Getting Used To Being Weak.

It's worse than you probably imagine.

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Listening to the statements of western politicians and the clever new ideas of op-ed writers and think-tank “experts,” it seems fairly clear that the western plan for the future of Ukraine is changing quite rapidly. This is not surprising after the abject failure of Plan A, but it pre-supposes a Plan B, or even a Plan C to move to. I’ve set out before why, in my view, there is no Plan B, and by extension I would now argue that the rest of the alphabet is unlikely to be called on either. This essay tries to explain why this is so, both for the technical reasons I’ve touched on before, and for a variety of political and cultural reasons as well.

Those with long memories will remember Plan A V1.0 to rebuild Ukrainian forces, send them to attack the Russians, after which the Russian defenders would run away, leading to the collapse of the Russian Army, and subsequently the Russian state. This was assumed to happen very quickly, and without any downsides for the West. Countries rushed to associate themselves with the plan, and in some cases to join NATO, so as to be positioned to feed off the corpse. When the glorious offensive of 2022 didn’t quite lead to that outcome, then Plan A V.1.1, the glorious offensive of 2023 incorporating western armaments, western planning and western training, was assumed to be going to do so.

No matter how lunatic these assumptions may seem now, they are really the only way in which we can understand the confidence with which the West repeatedly launched soldiers with, at most, a few months’ training, some in light wheeled armoured vehicles, against a formidably entrenched enemy with massive artillery superiority and control of the air. The assumption was not that the Ukrainian forces were objectively strong, but rather that the Russians were so objectively weak and cowardly that they would crumple at the first shot. These ideas did not, of course, appear out of thin air in February 2022: they were deeply ingrained, in such history as the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) is still taught, in folk memories of the Second World War, and in confused recollections of the dire state into which the Russian military had fallen during the 1990s, the years of greatest western influence in the country. Oh, and of course they also derive from centuries of racialist under-estimation of the barbarian Slavs: even as I write, interns in Washington are busy copying and pasting paragraphs of the 1945 speeches of Dr Goebbels, warning Germans to fight to the last amputee against the barbarian hordes who were coming to rape, murder and destroy.

All that hasn’t worked and isn’t going to. Yet because the assumptions described above come from inductive ideological reasoning rather than any experience, they can’t be completely abandoned that easily. Some influential people continue to believe that, if the Russians have not been defeated yet, it’s because their weaknesses have not been properly exploited. So if NATO can only supply flying saucers, death rays, particle cannons and mechanised flying suits for the million-man army now being recruited during the next six months, the Russians will cut and run.

Back on earth, the West itself is slowly confronting an existential crisis provoked by the fact that a society that scorns its advanced PMC liberal values is actually winning, and that the West is unable to do anything about it. Fantasies of a cease-fire still seem to be circulating, although the Russians are not interested in one, and tank-thinkers and pundits are thinking and punditing about some reconstruction of Ukraine and its military, using resources that the West does not have, equipment that cannot be produced, human beings who are already dead, and money that does not exist. But they need to have something to write about, I suppose.

So it now looks as if a staged retreat is beginning from even that most recent fantasy. After all, pundits and media writers rely on access to official thinking if they are to write their stories and make their careers, and some recent writings suggest hints being dropped that things are changing. In practice, though not yet in theory, Ukraine is going to be abandoned to its fate. But something is going to have to be said to make up for that: some new political discourse, some new way of speaking to the public about Russia, will have to be found. In fact, it looks as though the first crows of winter have already been spotted. The story this time is going to be a revival from the 1980s, The Russian Threat. You can begin to see the outlines of it taking shape, and it will run somewhat as follows. Crazed dictator Putin wanted to take over Europe, but plucky Ukrainians with NATO help managed to stop him temporarily in his tracks at great cost in lives and treasure, admittedly, but all worth it. Now, we have to make use of the time which has been gained by fighting the Russians to a standstill to rearm ourselves, prepared to defend our frontiers, rebuild our defence industries etc. etc.

The fact that this is garbage from beginning to end does’t make it any less attractive as a political strategy: in any case it is just about the only viable one left. Admittedly, the wrenching transition from “Russia is weak and will collapse instantly” to “Russia is terrifyingly strong and we must find a way of resisting”, is not straightforward, but so many pundits and media parasites made such fools of themselves for so long, that we can assume they will join eagerly in selling this new way of thinking. (“Weak? Did you say weak? Where did you get that idea from? I never said that!). One crow doesn’t make a winter, but some discreet punditing has already taken place in the media along these lines.

As I have pointed out before, the idea that Europe (and for that matter the US) can substantially rearm is a fantasy. I want to return to that theme but on a larger scale and based on more recent events, because I want to discuss three kinds of insuperable obstacles to this, and any other idea of “resisting” Russia. Some are practical, some are political, but I increasingly think the most important ones are cultural. Let’s look at them.

You can’t rebuild a defence industry and large armed forces from our kind of economy and society. I don’t mean “overnight,” I mean, at all. Consider: military technology has always required pre-existing technologies to develop and support it. When the tank (“armoured machine-gun destroyer”) was first proposed in World War 1, the technologies it required already existed. There were large metal-working industries making locomotives, commercial vehicles and ships, as well as protective armour-plating. The internal combustion engine was well-developed, tracks had been developed for agricultural machinery, and of course machine-guns had been produced for decades, and artillery for centuries. In addition, entire industries had developed to service and maintain lorries and agricultural machinery. Western nations had very large numbers of technical specialists, frequently issued from apprenticeship schemes, technical high-schools and university engineering departments trained the managers, and expertise was concentrated in quite large numbers of small companies, often run by engineers and designers who had founded them. The military generally had its own technical training schools, for officers and other ranks.

The result is that, in both World Wars, the civilian economy was able to turn quite quickly to military production, because the skills, the organisation, the management, the factories, the components and the raw materials were all there. Literally none of that is true now. It might be theoretically possible to build new factories to increase the production of a modern tank from forty to a hundred per year (five years, perhaps to design and build the factory) but the other ingredients, now disappeared or pared down to an absolute minimum, would take a generation to reconstitute, if that could be done at all. Around a third to a half of the cost of a modern tank is electronics and the West no longer controls the manufacture, or even the supply, of a lot of key electronic components. Then, of course, you need to recruit people who understand the technology, who will have to undergo long training in institutions by people who themselves already have this training, not too mention decades of practical experience.

In summary, therefore, once you have built-down an industry or a capability, it’s almost impossible to revive it. An unrelated anecdote: many years ago I sat in on a presentation by a British defence company to a group of visitors from Asia, proudly showing how they had reduced their estate and manpower progressively over the years to boost profits. I could feel the sense of panic in the audience as they quickly calculated how soon the company would close down entirely. You can’t change this mentality now in years, or even decades. No company is going to build new facilities and ramp up production unless it is forced to, when there are easier ways of making money.

Today’s analogy for the tank would be, I suppose, the long-range conventional land or air-launched missile, of which the Kinzhal is the best-known example. Such a missile travels at speeds of up to Mach 10 and can manoeuvre in flight. Most of the elements of these technologies don’t exist in the West, because we have got rid of the precursor technologies, the training and education and the industrial facilities which would have made their development possible. However much notional money is pushed into the defence industry, you can’t buy back things you have already destroyed. And the West has no technologies capable of stopping these missiles either, and no chance of developing them: a political point of some importance that I return to below.

But of course even if you can partially address some of these technical problems on a national basis, there  are international political problems too. It’s common to think of alliances as stronger than individual nations—after all, the more countries the better, right?—but experience suggests the opposite. Even when one nation has a dominant position, as the US does in NATO, in practice the group often goes at the speed of the slowest. Different legal systems, different political systems, different contractual systems, different national interests, mutual jealousies and local political developments all massively complicate the management of any subject, even assuming that there are no underlying technical disagreements. But often there are: to take the example of tanks, standardisation in NATO was never possible because one school of thought, headed by the Germans, wanted lighter tanks, relying partly on mobility for their protection, whereas another, headed by the British and the US, emphasised extra protection (and thus weight) over speed. As a result of this kind of problem, any international grouping is inevitably less than the sum of its parts, and with NATO I think we reached the point some time ago where the addition of each new member actually reduced the effectiveness of the organisation overall.

This is one of the reasons why the idea there could be any collective “western”, let alone NATO, response to the situation the West will find itself in at the end of the Ukraine crisis, is quite unrealistic. Oh, this doesn’t rule out lots of work on a new “strategic concept,” lots of activity at the political level, important speeches by leaders of major NATO nations, and promises to spend more money. But in reality everything that the “West” in this context will want to do is likely to fall under the heading of impossible technically, or impossible politically and culturally. (I have no idea what the people who think that this crisis will “strengthen” NATO can possibly mean: neither do they, I suspect.) Most of all, current western political culture confuses spending (or more precisely  promising to spend) money with actually achieving things, forgetting that the world is not a gigantic Amazon store, and that you can only buy what is actually available.

But the difficulties go well beyond the purely technical, and they have to do with the way in which states relate to each other, and to bigger and smaller states. The way in which this happens in practice is very different from, and much more subtle than, the crude stereotypes found in Realist and Neo-realist textbooks of international relations, or for that matter in the pages of Foreign Affairs. Let’s take a little detour into complexity, because this helps us understand not only what might happen in NATO and in Europe, but also in other areas of the world where the West currently wields influence.

No state is entirely autonomous, autarkic and all-capable: all depend on others to some extent. Indeed, the international system is far more about cooperation, at every level, than it is about competition. States often find that they have common, or at least overlapping, interests, and they decide to work together, or at least not frustrate each other’s designs. States find that they can exercise more influence by being members of economic or political groupings, that they can attract the interest of larger states, and play a vicarious role in international affairs. Some states make a fetish of always operating quietly behind the scenes, and do not seek credit or even visibility. Some states (the US for example) operate very publicly, and are always claiming a leadership role, which their allies are generally polite enough to let them have, at least on the surface.

In any region, there will be distributions of economic, military and political power, which will influence state-to-state relationships. The region may feature anything from loose economic cooperation, to some kind of formal alliance like NATO. Custom holds that larger and more powerful states tend to get their way more easily than smaller ones. But there is nothing banally mathematical about this, and smaller states can often get what they want out of a relationship with a larger state: indeed, the two might have complementary aims, or at least aims that are not in conflict with each other. And at the end of the day, even if the larger state has very publicly got what it was seeking, the smaller state may well feel it has achieved its own independent aims anyway.

But states outside the region can also be made use of. Take the topical example of francophone West Africa. The local superpower is Nigeria: by far the largest and most powerful state in the region, with a large military, with ambitions to be a regional hegemon, and not particularly celebrated for the tact and delicacy with which it deals with its neighbours. So as a small francophone state, what do you do? Well, you have the ex-colonial power as a balance, with which you almost certainly have a complex relationship anyway. But then for political reasons you don’t want to seem too publicly dependent on the French. So when the US or the UK come calling, you say, why not? Send a training team, organise a joint exercise, set up bilateral political or economic talks. Accept some Chinese investment as well. This gives you more freedom of manoeuvre with the French and the Nigerians, and if the price of that is signing a communiqué, a vote in the General Assembly, or sitting patiently through interminable speeches by people ignorant of Africa, well, that’s a price worth paying. This is how quick-witted African leaders deal with large foreign powers, and in Africa leaders tend to be divided into the quick-witted and the dead.

But variants of the same thing take place everywhere. In general, small nations in the vicinity of large nations find themselves looking for some way of adjusting the calculus of power that results. It’s not that Singapore or New Guinea are afraid of being invaded by China, or seek “protection” from elsewhere. It’s that life is more comfortable politically and strategically if you are not under the shadow of the same large power all the time. So for many countries, the US presence in the Pacific is a balancing factor to Chinese influence, and can be exploited to provide them with more flexibility than they would otherwise have. Sometimes, the benefits are very obvious. The US presence in Japan, for example, has been a stabilising factor for the region, in that bitter memories of Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s have been partially alleviated by the perception that their military was under foreign control. For their part, the Japanese—the most profoundly pacifist people I have ever known—saw defence and the military as such a sensitive subject that it was best left to others, even if the US presence was itself a major political irritant. Major powers quite often find themselves used this way.

So let’s circle back to Europe. In that Continent, the great question of history has been who will dominate, not just militarily but politically. Most recently, this involved three wars in less than a century between France and Germany, the last two of which devastated the continent. After 1945, the initial idea of a pre-prepared military alliance against a resurgent Germany eventually developed into a military alliance with Germany as a member, but with all its forces subordinate to NATO and its US Commander, and with no capacity for independent military operations. This provided a degree of reassurance and stability to Germany’s neighbours which probably could not have been provided otherwise.

The involvement of the US in Europe after 1945 essentially follows the pattern set out above. It’s almost impossible now to recapture the mood of fear and vulnerability experienced by Europe in the decade following the Second World War. The terror of a new conflict from somewhere, which this time would devastate Europe beyond repair, was accompanied by fear of political domination of the continent by the Soviet Union. European states were weak and largely disarmed, Communist governments had been installed in Prague and Budapest after Soviet intimidation. Who was to say the France and Italy, with their large and well-organised Communist parties would not be next? And would this not spark off terrible civil wars in Western Europe, as there had been in Greece?

This, to repeat, was not a fear of military attack: that came later, and was assumed to follow the (Soviet-approved) Chinese involvement in the Korean War. It was most of all the search by weak and bankrupt European states for an outside source of support which would give the Russians pause in any plans for political dominance they might have. And indeed there was some evidence this might be true: the Berlin Blockade crisis of 1948-9 would probably have turned out differently had the US declined to become involved. The Washington Treaty of 1949, less than the Europeans hoped for but as much as the isolationist US Congress would accept, tied the US formally to European security as a counterweight to Soviet power. The idea was not that the US would “defend” Europe (the vast majority of the troops involved in a hypothetical war would be European) but rather that any political crisis between the Soviet Union and Europe would require the former to take into account US reaction as well. In spite of persistent fears during the Cold War that the US and the Soviet Union might do some kind of deal neglecting Europe, this logic pretty much held. To that extent, the visible NATO/WP confrontation with its aircraft and tanks and missiles was a bit of a distraction from the underlying political mechanics.

And then the Soviet “threat” evaporated overnight. As I’ve pointed out many times, the political advantages of NATO for European powers in their relationships with each other (and which obviously could not be formally acknowledged) combined with the lack of any agreed alternative and the fear of a security vacuum in Central Europe with unpredictable results, meant that NATO continued through inertia more than anything else. Enlargement (never considered at the beginning, even by countries that subsequently demanded it) gave NATO something to do, as did the deployment in Bosnia and later in Afghanistan. But something had gone missing: the idea of the use of the United States as a political counter-weight to a potentially hostile power was simply forgotten, because it didn’t seem relevant any more.

One result of this has been that public, and even expert, opinion, scarcely noticed the running down of conventional forces in Europe. Commentators recently seemed astonished to discover that the massive NATO forces of the Cold War had evaporated, and that NATO as a whole could scarcely muster a dozen light mechanised brigades, capable of fighting or a week or two before their supplies and ammunition were exhausted. In theory, massive reinforcements might come from the US, but only by bringing back into service mothballed 1980s tanks and finding and training crews for them and their supporting arms, which, even if it were possible, at best would take years and cost a fortune. So ironically, NATO now confronts the one contingency for which it was expressly designed—a powerful and heavily militarised Russia confronting a weak Europe—at a time when it has never been less able to meet it. Which is really clever if you think about it.  It was also completely avoidable. Seeking good relations with Russia from a position of relative weakness was one possible strategy. Hostility towards Russia from a position of relative strength was another. But hostility towards Russia from a position of relative weakness was just stupid. Yet the West continues to threaten Russia, as though it, and not Russia, was the stronger party, and as though the United States were still strong enough to be used as a counterweight.

For reasons I have gone over a number of times, this situation is not going to fundamentally change. Economic assets, for example, are where they are. The sea is not going to move. There’s a limit to where and how you can grow food. Likewise, economies based on rent extraction might develop into industrial and manufacturing economies, as happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there is no way that they can return to that state from their present financialised one. This means that western defence industries and force structures will actually continue to shrink, and western defence equipment will continue to be increasingly expensive. Yet condemning the leaders of these industries is slightly beside the point. From the Cold War onwards, the West has followed a policy of quality before quantity, believing that its technological lead would produce overall military superiority. In reality, this was probably the only policy that was economically and politically feasible, but it produced an expensive, delicate and increasingly small armoury of weapon systems, difficult and expensive to maintain, and needing to be kept in service for longer and longer.

Today, the situation has worsened. I’m not an expert, but it looks very much as though the West simply has the wrong arsenal to match up to Russia militarily in Europe. (I’m not thinking of an actual war, but rather the political consequences of highly imbalanced forces.) The Russians have very large numbers of “good enough” platforms, and in some cases their technology appears to be in advance of the West. But in addition, they have chosen to invest in areas such as missiles, artillery, drones and electronic warfare which suit their concept of what a war in Europe would be like (as we see in Ukraine.) They continue to use legacy systems, such as tanks and helicopters, but as part of an integrated military force.

The West by contrast has tiny legacy forces from the Cold War era which would be brushed aside in any conflict with Russia, assuming that they could somehow move safely the hundreds, or even thousands, of kilometres into contact, and then deploy in an organised fashion. Now note that the decision to get out of heavy-metal warfare in the 1990s was almost certainly the right one, and I supported it at the time. But it carries one immense corollary, which was so obvious at the time it was taken for granted: don’t antagonise the only large, serious military power in Europe. Nonetheless, Cold War triumphalism, and contempt for the state into which Russia rapidly fell, effectively led to the imbalance between political posturing and actual capability that I referred to above.

Much the same is true of aircraft. The West traditionally favoured air control through expensive, high-capability air superiority aircraft. In a scenario of an aggressive war by the Warsaw Pact, this made some sense, although it was still at the price of relative neglect of less glamorous surface to air missiles. But the generation of aircraft that the West now fields (the F35, the Typhoon, the Rafale) now have no air superiority war to fight, since the Russians prefer to use missiles, and are simply too few, too vulnerable and too expensive to be used as platforms to launch the very small numbers of weapons they can carry. In any event, Russian missiles or long-range fighters would be able to engage them well before they could get into firing range.

The West continues to be strong at sea, but what use is that? Carrier Battle-Groups are still the only viable means of force projection, but they are increasingly vulnerable: look at the current very careful US deployments near the Red Sea, well out of missile range. A single missile hit is probably enough to put a carrier out of action, at least temporarily. Nuclear attack submarines, where the West has a lead, could play a role in protecting shipping lanes, but it would be at the margin. And all the ballistic nuclear systems in the world don’t really count in this kind of calculation: their place is in an alternate universe. As a result, the West (and especially the United States) sees its global security influence dissipating daily.

Finally, the Russians are continuing to put money and effort into developing conventional ground and air-launched missiles, which can strike targets throughout Europe. The West has simply chosen, over the decades, not to develop these technologies, and cannot now do so, in any useful timetable and at any useful scale. And whilst NATO has had anti-missile programs for a generation now, they are not aimed at this kind of threat, and would never be able to cope with it. Broadly speaking, therefore, and even today, the Russians can hurt us, but we can’t hurt them. This is why all the nervous chin-stroking about “NATO becoming involved” in Ukraine and somehow turning it around would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

And what are the likely consequences of the blood-freezing, testicle-shrinking, realisation of this strategic vulnerability? Well, I can think of three possible outcomes, not necessarily exclusive of each other. The first is denial, for as long as humanly possible. Politics has an inertia of its own, and a whole generation of political leaders will have to waste out over the next few years before reality finally penetrates. In the meantime, life could get very dangerous, as western leaders continue to posture and threaten, with power they don’t have any more. So far as I can judge, this is especially true of the United States, which is about to be confronted with the brutal truth that the Russians care less and less about what they think. And in turn, nations that have found the US useful, for one reason or another, will be looking again at their options.

The second is a call for massive rearmament to confront the new “threat.” The problem (well, the first one) is that very few people have any idea what that means. So last week Le Monde, the newspaper the French PMC lines its cat trays with, told us that the country needed a “war economy.” I doubt if the intern who wrote that had the remotest idea of what a war economy would be like, or could even imagine it. Let’s see. Government direction of the economy, direction of labour, compulsory purchase and repurposing of companies, nationalisation of important assets, currency controls and sharply higher taxation … do I need to go on?

But there’s a more important point. You can’t re-arm from an Amazon site and by recruiting anyone who would otherwise work for starvation wages delivering parcels. For a start, you would require the kind of national commitment and consensus for mobilisation and rearmament that the British managed in the 1930s (better than the French, but that’s another story.) Nobody wanted war, but across the political spectrum there was a broad recognition that it might happen, and that it was necessary to be prepared. The services had little difficulty in recruiting more personnel, and the civilian population duly took part in air raid drills. And when the war started, the mood of my parents’ generation was “let’s get it over with:”an acceptance that certain things just had to be done. That generation accepted being mobilised and sent to fight, sent to factories to work or fields to grow food. They accepted food rationing, direction of labour and massive increases in income tax. There was grumbling, but little resistance.

All that seems like science fiction now. It resulted from a society which, though far from perfect, still saw itself as a whole, still lived locally and was organised through extended families, and social groupings like factories, football teams and even the Scouts. But neoliberalism has put an end to all that. Few of us now feel an identity with any “society” at all. Why should we? Our families are scattered around the country, we hardly know our neighbours, we cycle through transient temporary jobs with ever-changing colleagues, we have no time for any activities outside work, travel and shopping. Well, you can have that society of indistinguishable utility-maximising clones, but you can’t expect them to act together for a common purpose, especially when you have always denied that society has one.

As it happens, the Covid crisis has just given us all the proof we could have wanted. It was simple enough to understand that Covid was an infectious disease spread through aerosol clouds. Society as a whole could be protected if people stayed away from confined spaces where they might breath infected air, stayed at home if they were certainly infected, and wore a mask to prevent themselves from contaminating others. And yet, with a few honourable exceptions, no western government and no western society seemed capable of understanding this, because it trespassed on the first and only commandment of a neoliberal society: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, as long as you can pay. For significant sections of the population, being told to wear a mask was an unthinkable erosion of personal freedom, one step away from nazi concentration camps. A society that cannot accept that others’ lives come before your personal comfort is not going to be able to withstand the sort of stresses I’ve described.

The more so, because politics is now explicitly divisive, pitting real and constructed groups against each other to gain power. I’m not sure that the vocabulary and the set of concepts intended to rally an entire society even exists any more. Of course such discourses always had an element of hypocrisy to them, and no consensus was ever absolute, even in periods of crisis. But I think our current political class lacks even the understanding that it might be possible to rally the vast majority of people to the same side out of common interest. Even in France, where social bonds have so far resisted the very worst ravages of neoliberalism, Emmanuel Macron, in his first Presidential address during the Covid crisis, was reduced to chanting “we are at war,” like an incantation, though he couldn’t explain why, or what we were therefore supposed to do. So it’s not a all surprising that western leaders have tried to mobilise their populations over Ukraine not in the defence of anything, but simply by trying to get them to hate Russia. What else is there?

After all, what would we be defending? In Europe, both nationally and in the EU, history and culture is something to be ashamed of. Scarcely a week passes without a European politicians apologising for something or other. Efforts are made to suppress the teaching of history, on the basis that it is divisive, or to inculcate a sense of guilt and repentance in the young. In domestic  politics, meanwhile, history is used as a weapon by one group to demand concessions and money from others. Now fine, if that’s what you want to do, but don’t then expect that a post-cultural, post-historical society will suddenly and magically find something to coalesce around just when you need it. Nobody is going to die for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Which leads to a final thought. There’s been some surprise at the resistance of the troops fighting in Ukraine, especially the Ukrainians themselves. And elsewhere in the world, the Houthis are going strong, the anti-government forces in Myanmar are nothing if not persistent, and the various militia groups in Afghanistan fought each other and the Russians and Americans for forty years. Why, when you could be at home playing the same thing on a games machine? Why, for that matter, did people put up with hardships and death in the trenches of the First World War, or the Eastern Front, in the Second?

Now in large measure, we’re dealing here with inherited social expectations and norms. This is what we do. Or more precisely this is what Men do. Because until very recently, being born a male child subjected you to a non-zero chance of having to fight, and perhaps die, at some point in your life, to protect the lives of others. (Indeed, in some African communities, for example, “warrior” and “man” were effectively the same thing.) In the West, such ideas are no longer taken seriously. We have deconstructed toxic masculinity, and we demand that the military, like other parts of the state, should become more “diverse” as its first priority. Which is fine, as long as you don’t ever expect to have to attract ordinary people to join a military which is suddenly all about discomfort, danger and possible death, once again.

Which is to say that socially, just as much as strategically and technologically, the West has opted for a direction which only makes sense if you assume a world without challenges and dangers, and where individuals can do what they want, have what they want, be what they want, and demand what they want from others. It’s reasonable to wonder how such a society will fare, given the kind of problems that are about to hit us. The third possible outcome—which really needs an essay of its own—is that it may simply not survive. More of that another time.