When it all gets too much

Every generation goes through a cycle – marvelling excitedly in youth at the speed with which the world is changing; experiencing the pace of change later as more of a challenge; and, in a final period of nostalgia, regretting and resenting it.

My generation of baby-boomers may, however, be the first to be required to recognise the need for urgent change in its later years. 

I was in my mid 30s when some books started to appear which sent a shiver down my spine. Two which made such an impression on me that I remember them to this day were James Robertson’s The Sane Alternative (1978) and “The Seventh Enemy” by Ronald Higgins (1978). The first was very much influenced by the more technical “Limits to Growth” which had been produced by The Club of Rome in 1970. The second looked at six looming issues - viz of the population explosion, food shortages, raw materials exhaustion, environmental degradation, nuclear power; and abuse of science and technology. But then suggested that the real enemy was the seventh – us, the human race! Higgins’ book is no longer available but you can get the gist from this BBC documentary.

 They were early harbingers of the sense of crisis which has come over most of us in the new millennium. It wasn’t, however, difficult for corporate interests to subject such texts to a barrage of criticism and ridicule – as long as things were going well and human inventiveness could be summonsed as the genie in the bottle.

But the global financial crisis of 2008 and the reality of global warming has seen a deluge of titles in the last decade reminding us that what goes up generally come down, often in calamitous crashes – written by people such as Jared Diamond, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Michael Greer.

Wherever we look today, there are crises – and it is most decidedly not just a question of perception. It’s for real.

The normal human response when you confront an unpalatable situation is to stick you head in the sand – to shut off the reality. I readily confess that that’s the way I deal with things – either that or walking away…But there’s no way of walking away from the situation the world now confronts – however feverishly billionaires try to buy up remote land in places like New Zealand. 

Even more reprehensible than our personal responses is the deliberate encouragement of such weak behaviour by ideologues who give us rationalisations to justify our crassly irresponsible myopia. I’m talking, for example, about the Think Tanks which push Hayek’s doctrine of leaving the market to solve all problems – let alone the Big Dirty Money which funds the climate deniers.

It’s those resources and algorithms which are behind the astonishing growth of the Fake Reality which has some two thirds of Republican voters in the US believing that the last Presidential Election was stolen 

the country remains intensely divided over the election and the 6^th January events at the Capitol. Like the election audits, trials of the rioters would bring out and deepen these divisions, further radicalizing the Republican base. So too would acts of violence. The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois are just a few of the better-known paramilitary organizations that acted violently on January 6. There are many others. Some are national and many are local. Some are well known and many remain covert. 

Now that the election has been stolen and the thief responsible has begun to propose dramatic changes to the country—and now that the deep state has proven that voting is useless in blocking them—how will members of these organizations and their sympathizers respond?

It seems plausible that at least some will respond with violence. The intelligence analyst Katrina Mulligan noted shortly after the Capitol attack that the country had just witnessed “violence with a political goal in mind: Preventing the lawful certification of presidential election results to disrupt the peaceful transition of power”:

There are troubling indicators, such as a shared grievance, a strong group identity, and recruitment and training, that America could be in the early days of a violent political movement that will endure. This movement brings together conservatives, Christian nationalists, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists, and ultranationalist groups such as the Proud Boys. While these groups united around Trump, they also have shared racial grievances that will continue to unite them. 

Members of these violent groups see a political dispensation gaining force under an illegitimate president that privileges minorities and immigrants, which they understand as part of an elite plot to “replace” them as central participants in the country’s politics.

 Even before the Capitol attack a number of terrorism researchers saw the conditions for “incipient insurgency” emerging in the United States. David Kilkullen, an elite combat soldier who helped shape strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that “the main long-term impact” of the violence launched against the Black Lives Matter protests last May and June might “be its radicalizing effect on a tiny minority of participants who join more violent groups as a result”.

.....Before our eyes, calls to “stop the steal” of 2020 are evolving, with the help of Republican-controlled legislatures in crucial states, into a movement to in effect “steal back” the presidency in 2024. 

But I’m also beginning to wonder about the Complexity Theorists – whose argument that the world is too complex for human interventions to work sustains our natural inertia. 

Albert Hirschman was a brilliant polymath of a developmental economist (whose intellectual biography has just come out) who explored the arguments such people use in The Rhetoric of Reaction – perversity, futility, jeopardy (1991)    

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. 

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. But such fatalism offends my sense of what we used to call “free will” (and now “agency theory”). Powerful people exist – whether in corporations, international agencies or governments – who can and do influence events. Our job as citizens is to watch them carefully and protest when we can..

In the 1930s it was not difficult to identify the enemy…Today the enemy is a more voracious and complex system which we variously call “globalisation” or “neoliberalism” and only more recently “capitalism” - whose disastrous consequences the activists of Porto Allegro had exposed……although it took the crash of 2008 to prove the point…