Magical Thinking
Every few years I read an essay that is so well-written and so pertinent to the subjects of this blog that I just want to copy and paste it into my blog (with attribution of course) so it stays as a permanent part of my 22-year-long chronicle of civilization’s demise.
The latest from British historian-diplomat Aurélien, entitled Do You Believe In Magic, is just such an essay.
In it, he resummarizes what I’ve described as the five underlying causes of, and contributors to, the polycrisis that has given rise to the current collapse of the systems constituting our civilization. They are (in my own words):
- The staggering complexity and interdependency of the now-global systems on which our civilization now rests and depends;
- The ever-growing size and scale of the human population and its activities, infrastructure, and artifacts;
- The increasing incompetence of all of us, but especially those with wealth and power, to cope with the predicaments that collapse presents. This incompetence (an objective statement of fact, not a dismissive judgement) has been more than a century in the making, and would take decades to rectify. It has four aspects:
- Insufficient cognitive capacity to navigate our complex world safely and effectively (we have not been taught how to think for ourselves, nor given enough practice using our critical, creative and imaginative thinking skills);
- Insufficient information and knowledge (and too much misinformation) to have an adequate context for forming coherent and useful beliefs and taking appropriate action;
- Insufficient technical and ‘soft’ skills and experience to be able to understand what needs to be done and to carry out appropriate and necessary actions (and even to do our day-to-day jobs) capably, especially collaboratively with others;
- Insufficient mental health to be able to think coherently and act in a reasoned and effective manner;
- A lack of appreciation of how things actually get done (from lack of knowledge of history and lack of practical experience), and a commensurate incapacity to practically intervene in our failing systems in useful and productive ways; and
- The inherent fragility and lack of resilience in these systems caused by the pursuit of profit and short-term thinking instead of effectiveness and sustainability.
As a result, he argues, we are going into a period of unprecedented collapse that we don’t understand, and can’t effectively deal with, and which will be even worse because the collapsing systems are built on such shaky ground to begin with.
In short, this is why (I believe) collapse is occurring, and why it will inevitably be a complete collapse, rendering life in future centuries unrecognizably different from how we live today.
Enough words from me. Please read his whole (long — 5500 words) article, linked above. Here are some of what I thought were the most cogent passages:
Visions are easy, but the West has progressively lost the capacity to formulate and operate mechanisms for putting them into practice. In part, this is because there is very little inherited understanding left of the necessary practical steps. For example, re-shoring manufacture of some pharmaceuticals would involve activities that most politicians and pundits have never heard of, let alone be able to describe. Finding and importing supplies of chemicals, designing and building factories, recruiting and training skilled technicians and graduates in chemical engineering (having set up the necessary courses first, naturally), dealing with all the various health and safety hazards, setting up a distribution system for the products … I doubt if much of our current ruling class and its parasites has any idea even of the steps involved, let alone how to sequence them. By contrast, there’s a great deal of experience in closing factories, making workforces redundant and tying yourself to overseas suppliers. But unfortunately, that’s not much use here…
The Anglo-Saxon (now more broadly Western) fixation with archetypal heroic entrepreneurs and university dropouts has obscured the historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement…
[The recent Western government approach to crises has been] to create the right “magical” environment (low taxes, few regulations) and then the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs would spontaneously do the rest, through the “magic” of the “market.” The magician, however, having summoned up these powers, should make sure to stay well away from the working… Instead of doing things, governments “create the conditions” for others to do things, and sit back in hopeful anticipation. Serial failures, in true New Age fashion, meant that the spell was not right, or more usually that it was not used with enough will and conviction. The idea that governments should actually do things is considered a quaint anachronism…
As a result, where governments actually did have to do things, there was no tradition or capacity in planning and implementation to fall back on. Covid demonstrated this, in the search for some magical gizmo that would solve the problem without the large-scale government programmes that were no longer possible. Vaccines, for all their questionable efficacy, could be presented as “creating the conditions” for people to return to work, so enabling the government to declare the problem solved. The incoherence of Mr Trump’s attempts to rebuild US industry through tariffs, and the ignominious retreat this seems to have provoked, are simply the latest example of the magical thinking that says vague aspirations can be converted into specific results through willpower and the creation of the right “conditions.” In reality, it seems unlikely that anyone in Mr Trump’s confidence has the remotest idea of what would be practically involved in rebuilding US Industry. Likewise, the incoherence between ambitious, high-level American plans in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Middle East more generally, and their desultory and amateurish execution, has been much noticed…
Thus, whatever may be the incoherent strategic objectives western governments set themselves in trying to navigate the appalling challenges of the future, and even regain lost ground if possible, they are highly unlikely to be achieved. Not only is the technical capability lacking, but the very thought-processes are absent as well… Inevitably, as the capability for holistic thought and planning has been lost, governments and others have found themselves adopting little ad hoc measures which they delude themselves, when aggregated, can collectively be passed off as a “strategy.”… Naturally, then, governments don’t really have strategies for dealing with the massive environmental and climate challenges of today and the near future, for example: they just have sets of disconnected initiatives from brainstorming sessions organised by management consultants, many at cross-purposes with each other…
The result is that the machinery and the competence, and even more the capacity for strategic thought and planning, do not exist at anything like the level required to tackle the really major problems discussed in my previous essay. To take a simple example, the price of gas in Europe is likely to rise very sharply in the next few years, and there may be actual shortages if the Russians decide to be awkward. There will be electricity outages in the winter and people will be without heat and power because they can’t afford it, or it simply isn’t available. The last time anything similar happened was the 1973 oil crisis, which resulted in well-organised countries such as France and Japan turning to crash nuclear programmes. The thought of any western country having the imagination or the resources to mount any programme of such ambition these days is laughable. We can imagine a procession of politicians telling people to buy warm clothes, run around to keep warm and invest in solar panels, which if you are an unemployed single mother living on the fourth floor of a tower block isn’t particularly helpful.
Yet in a way this minimalist, short-term approach is understandable, even if it’s not very attractive. The combination of really large and potentially insoluble problems, and a radically reduced capability to deal with problems of any kind, virtually dictates that governments will at best be reduced to merely fiddling with things, and at worst just spend their time arguing about whose fault it is…
[When it comes to programs like recycling and waste management, for example], the total size of the problem is immeasurably larger than the sum total of the initiatives that individuals can take to deal with it… The result is that, because the size of the problems we face in many areas is overwhelming, critics, activists and others fasten on to anything that can be done quickly, whatever its real impact, just because it can be done, and also because often it will not affect them… The discrepancy between the sheer magnitude of upcoming problems and the sum total of the ideas for dealing with them, no matter how individually well-founded, is partly because few of us are capable of comprehending what really large numbers mean…
Effectively, therefore, we have built highly complex, extremely fragile, urban systems that will collapse, perhaps terminally, after relatively little stress, and which depend absolutely on the continuity of power and fresh water supplies for ever and ever. Because there is no reversionary mode, and no Plan B if anything goes wrong, we rely absolutely on the favour of the gods for our survival… [As an example], over the last generation, food distribution chains, which used to be quite simple, have taken on a hallucinatory complexity, not least as sub-contractors and sub-sub contractors have become the norm. The resulting system seems supernaturally complex, especially since its main purpose, after all, should be to make sure we have enough to eat. Yet in fact, the actual purpose of the system is to make as much money as possible for shareholders and managers. Western states thus depend for their very survival on elaborate and complex food distribution chains that are designed to reduce costs to the bare minimum, and have little or no redundancy in them. All we can do is pray that they are not greatly disrupted…
Now, few of us wanted this situation, and even the glassy-eyed utopian ideologues of the 1980s didn’t actually think it would turn out this way. But the combination of immensely complex and fragile systems with the ever-decreasing capability to manage them, or even stop them disintegrating, is lethal, if only our rulers realised it. After all, ask them how the population and industry of Europe is going to manage in an era of massively more expensive natural gas, and they have no idea, other than that some magical solution will pop out of a Powerpoint presentation. As Leonard Cohen said, we have seen The Future, and it’s murder. All our rulers can do is wait for a miracle.
Consumerization of the Human Species
One of the perhaps unforeseen effects of untrammelled ‘free market’ capitalism has been the debasement of much of our personal and collective identity from that of citizen to that of mere consumer.
Money has long played a role making our political systems less and less democratic, to the point that politicians no longer even pretend to represent their voters and citizens — they respond only to the orders of their financial donors. If AIPAC doesn’t like your stance on the genocide, they will simply buy your defeat by massively bribing and bankrolling your opponents. Candidates, elections, and laws are simply bought and sold on the ‘open’ market like everything else.
At one time, if you objected to government action, it might have been useful to write letters to your ‘representatives’ and the media, and hold protests in public places. Those days are long gone. The outrage of a thousand protesters is ignored in favour of the ‘louder’ voice of a single billionaire.
Likewise universities and medical institutions, once valued for their research, knowledge and insight on political and other public interest matters, are now easily cowed by large corporate funders, rich ideological ‘philanthropists’ and deranged right wing autocrats with threats of ‘defunding’ if they don’t self-censor and squelch protest against those daring to challenge those donors’ and funders’ political interests.
Capitalism even has a name for what were once called ‘citizens’ — human ‘capital’ or human ‘resources’, to be bought and sold like any other commodity, using the best price and market manipulation money can buy (the destruction of unions and worker protections, outsourcing and offshoring, ending corporate pensions, privatizing essential services, enforcing NDAs and non-compete ‘agreements’, and on and on).
You are less than a consumer, even — as the tech bros exploit the end of anti-monopoly and anti-oligopoly regulations, you’ve become the product, whose ‘eyeballs’ and ‘attention’ are sold to the real customer, the corporations buying adverting space.
Even the mechanisms of protest available to you have been ‘commercialized’, forcing you to try to influence decisions using your (paltry) economic power rather than your (non-existent) political power. If you can’t afford to ‘buy’ politicians and laws, you have to resort to BDS and other indirect methods of economic ‘protest’. (More on that in an upcoming article.)
You are conditioned to feel as if the 157 ‘likes’ and ‘reactions’ you got in response to your expression of righteous indignation about some political or social outrage, is somehow ‘doing something’ about that outrage.
You are the product you are trying to sell when you apply for an advertised job that has actually already been offered to a rich executive’s or major supplier’s relative. Sorry, nice credentials but we received a better ‘offer’.
We are powerless, now, politically, socially, economically. We just don’t have enough ‘capital’ in this heartless, brainless, hopelessly-flawed capitalist system to count for anything.
All of this was foreseeable, if unpredictable. There is no fixing it. As we slide further into collapse, as all our systems increasingly fall apart, our paper money and paper wealth will soon become largely worthless, as what is valued is not cash or shares or web platforms but real goods and services essential for our survival, health and comfort. Things like wholesome local food, safe, clean, durable housing that isn’t energy-dependent or technology-dependent, personally-made and locally-repairable clothing, bicycles and other critical elements of a sane and healthy life, not dependent on a massively complex, global, recklessly fragile capitalist economy.
Fifty years from now, those of us fortunate or unfortunate enough to be still alive will likely read reports about early 21st-century life with astonishment and disbelief. Did people really live this way, and think it could continue? And why would they want it to?
Such is the lot of our frightened, downtrodden, repressed, dumbed-down species in an age of precarity and horrific imaginative poverty. We have forgotten, or never learned, and can’t imagine, that there is any other way to live. We are caught in a maze with no exit. A maze with a ‘capital’ M.
|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Pollard publishes How to Save the World, a chronicle of civilization's collapse, creative works, and essays on our culture, searching for a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. For more information about his personal journey and current wok, click here.
|
