The worst will never happen until it does. We live in a just-in-time society, whereas we used to live in a just-in-case one.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: National Archives
In 1943, Jorge Semprùn, a Spanish exile in France, was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp for his Resistance activities. Semprùn, scarcely twenty at the time, would have been executed immediately, but his life was saved because he had joined the (illegal) Spanish Communist Party the year before, and subsequently the FTP-MOI, the clandestine Resistance organisation largely recruited from foreigners, and organised by the French Communist Party. The concentration camp, like many in Germany, was effectively administered by an elite group of inmates, in this case members of the German Communist Party many of whom had spent the best part of a decade there. They recognised Semprùn as one of their own, and falsified his personal documents to show that he had skills which were worth keeping him alive for. He spent the next traumatic year in the Camp working in an administrative job. He survived the war, becoming a senior official of the exiled Spanish Communist Party, before breaking with them, and developing a career as a writer of books and screenplays, finishing as Culture Minister after the death of Franco. Quite a life to be saved by the stroke of a pen.
His experience is a microcosm of the way in which the subject populations of the Nazis survived, some in extreme circumstances as here (one could add Primo Levi, another resistance worker whose life was spared in Auschwitz because he was a chemical engineer), others in a more everyday fashion. I will say a few words in this essay about both physical and mental survival and resistance, starting deliberately with some exceptional cases, because I think we are now moving into very difficult times, where the kind of psychological strength needed for personal survival, and the kind of physical and organisational capabilities needed just to keep society going, will not be those that our society currently values, or for that matter is even able to generate. I’ll make a number of references to the Second World War as we go, because what happened then and afterwards is an extreme exemplification of the wider argument I want to make.
Let’s start from the worst of the worst, then. I’ve said before that the easiest way to understand the Nazis is as a group of psychopathic management consultants. Here, the question was simply: who was going to survive? Europe in 1942 was starving, and some form of priority was necessary for rationing food. In the absence of a McKinsey-type organisation, the Nazis set about establishing priorities of their own to decide who would be fed. First, of course, the Germans. Within that, front-line soldiers and industrial workers were the most important. After the Germans, foreigners supporting the war effort in some way. Right at the end of a long list came prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps, as well as the civilian populations of the conquered territories in the East. Since not everybody could be fed, the solution was to concentrate the food where it was needed, and, um, dispose of the rest. Thus the two million Polish Jews murdered in 1942. Until recently, we would have assumed that such brutal questions of survival and priority were safely in the distant past. But what happens when there’s not enough food to go round in Europe in 2027? Which leaders will be capable of understanding, let alone dealing with, the ethical and practical problems that will certainly follow?
Zooming out, we should be familiar with the commonplace observation that some people survive in situations where others don’t, and some are useful when others aren’t. Take your average disaster movie from the 1970s, or any story about a small group of survivors from a plane crash and you’ll have an idea of what I mean. Survival doesn’t only mean physical survival, either. Evidence suggests that mental survival is actually more important. In the concentration camps (as with the prison camps in in the Soviet Union) those who fared worst came from the respectable middle class, who had long been used to the deference and obedience of the State and of men in uniform. Bankers, lawyers, or for that matter Party officials in the Gulags, often broke down psychologically because they could not understand by what process they had become suddenly the lowest of the low. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, was a pastor and theologian finally executed by the Nazis just before the end of the war. But almost until the end, his letters suggest that he believed a mistake had been made. He shouldn’t be in a concentration camp, and if he could find a good lawyer he could surely get himself released. The psychoanalyst Victor Frankl, himself an inmate in Auschwitz, recounts how he and others set up a rudimentary counselling service to help new arrivals better adapt to the hell into which they had been sent. (Counselling tends to mean something a bit different these days.) By contrast, working-class inmates, habitual criminals, trades unionists and groups such as homosexuals often survived psychologically because they had always lived with the idea of the State as an enemy. How by contrast, will today’s comfortable and entitled middle-class react to such mild constraints as compulsory petrol rationing, or the widespread cancellation of holiday flights, and extended waiting times and triage in hospitals?
Widening the focus again, war and crisis are not just, as I have suggested, a form of price discovery, they are a brutal way of sorting people with psychological strength and practical skills from the rest. Semprùn joined the Resistance, and survived the camps in large part because of the solidarity of the Communist movement, and its long experience (apart from the unfortunate hiatus in 1939-41) of fighting against the Nazis: it seemed natural, which is why a sizeable part of the Resistance came from the Communist Party which had been a semi-clandestine organisation anyway, and many others came from marginalised and dissident political or social groups. The sociology of Resistance in Occupied Europe is a fascinating subject in itself, because its members also included convinced Catholics, right-wing nationalists and just plain angry patriots, as well as groups of the Left. (Indeed, the forces of the State also rebelled on occasions: the liberation of Paris was led by the city’s Police force, partly because they had access to weapons.) But there was always an ideology, a faith, a pride in the nation: all things that we’ve carefully done away with. In France, the myth of universal resistance, damaged by such works as the 1968 film The Sorrow and the Pity has been at least partly rehabilitated through the work of recent historians with access to the files of the German occupiers, with their endless complaints about how a recalcitrant French population tried to make life difficult for an over-stretched occupation force. As usual, it’s also a question of context: the dilemmas of an Army officer or a government official stationed in Paris would be different from those of a solicitor in a small town in the Unoccupied Zone. But maybe dilemmas don’t change that much: in a couple of years’ time, will a doctor feel justified in buying petrol on the black market to help look after their patients?
But there’ also the more positive question of finding those with the right skills for exceptional times, for example in the chaos of 1944-45 when newly liberated territories had to be administered. Such people existed then in sufficient numbers: it’s not clear they do now. This had already been made obvious in the military, where the skills needed of a peacetime manager were not identical to those needed by an operational commander: indeed, it was normal for peacetime commanders to be shunted aside when the shooting started. But even in wartime, it’s horses for courses and the skills needed by a very high-level commander may be as much diplomatic and political as military. Thus Eisenhower, who had never commanded troops in battle, was the right man to exercise overall command in 1944-45, whereas Montgomery was not.
More generally, it’s interesting to study the wartime mobilisation of talent at that era, especially in Britain, where men and women with all sorts of weird and wonderful skills and experiences found themselves pressed into service for the war effort, and doing things they could never have expected. Likewise, and this continued even in peacetime, military organisations found out they needed people capable of carrying out non-standard, often highly specialised and covert activities. In many cases, they had the reputation of being “bad soldiers” (hair too long, insubordinate) or officers too independent to reach the highest ranks. It’s this willingness to work in unorthodox situations, by the way, to deal with the resulting stresses and demonstrate great independence, that tends to distinguish genuine Special Forces personnel; not being eight feet tall or able to kill you with the side of a matchbox.
All this in turn is an aspect of a more generic and more perennial issue. Any organisation of any size has an inbuilt tension between those who do, and who always will do, routine jobs, and those whose capabilities also qualify them for non-standard situations. This is essentially what structural redundancy is about: the ability of an organisation to develop and retain the resources needed to deploy in untypical situations, and to manage them successfully. This means attention to people, not just procedures and facilities. You may have an elaborate written plan for dealing with emergencies, and the right equipment available with compulsory training, but none of that is any good if people panic, or faint because they can’t stand the sight of blood. (Yes, I’ve seen it happen.) A good organisation also needs a register of reliable people it can send out into the field, into non-standard situations to manage non-standard problems, with a good chance of success.
Redundancy does not have to be dramatic, but lack of redundancy can have unexpected and quite serious consequences. You can tell a good organisation by the redundancy it has built in, and the degree of competence it shows in managing unexpected emergencies. In one celebrated case in 2009, no less than five Eurostar trains were trapped in the Channel Tunnel at the same time, stranding thousands of passengers for extended periods. (As Oscar Wilde might have put it, one could be accounted a misfortune, but five sounds remarkably like total incompetence.) The proximate cause (snow melting onto electric circuits) was less important than the fact that the organisation as a whole had no plans or capability to cope with such situations, and the personnel were untrained in how to handle thousands of angry and in some cases desperate passengers.
But all this costs money, you see, which could better be spent on executive jets and share buy-backs. After all, the worst is never certain, and it might never happen. Until it does. Yet what is curious is that the same disease has increasingly affected the public sector as well, where the financial incentives are not so brutal. Indeed, behind the endless “efficiency” drives that have characterised the public sector around the world over the last generation or two, there is, in reality, no genuine rationality at all. All one can say is that political folklore has always branded the public sector “wasteful,” without explaining exactly why that should be. (Though I recall the case of a distinguished figure from the private sector some years ago who demanded that a government building should be redecorated before he would deign to work there: “I can’t bring people from industry into this pigsty” he is reported to have said.) The result is that virtually any initiative to cut staff or spending is greeted with rapturous acclamation, and is correspondingly difficult to argue convincingly against, for ideological reasons. After all, as long as the system still works, more or less, then if less money is spent it must by definition have become more “efficient.” And even if we are cutting corners and have no spare capacity, we can always trust to luck, talk pompously about risk management and intelligent planning, and assume that the worst will never happen. Until it does.
To a far greater degree that most people appreciate, we live in a just-in-time society, whereas we used to live in a just-in-case one. Organisations today are structured and run for normal circumstances only, where everything just about works, and people and resources are just about adequate if everything functions correctly and things happen just in time. The old habit of building in staff redundancy to cover people away sick or on holiday would seem laughably profligate now: the question “who’s dealing with the subject in their absence?” would be meaningless in many organisations today. After all, things will work out, won’t they? Until they don’t. But if this is irritating and frustrating in daily life, it is potentially very serious when it involves major public issues. Covid revealed that most governments had run down emergency stocks, failed to develop any useful contingency plans, and didn’t have the surge capacity in their health services to cope with an emergency of such proportions. But in many ways this wasn’t surprising: it was already clear (for example from the Brexit saga in the UK) that governments in general had run down their reserve capacity to the point where they simply couldn’t handle anything that wasn’t absolutely routine and predictable.
It’s not just about organisation, either, but about the people who work there. Now this isn’t yet another diatribe about Young (or not so young) People Today. The fact is that people respond to the cues given to them by their parents, their society, the institutions for which they work, and increasingly their governments. I think it’s fair to say that the incentives that have been provided to those growing up over the last fifty years have served to create a population at all levels less prepared than ever before to meet the practical and psychological demands of significant new challenges. And since “significant” is a massive understatement to describe what’s coming over the next few years, this is really quite serious.
Take one simple change that affects all levels: the move from broadly defined areas of work in institutions to fussy lists of detailed objectives. This began in the 1990s, and generated a whole culture of boxes to tick, percentages to reach and, most of all, objectives that could be quantified in some way. Objectives that could not be quantified tended to get left to one side. When I first joined the government service, I would arrive at a new job with a list of four or five broad areas to look after, followed by a phrase like “other duties as directed.” This was pretty much the spirit of the times, and the first attempts to replace it with lists of rigid and exclusive objectives were met with the criticism that if you didn’t already know what you were supposed to be doing, then there must be something wrong with you and your organisation.
Over time, this has produced a working culture in which initiative is in practice discouraged, in spite of the drivel about “self-starters” in recruitment advertisements. People limit themselves to what they have been specifically told to do, often measured against quantitative targets, and neglect those things that, however useful and sensible they may be, don’t figure in the printed list. This means that there is effectively no intellectual or practical capability to respond to the unexpected, let alone to serious crises. And when the blame game begins, it’s seen as a perfectly reasonable defence to argue that such and such a crisis “wasn’t my responsibility.” As long as you have ticked your boxes and met your targets, no-one can blame you if a disaster occurs elsewhere. We can see this mentality at work in the reactions (or to be more precise lack of reactions) of western governments to the crises over Ukraine, and even more Iran. People attempt to deal with a crisis by doing what they have always done, only more so. Things that are not their responsibility are no doubt the responsibility of someone else, except that no-one, at any level, seems to have realised that the problem with politics is, as Harold Macmillan famously said, “events,” and so no-one is actually responsible or prepared for events that are not anticipated.
The bureaucratic, managerial style of modern politics, exemplified best perhaps by the unfortunate Mr Starmer, cannot by definition deal with the unexpected or with a genuine crisis effectively. Fifty years ago, government bureaucracies were in general, and for all the ignorant invective directed against them, large enough and flexible enough to cope with the unexpected. Now they drown under a tidal wave of management-consultant type administration, which, combined with radical cuts in their size, and thus the level of their inbuilt redundancy, has destroyed any real capacity to respond to the unexpected, and anyway encourages the best people to leave.
Organisations send signals about who they want to recruit and who they want to keep, not just (or even principally) by their public image, but by the way they treat their staff: who they promote and who they leave by the wayside. Any organisation that proudly announces job cuts sends a message that financial objectives are more important that the welfare of the staff, or even doing the job properly. Many years ago, when I first encountered the British Treasury’s never-ending attempts to reduce the size of the public sector, I noticed that the continual references to jobs “saved.” Thinking that this didn’t sound like the Treasury at all, I investigated further, to discover that here, “saved” was used in the unusual sense of “lost”: ie the destruction of the jobs of their colleagues in other Ministries was regarded as a morally praiseworthy activity. (But then I have always believed that Finance Ministry officials are not born naturally like you and me, but manufactured in underground facilities, like Sauron’s Orcs.)
With ever-shrinking workforces and ever more competition for top jobs, the ambitious try to read the signals their institution sends, while the rest just try to do the best job they can. Most institutions today reward the cautious and the conventional, those who are unlikely to make mistakes and can be relied upon to follow even the dumbest political instructions. The days when institutions were large and varied enough to accommodate the unconventional, non-standard kind of person whom you might need in an emergency, have long gone. The result is that organisations have become risk-averse, because the people in charge of them have floated upwards by not making mistakes, and by not taking controversial initiatives. This doesn’t mean that the decisions they took have worked out well, just that by taking decisions which are fashionable, or which emulate decisions taken elsewhere, they could insulate themselves from criticism when things go wrong. (“We followed standard practice.”)
This even applies to the military, which may seem surreal: how can you have a risk-averse military? Well, wars and hostilities of any kind are relatively rare, but in peacetime “events” happen every day. Some years ago, I was talking to a Naval Officer, who remarked that commanding your own ship—once the height of any officer’s ambition— was no longer what it had been. Too many things could go wrong. “The only advice I give” he said “is don’t **** up. Try to get to the end of your command without the ship breaking down or running aground, without accusations of sexual harassment, or bad behaviour by the crew ashore. Otherwise, your career’s finished.” Much the same is true of Armies, which have been deployed in recent decades into completely impossible situations, where the established laws of war are simply irrelevant, and junior soldiers are left to take life and death decisions in moments. Senior commanders know that if anything goes wrong, the political leadership will disown them. So it makes a grotesque kind of sense to prefer the possibility that a suicide bomber may kill some of your troops to the possibility that one of your troops will shoot a suspected suicide bomber, only to find he’s not. The first will not damage your career: the second may well end it.
The result is that western militaries are now headed by careful, conformist officers, more managers than leaders, with no capacity to think differently or radically, or even understand the enormous changes that are taking place in warfare and the consequences they will have. They realise vaguely that drones have changed everything, but not how, and why, still less what to do. They make speeches and attend committee meetings where everybody says the same things, but nobody really has any creative ideas. There might be a superficial comparison with the Generals of the First World War, save that the latter had generally commanded forces on operations, and they proved themselves far more open to innovations when the War began. The day-to-day work of today’s commanders, on the other hand, is financial management, personnel reductions, diversity initiatives, procurement decisions, public relations, and dealing with a political class that is more uninformed about strategic issues than ever before in history. And their success in dealing with such issues largely determines their career path. After all, we don’t really need competent military commanders, do we? Until we do.
Senior military and police commanders, like heads of government departments and Ambassadors, react to the political agenda as it is set by their political leadership and the media: they cannot do otherwise. And that agenda is very much concerned with mundane daily issues of personnel and financial management, of endless detailed reporting, of evanescent scandals and lurid, if generally unsourced, accounts of misbehaviour: in short, of non-technical issues that the average journalist or politician can understand. If there is no pressure for long-term and innovative thinking, there will be none. If the rewards are entirely for dealing with the banal problems of the day, the capability to respond to the unexpected will atrophy, or just never develop.
This would be less of a problem if there were influential outside forces calling for a recognition of the need for change, as there have been for most of modern history. But whilst there are a number of dissident writers and podcasters on such subjects as Ukraine and Iran, they represent a tiny fringe of the punditocracy, and they have little influence. For every retired officer on YouTube telling us that Ukraine will lose, there are twenty or thirty confidently foretelling a Ukrainian victory. The same is true of think-tanks and the media, of international organisations, and almost the whole of the political class and its lackeys. It is tempting to imagine that this is all some vast conspiracy, but in fact the truth is more depressing than that.
The reality is that all these people resemble each other to a frightening extent. They go to the same universities and study the same subjects, they read the same media, they reinforce each other’s views when they socialise together, they marry each other and seek recognition and promotion through displays of conformity, thus obeying a central commandment of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) of which they are part. The days when relations between diplomats, politicians and the military were more difficult and often conflictual, because their backgrounds and education were different, have long gone. These days you can easily mistake one for the other. And journalists used to start young and develop their own expertise, and with it a healthy scepticism about the political process. Now they go to Journalism School. Finally, the sheer difficulty of getting a worthwhile job these days tends to encourage conformity: advertise a research post on East-West relations at a think-tank, and you might get fifty credentialed candidates. Why take a risk with someone whose views are a little outside the mainstream? You recruit somebody safe and conventional, who is just as wrong about Russia as everybody else. But being wrong about Russia is just one of those things. It’s not a problem, until it is.
Thus, perverse incentives have created a political class, with its advisers and heads of institutions, which thinks alike, which is focused primarily on procedure and the avoidance of risk, and which is reluctant to think differently or accept the idea that radical change may be forced upon them. If you had to design a ruling class and its acolytes particularly ill-prepared for the likely consequences of the Ukraine and Iran crises, you could not have done better. This accounts, I think, for the surreal complacency that our ruling class displays at the moment. When people encounter a truly new and disorienting idea for the first time—like the possible end of an economy based on mass petroleum usage—the brain goes into a kind of catatonic mode typical of how people often react in life-threatening emergencies: not with panic or violence but a kind of numb stupor. That, I suspect is the way that western elites are starting to react now.
But of course ordinary people are also subject to signals from society about what success is, and what they should strive for. We may not regret the passing of a historical ethos of service, patriotism, good conduct etc. or the elevation of great sportsmen, war heroes or explorers to a pantheon for imitation, but we have to recognise that what has taken their place is a simple ethos of real or apparent financial success. Our society tells people today that what matters is how much money they have, and young people take their examples from the financial success of their elders. (In Marseille recently there have been a large number of gangland killings carried out by 14 and 15-year olds: when interrogated by the Police they justify their conduct by the amount of money they were paid.) More generally, it’s a long time since I remember a major public figure being generally condemned for the way in which they have become rich. Even those disgusted by Jeffrey Epstein’s personal life seemed to have no problem with how he made his money.
This begins from the top, and society tells us very quickly how the ruling class of tomorrow will be selected, and how we should behave if we want to join it. It’s largely, we learn, a question of credentials, and having the right opinions. Education in the traditional sense is not really important: we can outsource literacy and numeracy to machines. History is, on balance, dangerous to teach. What matters is to have the right attitudes, so schools and teachers follow the incentives they are given, and pupils emerge functionally illiterate, which doesn’t matter until it does. Universities in many western countries exist to provide credentials, not education. They select students, including for higher degrees, as much on “personal narratives,” and ethnic or social background as on academic ability, and teachers are expected (I’ve done it), to help them to scramble over the minimum pass-mark, if necessary. There are real concerns in some countries about a lowering of standards in scientific and technical subjects, including medicine, but this won’t matter, until it does. After all, universities are just responding to the incentives they are given, to get as many people out of the door with certificates as possible, not necessarily to provide an education. Indeed, if you look at a programme of forthcoming events at a major university (I have one here) it’s mostly performative virtue-signalling: inviting the right speakers, addressing the right themes, supporting the right campaigns. As a preparation for life in the PMC, it’s admirable. Meanwhile, we can get doctors and nurses from abroad, and outsource technical needs to India and China, or at least until we can’t.
The combination of these two factors is producing a PMC that is less and less well educated, but also one that rushes towards whichever jobs are currently believed to pay best or have the most glamour attached to them. As well as those who go into fashionable careers like finance, internet startups or public relations, there is now a huge new class of aspiring politicians, “advisers,” media figures, and pundits, not really qualified for anything, and without any real experience, with their eyes riveted on a lucrative career. The result is a ruling class that is boring, poorly educated, lacking any real experience, and above all conformist, nervously checking that they have not gone beyond the bounds of accepted speech, and so might have put that coveted next job in jeopardy. Just the kind of people you want to be running things when the tsunami hits.
But it isn’t just a matter of intellectual qualities or the robustness of organisations. It’s also about personal strength as well. I’ve been in a few dodgy places and situations in my life, but I’ve never been in a war (directly anyway) or in a prison, let alone a concentration camp. Much of my generation was born and grew up when times were difficult, but that was still after the War, and, in western Europe at least, we didn’t have to worry about the knock on the door at three in the morning, or political violence in the streets. Western society as a whole has led a sheltered existence over the last couple of generations, and the ruling class particularly so. It’s not just that the ruling class has been insulated from poverty and insecurity, as ruling classes always have been, but rather that they have grown up with a sense of entitlement; less to material wealth than to happiness, and getting what they want. The approved method of accessing rewards, power and influence these days, carefully inculcated at university, is through demonstrating your vulnerability or your marginalised status. “Neurodiversity,” learning difficulties, membership of “historically marginalised” groups will help you get on in life and move into better jobs with more power and influence. (It’s a bit like sights you see in parts of Africa, where the sick and mutilated compete to show you their wounds, hoping for charity.) This isn’t going to work any more, when it comes to food rationing, for example. Their sense of entitlement, whether financial or political, is going to take an almighty hit, and governments themselves, unused to having to make such decisions, are likely to be overwhelmed.
A couple of generations ago, societies knew what hunger, mass poverty and political insecurity were like. This didn’t necessarily make them “stronger,” nor are we necessarily “weaker” today. It’s a question of what you are used to. The PMC, far from all this, floats in a little bubble of contentment where such problems mostly happen elsewhere, and even then are only occasions for performative gestures. Then you discover that your local hypermarket is closed because the delivery lorries couldn’t get the diesel, that your local garage has no petrol, and that the pharmacy has run out of cough medicines for your child. All your life, you have been used to receiving things without effort and with the smallest disagreement possible. Others necessarily do your bidding. What happens when a group of youths armed with knives comes to drain the petrol tank of your car, and asks for money to “protect” your house?” What happens when you encounter an improvised roadblock that you have to pay cash to pass, or when drug dealers demand proof of where you live before they will let you into your road? These things happen elsewhere in the world all the time, of course, but they also happen in some areas of western cities, including areas a few kilometres away from where I’m writing. Just not to the PMC: yet.
But won’t “community leaders,” step into the breach as they always have? Well, there are large parts of western cities now where there are no “communities” in the first place. You can’t buy, or even rent, an apartment in Paris on anything resembling an ordinary salary. Those apartments that are inhabited are bought by people from finance, the media, public relations or internet start-ups, usually on two salaries. When your apartment building is occupied by accountants, currency traders, PR consultants, TV journalists, YouTube influencers and celebrity plastic surgeons, where is your community? And who are the natural leaders? Who is going to competently take charge when the power goes off?
In the end, I’m less worried about ordinary people—though we ourselves will objectively suffer more—than about the PMC, which will probably have some kind of collective nervous breakdown. We shouldn’t idealise the past, but it remains true that the kind of men and women who fought World War 2 and rebuilt Europe don’t exist any more. But the uncomfortable thing is that it’s not they who were exceptional, but our current ruling class. Intellectually and morally pampered, feeling entitled to everything, only able to cope with routine, incurious about the future, they will suddenly find themselves confronted in their own jobs with things they never thought possible. Utterly incomprehensible media reports, economic crises, bankruptcies, large-scale outbreaks of looting, political crises, no Internet … and then it may start to get really serious. How will a political system of this sort ever bring itself to make friends with Russia again, so that at least we have some petrol?
Forty years of Liberal-neoliberal vandalism of society and the economy have brought us to a position where our just-in-time society itself can only really survive if nothing serious goes wrong. And if it does, we have a political class and a PMC which could have been purposed-designed to panic, to run away and generally react as incompetently as possible. For decades we have been told not to worry, the worst will never happen and anyway it doesn’t matter. It does now.
Be the first to comment