"Why The World Is Ripping Itself Apart," Umair Haque
Consider the following finding.
A third of Americans would give up their right to vote for a 10% raise.
About $5000.
Troubled yet?
Now imagine that a demagogue comes along and offers them exactly that. You don’t have to try very hard, do you? Bang. Democracy goes bye bye — overnight.
All that’s what’s really going wrong in the world today, in one single, alarming statistic. We are repeating history. It’s a point that we miss, given the daily news cycle, the global warming, the planet dying, the pandemic surging, the constant barrage of collapse that we’re now faced with.
Yet unless we see clearly how the larger dots of human despair, folly, and prosperity are connected, we are doomed to be history’s mute puppets, not futurity’s authors — I’ll return to that, after we discuss those five exact dots, one by one.
Stagnation is producing authoritarianism. What does it mean that a third of Americans would give up their right to vote for about $5000? It means that economic stagnation produces authoritarianism. When people grow poor — absolutely or relatively — they lose faith in democracy. That democracy can offer them a working social contract — one that elevates their standards of living. They are willing to make what seem like foolish bargains later — but make sense at the time. Democracy for a better life? A functioning society for tyranny? When a democracy ceases to represent you, why not? In just this way, strongmen — who tempt people with the better lives that democracy can no longer offer them — rise, take control, and shape the destinies of nations. That is the story of the 1930s, whether in Germany, Italy, Japan, or Russia.
Plato's "Five Regimes" and Kyklos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes
The Shocking Academic Paper That Predicted "The End Of Democracy" (Written By Harvard-Yale-Oxford Grad, Shawn Rosenberg) https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-shocking-paper-predicting-end-of.html
Authoritarianism is producing instability. People turn to authoritarians for a sense of stability — they are like wounded infants seeking safety in the arms of a strong daddy figure. But when authoritarianism ripples through nations, the result globally is instability. That is because authoritarians brook no compromise, hold no respect for democracy externally, not just internally. And so treaties, agreements, alliances, all get shredded. Trade wars erupt — all in the name of “us first!” Borders are closed. Exit visas are issued. And so on.
The result for people is ironic — they sought stability, but they gain only more and more instability. (Alan: And mounting instability -- in the minds of "wounded infants" heightens the clamor for more authoritarian promises of stability... new-age serfs turning to "The Strong Noble" who guarantees them... their serfdom.)
Authoritarianism is not compatible with global order, which must be carefully negotiated, discussed, consented to — if a handful of petty authoritarians are vying for absolute power, trying to bully the next one a little harder, then how can nations ever agree on anything? But that is the case today, too — authoritarians ripping up the older order, each one promising everything to their own nations, just as it was in the 1930s. But no nation can have it all — that way lies the threat of trade wars, genuine war and (ubiquitous) ruin.
What is the result? Even more hostility, anger, rage, envy, as people grow even more impoverished. Towards neighbors, who were once allies, partners, friends. That is the case across the globe already too, isn’t it? You don’t have to think very hard about once great partners and allies becoming something like enemies — societies saying “what have you done for us? We are better off without you!”
Now, no one notes, usually, at this point, that this hostility is misplaced — the fault is not that of former allies, but of the turn towards authoritarianism itself. Instead, people growing more and more impoverished become more and more aggressive. Towards "the weak" inside their own societies, and their new enemies, who were once their partners. That is the story of the 1930s — and it is the story of now, too. Hostility and aggression grow by the day... When a global order fractures, that is the natural result.
Hostility produces chaos and war. I won’t say much about this, because I don’t need to. The point to note is that it’s difficult, impossible, to say, what the trigger of outright war will be. (Alan: It is often said that the relatively trivial assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Sarajevo ignited World War I. Good friend, retired Air Force general AWC - an attentive student of history and politics - openly admits that he does not know what caused WWI.)
It’s better to think of all the above as something like an avalanche. The factors above — stagnation producing authoritarianism producing instability producing aggression — pack the snow tall on the mountain of human folly. And all it takes is a single flake shifting to cause the tide to thunder down the slope, and wipe out the village of human prosperity.
Alan: In an avalanche, no single snowflake accepts responsibility.
Now. The last dot I want to discuss is the first one. If you understand all the above so far — stagnation, authoritarianism, instability, hostility, in that order, cause and effect, a linked chain, a vicious cycle — then what produces the first link in the chain, stagnation?
Broken social contracts produce stagnation. What caused the stagnation of this era? A botched response to a great financial crisis. I want you to think about all this carefully: did the alt-right, the new global extremism, the aggressive hostility that permeates the globe — any of it — really exist before 2007? It didn’t... So the greatest financial crisis since the great depression is what ultimately sparked this doom loop.
How?
Again, I want you to really understand this part, because it is the key. Banks failed, saddled with bad debts, as a result of foolish loans and (deliberately crappy) investments. Societies from America to Britain to Germany chose to “bail them out” in a particularly toxic way — society assumed the debts, and the banks essentially got off scot-free, with no real costs to shareholders, executives, or even their own incomes.
What happened next? Well, society was burdened with all these bad debts. At this point, it could have done two smart things — simply cancelled those debts, or printed money to offset them, which would have ended up in people’s pockets.
Instead, a generation of politicians chose to believe that the only way to pay off these debts was to cripple society and tear up the social contract — “cut as much spending as we can!”, the cry went up, not understanding at this precise moment, the economy needed investment, because money wasn’t flowing through the economy. So a wave of austerity swept the globe. Nations shredded their own social contracts — and as a result, people’s living standards began to fall sharply, until, now, for example, life expectancy is declining in America.
Austerity following the last financial crisis produced stagnation, that sparked authoritarianism, which led to instability, that is creating aggressive global hostility. And all that is the story of the 1930s, too. in 1929, a great financial crisis wrecked the globe. Governments responded in exactly the wrong way — cutting investment, wrecking social contracts, raising tariffs. All this caused stagnation, which led to authoritarianism, instability, hostility, and ultimately, world war.
The Original And Enduring Conspiracy: It's About Keeping The Filthy Rich, Filthy Rich
Billionaire Nick Hanauer: "The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure"
Billionaire Nick Hanauer's TED Talk: "Capitalism's Dirty Little Secret"
We are on the fatal trajectory of the 1930s today — exactly and precisely. World war will not erupt tomorrow, to be sure. But it is a mistake to think that every day we repeat history, history is not laughing at us.
And so. We cannot solve the great problems of today by focusing on the daily outrage. What scandal happened today matters not a whit. What matters is a politics and economics, a leadership, that can really understand — and break the chain above, by cutting it away at the root. How? By offering powerful, expansive, deep social contracts that undo stagnation.
That way, the rest of the link in the chain — authoritarianism, instability, hostility — will come undone, too.
People will consent to being self-governed again — because self-governance now offers them decent lives again.
Nations will regain their faith in democracy, their optimism in society, and their trust in one another. The fires of war will not burn.
But here is the harsh and unforgiving truth. If the world cannot do all that, then the doom loop that (we are in) will end in the same place it always has.
Atrocity, ruin, and despair.
Umair
July 2021
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