Again, this article reveals more about you and your murky past than it does about the actuality. No mention of causes people *could actually get behind* like not destroying the planet for profit, or transforming the human condition through technological advancement. Undoubtedly the war-Liberal PMC still reigns in most western countries, so you're right about that. You're totally wrong about the hackneyed idea that mere anarchy will replace it. Something *will* replace it, or we'll all be dead.
"not destroying the planet for profit" requires a mighty load of lifestyle changes not in the direction of increased comfort, good luck with getting people to get behind that
"transforming the human condition through technological advancement" sounds like tescreal, more beloved by libertarian billionaires than the rest of us
China as a very different demographic profile than any "Western" country and a very different religious legacy. Oh, and China's history of the past 120 years is something to be wished upon an enemy, not a friend. What you revere is a product of all this.
Before Simone Weil called for the abolition of parties, George Washington had this to say: "Party serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” [Farewell address to the Nation]
Yes — what little I recall about the rhetoric of the immediate post-Revolutionary period in America was the virulent abhorrence of “faction” in all its guises.
I suspect that “the Framers” would look upon the contemporary Republicans and Democrats alike with horror and revulsion.
'The Framers' might do so indeed, but they started the whole process in the first place (or actually second place if you count the original religious fundamentalists from England). The constitution was written by a group of rich or landowning men with pretensions to aristocracy, who intended the document to perpetuate and confirm the rule of their own little cabal, in perpetuity. Things have changed only in scale since then.
Greetings, Aurelius, from one of your subscribers, this time from Serbia. I have just one technical correction: on October 5, 2000, protesters in Belgrade stormed the National Assembly building, not the Presidential Palace.
Liberal? The post-modern individual answering only to himself/herself. That liberal. The persons who look at the world, grab what they can and whose philosophy is I'll be Gone and You'll be gone, let the children and grandchildren look after themselves. Ayn Rand came to mind as I read. The Party or as I name it The DC Bubble and Echo Chamber unresponsive to any but its own narrow interest. This is repeated in Europe and, of course, the EU commission. In Europe governments have failed to provide for defense. In the US government has enriched the arms industry, but providing for actual defense is wide open to question. In the US and Europe the general welfare of the people at large is neglected if not ignored. That of the favored class is seen to. The examples go on and on. In the US we have a poorly led and badly disciplined gaggle rampaging through the streets supposedly to enforce immigration laws. The gaggle looks more like a budding praetorian guard and secret police answering not to law but to individuals. We have the president of the United States saying the only restraint on him is his conscience. Louis XIV theoretically answered to God even as he said he was the state. Legitimacy? Looking around where I live the city government does its job. I find it legitimate. The county also. The state is somewhat suspect. The national government, the DC Bubble and Echo Chamber and its parasitic attachments, has looked and acted less like a legitimate government since 2,000 and more like a vehicle to serve the favored few, I shall call them the elite and the PMC to be marginally polite. What is the test of legitimacy? It is only clear when the existing arrangement looks wanting and then is replaced. Jefferson had quite fine words for that in the Declaration of Independence --you can look it up. The Zhou dynasty of Chine 3,000 years ago seems to be the first to put it in this pithy form: The Shang had lost the Mandate of Heaven. I like that. Legitimacy is a mushy word. Mandate of Heaven has bite and authority.
I played with gestapo and brown shirts before settling on praetorian guard and secret police. Not the best descriptions as they lack discipline. There were other street warriors in Germany in the 1920s, Stahl Helm(?) for one. Here in the Us we had the post civil war "irregulars", Klan, Knights of the white Camilla, the Pinkertons and so on, but none were part of the government and none were given the cover that these goons enjoy.
That , is a lot to take in , perhaps its my lack of knowledge of the workings of the wider spectrum of politics that keeps me away from from such a pessimistice conclusion.
I still believe that a political party can succeed if it has only three or four crucial policies that are top of the list in importance to a majority of the people who vote.
A political party that has a policy of
(1) reducing the number of millionaires and billionaires whilst at the same time
(2) tightening the mergers and takeover laws to stop the increasing number of massive corporations and actually reducing their number
(3) closing the gap substantially between rich and poor and high and low earners
( 4) using the same strong legal forces against the wealthy that it uses against the poor , to address (1) to (4) ensuring that we put an end to the salacious road trip the rich are on and that it is roadblocked , massive luxury yachts traversing the globe and jet planes with one or two passengers should be stopped overnight we have no useful need for this polluting nonsense .
(5) ceo salaries to be limited to say , ten times the lowest full time salary of the company , let them leave let them move to another country they were never the ones responsible for the success of company anyway , the company will survive well enough without them .
(6) build railway lines and tram lines that transport people , food and other essentials and ban cars vans trucks and buses yes some people will have to walk from the end of the line to their actual destination but we can also build mini tramlines into housing developments for deliveries to be made and help people slim down a bit.
(7) smaller hospitals and schools in their communities and more of them
All this can be done if governments spend the money on people and their wellbeing rather than never ending business conglomeration look around and see the decay setting in to the biggest corporate businesses .
CEO can have any bonus level. But you have to distribute 10x that bonus among the company’s non-managerial employees. Keeps the amount reasonable and shares the reward with the front lines.
“ceo salaries to be limited to say , ten times the lowest full time salary of the company”
Not to get all “People’s Front of Judea vs Judean People’s Front” on you, but did you perhaps rather mean to say socialism? It’s after all the broader umbrella under which communism sits to the extent to which I understand the political science taxonomy.
Puting things to the limit, eh?! Very philosophical of you A...
The DMS-5 has this diagnostic, readily available: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).
In the past I heard that GDR had the most informants and spies, up to 5% of population. In Romania's case, the 10% is suffering of great hyperinflation. I know. My daddy worked as police detective for quite few years prior to 1989 and also was loaned to work as executive assistant to the county Securitatea director. The service never had anything on that scale. And I know from personal experience how the informants were "collected" and never used... Was all a sham.
As for solutions, mind and memory goes to Solon and Cleisthenes that wiped the slates clean and brought (back ?!) sortition as a means to select representatives... Goodby parties and uniparties!
Liberalism in Western societies today, it should not be forgotten, is modelled on the republican system of Ancient Rome, which was an oligarchy of the well born much like today's oligarchy of the PMC that, like the ancient Romans, uses the device of elections to maintain its grip. In my view, elections, which we've been duped into equating with democracy, are themselves the nub of our problems. The real solution it seems to me is to get rid of elections altogether and replace them with a system of sortition where randomly chosen ordinary people get to pull the levers of power in day to day governance. That’s what the ancient Athenians did: in addition to more or less monthly meetings of the assembly (direct democracy), running government on a daily basis was under the command of randomly chosen representatives of the population at large created for the first time a truly, genuinely democratic polity (sortitive representative democracy melded with direct democracy). We too could have our state apparatus commanded and overseen by random groups of representatives, political juries as it were. Remember: Greek democracy succeeded until a monarch, Philip of Macedon, tyrannically stamped it out. Ordinary people are never short-termist where the medium and longterm interests of the people at large are concerned. It might be nice if you were at some point to provide your thoughts on a system of sortitive representative democracy such as that described in the book The Democracy Manifesto by Waxman and McCulloch.
The Roman system was clearly superior to the Athenian one. Athenians had disastrous Sicilian expedition, lost the war against Sparta right because of the flaws of their government (absolutely idiotic attack on Alcibiades, for example). They also lost completely (and twice) against Macedonia, while monarchic Sparta fought back for another 150 years, just like Achaians and Aetolians. Athenians viewed their allies as slaves, Romans viewed their allies as junior partners and had a very sophisticated system of incorporating them.
Shocks are now coming one after the other. Greenland, Venezuela, tariffs, etc. But now Trump has stated his personal morality is his guiding light. This is orthogonal to the West's moralizing framework. This just broke the entire narrative of the West. Now Rick Wilson, a former Republican, says Trump "is the kind of man Americans once sent their son to fight and defeat." Change is here, I think. We just have to see how the pieces fall.
1. What exactly does Aurelien mean by "Liberal"? His depiction doesn't bear much resemblance to the classical liberals, more to "liberals" as the term is used in USA-ian political discourse, but it seems to largely coincide with the PMC, whose whose class consciousness is made manifestation in the Democratic Party, the "liberal" party (in the narrowly American sense).
2. "This is to say that in a Liberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned."
Surely you have noticed that relationships in the West are increasingly explicitly transactional. See, e.g., Kamala Harris' term as Willie Brown's mistress. While such things have always happened, now it's out in the open, and nobody cares. That's Just The Way It Is.
3. "Those who complain that politics increasingly resembles competition between manufacturers of breakfast foods see more clearly than perhaps they realise, with the difference that such manufacturers do at least praise the virtues of their products: political argument today consists of little else but nihilistic attempts to destroy the opposition."
My preferred analogy is sports teams, except I have found that barroom sports fans typically have better and more fact-based reasons for supporting their favorite team or position than do political partisans.
4. Thanks to internet linked security cams and AI, repression is now much easier than In the past. Some Palantir bigwig said as much recently. And if the AI linked goons grab the wrong person, so what?
"And because the motivation is fundamentally aesthetic (even if it wears ideological garments) negative results are irrelevant.
Education theory is a good example, because it can be practiced on Other Peoples’ Children, and so nobody of importance will be hurt when things go wrong. Whilst the subject of education is vast, and I am not an expert on it, there is one tendency that every parent has seen. That is the belief that “forcing” children to learn things is aesthetically wrong, and that children should “work things out for themselves,“ except perhaps in such areas as gender studies. What this means in practice, for example, is that in many countries children are not taught to read phonetically as was traditionally the case, but by deduction from looking at words with similar letters. This doesn’t work, and has led to a catastrophic decline in literacy in many countries, but that’s irrelevant, because the model itself is non-hierarchical and participative, which means it must be aesthetically and ideologically right."
Also, "policy decisions made on the basis of aesthetics" is an area perhaps worth exploring further.
This is one of the darkest diagnoses and predictions I have seen from analysts such as yourself. It is perhaps, even worse than Balkanisation with semi-stable and mutually hostile micro-states or some sort of Islamic takeover with Sharia law, etc, as even those would establish some sort of order and discipline on society. Instead we would get essentially a failed state and inevitably rapid and deep economic decline, perhaps with the end of functioning state services altogether. The UK and France have maybe 2-3 years to pull ourselves away from this fate?
Perhaps Aurelien foresees this anarchic period as prologue to the emergence of “semi-stable and mutually hostile micro-states?” It may be that civilization could take a while to re-emerge along a series of stages, much as it has before (viz the Bronze Age collapse)
Winters can be long and multigenerational endurance may be required before stability returns, eh?
Isn't pseudo-technocratic dominance of ideology the inevitable result of economic dependence on technocratic processes to provide a supply of jobs? There's no world where states that want a hundred thousand chemical engineers to maintain competitiveness don't adopt their language. Zubok wrote that the exact same process is what produced Gorbachev.
Technocratic processes do have a language and language, but you have chosen the wrong example with chemical or industrial engineers. They gain power from producing useful and valuable stuff, not just 'jobs'
Better examples of the technocratic process of the modern PMC would be from David Graber's "Bullshit Jobs", PR and Image Management consultants, HR department compliance officers, Internet Influencers etc. etc.
That was quite a long wind-up to an obvious conclusion: Suburban criminals and international drug and human trafficking cartels are the purest expression of neoliberal capitalist ideals as practiced by the Professional Managerial Caste in the Inverted Totalitarian west.
Have you factored in the combination of rising internal Muslim populations in the big cities of Western Europe with a mass influx of Muslim populations as climate change makes large parts of the Middle East and North Africa inhospitable to large scale living by mid-century. In that scenario, the Islamists might win the war against the hard-right in large parts of western Europe.
"But it is partly also the second- and third-order result of the confused intellectual heritage of the sixties and seventies, in which the teachers of today’s PMC grew up, and which I wrote about in one of my first essays. If theory is more important than reality, if facts are, as Althusser maintained 'concepts of an ideological nature,' which have to be tested against theory to see if they are correct, then any form of traditional pragmatic government is pointless."
The problem is, Sahara is greening which is well documented by now.
The warmer climate will bring more rainfall to Sahara and Arabic desert and will make these regions less arid. Just as it was in previous warmer periods in Earth history. You can google "Sahara in Atlantic period" for example.
The problem with the Middle East is not climate change but booming populations. Egypt grew tenfold in the last 100 years - it's hard for the agriculture keep up with the growth of such scale.
"You not concerned about rising heat levels"
If the heat levels are the problem, why are the British migrating to Australia and Wisconsinians to Florida and Texas and not the other way around?
<i>If the heat levels are the problem, why are the British migrating to Australia and Wisconsinians to Florida and Texas and not the other way around?</i>
Not to be flippant whatsoever, but the answer is, of course, air conditioning.
Well, Minnesota and UK have the heating, so they are level.
Air conditioning is great but people don't usually spend their whole life indoors. So, climate change or not, even extreme heat is still preferable to moderate cold. Most people move from a hotter to a colder country or region only if there is a huge difference in quality of life in favour of the latter. If these things are equal, the choice is always the warmer country.
Human beings are still tropical monkeys, it's the biology.
Again, this article reveals more about you and your murky past than it does about the actuality. No mention of causes people *could actually get behind* like not destroying the planet for profit, or transforming the human condition through technological advancement. Undoubtedly the war-Liberal PMC still reigns in most western countries, so you're right about that. You're totally wrong about the hackneyed idea that mere anarchy will replace it. Something *will* replace it, or we'll all be dead.
"not destroying the planet for profit" requires a mighty load of lifestyle changes not in the direction of increased comfort, good luck with getting people to get behind that
"transforming the human condition through technological advancement" sounds like tescreal, more beloved by libertarian billionaires than the rest of us
got any other nostrums to hand?
I'm more interested in practical Governance. China has cracked it.
China as a very different demographic profile than any "Western" country and a very different religious legacy. Oh, and China's history of the past 120 years is something to be wished upon an enemy, not a friend. What you revere is a product of all this.
Before Simone Weil called for the abolition of parties, George Washington had this to say: "Party serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” [Farewell address to the Nation]
Yes — what little I recall about the rhetoric of the immediate post-Revolutionary period in America was the virulent abhorrence of “faction” in all its guises.
I suspect that “the Framers” would look upon the contemporary Republicans and Democrats alike with horror and revulsion.
'The Framers' might do so indeed, but they started the whole process in the first place (or actually second place if you count the original religious fundamentalists from England). The constitution was written by a group of rich or landowning men with pretensions to aristocracy, who intended the document to perpetuate and confirm the rule of their own little cabal, in perpetuity. Things have changed only in scale since then.
Greetings, Aurelius, from one of your subscribers, this time from Serbia. I have just one technical correction: on October 5, 2000, protesters in Belgrade stormed the National Assembly building, not the Presidential Palace.
Liberal? The post-modern individual answering only to himself/herself. That liberal. The persons who look at the world, grab what they can and whose philosophy is I'll be Gone and You'll be gone, let the children and grandchildren look after themselves. Ayn Rand came to mind as I read. The Party or as I name it The DC Bubble and Echo Chamber unresponsive to any but its own narrow interest. This is repeated in Europe and, of course, the EU commission. In Europe governments have failed to provide for defense. In the US government has enriched the arms industry, but providing for actual defense is wide open to question. In the US and Europe the general welfare of the people at large is neglected if not ignored. That of the favored class is seen to. The examples go on and on. In the US we have a poorly led and badly disciplined gaggle rampaging through the streets supposedly to enforce immigration laws. The gaggle looks more like a budding praetorian guard and secret police answering not to law but to individuals. We have the president of the United States saying the only restraint on him is his conscience. Louis XIV theoretically answered to God even as he said he was the state. Legitimacy? Looking around where I live the city government does its job. I find it legitimate. The county also. The state is somewhat suspect. The national government, the DC Bubble and Echo Chamber and its parasitic attachments, has looked and acted less like a legitimate government since 2,000 and more like a vehicle to serve the favored few, I shall call them the elite and the PMC to be marginally polite. What is the test of legitimacy? It is only clear when the existing arrangement looks wanting and then is replaced. Jefferson had quite fine words for that in the Declaration of Independence --you can look it up. The Zhou dynasty of Chine 3,000 years ago seems to be the first to put it in this pithy form: The Shang had lost the Mandate of Heaven. I like that. Legitimacy is a mushy word. Mandate of Heaven has bite and authority.
"The gaggle looks more like a budding praetorian guard and secret police answering not to law but to individuals"
Trump as Sulla? Proscriptions may be on their way...
"The gaggle looks more like a budding praetorian guard and secret police answering not to law but to individuals."
The gaggle act like brownshirts.
I played with gestapo and brown shirts before settling on praetorian guard and secret police. Not the best descriptions as they lack discipline. There were other street warriors in Germany in the 1920s, Stahl Helm(?) for one. Here in the Us we had the post civil war "irregulars", Klan, Knights of the white Camilla, the Pinkertons and so on, but none were part of the government and none were given the cover that these goons enjoy.
Not sure that ICE is all that disciplined but I get your point.
That , is a lot to take in , perhaps its my lack of knowledge of the workings of the wider spectrum of politics that keeps me away from from such a pessimistice conclusion.
I still believe that a political party can succeed if it has only three or four crucial policies that are top of the list in importance to a majority of the people who vote.
A political party that has a policy of
(1) reducing the number of millionaires and billionaires whilst at the same time
(2) tightening the mergers and takeover laws to stop the increasing number of massive corporations and actually reducing their number
(3) closing the gap substantially between rich and poor and high and low earners
( 4) using the same strong legal forces against the wealthy that it uses against the poor , to address (1) to (4) ensuring that we put an end to the salacious road trip the rich are on and that it is roadblocked , massive luxury yachts traversing the globe and jet planes with one or two passengers should be stopped overnight we have no useful need for this polluting nonsense .
(5) ceo salaries to be limited to say , ten times the lowest full time salary of the company , let them leave let them move to another country they were never the ones responsible for the success of company anyway , the company will survive well enough without them .
(6) build railway lines and tram lines that transport people , food and other essentials and ban cars vans trucks and buses yes some people will have to walk from the end of the line to their actual destination but we can also build mini tramlines into housing developments for deliveries to be made and help people slim down a bit.
(7) smaller hospitals and schools in their communities and more of them
All this can be done if governments spend the money on people and their wellbeing rather than never ending business conglomeration look around and see the decay setting in to the biggest corporate businesses .
Counter-proposal:
CEO can have any bonus level. But you have to distribute 10x that bonus among the company’s non-managerial employees. Keeps the amount reasonable and shares the reward with the front lines.
“ceo salaries to be limited to say , ten times the lowest full time salary of the company”
For what it’s worth, I’d vote for that!
There's an alternative system. It's called Communism. It needs adherents.
Not to get all “People’s Front of Judea vs Judean People’s Front” on you, but did you perhaps rather mean to say socialism? It’s after all the broader umbrella under which communism sits to the extent to which I understand the political science taxonomy.
Puting things to the limit, eh?! Very philosophical of you A...
The DMS-5 has this diagnostic, readily available: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).
In the past I heard that GDR had the most informants and spies, up to 5% of population. In Romania's case, the 10% is suffering of great hyperinflation. I know. My daddy worked as police detective for quite few years prior to 1989 and also was loaned to work as executive assistant to the county Securitatea director. The service never had anything on that scale. And I know from personal experience how the informants were "collected" and never used... Was all a sham.
As for solutions, mind and memory goes to Solon and Cleisthenes that wiped the slates clean and brought (back ?!) sortition as a means to select representatives... Goodby parties and uniparties!
Liberalism in Western societies today, it should not be forgotten, is modelled on the republican system of Ancient Rome, which was an oligarchy of the well born much like today's oligarchy of the PMC that, like the ancient Romans, uses the device of elections to maintain its grip. In my view, elections, which we've been duped into equating with democracy, are themselves the nub of our problems. The real solution it seems to me is to get rid of elections altogether and replace them with a system of sortition where randomly chosen ordinary people get to pull the levers of power in day to day governance. That’s what the ancient Athenians did: in addition to more or less monthly meetings of the assembly (direct democracy), running government on a daily basis was under the command of randomly chosen representatives of the population at large created for the first time a truly, genuinely democratic polity (sortitive representative democracy melded with direct democracy). We too could have our state apparatus commanded and overseen by random groups of representatives, political juries as it were. Remember: Greek democracy succeeded until a monarch, Philip of Macedon, tyrannically stamped it out. Ordinary people are never short-termist where the medium and longterm interests of the people at large are concerned. It might be nice if you were at some point to provide your thoughts on a system of sortitive representative democracy such as that described in the book The Democracy Manifesto by Waxman and McCulloch.
The Roman system was clearly superior to the Athenian one. Athenians had disastrous Sicilian expedition, lost the war against Sparta right because of the flaws of their government (absolutely idiotic attack on Alcibiades, for example). They also lost completely (and twice) against Macedonia, while monarchic Sparta fought back for another 150 years, just like Achaians and Aetolians. Athenians viewed their allies as slaves, Romans viewed their allies as junior partners and had a very sophisticated system of incorporating them.
In the end, the score speaks for itself
Shocks are now coming one after the other. Greenland, Venezuela, tariffs, etc. But now Trump has stated his personal morality is his guiding light. This is orthogonal to the West's moralizing framework. This just broke the entire narrative of the West. Now Rick Wilson, a former Republican, says Trump "is the kind of man Americans once sent their son to fight and defeat." Change is here, I think. We just have to see how the pieces fall.
For context, when asked how his (Trump's) power might be limited domestically, he said:
“It’s limited by my morality, and I have a very high grade of morality, so therefore it’s limited.”
1. What exactly does Aurelien mean by "Liberal"? His depiction doesn't bear much resemblance to the classical liberals, more to "liberals" as the term is used in USA-ian political discourse, but it seems to largely coincide with the PMC, whose whose class consciousness is made manifestation in the Democratic Party, the "liberal" party (in the narrowly American sense).
2. "This is to say that in a Liberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned."
Surely you have noticed that relationships in the West are increasingly explicitly transactional. See, e.g., Kamala Harris' term as Willie Brown's mistress. While such things have always happened, now it's out in the open, and nobody cares. That's Just The Way It Is.
3. "Those who complain that politics increasingly resembles competition between manufacturers of breakfast foods see more clearly than perhaps they realise, with the difference that such manufacturers do at least praise the virtues of their products: political argument today consists of little else but nihilistic attempts to destroy the opposition."
My preferred analogy is sports teams, except I have found that barroom sports fans typically have better and more fact-based reasons for supporting their favorite team or position than do political partisans.
4. Thanks to internet linked security cams and AI, repression is now much easier than In the past. Some Palantir bigwig said as much recently. And if the AI linked goons grab the wrong person, so what?
The Byzantines had the Blue team and the green team and they had their sport as well, chariot races on the hypodrome.
"And because the motivation is fundamentally aesthetic (even if it wears ideological garments) negative results are irrelevant.
Education theory is a good example, because it can be practiced on Other Peoples’ Children, and so nobody of importance will be hurt when things go wrong. Whilst the subject of education is vast, and I am not an expert on it, there is one tendency that every parent has seen. That is the belief that “forcing” children to learn things is aesthetically wrong, and that children should “work things out for themselves,“ except perhaps in such areas as gender studies. What this means in practice, for example, is that in many countries children are not taught to read phonetically as was traditionally the case, but by deduction from looking at words with similar letters. This doesn’t work, and has led to a catastrophic decline in literacy in many countries, but that’s irrelevant, because the model itself is non-hierarchical and participative, which means it must be aesthetically and ideologically right."
Also, "policy decisions made on the basis of aesthetics" is an area perhaps worth exploring further.
I died for Beauty - but was scarce
RW 448 Emily Dickinson
I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room -
He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren are", He said -
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up - Our names -
This is one of the darkest diagnoses and predictions I have seen from analysts such as yourself. It is perhaps, even worse than Balkanisation with semi-stable and mutually hostile micro-states or some sort of Islamic takeover with Sharia law, etc, as even those would establish some sort of order and discipline on society. Instead we would get essentially a failed state and inevitably rapid and deep economic decline, perhaps with the end of functioning state services altogether. The UK and France have maybe 2-3 years to pull ourselves away from this fate?
Perhaps Aurelien foresees this anarchic period as prologue to the emergence of “semi-stable and mutually hostile micro-states?” It may be that civilization could take a while to re-emerge along a series of stages, much as it has before (viz the Bronze Age collapse)
Winters can be long and multigenerational endurance may be required before stability returns, eh?
Oh China and the period of the warring states, which led to Confucius...
Isn't pseudo-technocratic dominance of ideology the inevitable result of economic dependence on technocratic processes to provide a supply of jobs? There's no world where states that want a hundred thousand chemical engineers to maintain competitiveness don't adopt their language. Zubok wrote that the exact same process is what produced Gorbachev.
I agree, but only to a point.
Technocratic processes do have a language and language, but you have chosen the wrong example with chemical or industrial engineers. They gain power from producing useful and valuable stuff, not just 'jobs'
Better examples of the technocratic process of the modern PMC would be from David Graber's "Bullshit Jobs", PR and Image Management consultants, HR department compliance officers, Internet Influencers etc. etc.
That was quite a long wind-up to an obvious conclusion: Suburban criminals and international drug and human trafficking cartels are the purest expression of neoliberal capitalist ideals as practiced by the Professional Managerial Caste in the Inverted Totalitarian west.
Hi,
Great post. I have highlighted it in my latest blog post - https://forecastingintelligence.org/2026/01/14/quick-takes-10/.
Have you factored in the combination of rising internal Muslim populations in the big cities of Western Europe with a mass influx of Muslim populations as climate change makes large parts of the Middle East and North Africa inhospitable to large scale living by mid-century. In that scenario, the Islamists might win the war against the hard-right in large parts of western Europe.
As Middle eastern living in the Middle east. I can tell you this, Climate change doesn't affect us as much as your media tends to make.
Interesting.
You not concerned about rising heat levels, worsening water shortages over the next 20 years.
"But it is partly also the second- and third-order result of the confused intellectual heritage of the sixties and seventies, in which the teachers of today’s PMC grew up, and which I wrote about in one of my first essays. If theory is more important than reality, if facts are, as Althusser maintained 'concepts of an ideological nature,' which have to be tested against theory to see if they are correct, then any form of traditional pragmatic government is pointless."
The problem is, Sahara is greening which is well documented by now.
The warmer climate will bring more rainfall to Sahara and Arabic desert and will make these regions less arid. Just as it was in previous warmer periods in Earth history. You can google "Sahara in Atlantic period" for example.
The problem with the Middle East is not climate change but booming populations. Egypt grew tenfold in the last 100 years - it's hard for the agriculture keep up with the growth of such scale.
"You not concerned about rising heat levels"
If the heat levels are the problem, why are the British migrating to Australia and Wisconsinians to Florida and Texas and not the other way around?
<i>If the heat levels are the problem, why are the British migrating to Australia and Wisconsinians to Florida and Texas and not the other way around?</i>
Not to be flippant whatsoever, but the answer is, of course, air conditioning.
Well, Minnesota and UK have the heating, so they are level.
Air conditioning is great but people don't usually spend their whole life indoors. So, climate change or not, even extreme heat is still preferable to moderate cold. Most people move from a hotter to a colder country or region only if there is a huge difference in quality of life in favour of the latter. If these things are equal, the choice is always the warmer country.
Human beings are still tropical monkeys, it's the biology.