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SOCIO-ECONOMIC COMMENTARY
UMAIR HAQUE This Is What the Beginning of the End of a Civilization Feels Like ... A New Dark Age is Falling — And We Might Be Powerless to Stop It Image Credit: Jongsun Lee on Unsplash Original article: https://eand.co/this-is-what-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-a-civilization-feels-like-9e4da20463cb Peter Burgess COMMENTARY At some level I agree with Umari Haque ... but another part of me thinks his analysis is 100% wrong. If the analysis of the world is essentially an academic study, then there is a huge amount that is catastrophically wrong ... and the conclusions are going to be pretty negative. But if ... perhaps ... we look at the hard facts around us, then perhaps the conclusions can be very different. My most measures, I can be considered to be a 'news junky' and my resulting mondset is pretty negative. The news confirms over and over again that the world is falling apart and that violence and antoi-social activity is dominating everything. But when I go out and interact with my neigbors and the folks at the supermarket and coffee shop and barbers and all the other little things in my neigborhood I find that everyone is nice and everyone wants much the same as I want! Peter Burgess | ||
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This Is What the Beginning of the End of a Civilization Feels Like
A New Dark Age is Falling — And We Might Be Powerless to Stop It Written by Umair Haque March 18th 2023 One of the defining features of this age is a paradox. It goes like this. 1) The world is going to hell, and 2) we’re powerless to stop it. Do you feel it? That aching, infuriating, paralytic sense of powerlessness that defines now? Take a hard look at the world. “Climate change,” aka temperatures rising, mass extinction, ecological collapse, social upheaval, economic dislocation, flood, plague, water running out. There sit you and I, shuddering at the mess things are in, hearts pounding in our throats, knowing, desperately, bitterly, we’re totally powerless to really stop any of it. I’m here to tell you a bitter truth. That feeling isn’t just a feeling. It’s not just fatalism. It’s reality. Your gut is right about your powerlessness. And that powerlessness is probably the greatest flaw in the design of the world that we’ve built — or rather, that was built to keep us, more or less, blind, dumb, foolish, hateful, and violent. The world is experiencing what you might call a Great Centralization. Power has been consolidated and centralised. To extreme, absurd degrees. The result is that you and really are powerless to change much — except in illusory terms. Sure, kings and emperors have always existed. But power has been centralised in our world — by technology, institutions, and systems — to a degree which has never before existed in history, so far as I can tell. Who really decides the fate of humanity? The planet? Life on it? You and me? The animals, oceans, rivers, forests? A handful of people do. Billionaires, politicians, maybe a few executives. That’s it. The rest of us? We hold no power whatsoever. Over anything, except maybe, to some tiny degree, how much and long we can survive the age of chaos unfolding, beginning now. That is not the way it should be. The world should not be powerless. The relationship doesn’t go like this: the world is going to hell, and we’re powerless to stop it. It goes like this: the world is going to hell because we’re powerless to stop it. Let me give you two examples of how centralised power has become in the world. Who decides the fate of the world’s democracies? To a very large degree, Zuck does. Maybe Rupert Murdoch, for a few, and the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought a Comms Platform. But mostly, Zuck. He sets the limits that define what’s permissible in discourse and propaganda. It’s an example of a massive monopoly on a critical resource. In this case, attention. Thinking. Relationships. Facebook and Youtube have reinstated Donald Trump’s accounts, just before the next election — and you and I have no power whatsoever to stop it. We are just spectators in this fools game. Here’s another example. Let’s rewind to when the pandemic mattered to people. Why couldn’t we vaccinate the world? Because a tiny, tiny number of incredibly powerful people didn’t want to. Investors, executives, politicians. Maybe a hundred — certainly fewer than a thousand — people in the world decided the fate of billions. That’s power. But should anyone have that much power? The answer to that question, unless you’re an idiot in the classical Greek sense — self-absorbed, indifferent, stupid — is: of course not. But to have to ask the question reveals a bitter, brutal reality. The world is mostly totally and completely powerless. That includes you and me in the rich West. I’ll come back to us, though. Maybe you see my point a little bit. Gates decided who’d get a vaccine and who wouldn’t. Zuck decides which politician can say what, what counts as a genocide or abuse of power, what idea is believed to be true or not. The rest of us have no power whatsoever in any of these regards. Both of these are examples of a tremendous centralisation of power. The world didn’t used to be this centralised in terms of power — not remotely. When it came to, for example, polio or smallpox, there was no figure like Bill Gates, dictating who’d get a vaccine and who wouldn’t. When it came to democracy, attention, influence, there was no figure like Zuck determining political reality and responsibility on a mass global scale. This level of centralisation of power is new. Figures like Zuck and Gates have more power than anyone, really, in human history. Even emperors of the world’s mightiest empires didn’t have remotely the power to decide the fates of billions of people at a whim. They were constrained in very, very real ways. But those to whom centralised power has flowed today have control in a nearly limitless, totally absolute way. Nobody — nobody — could stop Gates from blocking the world from having vaccines. Nobody could stop Facebook and Youtube from reinstating Donald Trump — at least, nobody with any real power. These figures have absolute power. Nobody can check or challenge them in any way whatsoever. Napoleon got exiled to Elba — but they will never pay a price for the bad decisions they’ve inflicted on the world. That brings me to the costs of a world where power is centralised to such an extreme, absurd degree. There are three. The first is that, feeling powerless, being powerless, is not a healthy place for people to be. Many will react, predictably, by turning to magical thinking and conspiracy theory and all kinds of fanaticism and superstition, to regain some measure of power, no matter how imaginary. We see this markedly today, whether in the rebirth of fundamentalist religion, or movements like incels and antivaxxers. All of these are ways for powerless people to cling to the illusion that they might be able to exercise some kind of agency in a merciless world over which they have not an iota of real control. Many turn, too, to fascism, for a sense of worth — because being powerless is also saying that you are worthless. Better to be part of a vast machine of violence, in which you count for something, than to be powerless in the world billionaires and their corrupt underlings have made — even if, at the end of the day, one blurs into the next. Powerlessness, in other words, breeds every form of human folly, from ignorance to spite to rage to hate, and these boil over, politically, into the regressive movements we see across the world. People are saying that it’s better to have some degree of power, according to the old social hierarchies of race, caste, religion, than have none at all, even if it’s only the power to hate, withhold, deny, abuse. Human ugliness is certainly a big problem. The second problem, though, may be even bigger. For a world of centralised power not to go to hell means that the tiny few with all the power have to be a) omniscient in knowledge b) wise in the ways of truth and beauty c) have a bulletproof morality and ethics and d) an expansive sense of justice oriented towards the long term. Of course, figures like Gates and Zuck and Bezos and so on have none of these things whatsoever. They should not have the power they do. Zuck and the Man Who Bought a Comms Platform are not men of letters or statesmen or historians — what do they know about democracy or even information? Bezos is hardly some kind of Leonardo Da Vinci — and yet he controls wealth and labour on an immense scale. You get my point. Power has flowed to all the wrong places in the world we’ve made. In an ideal world, I imagine, any sensible person would want maybe a council of elder Prime Ministers of successful democracies to figure out rules for public spaces online — not Zuck. Centralized power is doomed to fail unless those who hold it are nearly superhuman in the virtues of wisdom, truth, justice, and integrity. And as far as I can see, such people have never existed at all. In our flawed world, centralising power has had a perverse effect. Those who have it most are those who should have it least. I’d bet even most kindergarten teachers or engineers or doctors would say: “My God man, vaccinate the world. Fast! Cheap! Don’t create monopolies! Are you crazy?” Or: “Of course Trump should be off social media for life. Are you kidding? Every demagogue should be.” Average people would probably do a far better job of adjudicating power than the mostly clueless and certainly amoral billionaires who hold it, and the craven politicians who execute their policies. The world is going to hell because you and I are powerless. These things are causes and effects in a relationship. I’m not arguing for some utopian notion of totally decentralised power — I don’t want, say, the idiots who call me a racist on Twitter to run the world, either. But I do think that power has to be much, much more decentralized, in the right ways, for the world not to continue to go to hell. What does that mean, exactly? Well, something like this. The average person should have money, so they have more control over their fate. Billionaires like Zuck shouldn’t just have their monopolies broken up — there should be public alternatives, too, just like public libraries were created to propagate knowledge. Every child on planet earth should have an education, every human being healthcare, and every life income and water and sanitation and savings endowed at birth. Power should flow downhil, yes. But not just willy-nilly — to the bottom of the abyss, where bottom-feeders are waiting to abuse it. To the right places. To where it’s needed most, because it’s had least. We’re not remotely close to a world like that. Let me give you a final example to make my point. You know who’s really powerless? Nature is. There should be a Speaker for the Animals and Oceans and Forests in every parliament. They should speak for the interests of nature. That is what I mean by power flowing downhill, to the right places, where it’s needed most, but had least. Do you think we’ll ever get to a world like that — where animals and oceans are political agents, too? Maybe we won’t. But I’d bet the civilisation that emerges from the ashes of ours will. Maybe there’s a kind of consolation in that. Maybe they’ll learn what we still haven’t. Keeping too much power in far, far too few hands — especially the hands of those who crave it most, for abusive, selfish, stupid, poisonous reasons — is the surest recipe for a collapse there ever was. Should any one person decide the fate of a world’s future? Democracy? Finance? Any hundred people? Then why, my friend, do they? Umair March 2023
| The text being discussed is available at | https://eand.co/this-is-what-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-a-civilization-feels-like-9e4da20463cb and |