This article reinforces for me the loss of personal, family and community connections to people who spent periods working in Africa, the Middle East or Asia in the past. My uncle was a colonial officer in Ghana during and after the war. There were about 40 of them supposedly "running" the country. The idea that they could impose change on reluctant communities was absurd. Indeed, there were more Ghanaian graduates from UK universities than there were colonial officials. The primary job of colonial officers was to broker disputes between communities or individuals and to mobilise resources to invest in infrastructure, education and health. Perhaps reflecting the patrician aspects of the colonial service, there were major tensions within what we would now call the expat communities in Africa between commercial interests, who were seen as exploiting local population, and officials who took a more paternalistic view.
Even in my generation, there were people who spent extended periods working as volunteers in local communities in many African countries - perhaps the modern equivalent of missionaries. This was particularly common for those with medical or healthcare training. Such experience is very different from a gap year travelling around Asia, and it rapidly knocked off any rough edges of arrogance. Such people were not the sahibs and memsahibs of mid-19th century India - and even those were largely fictional residents of Calcutta and Bombay.
Colonial Africa and Asia was managed by an extremely thin layer of officials and merchants in association with a much larger group of local elites who wanted stability, competence and a degree of independence from local interests. In my experience, working with western NGOs and Aid consultants both in Africa and even more in the former Soviet Union revealed attitudes and behaviour that was far worse - predatory and uninterested in local conditions - than anything I saw 30 years before in immediately post-colonial Africa.
The subtitle totally encapsulates the problem the article totally overlooks.
Money.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, if only to prevent civil wars and revolutions, that it works best as a public utility. More referee than locus. Much as our mind is more referee of the desires and needs, than source.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead. Try telling a doctor that medium and store are interchangeable and he will look at you like you are really stupid, but to an economist, it would be common knowledge. Consequently the entire financial accounting system of society has been turned into a giant casino. The financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
So rather than resources being allocated where they would have the greatest benefit, much is siphoned off to feed large egos, leaving the rest to fight over the scraps. It would be like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn't have your picture on it, you don't hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth. Such as indebting younger generations, rather than investing in them as the future of society.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
So yes, the entire political apparatus has become a zoo of large egos and low morals.
Very interesting indeed , to me it paints a rather unrealistic picture , looking through the eyes of an arab or an african i think the view would be one of subjugation ,yes the religious fervour on paper meant well and in some instances performed wonderfully well but there is much more historical evidence of cruelty , forced religious conformation and all the while with the other hand european governments financed the theft of african and middle est resources , the africans and the arabs fought back they tried to protect their so called backward lifestyles and resources and many of their leaders educated in the european way did become freedom fighters but there were many too who took the opportunity to enrich themselves bribed and aided by the european governments in exchange for the pillageing of resources.
Cruelty was rife , religious europeans thought themselves superior creatures many still do ,the idea that europeans educated the africans and arabs is glib , these peoples didnt need education they simply needed left alone to develop their own culture and lifestyle in their own time , even in todays world we see the continued arrogance of the white people of europe and usa who say they will impose what they call regime change under the pretext of setting the people free , which is just the same thing this essay descibes taking place all those years ago , nothing has changed in that respect , there was no golden age of education by religious groups installed in africa and the middle east , the peoples of those countries were already educated in their own way and like anyone going to a country they have not been to before , you can read up about it as fully as you want beforehand but you will never really understand it until you have been there and lived there for a considerable time , the white european peoples arrogance was writ large when they wrote their plans in their churches and business boardrooms and government offices in european capital cities many miles away by leaders who had never ever set foot in africa or the middle east , these leaders then sent their people to africa and the middle east to follow the plan , forced education , forced religious practice is cruel because its the other part of the story that shines the light on the reality , the exclusions that were imposed on those who didnt conform , the punishments inflicted on those who tried to stop this enforced change to the way their people lived.
Lets stop pretending that all countries across the world should develop at the same speed lets end the pretence that religion actually educates people usefully , lets end the practice of white people in europe and usa gatecrashing countries around the world pretending they are helping the people in those countries, it used to be religion that was used as a cover for this evil , now its a new religion....MONEY.
During ww2 as almost all western soldiers were pulled from the colonies the locals could have easily overrun their 'cruel masters'. They didn't, instead they fought for them.
People only fight for a cruel master if not fighting for a cruel master would harm them more than fighting for their cruel master only a fool would think otherwise jbnn
Nonsense. After ww2 hundreds of thousands of British, Dutch and French colonial soldiers chose to relocate to the motherland and bring their families with them.
'We’ve lost that now. We continue to preach governance although our political systems are collapsing. We continue to try to influence foreign militaries when our own have practically ceased to exist. We offer assistance on combating drug smuggling when parts of Europe have themselves become narco-states. We presume to sort out the political crises of others while in Britain we are about to see the seventh government in ten years, and in France the political system is disintegrating before our eyes. And let’s not even get into the normative side now. You know the rest. We are not listened to out of respect any more, just out of nostalgia and habit, and because, for the time being at least, we still have the money to fund the projects. How long will that last, though?'
There are two things going on here: modernisation and westernisation. I’m not sure if this essay doesn’t forfeit explanatory power by conflating them. I closely read the first few paragraphs, then skimmed the rest because I wasn’t sure what the essay was about. Either modernisation can be reduced to westernisation or it can’t. In either case, most of the points in the essay seem redundant. Or am I missing something?
Maybe what I am missing is why I would include myself in the “we” presented in the conclusion. Yes, I am modern, but so are most people nowadays.
“There are also people who believe, or affect to, that their own nation is so evil and hateful that it does not deserve to have interests or influence.”
To apply the concepts of ‘love’ or ‘hate’ to a State is a mistake. At its very simplest level of explanation, a state nowadays is generally conceived to be an organisation set up by a group of people to organise their joint affairs so as to benefit that group. Usually this is just a carefully crafted illusion, as states are generally run (and originated as being) for the benefit of a much smaller section of society made up of the powerful / monied. Of course if this was the whole story it would be a short one, so in order to remain in existence a certain amount of wealth and power is allowed to permeate the whole of society, with the effect becoming more and more attenuated as it leaves the controlling source. This process is mediated by a group of more or less useful functionaries, who are basically parasitical on society as a whole.
A state therefore must be judged internally on whether or not the inevitable costs to the majority are perceived to be worth the benefits allowed to them. There is also a parallel external category for judgement - i.e. whether any particular state costs the entirety of human society more than it benefits it.
Responsible citizens should therefore judge their own state and others in the light of these two measures. But love or hate for an abstraction is misplaced and irrelevant. (The suggestion that people one doesn’t approve of are driven merely by such emotions is both shallow and cheap, and most probably is a sign of not wanting to engage with real arguments).
As usual, this picks on one small part of the article, but I could pick up on something in practically every paragraph - for example:
“It took centuries for the extractive classes in Europe to be replaced by the productive classes” “the West, and especially Europe, had certain advantages.” “the lazy equivalence of missionary work with colonialism”
- but I would find myself losing the will to live.
From a logical/rational perspective I substantively would agree with you that ascribing moral attributes to non-human objects - machines, companies, institutions, states, etc - is a category mistake. However there's a practical difficulty: people increasingly are trained (whether intentionally by media and propaganda or unintentionally by education is irrelevant here) to be irrational.
The same applies when you invert it to consider the "morality" of state behaviors towards other states and foreign peoples, and of course their own people. Mearsheimer and Rosario's superb work "How States Think" wonderfully pushes the assumption that states ought to conduct foreign policy (and by implication domestic policy) in a rational way. But the assumption increasingly fails to refer once it's obvious (from their own case studies) that frequently states operate irrationally. A frequency that arguably has continually increased over the last 30-40 years...
1. "Thus, a “reform” programme in an Interior Ministry may in practice just be a random collection of projects that foreign donors feel comfortable funding. And whereas Missionaries tried to save souls, NGOs deliver moral lectures."
The joke is that when a Chinese official visits, China gives a hospital. When a western official visits, he gives a lecture.
"Well, you need to know that that hospital may have strings attached..."
And here comes the lecture.
2. "Whereas colonial administrators built railways, donors pay for consultants to advise on how to privatise them. And almost all the activities are symbolic and performative: corruption in an unpaid customs service requires a new law, brutality by unpaid and untrained policemen requires a code of conduct. Here’s a translation of the one we use in my country."
There is an Kenyan sitcom about this. A lot of what is piously packaged as "foreign aid" gets funneled back to home country consultants and favored NGOs.
3. "And the defeat and humiliation of 1967 by Israel, more than any other single event, shattered the fragile self-confidence of the secular era."
The Americans, the Israelis, and their british and french catamites have certainly done their damnedest to crush any modernizing, reformist or secular movement in the Arab world, or anywhere in the proximity of Israel.
4. The british did not educate Nelson Mandela out of the goodness of their hearts. The education of the sons of select4ed chiefs was an entirely intentional policy of creating a westernized leadership class.
For is it not written that the purest English in the world is spoken in the Lago Oxford Club and the Lagos Cambridge Club?
When I lived in Ukraine, the yuppies in Kiev could imagine no fate (other than emigrating) better than getting some bullshit job with one of the bullshit NGOs which popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain.
It seemed to work finely while Russia was just giving money to corrupt "brothers" in the administration and "the proper boys" in business elites for what? Russia failed to "sell" itself to Ukrainians despite being in a good position from the beginning.
I don't have anything to comment, but I should mention that I am impressed that Aurelien knows about université Saint-Joseph, but doesn't know about its more widely known protestant counterpart in Lebanon, the American University of Beirut which was built around the same time.
I can count many other institutions from that era and even later. Lebanon is, at the end of the day, a nation built by education institutions before anything else.
Thanks Aurelien for your usual insightful reflections. Of the entire essay, I find the following very stimulating: "...such projects, with their deadening vocabulary and stultifyingly amorphous concepts, often seem to serve little purpose other than virtue-signalling".
There are multiple questions emerging from this phenomenon:
- what role in its emergence is played by technocrats living in their fantasy world bubbles and speaking through the new forms of edits that is, calls for expressions of interest et similia? What role is played by the more general Postmodern ethos based on "narrative" with its painful disconnection from the material conditions of life and reality? Maybe the two are linked, but how? What is this fascination with appearances, and why have we lost our capacity to focus on "reality"?
One obvious factor in the whole phenomenon (which you also mentioned several time) is the liberal obsession with measurement which causes untold biases and disastrous consequences, from Goodall's Law (when a metric becomes a target it stops being a good metric), the Cobra effect (sadly observed in many south American countries), Surrogation and the like. Curiously enough, what appears like a way to get us "nearer to reality" by measuring it, it actually produces the exact opposite, and here The Little Prince comes to mind ("the indispensable is invisible to the eye").
I am looking forward to next week's continuation of this topic
This article reinforces for me the loss of personal, family and community connections to people who spent periods working in Africa, the Middle East or Asia in the past. My uncle was a colonial officer in Ghana during and after the war. There were about 40 of them supposedly "running" the country. The idea that they could impose change on reluctant communities was absurd. Indeed, there were more Ghanaian graduates from UK universities than there were colonial officials. The primary job of colonial officers was to broker disputes between communities or individuals and to mobilise resources to invest in infrastructure, education and health. Perhaps reflecting the patrician aspects of the colonial service, there were major tensions within what we would now call the expat communities in Africa between commercial interests, who were seen as exploiting local population, and officials who took a more paternalistic view.
Even in my generation, there were people who spent extended periods working as volunteers in local communities in many African countries - perhaps the modern equivalent of missionaries. This was particularly common for those with medical or healthcare training. Such experience is very different from a gap year travelling around Asia, and it rapidly knocked off any rough edges of arrogance. Such people were not the sahibs and memsahibs of mid-19th century India - and even those were largely fictional residents of Calcutta and Bombay.
Colonial Africa and Asia was managed by an extremely thin layer of officials and merchants in association with a much larger group of local elites who wanted stability, competence and a degree of independence from local interests. In my experience, working with western NGOs and Aid consultants both in Africa and even more in the former Soviet Union revealed attitudes and behaviour that was far worse - predatory and uninterested in local conditions - than anything I saw 30 years before in immediately post-colonial Africa.
The subtitle totally encapsulates the problem the article totally overlooks.
Money.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, if only to prevent civil wars and revolutions, that it works best as a public utility. More referee than locus. Much as our mind is more referee of the desires and needs, than source.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead. Try telling a doctor that medium and store are interchangeable and he will look at you like you are really stupid, but to an economist, it would be common knowledge. Consequently the entire financial accounting system of society has been turned into a giant casino. The financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
So rather than resources being allocated where they would have the greatest benefit, much is siphoned off to feed large egos, leaving the rest to fight over the scraps. It would be like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn't have your picture on it, you don't hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth. Such as indebting younger generations, rather than investing in them as the future of society.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
So yes, the entire political apparatus has become a zoo of large egos and low morals.
Very interesting indeed , to me it paints a rather unrealistic picture , looking through the eyes of an arab or an african i think the view would be one of subjugation ,yes the religious fervour on paper meant well and in some instances performed wonderfully well but there is much more historical evidence of cruelty , forced religious conformation and all the while with the other hand european governments financed the theft of african and middle est resources , the africans and the arabs fought back they tried to protect their so called backward lifestyles and resources and many of their leaders educated in the european way did become freedom fighters but there were many too who took the opportunity to enrich themselves bribed and aided by the european governments in exchange for the pillageing of resources.
Cruelty was rife , religious europeans thought themselves superior creatures many still do ,the idea that europeans educated the africans and arabs is glib , these peoples didnt need education they simply needed left alone to develop their own culture and lifestyle in their own time , even in todays world we see the continued arrogance of the white people of europe and usa who say they will impose what they call regime change under the pretext of setting the people free , which is just the same thing this essay descibes taking place all those years ago , nothing has changed in that respect , there was no golden age of education by religious groups installed in africa and the middle east , the peoples of those countries were already educated in their own way and like anyone going to a country they have not been to before , you can read up about it as fully as you want beforehand but you will never really understand it until you have been there and lived there for a considerable time , the white european peoples arrogance was writ large when they wrote their plans in their churches and business boardrooms and government offices in european capital cities many miles away by leaders who had never ever set foot in africa or the middle east , these leaders then sent their people to africa and the middle east to follow the plan , forced education , forced religious practice is cruel because its the other part of the story that shines the light on the reality , the exclusions that were imposed on those who didnt conform , the punishments inflicted on those who tried to stop this enforced change to the way their people lived.
Lets stop pretending that all countries across the world should develop at the same speed lets end the pretence that religion actually educates people usefully , lets end the practice of white people in europe and usa gatecrashing countries around the world pretending they are helping the people in those countries, it used to be religion that was used as a cover for this evil , now its a new religion....MONEY.
The mad scramble of elites and counterelites in a permanent war of all against all …😑
During ww2 as almost all western soldiers were pulled from the colonies the locals could have easily overrun their 'cruel masters'. They didn't, instead they fought for them.
And the clown danced some more.
People only fight for a cruel master if not fighting for a cruel master would harm them more than fighting for their cruel master only a fool would think otherwise jbnn
Nonsense. After ww2 hundreds of thousands of British, Dutch and French colonial soldiers chose to relocate to the motherland and bring their families with them.
'We’ve lost that now. We continue to preach governance although our political systems are collapsing. We continue to try to influence foreign militaries when our own have practically ceased to exist. We offer assistance on combating drug smuggling when parts of Europe have themselves become narco-states. We presume to sort out the political crises of others while in Britain we are about to see the seventh government in ten years, and in France the political system is disintegrating before our eyes. And let’s not even get into the normative side now. You know the rest. We are not listened to out of respect any more, just out of nostalgia and habit, and because, for the time being at least, we still have the money to fund the projects. How long will that last, though?'
There are two things going on here: modernisation and westernisation. I’m not sure if this essay doesn’t forfeit explanatory power by conflating them. I closely read the first few paragraphs, then skimmed the rest because I wasn’t sure what the essay was about. Either modernisation can be reduced to westernisation or it can’t. In either case, most of the points in the essay seem redundant. Or am I missing something?
Maybe what I am missing is why I would include myself in the “we” presented in the conclusion. Yes, I am modern, but so are most people nowadays.
A very interesting perspective, far removed from the prevailing clichés. I look forward to its continuation.
“There are also people who believe, or affect to, that their own nation is so evil and hateful that it does not deserve to have interests or influence.”
To apply the concepts of ‘love’ or ‘hate’ to a State is a mistake. At its very simplest level of explanation, a state nowadays is generally conceived to be an organisation set up by a group of people to organise their joint affairs so as to benefit that group. Usually this is just a carefully crafted illusion, as states are generally run (and originated as being) for the benefit of a much smaller section of society made up of the powerful / monied. Of course if this was the whole story it would be a short one, so in order to remain in existence a certain amount of wealth and power is allowed to permeate the whole of society, with the effect becoming more and more attenuated as it leaves the controlling source. This process is mediated by a group of more or less useful functionaries, who are basically parasitical on society as a whole.
A state therefore must be judged internally on whether or not the inevitable costs to the majority are perceived to be worth the benefits allowed to them. There is also a parallel external category for judgement - i.e. whether any particular state costs the entirety of human society more than it benefits it.
Responsible citizens should therefore judge their own state and others in the light of these two measures. But love or hate for an abstraction is misplaced and irrelevant. (The suggestion that people one doesn’t approve of are driven merely by such emotions is both shallow and cheap, and most probably is a sign of not wanting to engage with real arguments).
As usual, this picks on one small part of the article, but I could pick up on something in practically every paragraph - for example:
“It took centuries for the extractive classes in Europe to be replaced by the productive classes” “the West, and especially Europe, had certain advantages.” “the lazy equivalence of missionary work with colonialism”
- but I would find myself losing the will to live.
From a logical/rational perspective I substantively would agree with you that ascribing moral attributes to non-human objects - machines, companies, institutions, states, etc - is a category mistake. However there's a practical difficulty: people increasingly are trained (whether intentionally by media and propaganda or unintentionally by education is irrelevant here) to be irrational.
The same applies when you invert it to consider the "morality" of state behaviors towards other states and foreign peoples, and of course their own people. Mearsheimer and Rosario's superb work "How States Think" wonderfully pushes the assumption that states ought to conduct foreign policy (and by implication domestic policy) in a rational way. But the assumption increasingly fails to refer once it's obvious (from their own case studies) that frequently states operate irrationally. A frequency that arguably has continually increased over the last 30-40 years...
1. "Thus, a “reform” programme in an Interior Ministry may in practice just be a random collection of projects that foreign donors feel comfortable funding. And whereas Missionaries tried to save souls, NGOs deliver moral lectures."
The joke is that when a Chinese official visits, China gives a hospital. When a western official visits, he gives a lecture.
"Well, you need to know that that hospital may have strings attached..."
And here comes the lecture.
2. "Whereas colonial administrators built railways, donors pay for consultants to advise on how to privatise them. And almost all the activities are symbolic and performative: corruption in an unpaid customs service requires a new law, brutality by unpaid and untrained policemen requires a code of conduct. Here’s a translation of the one we use in my country."
There is an Kenyan sitcom about this. A lot of what is piously packaged as "foreign aid" gets funneled back to home country consultants and favored NGOs.
3. "And the defeat and humiliation of 1967 by Israel, more than any other single event, shattered the fragile self-confidence of the secular era."
The Americans, the Israelis, and their british and french catamites have certainly done their damnedest to crush any modernizing, reformist or secular movement in the Arab world, or anywhere in the proximity of Israel.
4. The british did not educate Nelson Mandela out of the goodness of their hearts. The education of the sons of select4ed chiefs was an entirely intentional policy of creating a westernized leadership class.
For is it not written that the purest English in the world is spoken in the Lago Oxford Club and the Lagos Cambridge Club?
Yes, exactly.
When I lived in Ukraine, the yuppies in Kiev could imagine no fate (other than emigrating) better than getting some bullshit job with one of the bullshit NGOs which popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain.
It seemed to work finely while Russia was just giving money to corrupt "brothers" in the administration and "the proper boys" in business elites for what? Russia failed to "sell" itself to Ukrainians despite being in a good position from the beginning.
The Russian leadership has been complacent for a long time.The Americans and their european catamites have been quite active all that time.
for a funny coincidence, Germany and Netherland has been kicked out from the soccer world cup. another sign of decline?
Better pause that thought. After all Australia, England and the USA have survived... ;)
Paraguayans are natives who fought for their country like lions. What would "German" multicultural soup fight for?
Interesting essay. A word missing is “tribalism”.
Branko Milanovic has a few interesting things to say about how the Europeans (and their settler colonies) lost the game: https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/how-the-virtues-of-neoliberal-globalization
My italian translation, as usual, here:
"Non aspettarti rispetto.
Tutto ciò che ci è rimasto ora sono i soldi."
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2026/07/non-aspettarti-rispetto-tutto-cio-che.html
I don't have anything to comment, but I should mention that I am impressed that Aurelien knows about université Saint-Joseph, but doesn't know about its more widely known protestant counterpart in Lebanon, the American University of Beirut which was built around the same time.
I can count many other institutions from that era and even later. Lebanon is, at the end of the day, a nation built by education institutions before anything else.
The last paragraph is the nut graf, isn’t it?
Best that we shut up, really.
Thanks Aurelien for your usual insightful reflections. Of the entire essay, I find the following very stimulating: "...such projects, with their deadening vocabulary and stultifyingly amorphous concepts, often seem to serve little purpose other than virtue-signalling".
There are multiple questions emerging from this phenomenon:
- what role in its emergence is played by technocrats living in their fantasy world bubbles and speaking through the new forms of edits that is, calls for expressions of interest et similia? What role is played by the more general Postmodern ethos based on "narrative" with its painful disconnection from the material conditions of life and reality? Maybe the two are linked, but how? What is this fascination with appearances, and why have we lost our capacity to focus on "reality"?
One obvious factor in the whole phenomenon (which you also mentioned several time) is the liberal obsession with measurement which causes untold biases and disastrous consequences, from Goodall's Law (when a metric becomes a target it stops being a good metric), the Cobra effect (sadly observed in many south American countries), Surrogation and the like. Curiously enough, what appears like a way to get us "nearer to reality" by measuring it, it actually produces the exact opposite, and here The Little Prince comes to mind ("the indispensable is invisible to the eye").
I am looking forward to next week's continuation of this topic
“the liberal obsession with measurement which causes untold biases and disastrous consequences”
What Blake might have depicted as the deadening hand of Urizen …