilbur Wright, for instance, didn’t invent the aeroplane and then sit around waiting for somebody to discover petroleum. Rather, they found a novel and worthwhile application for a source of energy that was already available.
Modern technology has delivered marvels, and we seem, in any case, to have an instinctive attraction to the new and shiny. Technology has been elevated to the status of a secular deity, capable of resolving our each and every problem.
And this is why our disillusionment with technology, as it arrives, will be such a shock. Because of their inferior material characteristics, renewables can’t restore growth to the economy, or even keep it at its current size. Engineering can’t resolve our environmental problems in ways that allow excess consumption, and super-rapid resource depletion, to continue.
If, at this festive time, you’ll allow me a single cliché, ‘as one door closes, another opens’. There are alternatives to our current arrangements, and perhaps we’ll discuss these in the future.
I have referenced Arnold Toynbee, an encyclopedic historian a few times in interviews, most recently in this discussion with James Delingpole.
There is a misunderstanding, usually divided along political party lines, about the United States and other nominally sovereign independent countries of the world. Typically the “leftists” call them “democracies”, while the conservatives in the US counter this with “we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy”. Other groups decry the corporate form of the US government. I think trying to pinpoint the ill invariably misses the point, as any state will undergo all of these forms before a given civilization ends.
According to Toynbee, a “universal state” is the last phase of a society before extinction. This doesn’t mean people go extinct: they don’t disappear as a group, however they may be reduced in numbers. We are talking about the concept of a “state” in this case. As Toynbee describes, universal states typically last a century or two, and all eventually disappear, but all proclaim that they are eternal right up to the point of their demise. The chapters I am quoting from primarily deal with Rome as a universal state, but draw comparisons and reference from many others - Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. Toynbee postulates that the imperial Rome (but not its earlier versions, i.e., royal, magisterial and republican) became the universal state for the disintegrating Hellenic (Greek) world. Reproduced below without commentary. I hope the quotes from ~2000 years ago ring a bell…
One World Government is a desperate last-ditch “Indian summer” attempt at staving off the collapse and disintegration of the existing world order. IMO, it has no chance of coming to fruition now.
Objectively, no universal state has ever been literally universal in the sense of having covered the entire surface of the globe; but in a significant subjective sense these states have indeed been universal, for they have looked and felt worldwide to the people living under their regime. The Romans and the Chinese […] thought of their respective empires as embracing all the peoples in the world that were of any account…
[…]
Universal states are, let us remind ourselves, essentially negative institutions. In the first place, they arise after, and not before the breakdown of civilizations to which they bring political unity. They are not summers but Indian summers, masking autumn and presaging winter. […] There is, however, an element of ambiguity in them, for, while universal states are thus symptoms of social disintegration, they are at the same time attempts to check this disintegration and defy it.
[Universal states invariably position themselves and are perceived by contemporaries as immortal and divine.]
[After it’s establishment after the battle of Actium in 31 BC], the secret of Roman imperial government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing city-states with a fringe of autonomous principalities in the regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration - which even at the end of the Hellenic time of troubles, was still publicly regarded as an honorable and covetable load - was to be left resting on the shoulders of these responsible self-governing local authorities; the imperial government was to confine itself to the twofold task of keeping the local communities in harmony with one another and protecting them against attacks from the outer barbarians; and for these limited imperial activities, a slender military framework and a light political superstructure were all that was required. This fundamental policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we look again at the Roman Empire as it emerged from a spell of two centuries of Roman Peace, we shall find that its administrative structure had in fact been transformed as a result of innovations that were reluctant and piecemeal, but were far-reaching in their cumulative effect because they were all in the same direction.
By end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-80), the last of the client principalities had been gleichgeschaltet [uniformized, often in a forced or totalitarian manner] with the provinces, and, more significant still, the provinces themselves had become organs of direct administration instead of remaining mere frameworks for local groups of self-administering city-states. […] in the course of … two centuries, however, the human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of the local administrative talent on which it had been accustomed to rely, found itself constrained not only to replace the client-princes with imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states in the hands of ‘city-managers’ who were appointed by the imperial authorities instead of being elected (as the city-state magistrates were) by the local notables, and who were indirectly responsible to the Emperor himself. […] while the self-complacent local magistrates and town councilors of the once self-governing city-states have been degraded into becoming unwilling instruments of the central exchequer for extracting ruinously heavy taxes from the local notables…
[…]
Another cause of the persistence of the belief in the immortality of the universal states is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the successive rulers who are its living incarnation.
[…]
Appian of Alexandria (AD 90-160) [a Greek who became a Roman propagandist, wrote] in the preface to his Studies in Roman History,
“the [Roman] state has reached its highest point of organization and the public revenue its highest figure, while as long and stable peace has raised the whole world to a level of secure prosperity. A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have revolted have been reduced to obedience; but, since the Romans already posses the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the globe, they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than extending their Empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and unremunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the Romans appoint themselves, since they feel no necessity to incorporate them in their Empire. There are also certain subject nations to whom they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to repudiate them in spite their being a financial burden. They have garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies, and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as if it were a modest farm”.
In the view of Appian and Aelius Aristeides [AD 117-181], the Roman Empire was eternal:
“…just as the sum total of things is eternal, because there is no room, outside it, for its components to fly apart, and there are no extraneous bodies that can collide with it and disintegrate it with a mighty blow.”
In these lines of the Roman poet Lucretius [BC 90-50], his teacher Democritus’s [BC 460] argument looks as impregnable as the Roman limes [borders] itself:
“Nor is there any force that can modify the sum of things. There is no space outside into which any kind of matter can escape out of the totality. Nor is there any space outside from which some new force can arise, break in, transform the whole nature of things, and deflect its motions.”
A universal state has indeed as little to fear from outer barbarians as the Universe has from stray star cluster that are ex hypothesi non-existent; yet the argument is a fallacy nevertheless, for, as we have seen in an earlier context, ‘things rot through evils native to their selves’ [Menander, BC 342-292, fragment 540]. In physical Nature there are elements whose atoms disintegrate by spontaneous radioactivity without requiring any bombardment from extraneous particles; and in human social life, universal states ‘are betray’d by what is false within’ [George Meredith] into revealing, for those who have eyes to see through their specious appearance of impregnability, that, so far from being immortal, these are spontaneously fissile polities.
However long the life of a universal state maybe drawn out, it always proves to have been the last phase of a society before its extinction. Its goal is the achievement of immortality, but the attempt to secure immortality in this world is a vain effort, whether blind or deliberate, to thwart the economy of Nature.
There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.
Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:
The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).
Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.
The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.
In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.
Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)
Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).
Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.
As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.
The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.
Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.
St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery
You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.
Wendell Berry
One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.
Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.
My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.
The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.
I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.
‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?
Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.
Rather like Christianity, in fact.
In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.
This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:
Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.
Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?
More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.
But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:
If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?
I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.
Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.
And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:
Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.
What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.
Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.
St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.
Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.
Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.
Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.
There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.
What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.
Damn, activism was so much easier.
Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.
Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.
What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.
More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:
Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.
Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:
Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.
Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.
This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.
I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.
Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.
Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.
Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.
Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.
We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.
Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.
I am offering this essay free of charge. If you can afford a subscription, it will help me to keep writing, and will also help those who cannot afford to pay to keep reading.
When looking at history to understand its lessons and discern where we are coming from, there are, broadly speaking, two competing schools of thought: one sees history as the product of mind, that is, what people thought and were up to. This is called idealism, and it is decisively out of fashion.
The other sees history as the result of material pressures, such as economic developments or natural and other external conditions. It is called materialism, and it is what we are all conditioned to believe in these days.
To claim that material conditions play no role in human affairs — and therefore history — would be absurd, obviously. But ever since sociology, Marx, and the so-called “social sciences” came on the scene in the 19th century, we have forgotten that at the end of the day, humans do stuff because, well, they think about doing it first; they find reasons to do so based on their world views, priorities, and ways of thinking.
You might argue that sometimes, people have no choice: before they starve due to famine, for example, or when threatened with death-by-flood, they will inevitably migrate. But these are limit cases, and claiming that this means history just churns along on autopilot, and that human behavior is simply caused by external circumstances, would be to commit what I have called the limit case fallacy: taking an extreme case where complexity collapses into a single dimension, abstracting some law from it, and then slapping the law back on the 99% of other cases that are not limit cases. This is left brain hemisphere nonsense on steroids.
Besides, humans arguably always have a choice. People have been known to override even their sense of survival and accept certain death in the name of a higher ideal. If someone strongly believes that cannibalism is worse than death, he will rather die than eat his fellow men. And if he believes that leaving his land would be a sin against his soul, he might take his chances with flood and famine rather than migrating.
Most cases are not that extreme, though. It’s easy to claim, for instance, that the industrialization drew peasants to the cities because of better wages. But the fact is, not all did that. And to understand why those who did decided to do so, we need to know about their thinking, their reasons: what did they value? Why did they have those values, and how did they develop them? Why didn’t they see a future living on the land anymore? What were they looking for? What happened to their culture before then? Who were the movers and shakers of the zeitgeist at the time, and what were their motivations?
While we are at it: who decided that industrialization was a good idea to begin with? You can’t separate it from the radical shift away from traditional religious ideas and towards worship of science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries, to name just one aspect. And you can’t separate that from earlier developments in the history of ideas, such as the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and knowledge. And even that is not straight-forward: reason and knowledge could have ushered in a flourishing of non-materialist cosmologies and studies that go beyond both religious and empiricist dogma, which indeed was a huge driving force during Enlightenment times, as I’ve talked about before. But alas, it went differently. That the industrialization happened, and happened the way it did, is dependent on a whole slew of developments in people’s outlook, what R.G. Collingwood called absolute presuppositions (see my essay about it here).
Also notice that a predecessor to the steam engine, the aeolipile, had been around long before the industrialization in Ancient Greece, but nobody had apparently thought about developing it further to power factories or vehicles. One wonders why, since from our perspective, this idea seems as straightforward as it gets. Perhaps this is the problem: from our perspective. People in the past simply had a very different perspective. And so, although nobody seems to know much about all that, it seems that the ancient Greeks just saw the steam device as a temple wonder, or a party trick. (Similarly, perhaps one day people will look back at our time and wonder why we didn’t develop telepathy to the society-altering powerhouse of communication those future generations might take for granted, and why instead we chose to see it as a mere party trick.)
Our sacred progressivism is too narrow a lens to capture what’s going on here: history is not some natural progression from primitive people towards our glorious age of technology. It is the history of people having different ideas, leading to entirely different lives and outcomes.
And even the industrialization could have gone much differently if people—including the elites at the time—had come up with different ideas, different visions. It’s all fine and dandy to look for certain patterns in the past, but history simply does not run on autopilot, whether it be a Marxian dialectic, Spenglerian cycles, or “evolutionary pressures” playing themselves out as if our ideas, our beliefs, and our daily thoughts had nothing to do with anything.
It is so much more complex than people being simply driven by some economic or social “law” that says “if X happens, then Y happens.” And even in the cases where such a law seemingly applies, the really interesting questions are obscured by the proclaimed causality between two end points: what we really want to know are the details between and surrounding these points. Hence Collingwood realized that every “historical fact” is connected to the entirety of the human experience, to the entire cosmos. As I’ve put it before: take any fact, drill down deep enough, and you end up with an infinite depth from which there is no escape.
In that sense, “social science” is an oxymoron: by “science” we usually mean something vaguely modelled after physics. But the whole point of physics is to artificially generate limit cases by means of controlled experiment, so that certain mathematical relations become visible that are otherwise obscured by the sheer complexity of what’s going on. But you can’t do that with history or societies. The exception, perhaps, are experiments in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment. But to the degree that social psychology works, we are still left with figuring out what those experiments mean in terms of internal reasoning and motivations. (The endless debates around these experiments and their interpretations are a testament to that.) We can then use these insights to help us understand people in the past and present, and why they thought what they thought and did what they did. But the point remains: it’s about understanding people, not about postulating laws.
The Collapse Will Be Mental
Again, nobody in their right mind would claim that external pressures, economic shortages or migration streams have nothing to do with how things go. The problem, however, is that in our modern day and age, we seem to have emphasized these factors so much that we have lost the ability to discern how thoughts shape reality.
This can easily be demonstrated by the fact that economists, technologists, and so-called scientists have become our go-to high priests for figuring out where we’re headed, replacing not only the oracle of Delphi or the wise men of old, but even the classical humanists: nobody seems to be interested in what historians think anymore, or those philosophers who have developed some actual wisdom, or the classically educated. (Of course, those are an endangered species anyway, so there’s that.) Never mind actual priests and theologians.
I don’t know about you, but except perhaps for the true (and few) old school scientists who combine their science with a profound interest and therefore education in a wide range of fields, including history and the history of ideas, I’d take Delphi any day over most of those dimwit “experts” when it comes to inspiring a way forward. (Not to mention that silly class of grifters called “futurologists.”) Because you see, if we are to avoid further collapse and degradation, we need to change the way we think.
You can see the truth of that in history, too. While there are endless debates as to why the Roman Empire fell, for instance, it is clear that the proverbial degeneracy of the late empire was caused neither by invading barbarians nor comets nor “economic laws.” The fact is, people (including the elites) went bonkers before all that, whatever it was.
To the religious mind, the reason for this dynamic is straight-forward: if a society as a whole develops what used to be diagnosed as “moral insanity,” eventually God will give it a good spanking and escalate from there — be it in the form of war and pestilence, floods and comets, or just a series of bad luck, which can be enough to wipe a civilization off the face of the earth.
But even the non-religious mind can understand this idea: a society that has gone off the deep end, where people cannot think straight anymore, will be vulnerable to all kinds of shocks. In a Roman society where everybody is just out to secure some petty benefit for himself, where the classical virtues have just become a half-hearted show nobody believes in, where all kinds of perversions have become the mainstream way of life, and where everybody knows that the once-proud Legions are nothing but groups of mercenaries protecting corrupt oligarchs, what do you think will happen when a bunch of barbarians shows up? Or just a disruption of the complex logistical networks? Or even just a few bad harvests? Again, we need to understand how people thought, what their motivations were, their dreams and aspirations, their highest values, individually and as a society. Only then do we understand how and why they behaved the way they did, and how that produced history.
Yes, tough times beget strong men, who beget prosperous times, which makes men weak, which leads to tough times. But even if we take this as expressing a deep truth, it is vague and malleable. The devil is in the details — or rather, in people’s minds and souls. It is there that we have to look, and where solutions emerge.
The Solution Will Be Mental
If, at the end of the day, history is downstream from mind, then so will be the solutions to our problems.
To those who say that whatever historical cycles they have identified are inevitable, I can only repeat myself: we can always choose differently. Which renders the idea of “historical laws,” understood as akin to the laws of science, moot. If anything, they are better understood as thinking habits playing themselves out based on lack of wisdom and knowledge.
The fact is, if we chose today to think differently, everything would change.
Sure, there are biological and physical constraints to what we can do. We can’t change a man into a woman; we can’t decide that giving up food is the solution; we can’t pretend that resources are infinite, and so on. But because reductionism — biological, physical, or otherwise — is false, there is no reason whatever that we cannot radically change our entire outlook on the world, therefore our entire way of life, therefore history.
I have talked elsewhere about the metaphysical nexus we find ourselves at. We are called upon to transform our presuppositions, our internalized beliefs about the world, our place in it, and how it all fits together. No fiddling with what
calls “the machine” will do. Because our world is not a “system” running its course according to a bunch of parameters, we can’t change its parameters to alter the course of history. We have to change our minds.
This is the good news. The bad news is that I can’t see how enough people will be able to pull off this kind of transformation. Which means God’s spanking session might still be around the corner.
But so what. The thing is, if you change your outlook, your entire experience changes.
For example, from a more spiritual perspective, if you learn how to see the unseen and develop trust in the higher reality, you will know that the Higher will lend you a hand if you do your part. You won’t be terrified of the future and take bad decisions as a consequence, but instead you’ll know in your heart that you will end up exactly where you are supposed to. That there will be subtle guidance, and in the end, All Will Be Alright.
We seem to have completely lost this idea.
It is astonishing how much we have been conditioned to believe in materialism, nihilism, and a cold, pitiless universe for so long. You can only slowly realize this by working your way through all the contradictions and absurdities this materialist mindset entails, and also by studying how people in the (distant) past have looked at the world — how utterly different it was. And this is not about embracing some half-baked religious mindset as a sort of cope. This doesn't fly, because even if you develop trust in the Higher, this doesn't mean you can just be lazy and not care about the real world. On the contrary, it requires hard work, even harder than anything else. But it's a different kind of work, coming to be as a consequence of an entirely different view of the world. It can be comforting too: just knowing in your heart that you don't need to figure out and understand everything — because nobody can. If you keep walking the path, learning and growing in the process, the cosmos will pull you along in the right direction.
This means that you might well be alright even if things go to crap. It also means that individuals can have more impact than they think: our efforts are scalable on a spiritual level; we can leverage the Cosmic Logos. (Ugh!)
Perhaps not everybody has to — or can — be part of this transformation. But individuals have been known to change the course of history, as have small groups who seed a new way of thinking, a new mindset.
From a new way of thinking, a new world shall arise. One in harmony with the cosmic order: whole as opposed to fragmented in its thought, oriented towards the High instead of the Low, embodying universal order instead of chaos: in communion with the cosmic purpose, the final telos of unity and Truth for those who freely choose it.
This post is public so feel free to share it.
There’s one good counter-point to all that: we know that people tend to rationalize their behavior. That is, they might come up with elaborate stories about why they do things, when in fact they’re simply following their lower biological instincts.
But first, while this is true, it is certainly not true for all people, all thoughts, and all actions. This alone counters the argument, because even if just one person in a hundred is able to really think (at least sometimes) as opposed to build narratives around urges, history cannot be seen as a mere product of material or biological pressures anymore.
Second, even when people do rationalize urges, this is still thought. And they still act based on this thought. The debate then really is about how much free will we have in terms of what we think.
The USSR collapsed in on itself, not from the war in Afghanistan (1979-89), but from the Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1989). The Soviets suddenly realized that the state was no longer in control. The members of the Warsaw Pact, whom Leonid Brezhnev had made vassals, revolted. The churches, the Communist Youth and the gays of East Germany brought down the Berlin Wall [1]. Not only did the USSR not react, but also it abandoned its allies outside Europe, especially Cuba. The First Secretary of the party, Mikhail Gorbachev, turned from a reformer into a liquidator. The USSR broke up, creating many new independent states. Then it was a descent into hell. A few "New Russians" appropriated the collective assets and waged a machine-gun war in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Production collapsed. It became difficult to find food in many Russian regions. Life expectancy dropped sharply by about 15 years. The fall was so sharp that no one thought the country would recover quickly.
At the same time, the United States imagined what it could do without a rival. President George H. Bush Sr. addressed a full Congress on September 11, 1990, and floated the idea of a "New World Order. He had just staged a war in the Gulf that almost every state in the world joined. Even before the dissolution of the USSR, the United States had become the hyperpower that no one contests [2]. The Straussian Paul Wolfowitz elaborated a doctrine aimed at preventing the emergence of a new competitor, which would take the place of the Soviet Union. He unhesitatingly designated the political project of François Mitterrand and Helmut Köhl, the European Union, as the enemy to be destroyed. The European Union was flawed from the start, with the obligation to bring in all the Warsaw Pact states and the former USSR until its institutions became unworkable and the Maastricht Treaty stipulated that Washington would defend the EU.
The Pentagon was so sure that it no longer had an adversary that it demobilized one million men once Iraq was crushed. The research and development units of the armies were disbanded. President Bush Sr. believed that this was the last war and that an era of prosperity was beginning.
Although no one threatens the supremacy of the US, it feels that its internal balance is fragile. Their jobs have been relocated and their economy is based more on the internationalization of their currency, the dollar, than on the wealth they produce.
In 2001, the Straussians organized the September 11 attacks [3] and adopted the Rusmfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [4]. They suspended fundamental freedoms at home with the USA Patriot Act and wage an "endless war" that ravaged the "wider Middle East".
Russia, however, did not see it that way. In a speech given on February 11, 2007 at the Munich Security Conference [5], President Vladimir Putin denounced the Bush New World Order as "unipolar". According to him, it would be more accurate to describe it as "monopolistic". He notes that far from bringing peace, it sowed misfortune.
During the subprime crisis, the Russian intellectual Igor Panarin, who was working for the secret service at the time, studied the hypothesis that the dollar would collapse and the US population would be divided along ethnic lines, so that the country would eventually break up [6]. His work was wrongly interpreted as a replica of the hypothesis of the Frenchwoman Helène Carrère d’Encausse, who envisaged a break-up of the Soviet Union, also on an ethnic basis. None of this happened, nor was my hypothesis that the "American empire" would not survive the "Soviet empire" verified.
So what did happen?
In the 15 years since the Munich speech, Russia’s priority has been to rebuild its power. In 2012, it promised to protect Syria from Anglo-Saxon-backed jihadists (the so-called "Arab Spring"), but waited two years before intervening. When it came out of the shadows, it had plenty of new weapons. On the battlefield, it learned how to use them and trained its personnel, which it renewed every six months. Although Vladimir Putin, in his Munich speech, named Brazil, India and China as his privileged partners in building a multipolar world, he waited a long time before sealing a privileged relationship with Beijing. China, which is still partly developing, is putting a lot of demographic pressure on Russian Siberia, but it has understood that, in order to get out of the "monopoly dictatorship," it must be Russia’s ally. Both countries have suffered from the West and have experienced their lies. They have no future without each other.
Western defeat in Ukraine should be an eye-opener for the United States. The tensions examined by Igor Panarin are resurfacing. The attacks of September 11 and the "endless war" will have been nothing more than a diversion. They gave the "American empire" a reprieve, but nothing more.
In the 35 years since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has wrongly convinced itself that it has defeated its rival. In reality, it was the Soviets themselves who overthrew it. They believed that the Russians would need a century to recover from their mistakes. In fact, they have become the world’s leading military power. The United States has succeeded in subjugating Western and Central Europe, but today it must confront all the states it has bullied, led by Russia and China.
During this period, the Republicans and Democrats have given way to two new currents of thought: the Jacksonians around Donald Trump and the Wokists, puritans without God. We are currently witnessing an intensification of population movements in the USA. Electoral specialists note that many Americans are leaving the Woke regions and joining the Jacksonians [7]. Moving companies report that their clients are leaving large cities for smaller ones where life is cheaper and more pleasant. However, they all note that their customers increasingly cite a new motive: they are moving to join family members. This explanation is consistent with what Colin Woodard observed a decade ago [8]: U.S. citizens are clustering by community of origin. Real estate developers are observing the multiplication of gated communities. Their clients are grouping together with people like themselves, having inherited the same culture and belonging to the same social class. They often worry about the rise of insecurity and talk about a possible civil war.
Let’s not be blind. All empires are mortal. So is the "American empire".
[1] « À l’Est : la Révolution Gay », par Didier Marie, Rebel (France), Réseau Voltaire, 1er mars 1993.
[2] “Bush’s Strategic Doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 9 July 2004.
[3] “Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 3 September 2021.
[4] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.
[5] “The unipolar governance is illegal and immoral”, by Vladimir Putin, Voltaire Network, 11 February 2007.
[6] The crash of the dollar and the disintegration of the USA (only in Russian), Igor Panarin (2008).
[7] «On the move», Jennifer Harper, The Washington Times, April 14, 2023.
[8] American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America, Colin Woodard, Penguin Group (2011).