The End?

There must be some way out of here ... surely?

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The original idea behind these essays when I started them three years ago, was that there was too much polemic and opinion on the Internet, and not enough hard analysis and explanation. It seemed to me evident that in any area of life, after a long enough period of time, you develop a feel for how things work, and so you can try to explain them to others. An engineer can draw you a diagram of how a car engine or a rocket motor works, for example, and explain what variations there are, and whether the latest clever innovation is likely to work or not. Politics, as I’ve always said, is a bit like that: forces acting on bodies and producing results within a foreseeable spectrum. There are laws in politics, not as there are in science, but as there are in engineering, or even in medicine. Just as an engineer can look at a bridge and say “that will come down” without being able to say precisely when or under what circumstances, and a doctor can make a prognosis that is usually right, so anyone who’s spent a lifetime in politics can in principle explain what’s going on according to these laws that broadly regulate what is possible and how it might develop. There is always scope for argument, and in any case I tend to stay away from firm predictions which are dangerous, but nonetheless I try to draw on a lifetime of experience in politics around the world—largely down at the coalface I should add—to try to offer some interpretations of what’s happening, and some thoughts about where it might lead.

In that context, I’m especially interested in complex and fragile systems, which can fail catastrophically and unexpectedly without this failure being easily predictable. We live in a world whose operating system, if you like, has become more fragile and more complex every year: something that most people, and most national leaders, only discovered to their horror at the time of the Covid disruption. Indeed, the world “system” now resembles one of those software systems, used by banks or air traffic control organisations, which was originally written decades ago, and has been added to and patched to the point where nobody really knows how it works any more. Such software can fail at any time, unpredictably and with unforeseeable consequences . (There have been stories in the media about bank software failures almost every week recently.)

Now the world is not a single “system:” it’s far more complicated than that, but the logic applies to various components of it, some of which I want to discuss today. What they have in common is that they are complex and fragile, and so may fail unpredictably, and potentially catastrophically. In addition, virtually every system in the world today lacks redundancy, so there is no backup system, no plan B, and in general no way of restoring the system even in part. So I’m going to take this metaphor and apply it to a number of areas whereI hope I may have some insights to offer. I’m going to start from the mundane observation which I’ve heard from more people than I can count, that “nothing works anymore.” As Mr Dylan perceptively argued as long ago as 1989, Everything’s Broken. That seems to me to be very largely true, but invites the questions, why? and is the situation recoverable?

There is a wider debate, which I will leave to others, about whether “western civilisation,” or “our way of life” or even the current organisation of the entire world, is in decline, and if so whether this decline will be gradual or rapid. I don’t think that “civilisation” is necessarily a helpful unit of account here, and trying to analyse declines is tricky, at best: recall that historians now doubt that the “fall” of the Roman Empire as such even happened, but suggest rather that the centre of gravity just moved to the East. Likewise, it’s not obvious by what measure you can even estimate decline and fall. At one extreme, in James Blish’s 1950s Spenglerian space epic, Cities in Flight, the “Fall of the West” is simply taken to be the point where the West becomes indistinguishable from its (then) Soviet adversary. So I’ll leave that to others.

However, unlike Rome, or the Aztecs, or whoever, modern civilisation has a number of extremely delicate and highly interconnected components whose graceful degradation is effectively impossible. I’ve lived and worked pretty much all my life in cities of millions of people, which are, much more than you might realise, very complex and delicate systems with little redundancy. In many cases these effects are of the second and third order. For example, in France a few years ago there was a strike of lorry-drivers delivering petrol to petrol stations. Awkward for car owners, certainly, many could not get to work. But the real problems were elsewhere. Lorries delivering food to supermarkets could not get petrol, so they started to run out of supplies. Had the strike gone on much longer, shops and organisations relying on staff commuting by car would have needed to close, and petrol rationed so that emergency services could still operate. The last time I saw any reliable figures, the average western supermarket kept stocks for three days: I suspect that with the endless pressure to cut costs, that figure is now probably lower. Any substantial interruption of the delicate and interconnected system of resupply, through electricity cuts, fuel shortages or unexpected extreme weather, and the shops would quickly be empty.

Suppose you live on the top floor of a ten-story apartment building. A serious power outage, and you have no running water, no flushing toilets, no heat, no light and of course no lifts. Even if you could get out, where would you go, especially if the weather is bad? There are no shops, no transport and no banks. If you remained where you were then in a couple of days you’d be hungry and quite possibly dehydrated. A major city largely without power for a week would be uninhabitable, and such a crisis would be so enormous that you can’t really prepare for it. Recovering from it, and from its wider and longer-term consequences, may not actually be possible; and dealing with those consequences would pose problems well beyond the feeble capacity of modern states to tackle. This is a case where once the damage is done, the resources and the skills simply do not exist any more to return the situation to how it used to be. It’s my contention that many of the systems that support life in the West today are effectively broken, just like the bridge that could collapse at any moment, except that we don’t know when the collapse will come, and in practice the collapse will be irreversible.

Let’s talk about politics first, because in many ways it’s the most serious case. Now we all like to complain about politicians (and certainly the current crop is particularly awful) but it remains true that some political system, even anarcho-syndicalism, is essential if a country is to be held together and run at all. Still, I would argue that the underlying problem, which I take to be the ever-increasing distance between the rulers and the ruled, will eventually lead to the collapse of western political systems, because the resources to reform, let alone replace, the current system no longer exist. The lack of replacement capacity will be a consistent theme of this essay.

The distance between rulers and ruled is partly one of relative wealth, and partly one of physical distance and protection. Research last year showed that half of the French government were millionaires, and that is likely still to be true. But it’s not just that politicians these days are comfortably off, it’s also that in general they always have been. The days when manual workers, trades unionists, small tradesmen and others went into politics are generally over: indeed, the very concept of “going into” politics after a professional career elsewhere now seems an anachronism. An ingrown political class which talks only to itself and its parasites simply has no conception of how ordinary people are obliged to live. And these days the physical separation of the political class from the people is probably as great as it was in the eighteenth century. In most western countries, only the very rich and the very poor now live in the city or town centre, and politicians can quite happily get through the week without meeting anyone earning anything like a normal income, except for their driver and the woman who cleans their office.

In any case, advancement in what I have described as the Party no longer depends on communicating with ordinary people and getting elected. Politics today is about climbing the greasy pole to the exclusion of everything else. Much as, once again, in the eighteenth century, it’s about finding and attaching yourself to a patron who will reward your loyalty with favours: if you lose an election, there’s always a think-tank somewhere.

But I think it goes a lot further and deeper than that. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I have to say that words like “psychopathic,” “sociopathic” and “autistic” for once seem entirely appropriate for our political class, the acolytes of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) who serve them, and the wealthy, powerful and influential generally. What I understand by such words is a psychological detachment from real life and real people, an inability to empathise with the rest of us, and a tendency to treat people as just objects, as raw material and components, rather than human beings. It comes in part from physical separation, but primarily from living in an echo-chamber where nothing outside is genuinely real, because it is filtered through statistics, ideological preconceptions, and slogans that serve as a substitute for thought.

The result is a ruling class (let’s call it that for short) which has a horrible, blank, soulless quality to it, which seems detached from real life and entirely lacks anything that could be described as character, individuality or interest. Who on earth is going to write biographies of our current ruling class? What would there be to say of any interest in Ursula von der Leyen: a German Life? Would there be any point, even were it published, in putting it on the same shelf as biographies of De Gaulle, Adenauer, Churchill, Kennedy or Nelson Mandela? Today’s politicians aren’t even interestingly bad or wicked, just blank, incompetent cyphers. At least the self-regarding aristocracy of a few hundred years ago had culture, religion and an inbuilt sense of status and responsibility. Today's ruling class has Netflix series, facile progressive values and an inbuilt sense of their own superiority. They have no idea what any of it is worth.

Indeed, in their detachment from the real world and their total lack of empathy, they resemble a bulk delivery some of the fictional heroes of the last century, who at the time were filed away as representatives of timeless existential angst. So Camus’s protagonist Meursault in The Outsider who commits a murder “because of the sun” and is sentenced to death essentially because of his lack of any empathy or human feeling, seems to us less like an existentialist hero in an absurd world, and more a prototype of the soulless, blank-faced ruling class of today. (The similarly blank heroes of Bret Easton Ellis are a more modern example.) Today, we are ruled by a confederacy of Meursaults, who do not even hate us, who are not even consciously wicked, but just as indifferent to the mass of the population as industrial agriculture is to animals. It’s the same in the private sector: I suspect that Steve Jobs—dead now almost fifteen years—is the last businessman anyone can name with a shred of personality and originality. The Joker has become the Thief, and not even an interesting one. If Robert Musil were to write his classic novel today, he could keep the original title: this is truly the era of The Man Without Qualities.

And in turn they have created a world in their image. I first saw Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fifty years ago, when we were worried about quaint things like oil prices and strikes, and the very idea of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister seemed a joke. Then, it seemed an allegory of the human condition in an absurdist world: now, I don’t think I’m the first to realise that it can now be seen as a piece of twenty-first century social realism, with its all-powerful but never seen master, its continual disappointments and its broken promises. Likewise, when people talk of a “Kafkaesque” world today, of no-one who will talk to you, of promises not kept, deliveries that never arrive, of incomprehensible rules and regulations, and punishments for no apparent reason or even by mistake, Kafka suddenly becomes our contemporary in a way that he was not fifty years ago.

The result is a ruling class which is not positively evil—it doesn’t have the imagination— so much as culpably indifferent. The interests of citizens, employees and customers are just not a factor in its deliberations. At most, they are groups for which PR specialists can be hired to calm them down and get them to accept the inevitable: higher prices, worse service, lower wages, more insecurity. When I was studying economics a lifetime ago, economists identified three factors of production: land, labour and capital. (These days “entrepreneurship” has been added.) But I don’t think that at the time anyone seriously argued that these factors could be treated alike. Today, the workforce, even in the public sector, is explicitly treated as fungible: it can be exchanged for computer systems or these days AI, it can be hired on short-term contracts or bought in from abroad. Human beings are just assets, somewhere in value between scented soap for executive toilets and waste-paper baskets.

We can see this mindset at work when we venture to point out what everybody knows: life has been getting worse for some time. (I don’t need to rehearse it here.) But the reaction of the ruling class, and especially of its paid propagandists, is one of incomprehension and anger. The first argument is that we are stupid: inflation isn’t really high, poverty isn’t really increasing, education and healthcare are not in deep decline, and if we think so, then we don’t understand how wonderful things really are, and we’ve been targeted by disinformation. To ask “exactly how are things wonderful compared with a generation or two ago, and according to what objective criteria would you measure improvement or decline?” invites the kind of irrational reaction I discussed a couple of weeks ago (“I suppose you think homosexuals should be put in prison then?”) followed by a tirade along the lines of mumbleiPhoneburbleracismmumbleNetflixAmazon burblesexismmumble electriccars.

In other words the ruling class (including those who identify with them) is capable of understanding progress only in the fulfilment of its own selfish wants. These wants may be practical—how convenient to be able to watch a football match from the other side of the world on your telephone—but mostly they are aesthetic. That is to say, a “better” world is one which conforms more closely to their aspirations for how people should think and behave. As vulgar Hegelians, they believe in practice that ideas are all that matter, and that a Good Society is one where their vaguely progressive, incoherent ideology becomes the dominant influence on speech and behaviour, and ultimately the only one. Like a modern workforce, like the population in 1984, ordinary people are to be moulded into using patterns of speech and behaviour pleasing to their masters. Today’s ruling class is indifferent to people dying of hunger in the streets, so long as the media report it in the right way, and its NGO component uses and jettisons the poorest and most desperate members of society for convenience in trying to influence the “public debate” around some issue.

This blank emptiness, and lack of real (as opposed to declarative) ethical principles, explains much of the ruling class’s recent behaviour. Take Covid, for example. There, I and many others thought that ultimately the ruling class would finally have to compromise, and take the interests of ordinary people into account. Yet this only happened to a very limited extent, because in the end what was important was their own comfort and convenience. So after initial denial, came panic, the desperate search for anything (hand-washing! vaccinations!) which could magically get people back to work, and then a sustained chorus of “it’s all over!” Meanwhile, they themselves installed air purifiers and demanded negative Covid certificates from everyone allowed to see them. I confess I hadn’t expected quite so much psychopathic blindness from a ruling class, and such a willingness to see millions die for their own convenience, and to preserve their precious ideological norms. (Remember that governments didn’t want to ban air travel from China because that would be ”racist.”)

Much the same is true of Ukraine, which for those in charge of western policy, and those cheerleading it, is essentially an exciting moral adventure, where Important Liberal Principles, whatever they may be exactly, are being defended against dangerous ideas like patriotism, tradition, culture and religion. The actual results, in terms of ruined economies, destroyed cities and dead and wounded, are not really the point: our ruling class cannot really empathise with, or even properly understand, the actual suffering involved, as they flit from international meeting to TV appearance to speeches delivering stern moral lessons. It’s all so exciting for them.

And finally Gaza, which among other things represents the irremediable death of liberal interventionism, since never has large-scale slaughter been easier to stop. But western leaders and opinion formers just don’t care because in the end death and suffering mean nothing to them: it’s all just pictures on TV, and the important thing is to crack down on those who would try to dispute official narratives and bring in genuine, as opposed to declarative, moral principles. Indeed, our ruling class is frightened of nothing so much as genuine moral principles, which would require them to do things they might find inconvenient, about situations they don’t understand.

You would think that a ruling class so detached from reality could not hope to survive. That’s probably true in principle, but then the normal assumption is that exhausted political forces will be replaced by new ones, and that may not be the case any more. Consider: in 1789 there were important highly-educated middle-class political groupings waiting in the wings in France, with ideologies and objectives honed over decades. The vacuum of power was quickly filled. In 1917, there were various groups ready and waiting to take advantage of the fall of the Romanovs: the Bolsheviks were not the most numerous, but they were the best prepared. In 1918, the Kaiser’s abdication put power into the hands of politicians who had been elected already. And in 1979, the Islamists, benefiting from decades of preparation, stepped in smartly to fill the gap where the Shah had been: a potentially worrying precedent to which I return.

That’s how it usually happens : ruling classes and political forces are displaced by others. Power vacuums seldom last long when there are organised forces ready to take control. The problem arises when there are many forces vying for control, and none is sufficient organised and strong to dominate, as has been the case in Libya since 2011, for example. There, a regime which combined severe repression with a careful balance among the tribes, and bought social peace with a generous welfare state, was overthrown and replaced by forces which had largely regional bases and limited ambitions. It’s not an exaggeration to say that such a pattern may be seen in western states as well, and the possibility of actual violence cannot be excluded.

Why is this? Well, in most western countries there is no organised opposition ready to take power, with a clearly different ideology and a plan for putting it into effect. Liberal globalism has captured every mainstream political party, and elections simply replace the group in power with a superficially different alternative. Whilst there are parties outside the mainstream, they stand little chance of actually taking and then usefully exercising power. It’s important to understand why this is so, and it has nothing to do with manoeuvres of the Deep State or whatever.

The fact is that organising political movements is hard, and inevitably has to be done around some kind of unifying principle and some set of common objectives. Classically, political movements represented different economic and social interests, sometimes also reflecting regional concerns, and could be more-or-less situated on a Left to Right spectrum, depending on how far they were content with the current system and how far they wanted to change it. That’s no longer the case, and, whilst the traditional subject-matter of Left vs Right disputes is as topical as ever, today’s politicians have managed to bury the very distinction itself beneath a facade of blank managerialism which has removed all of the politics from politics.

Someone knowing nothing of these developments would look at western countries today, and imagine that we were due a massive revival of the traditional Left. After all, it’s generations since poverty and inequality were so extreme, and there’s a desperate need to to invest in services such as health and education. But, given that existing parties of the Notional Left have been captured by Liberalism, how would you actually go about forming new ones? Traditionally, such parties were created in workplaces and factories in settled communities:something that simply doesn’t exist anymore. In most cases, leftist parties were closely linked to the trades unions, which are themselves on their last legs. All you actually get is a handful of boutique parties of intellectuals, who spend their time arguing about what Marx really meant. It’s worth adding that it isn’t any easier to imagine forming new parties of the non-Liberal Right, which were historically based on middle-class settled communities in small towns, often linked to churches and social organisations, and they don’t exist any more either.

The result is that the new parties that have appeared are generally parties of protest, and attract voters who wish to demonstrate their anger and frustration. But by their nature they cannot have a detailed programme, and they are mostly organised around one or two personalities. If they succeed in getting a share of power they seldom manage to change anything, and often come apart shortly afterwards.

The case of France is particularly instructive, because the Party there is very powerful, and is prepared to put aside its internal hatreds in order to use the idiosyncratic electoral system to keep other parties out. But these parties have themselves contributed to their own marginalisation. The Rassemblement national (RN) has failed to develop any kind of strength in depth or at local level, and its deputies are a pretty unimpressive lot. (The party was secretly relieved not to be in government in 2024.) Marine Le Pen’s exclusion from political office, which was made possible by the amateurish way in which the party moved money from Brussels to Paris, will not stop the RN fielding a Presidential candidate in 2027, but that candidate is unlikely to do well. Over on what used to be the Left, things are not much better. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise is essentially a glorified fan club, and, whilst it does have a few competent senior figures, it is so riven by identity politics disagreements and personal animosities that it could never expect to take part in government effectively.

So the most likely development, there as everywhere, is a Party which is increasingly remote, increasingly isolated, increasingly paranoid, but which remains in power because competing political groups are even weaker than it is. The Party cannot remain in power by sheer force—few regimes ever could, actually—but there will be no other grouping with the numbers and organisation to bring it down. Now of course there have been dysfunctional political regimes before, and periods where countries have been without governments entirely. In such situations, what counts above all is an experienced and capable bureaucratic administration that can keep the country going. All through the western world, over the last forty years, neoliberalism has been busy destroying this capability in as many countries as possible. At some point, it’s going to occur to even the densest politician that it would be nice to have an effective permanent administration to put their policies into effect. But by then it will be too late.

In other words, this is one more case of it being much easier to break things than to build them up. The government administrations of Britain, France and Germany for example, were set up at a time in the nineteenth century when the rising middle classes demanded a properly functioning state, and when a fierce ethic of public service, nourished by a sober Protestantism in Britain and Germany and a militant Republicanism in France, provided the motive force and the ideological underpinning. Even so, it took perhaps a generation for professional, neutral public services to fully emerge. It is futile to imagine that anything remotely similar could be done today, to undo the baleful effects of forty years of market nihilism: indeed, in the US Mr Trump seems determined to destroy what little capacity the American administration has left.

When neoliberalism was young, its glassy-eyed militants told everybody, don’t worry, the private sector will take over. We are surrounded by the wreckage (sometimes literal) of that assertion now, as governments start to take industries and services back into public ownership, where they still exist. The problem, of course, is that there isn’t much to take back, and rebuilding them is now effectively impossible. The European industrial miracle depended on coal and iron ore deposits near rivers, and a docile workforce drive off the land and needing to work. It also depended on the founding of technical training and degree-awarding engineering institutions, and a wide acceptance of the importance of these skills for the future of the countries concerned. It’s all a bit different now. This is why Mr Trump’s tarrif-based approach to re-shoring industry is so naive. It’s a prisoner of the romantic 1980s idea that if you give financial incentives they will come. In other words if people are prevented from buying products from abroad because of import duties, companies will spontaneously be created domestically to provide the goods to meet the demand. But in practice this never happens in mature economies: it just means that the goods are not available, or only to those with the ability to pay.

And in a globalised world, the capacity to rebuild cannot come from within the private sector itself. Western companies have long gone past the point of investing for the future: their priority is now selling off the present to boost short-term profits. But in globalised world, the managers, even if not themselves especially bright, are only responding to the dictates of outside forces. There is no chance of putting this into reverse.

Indeed, for all the justified scorn heaped upon globalisation, the process itself has now destroyed so much that it cannot be put into reverse without destroying quickly what it has only so far been destroying slowly. For example, the catering and hotel trades in Western Europe are now essentially dependent on cheap, often illegal, trafficked migrants, prepared to work for miserable wages and sleeping several to a room in slum areas. At the same time, skilled staff cannot be recruited because they can no longer afford to live close enough to the jobs in city centres to commute by public transport. Likewise, agriculture in many European countries is largely dependent on trafficked migrant labour for its viability. In my local supermarket, oranges from Spain are significantly cheaper than oranges from France, though they come from further away. This is because Spanish farms employ (often illegally) trafficked seasonal migrants, and the Spanish authorities turn a blind eye. Here, as in many other areas of unskilled and semi-skilled low-cost labour, it’s no exaggeration to say that the western Europe economy is as dependent now on trafficked immigrant labour as the American South was dependent on slavery before the Civil War. And in many areas it’s simply structurally impossible to replace this workforce with full-time, salaried staff.

But what about other, social, strengths that societies habitually fall back on in times of trouble? Well, here the problem is that people move from community to community, and even country to country, in search of work or affordable housing, and a community these days is no more than a population of people temporarily in the same place. (It would be absurd to talk of “Londoners,” for example in the way we did the I was young.) The old centres of the community—factories, clubs, sports teams, churches, even Boy Scout troops—are in decline if they even exist now. Of course communities have always been looser in cities (Parisians are notoriously from somewhere else originally) but these days cities are often divided on a communitarian basis with immigrant groups taking control of entire areas, fighting with each other over control of organised crime, and making it impossible for the State to operate. Such communitarianism tears societies apart. In any event, and in Europe at least, Brussels and national governments have sent thirty years undermining the very concept of society and nation: what did they think was going to happen?

In the absence of society, community and nation, is there anything else that might hold western nations together? When all else has failed, for example, will we see a revival of religion? After all, there are signs of a return to the church: baptisms are up in many countries, and church attendance is no longer falling. But that would require a larger and wider spiritual context than is available today. There is an argument about whether Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” has gone into reverse, or whether it even happened. I suspect the argument is pointless because different people mean different things by the words used. The fact is that organised Christian religion today simply cannot offer a holistic, moralised world view that gives a higher meaning to life, and prescriptions for living it. Since the 1960s it has pre-emptively surrendered before the forces of advancing Liberal humanism, to the point where recovery is now impossible. I couldn’t help wondering over the last Easter weekend how many clergy in established western churches actually believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus and, if they did, would try to convince others of its historical truth. Not many, I suspect. Go to a church complaining of the emptiness and meaninglessness of modern life and they’ll give you a cup of tea and suggest a course of meditation. And the secular ideologies that once sought to take over from religion and themselves give life meaning now no longer exist either.

It may be objected that some religious groups are gaining converts. That’s true, but in virtually all cases they are groups that divide rather than unite. Evangelical Christianity is making great progress, especially among immigrant communities, but it is at best intolerant and manipulative. Reactionary Catholicism, inspired by the success of radical Islam, has quietly been making a comeback in recent years, but among its leaders are dubious individuals with political agendas: I used to live near a traditionalist church in Paris where a Requiem Mass was said every year for Franco.

And of course radical Islam is flourishing, because it has all the answers. All political and moral questions can be given a definitive answer: all you have to do is obey. No need for laws, parliaments or elections, just do what you are told. And indeed people actually are, as Muslim communities themselves are radicalised, and non-Muslims increasingly turn to a religion which at least provides them with answers, and a meaning to life. The French media have been reporting rather touching stories, around Easter, of adolescents going to churches and asking for the same guidance on the detail of how to live, and spend Lent, as their Muslim school-friends talk about getting. And of course their interlocutors can offer nothing except Liberal banalities.

But none of these movements can bind society together: indeed, radical Islam is explicitly intended to destroy it, and replace it with a theocratic state. As our society, its political and government institutions and its economic structures begin to break down, the best-organised forces, independent of what we may think of them, will start to take control as they always do. Liberalism, I fear, will be unceremoniously elbowed aside and, for all that Liberalism is justly criticised, we will not necessarily prefer what follows. Brussels will probably be reduced to something like the status of the Papacy in the late nineteenth century. But none of the forces that are likely to be unleashed—radical Islam, conservative Christianity and various nationalist and regionalist movements—can aspire to anything more than local control.

Which is to say that controversies about the decline of the West slightly miss the point. Its society and its institutions, as well as its economic and commercial foundations, have already declined beyond the point where they can be rescued. What remains is a question of time. When I was at school were were taught that certain chemical reactions were irreversible, and that’s not a bad metaphor for where we are today. It’s not that we can’t imagine theoretical conjunctions of events that might change things, it’s just that the inherent laws of politics, economics and society rule them out.

Well, that’s cheerful, isn’t it? What are we going to do then? Well, we can start by acknowledging reality: the hour is getting late, and it’s not a time to talk falsely. Forty years of globalised neoliberalism have broken our societies, our economies and our political systems, and we no longer have the ability to put them back together.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t, and shouldn’t, try to do things at a personal level. In an essay last year, I suggested that we needed to start cultivating (or re-cultivating) the mindset that has seen people through harsh times before, that of doing the right thing in the absence of any real hope for the future, because it was the right thing. One of the examples I gave was the French Resistance, and it’s worth pointing out that Samuel Beckett, whom I mentioned earlier, served with distinction in the Resistance and was honoured by the French state after the War. (Indeed, the war years explain much more of the atmosphere of his work than is commonly realised.) So let’s end with a citation from the conclusion of one of his bleakest (!) works, The Unnameable:

You must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.