The new is dying, but the old cannot be reborn. What do we do?
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack
These essays have developed a reputation in some quarters for being pessimistic. That wasn’t the intention—I just try to analyse things as I believe they are and may become—but it makes me think once more about the important distinction between what, if anything at all, can be done at an institutional level and what we can all do personally, with what we have.
I have already written on two occasions about the lessons we can draw from Existentialism, and I have devoted another essay to celebrating those who carried on regardless, even when all hope appeared to have been lost. I have little time for pessimism on a personal basis, and have been known to make angry grimaces at people whose unofficial motto seems to be “if at first you don’t succeed, give up.” (If I were younger I would have a tee-shirt printed with the motif : “There is Always Something you can Do.”)
And there is always something that you or I can do for ourselves, provided we don’t think we should appeal to institutions or parent-substitutes to do it for us, nor fantasise about being saved by higher forces or improbable and providential turns of events. So the subject for this week is how we might survive personally, and even retain our sanity, when governments and institutions of all kinds seem to be beyond redemption and even beyond repair, and yet paradoxically people are expected to depend on them more and more. So first we need to look at where we are, and I will lay out the argument that the political and social order of the last forty years is crumbling, and so each of us needs to think about how we might react. I will then provide some (very preliminary) thoughts about how we might react.
I and others have written enough about the decline in governments and institutions of all kinds that there’s not a lot worth adding here. But it is interesting, perhaps, to dwell for a moment on what this means for individuals, which is the focus of this essay. Institutions should exist to serve people, after all, even if only indirectly. This point is often overlooked in the justified criticism of organisational decline: there are people on the other end. It is most obvious in government and the public sector generally, but it apples almost as much in the private sector. If I give your company money, then presumably I expect you will provide me with something that I could otherwise not have. And to be fair, this is still sometimes the case.
But increasingly we are moving towards a stand-and-deliver economy, a situation where obstacles are put in your way and you have to pay to have them lifted. (There’s quite a good analogy with “checkpoints” manned by militias in post-conflict societies.) Things that used to be relatively simple have now become increasingly complicated, and of course the complication exists in order to insert the maximum number of opportunities for the maximum number of rent-seeking gatekeepers to extract money from you. If you have ever tried to pay to park a car, at night, when it’s raining, having to download an application, set up an account with a user name and password, and then register and validate a credit card, all for thirty minutes parking, and for something that used to take five seconds with a coin, well then you know what I mean. Now it’s important for the argument of this essay to appreciate that this is not a move towards the future, it’s a move backwards, to an earlier model of extractive economic activity, and that is what economic changes in the last forty years, for all their surface glitter, have largely consisted of, and why they cannot last.
But sometimes life is becoming complex even when there’s no money to be made directly from that complexity: it’s rather the transformation of a process to reflect the interests of an increasing number of groups who want influence. The usual result is to make those who should actually be benefitting from the services invest more time, effort and money in what they receive, whilst at the same time giving them less. Take a case I have been occasionally involved in: university admissions. From all levels from first degree to doctorate, student admissions used to be a judgement made by academic staff, based on the perceived academic ability of the applicant. But that’s far too simple now. After all, what’s the point in having an Assistant Deputy Vice-Dean for Student Diversity, if its staff have no influence on who gets selected as a student? For that matter, what’s the point of setting up the Inter-Departmental Anti-Sexism Vigilance Group either? And once you have a cohort of students, fitted or not academically for their studies, how does the Assistant Deputy Vice-Dean for Student Welfare justify its existence if there is not a busy traffic in student accommodations for illness, mental health problems, learning difficulties, sensitivity to subject matter and inability to meet deadlines or carry out prescribed readings?
Now notice that this is not yet another complaint about Young People Today: in fact I have a great deal of sympathy for them. We are requiring them treat getting a university place like finding a job, and allowing their academic careers and personal futures to be influenced and even decided by special interest groups fighting power battles within institutions (of which universities are only one example.) For some time now, universities in various countries have been taking in students who don’t belong (more students=more money) with limited abilities but the right opinions and range of carefully-cultivated extra-curricular activities, and passing them out with degrees they haven’t earned, implying that they have skills they don’t possess. Which is fine until real life comes along, and people expect you to actually, you know, know things, and accommodations for learning difficulties are no longer acceptable.
We are not doing our young people any favours by all this, but then that’s not the point. They are raw material to be fought over for control. They are passive victims of a system which demands more and provides less, and leaves people worse fitted for the outside world, where there is no Assistant Deputy Vice-Dean for Avoiding Unhappiness. The increasing tendency to treat adolescents as children and grown-ups as adolescents isn’t ultimately to anyone’s benefit except those for whom ensuring permanent adolescence is part of their jobs. And to underline again a theme of this essay, it can’t last.
One of the deepest ironies today is that our society is encouraging people to be more and more dependent on organisations that function less and less well, and so making them less well able to function on their own. “Growing up” as it used to be called, was seldom easy, and for many young people of a sensitive disposition, it could be a trial. But it had to be done. However, one of the key demands of the radicals of the nineteen-sixties was that growing up should be optional, and this demand has now very largely been met. Children of the upper-middle class now effectively delay adulthood until their late twenties, passing through higher education, years abroad and internships, all the while sustained by an ever-increasing bureaucracy, and ever-proliferating sets of rules and regulations, as though they were still at school.
I’ve written several times about the infantilisation of our political culture, and I think you can see the connection. Many of our politicians and managers today haven’t really “grown up” in the traditional sense of the term. They, and their even younger advisers, passed successive birthdays in a world that was ever fuller of rules and regulations and unspoken but real constraints, in which they were theoretically free but in practice surveilled all the time by parents and authorities. Seldom being allowed to make mistakes and learn from them, they fell back on ever more complex systems of rules, believing ultimately that the answers to how to lead your life could be found in books. As they acquired power without having gained experience or judgement, it came naturally to them to seek to control the disturbing, even frightening messiness of real life by the imposition of more rules and, when that didn’t work, by even more rules. Whilst on one hand, multiplication of rules made people unwilling to risk making mistakes and learning from them, on the other hand institutional obsession with rules, norms, measurements, outputs and objectives effectively destroyed those same organisations. It soon became clear that succeeding in your studies, or doing your job properly, was less important than ticking all the right boxes. No organisation can long survive in such circumstances, as is now becoming apparent.
The increasingly authoritarian trend in western states and in public and private sector organisations is thus a result of weakness and dysfunction, not of strength. Authorities at all levels are now incapable of the kind of pragmatic, experienced- based judgements that were normal even a generation ago. Uncertainty is frightening, and as those notionally responsible no longer have the personal confidence to make difficult judgements, they fall back on ever-more detailed and constraining rules. As I was starting to draft this essay I read about a law making its way through the French Parliament which would impose compulsory “training” about anti-semitism (here understood to include any criticism of Israel) on all university staff and students, and establish disciplinary bodies to which people could bring complaints about others. Only a totally dysfunctional political and academic system could contemplate such a thing; the more so since in the other corner, heavily supported by M. Mélenchon’s circus and parts of the media, there are those trying to do the same thing for “islamophobia.” The head-on collision of these initiatives promises to be spectacular and not very enlightening.
This is, in fact, typical of how institutions now behave: essentially without the experience and judgement to settle issues pragmatically, their leaders just bow to whichever interest group assaults them most violently. There’s a mordant irony in the squeaks coming from educational institutions in the United States about a sudden loss of academic freedom, when you consider their recent behaviour. The Thought Police are still in charge, in fact, it’s just the ideology that has changed. (Indeed, any moral standing that western universities as a whole ever had to defend the concept of “free speech” vanished a long time ago.)
Once you accept that today’s leaders and managers are essentially still adolescents, a number of things become easier to understand: the conduct of the Ukraine crisis is an obvious example. (I would also argue that the enthusiasm for so-called Artificial Intelligence is just the latest iteration of seeking advice from your parents—more reliable than the Internet or Youtube—before doing anything.) Adolescents live in a complex and confusing world, grappling with inexplicable processes of physical and mental growth. In the past we got through it, more or less well, and emerged into adult life. These days, inversely, the permanent adolescence of our ruling class has imported the norms and customs of the school playground into public life.
That’s why, indeed, the normal tactic of special interest groups is not to do things for themselves, but to demand that others take responsibility for them: like running to your parents or your teacher and complaining that “it’s not fair.” Well, one thing you learn if you ever grow up is that life is not fair. But what we’ve seen in institutions in the last generation has been the normalisation of this kind of playground culture: anonymous denunciations, character assassination, authorised bullying of nonconformists, ritual abuse of opponents and so forth. So forcing someone in a position of responsibility to resign because of anonymous and unproven allegations is a victory for … something, I suppose.
Our leaders inhabit an adolescent dreamworld of unreflective rebellion and the avoidance of consequences, where parent figures will put everything right. They are the natural concomitant of that recent social phenomenon, the graduate in their twenties still living with their parents, unable to find a job and spending all day playing online games. In fact, if you consider that our ruling class increasingly mistakes the world they have to deal with for a giant video game where there are no consequences and nothing is real, their behaviour becomes easier to understand. Except, of course, they don’t like losing, and then they have a tantrum. It is helpful to considerer ruling class’s attitude to Ukraine, for example, as one of anger and incredulity in the face of a game they thought was easy but now find they can’t win. And if you’ve ever had children you know that anger tends to be projected upon parents. Here, Mr Putin is the frowning parent, and we hate and we hate him, and we’ll never forgive him because he won’t let us have what we want, in this case Ukraine.
But it’s more than that, I think. It’s also the wider inability of our rulers to confront reality, and to hide in virtual worlds instead. It’s been much noticed that there’s a total disconnect between the idea that our rulers have of the economy in most countries, and the reality as experienced by ordinary people. But the truth is, our rulers are not emotionally capable of confronting that reality, and they use their wealth and privilege to hide from it, not just physically, but conceptually in diagrams and spreadsheets. If some of our leaders and their media parasites had to live on an average working wage for a month they’d probably have a nervous breakdown. (Has it ever struck you, by the way, what a “spreadsheet” is? It’s a sheet you spread over yourself and hide under to escape from reality, just like you used to do as a child.)
The fundamental truth about all of this is that it isn’t working, and indeed was never going to. What I find most frightening about the last forty years is that so much damage has been done to our society by people who didn’t care whether their ideas worked or not. Indeed, living through the eighties and nineties in the UK there was a surreal sense of watching Alex’s droogs from A Clockwork Orange just smashing up things for fun. But even then, they had no more idea than Burgess’s characters of why they were doing what they were doing, and were about as bereft of any moral sense. There was a terrible carelessness to these people, of the kind of Tom-and-Daisy quality, as I observed a couple of years ago talking about the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC). On reflection, though, I think it goes much wider than that.
For all the attempts at the time to pretend that the rise of neoliberalism and globalism was natural and inevitable, for all that various authors have traced the origins of the dogma back to the inter-war period, the real question is how ideas about government, the economy and society which were certifiably insane actually became not just acceptable but compulsory. You could try to make a tragedy out of it, except that those responsible were too small and pathetic to be tragic figures. The butchery that was perpetrated on Britain in those days was carried out by not-very-bright politicians and their not-very-bright advisors, comfortably insulated from the effects of their own policies, and driven as much by panic and short-term manoeuvring than by any threadbare ideology. Oh, look, we seem to have destroyed the country’s transport systems. Dear me, whoever would have expected that? And Britain was the pathfinding nation, although it shouldn’t have been, and neoliberalism was widely hailed as a success, which it manifestly wasn’t, and many countries followed down the slippery slope, which they needn’t have done.
Consider how contingent the whole thing was. If the Tory grandees had been competent enough to fix the 1975 leadership elections properly, Thatcher would never have won. If Callaghan had called a General Election in October 1978, as many wanted him to, Labour might well have won, and would certainly have kept a Tory majority to a handful of seats, which they would soon have lost. If right-wing Labour politicians had not split the Party in 1981 and left to found another, then Labour would have won the 1983 election, in spite of the post-Falkland bounce. Thatcher would have died in the IRA attack on the Tory Party Conference in 1984, had it not been for an extraordinary stroke of luck. And so on. But the hopeless division of the anti-Tory vote (which nonetheless grew steadily throughout the 1980s) handed continued power to a government that was in economic and social crisis nearly all the time, and found itself resorting to measures like privatisation, which had not even been mentioned in the 1979 manifesto, just to raise money.
Indeed, it was a government which was never really in control of anything, moving from improvisation to improvisation, and leaving a trail of destruction behind it that it frankly didn’t care about. And as traditional Tories with local connections and loyalties were purged from the Party, it moved more and more in a neoliberal direction, alienating many of its traditional supporters, and largely destroying its traditional electoral base among the middle classes in small towns and suburbs. (Indeed, Thatcher began the destruction of the Tory Party, which is now almost complete). Meanwhile, her ascent to divine status was aided by a compliant media, convinced that she would be in power for a generation. (In person, she was small and unimpressive, which is why she was always photographed from below, to make her seem taller.) When she fell from power she was unremembered by the party as thoroughly as Stalin had been.
So whilst propagandists at the time, and some academics since, have tried to wrench this largely incoherent series of events and policies into a consistent doctrine, that’s not how it was then. Neoliberalism and globalism were partly a rationalisation of greed, partly a rationalisation of all sorts of weird ideas forced on governments by expediency. And it was obvious, even at the time, that the ideology would eat itself if it was not tamed. The impoverishment of society, the export of jobs, the destruction of manufacturing industry, ordinary people unable to buy a house, families separated and destroyed by economic stresses, all these could not continue indefinitely without something coming apart. Short-term palliatives like mass immigration of cheap labour could only delay the inevitable. Now, not just in Britain but everywhere, it is the turn of the nearly-rich who have benefited for so long to be eaten by the system, which means it cannot be far from its end.
Several thinkers claim ownership of the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I’m not sure this is true, at least outside the kind of people who write about such issues, but in the end that doesn’t matter. Forty years ago, the end of Communism would have been equally unthinkable, but it happened nonetheless. What it does mean, though, is that our punditocracy, which once saw the Tories as an immovable force, which once saw neoliberalism triumphant everywhere, which once saw an American hyper-power bestriding the globe forever, which once saw liberal democracy spreading unstoppably through the Middle East, will have been wrong again. In the United States we can already see an intra-capitalist civil war under way, and this kind of struggle is usually the prelude to the end of a system.
It’s true also that Neoliberalism’s cousin Social Justice or Identity Politics (IdiotPol for short) is tearing itself apart as it was always going to. On the one hand, we are clearly at some kind of conceptual nadir, with feminists and transexualists clawing each other’s eyes out, and different sub-sub-identity groups fighting each other as bitterly as fringe Marxist groups did in the 1970s. On the other hand, people in most countries are now getting fed up with being preemptively ascribed to one “group” or another, and told to follow and obey their leaders. It was always inevitable that an ideology drawn from half-understood concepts of ”French Theory” (not a term recognised in France) that pitted men against women, homosexuals against heterosexuals, black against brown against white and, ultimately, everyone against everyone else, in a grim struggle for power, wealth and influence, and which saw life as nothing but a dour Social Darwinist struggle for dominance, was going to come apart at some point. Whether other countries will follow the lead of Mr Trump’s administration on this issue remains to be seen, but I suspect that his initiative will actually reveal just how narrow and fragile is the foundation that this ideology has always been based on, and it may disappear faster than we expect, once it becomes clear that there is increasingly less political advantage to be gained through it.
As I have suggested, the behaviour of our ruling class at the moment is largely explained by fear. The last forty years have allowed the escape of demons that they cannot control. They were negligent and careless. It was fun, and they did not worry if they broke things, or indeed people. But I’m beginning to think that, ironically, the children of the current ruling class —say those born around the start of the century—may actually be the biggest sufferers, and may simply have to be written off. Over-protected and over-regimented, afraid of entering into personal relationships because they are dangerous and may go wrong, the jobs that they hoped to go into, from law and accountancy to journalism and media, are precisely those being eaten up by AI. (Quite soon, NGO grant applications to donors will be written by AI, evaluated by AI, and rejected by AI, without a human being having been involved at all.) I can see this generation never able to enter into a proper relationship and never able to get a proper job, while spending the rest of their lives living in their parents’ house. Well, as you sow, even so shall your children reap. By contrast, working-class children will always have jobs (AI will never replace a plumber) and have largely been spared the IdiotPol brainwashing about personal relationships. Now there’s a thought.
None of this was expected, but all of it was predictable. The rise of “populist” (ie democratic) political parties, the hollowing-out of cities, rising crime linked to insecurity and immigration, lack of support for or even interest in the political system, lack of interest in serving one’s country, worrying increases in loneliness and depression, not enough jobs for the credentialed, the breakdown in social bonds, the unaffordability of housing … everyone, I suspect could add a dozen other factors which were predictable but not expected, and which our rulers have no idea how to deal with.
The new is dying, then, but can the old be reborn? On a mega scale, I’ve argued often enough that complex structures that have been broken cannot now be put back together again. And I fear the same is true of communities and extended families. But let’s leave that for the moment, and spend the rest of the time considering whether as human beings, individually and collectively, we have some way out. As always, I disclaim all pretensions to special wisdom, or any ambitions to being a teacher, but we can at least look at what we have as human beings, that might help us to cope better with the approaching death of the new ideologies that have wrought so much havoc in the last forty years.
Let’s go back to Sartre for a moment, and his austere belief that we are free, and responsible for our actions. If there is a common characteristic of all of the ideologies of the last half century, it is of the imposition of servitude in the name of liberation. Our alleged economic “freedoms” amount in practice to being consumers, clicking boxes, being bombarded with algorithmic propositions for spending even more money, guarding against deceptive advertising, allowing our personal details to be shared with heaven knows who, being tracked everywhere we go on the Internet even when we have refused permission, and often being held hostage to some provider or contractor because of the immense amount of time and effort it would take to change. In most countries a generation ago, electricity was supplied by the municipality, and that was that. These days, ever-changing resellers of electricity jostle for your custom, changing names and ownership, offering special deals with pages of fine print. Effectively, rather than the traditional assumption that the state provides services to its citizens, the consumer now does a great deal of the unpaid work for the body trying to sell them something.
The apparent profusion of “freedom of choice” has long been recognised to be a chimera: even if the human mind were capable of dealing with the overwhelming number of possibilities presented, the reality is that differences between them are often minor, and the experience of apparent choice without real alternatives can be exhausting and demotivating. We may be “free to choose” in the notorious formulation of Milton Friedman, but we are not free to have what we want. We are consumers, nudged and algorithemed into doing what others want.
In our daily lives too, we are increasingly sorted into ascriptive identity blocs, which are essentialist in nature, and from which there is no escape. A long time ago, in the backwash of the nineteen-sixties, the word “liberation” was attached to many socio-political demands, made by groups of women, homosexuals etc. These days, the goal of capturing positions of wealth and power by those who were not then proportionately represented has largely been achieved, and so discourses of liberation and freedom are seldom heard. They have been replaced by a despairing, coercive discourse that says that we are born pre-sorted into essentialist categories depending on such things as skin colour and genital arrangement, and into competitive hierarchies of victimhood and domination. If we belong (or discover that we have been attributed) to a recognised victim group, then nothing awaits but an everlasting, ultimately fruitless, struggle against mysterious and hidden patterns of hierarchy and domination, where every apparent victory just conceals another, subtler, defeat. All that can be done is to blindly follow leaders, usually middle-class successful individuals, who have somehow emancipated themselves from the hierarchies of domination as their larger identity group cannot, and who have then imposed hierarchies of their own. The rest of us simply have to accept our ascriptive roles as perpetrators and villains, even if we ourselves are poor and powerless.
Much of the illness of our society, and us as individuals, derives from this conflict between alleged freedom and real servitude, between the fatuous promise of being “CEO of your life” and the reality of insecurity and stress, and between the granting of “rights” and the reality of subservience. These days, we see “freedom” or ”liberty” as something granted to us by governments or by institutions, often after legal or coercive pressure. But it’s become clear that notional “freedom” and “rights” largely reflect political and economic power distributions between competing groups, and their ability to enforce them: the Marxist criticism of “bourgeois” rights has never been more relevant. Indeed, more and more, “rights” awarded to groups after political struggles undermine the “rights” of other, weaker or more marginalised groups.
Well, Sartre has been waiting patiently for the last couple of pages. What would he say? Firstly, I think, that freedom is not something that can be given, or has to be demanded, but rather something we intrinsically have, and which can never be taken away. In an intolerant and increasingly repressive age, when people feel that they have little choice in what they do and what they say, it’s well to be reminded of this. Sartre always emphasised how much we deceive ourselves in assuming we have no freedom. There is always something we can do. If we say, for example, “I’d like to leave this job but I can’t,” then in all normal circumstances we are lying to ourselves. What we actually mean is “I could leave this job if I wanted to, but I am unwilling to face the consequences,” which is at least honest.
So we may say that we have “no choice” about whether to attend a campus struggle session on racism conducted by a TV personality, but actually we do. We just don’t want our career to suffer. We may feel we can’t speak up at work about Gaza, because we are afraid of being called anti-semitic. But we could if we wanted to, just as we could criticise Hamas on that “dissident” Internet site that we frequent, and risk being called a Zionist apologist. This, says Sartre, is living authentically, living for yourself and not for others. And if we live for others, by burying our opinions, for example, then we are responsible for the consequences, including feeling miserable and depressed and angry with ourselves.
Now of course everything has its limits, and I doubt whether even Sartre would approve of speaking one’s mind bluntly under any and all circumstances. Social life is only possible at all, and relationships even more so, because we are prepared to moderate what we say and do according to context. (Though Sartre would say that we should be aware that that is what we are doing.) But if we have a relationship which only lasts because certain things can never be said or done and certain events can never be mentioned, well, perhaps we need a new relationship. At least that would be authentic.
So the first thing to do is to be honest with ourselves. One of Sartre’s lesser-known books is a psychological and philosophical study of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who presented himself, and is still remembered, as the emblematic romantic poète maudit , the “cursed poet,” leading a life of tragedy and despair that he didn’t deserve. Not so, says Sartre, who had been through Baudelaire’s own journals and letters. Baudelaire made a series of very bad, self-destructive choices in his life, and his unhappy life itself was the result. He had the life he deserved, and indeed we all have the life we deserve.
Some people have found that last statement outrageous (“what about the children in Gaza!”) but of course that’s not what Sartre meant. What he meant, and what seems to me to be incontrovertibly true, is that we are all presented in life with far more choices than we realise, and that our life is determined to a very large extent by the choices we make or fail to make. We are far less the helpless victims of others, and of outside circumstances, than we would like to believe. We are ultimately what we do: we define ourselves by our actions, rather than allowing others to define us. We don’t really “create our own reality” in the banal New Age sense, but we have more of an influence on our reality than we are often prepared to admit.
Of course, this kind of thinking goes utterly against the liberal-libertarian ideology of the last half-century. Under the surface discourse of “freedom” and “choice” we are encouraged to believe that we have, in fact, no agency at all. The “market” is a mysterious, all-powerful entity, to which even the largest private companies are helpless helots, and if your job disappears or your company is offshored, then it’s nobody’s “fault,” it’s just the implacable hand of the market. If you can’t get a job, if the job you have isn’t worth doing, or it’s driving you insane, you just have to put up with it. Likewise, if you’re a member of a minority ethnic group, the structural racism of your society is indestructible, and everything that looks like an advance simply means that structural racism retreats to a further, even more subtle, position of power. If you are a member of the majority ethnic group, then no matter how tolerant and even militant you are on such questions, you cannot escape your racial destiny. If you are a man you are an actual or potential rapist. If you are a woman you are an actual or potential victim. All you can do is go on marches, sign petitions, try to destroy those you are told to hate, and buy books by those who tell you to do the hating, as you are conscripted into an endless, futile struggle against pure abstractions and bald assertions.
It’s not simply that this is a terrible way to live, it’s also that I’m not sure that we will be living that way much longer. It will be like awaking from a bad dream, except that the bad things in the dream are still there. The incoherence of the modern system is such that not all of it will degrade at the same speed, and it will probably come apart in pieces, over time. The problem is that it will leave behind it a western world where people have for a generation now been taught helplessness, and urged to competitively appeal to some higher authority (parents or the Courts or the Deputy Assistant Vice-Dean for Making People Feel Comfortable, it’s all the same in the end). We can’t live like that for much longer, and the only way we will survive as individuals, and so help to preserve any kind of society, is to acknowledge and make use of the freedom we have, even if that’s uncomfortable.
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