The Empty Raincoat, Part II
Altogether, Western society, as it presented itself in 2020, was as ready as it would ever be for a revolution that depended on the cowardice of men and the malleability of institutions.
The Empty Greatcoat & Other Stories
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As noted in Part I of this short series, Charles Handy did not, in his 1994 book, The Empty Raincoat, anticipate the kind of dark world we have entered now. He anticipated some turbulence, to be sure, and proposed a number of precautionary strategies, but his outlook was too humane, too liberal, too decent to even contemplate what was actually going to happen before his book was 30 years old.
The world we have inherited is quite unlike the one that Charles Handy implicitly desired. I do not say ‘the world he envisaged’, for it was not, by definition, his intention to prescribe a particular way of doing things, still less a particular set of outcomes. What concerned him was to retain at the core of the forward march of humanity an imperative that the ministering to human needs in the context of human endeavour would be foremost of all considerations. Clearly, nothing could be further from what we now observe, 30 odd years later, when the demeanour of those we have elected to manage our affairs is such as to bark at and barrack us as though for the sin of actually existing. ‘Are you still here?' they seem to ask, as though on behalf of some absent/external protagonist. ‘What do you think this is — a democracy?’ After lifetimes of sucking up to the People for permission to represent them, they now appear able to see the People solely as obstacle, as problem, as nuisance, seeking to express opinions and influence outcomes of important decisions, whereas — clearly—that day has passed some time since.
Yet, there is a remarkable chapter in The Empty Raincoat that carries within itself a strange and unintentional prophecy of the world facing us now. The chapter is titled ‘The Sigmoid Curve’, and it describes the method whereby the prudent head of an organisation might strive to avoid a future plummeting into decline by acting to implement change even while everything appeared to be going swimmingly. The Sigmoid Curve, Handy explains, ‘is the S-shaped curve that has intrigued people since time began.’ It is the story of life itself, he says: ‘We start slowly, experimentally, and falteringly, we wax and we wane.’ It is the story of empires, epochs, corporations, dynasties and brands. It tracks the fates of love and relationships. Things blossom and fade, flow and ebb, rise and fall. The Sigmoid Curve contains a prediction that bears down on everything: One day it will all come to grief.
But, says Handy, there is life beyond the curve. The right place to start that second curve is before it peaks, because, beyond the peak, is an unavoidable trough. The problem, as Handy — above all an organisational expert — explains, is that the point at which the curve requires to be renewed is also the point at which ‘all the messages going through to the individual or the institution are that everything is going fine, that it would be folly to change when the current recipes are going so well.’ Everything we know of change, be it personal or change in organisations, tells us that the real energy for change comes when you are looking disaster in the face [at the descent stage of the first Sigmoid Curve]; but that point is much too late, because the energy of the enterprise has already started to disintegrate, the leaders have lost credibility and shot their bolts, and morale is already on the floor. Starting the new curve earlier, he stresses, offers a ‘Pathway through Paradox’ — ‘the way to build a new future while maintaining the present rate of acceleration.
The secret of constant growth is to start a new Sigmoid Curve before the first one peters out, where there is the time, as well as the resources, and the energy, to get the new curve through its initial explorations and floundering before the first curve begins to dip downwards.
I was unable, re-reading this nearly 30 years after I must first have come across the Sigmoid Curve concept in Handy’s book, to avoid the realisation that what he is describing might, superficially at least, be taken for the working formula of the Great Reset, which might well be deemed the Sigmoid Curve of human advancement, but without human empathy. Or at least it might seem to be so to someone who thought of the world as an organisation, which most of our generally technocratic-minded politicians and entrepreneurs do nowadays. I do not imagine that Charles Handy thought (or thinks) of the world, or even the cutting-edge Western part of it, in organisational terms. But, in effect, what is happening now is an attempt to coerce the world into a new curve, though without democratic oversight or permission, but with the failed leadership of the past still in place, and without any persuasive evidence that we are anywhere near the point of the first curve petering out. There is — undoubtedly — a sense of urgency, but it is a contrived and imposed sense of urgency which, if we add into the equation of comprehension the fact that we are simultaneously looking at a colossal crime scene — the remnants of a half-century of systemised plunder, interrupted by a coup d'état and a suspension of the economic and financial systems — all of which has served to kick the consequences of these toxic initiatives down the road so far that the rolled-up tab will not be picked up short of the third generation, by which time several other rolled-up balls of debt will have gone scudding across the sky, over the heads of the transitory human quotient, into the continuingly unknowable future.
Handy was not naïve. He understood how business worked. ‘For a long time, now,’ he observes, ‘corporate chairmen have been saying that their real assets were their people, but few really meant it and none went so far as to put these assets on their balance sheet. That may change.'
He understood that we were heading for a world with fewer, albeit more productive and expensive, jobs. One exponential factor he was at the time unable to name or quantify was artificial intelligence, which — as we are now able to see — had the capacity to destroy his model of exploding creative economy. But he also, anymore than most of us, had no capacity to anticipate or comprehend the notion of the world becoming an utterly rigged deck. He understood that the drift towards greater and greater demand for more and more intelligence had the capacity to divide society — ‘unless we can transform the whole of society into a permanent learning culture where everyone pursues a higher intelligence quotient as avidly as they now look for homes of their own. A property-owning democracy is exciting though with this new definition of property.’
A recurring motif of the book is the author’s unmistakable tone of protectiveness for the human race. Reading it, you retain from the first page that this guy actually cares about the future and is anxious to make sure it is better than the past. Not that he is saying the past is ‘bad’, but that he is anxious to improve things. How ordinary this was then; how extraordinary it is today, when the entire thrust of public discourse is such as to attack the human race in a manner that makes you question the very humanity of the attackers — to blame and shame people for being people, for living ordinary lives; to warn them in the sternest terms about their expectations, excesses (of certain kinds); to set out a lengthy charge-sheet concerning self-indulgence and misuse of earthly resources; to warn in apocalyptic terms of the ultimate consequences of all this if left unchecked; and then, the pause, the severe silence, in the manner of a sadistic headmaster who says he will postpone punishment for a time until he has deliberated on all the possibilities.
If we are to attribute an error, or an oversight, to Charles Handy, then it is one he shares with most of his race, i.e. the tendency to take for granted that human beings, after 2,500 years of various gradations of democracy and freedom, must remain — as they have long been — still in control of their own destinies. Not that he bothered to say this, for there was no occasion to. He assumed democracy, as a minimal condition of all discussion about the human enterprise, or at least the Western manifestation of this. At the time, nobody argued with him about this, and why would they have? But now . . . ? Now it is by no means so clear. Or perhaps it is all too clear: All’s changed, changed utterly. A terrible ugliness confronts us.
There are multiple reasons why the Great Reset would not have been conceivable in 1994, or for a good few years afterwards. Some of these reasons are conspicuous, obvious and glaring; others are subtle; microscopic and all but invisible. All we can do as yet is draw rough light lines on a page.
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Broadly there are perhaps three main categories: cultural, economic and technological. The three headings, of course, are interconnected, and may, as we now begin to appreciate, have been subject to manipulation, manoeuvring and nudging — and perhaps for over a longer period than we are even yet beginning to understand. This is to say that, although the concept of a Great Reset was not foreseeable or conceivable within the scheme of general culture, it may well have been the subject of secret machinations at a subterranean level.
Certainly, I would say that almost anyone who was alive in 1994 and mature enough to make a judgement, would agree that, culturally speaking, it would have been impossible to pull the Covid stunt at that time. It is not immediately obvious why this is so; it is merely axiomatic, which is to say that, even ten years ago, it would have seemed an unthinkable idea. It is impossible to imagine the people we knew or lived beside or worked with then standing for it for more than ten minutes.
The chief reason for this has to do with manhood — the solidity provided to culture by the presence of men of purpose, discretion and courage. Until a relatively short time ago, Western man remained relatively upright and unbowed compared to what, by a process of retrospectively observable osmosis, he was to become. There are innumerable sources to which one might repair in order to draw a sketch of these cultural conditions. I will use three books by three authors: the German psychiatrist, Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982); the American poet and essayist, Robert Bly (1926-2021); and the contemporary American writer, R.R. Reno, who is a friend of mine.
In 1963, Mitscherlich published his classic work, Society Without the Father, a rich, teeming but somewhat dense and often impenetrable volume in which he diagnosed or prophecised the looming demise of the historical Great Father, which he predicted would lead to a new kind of civilisation, which he called ‘the sibling society.’
It was already in train when he published his book, barely into the era of Peace & Love. Temperamentally and affectively, he said, the father continued to exist, but his teaching powers, stretching back to the earliest times of the species, had been usurped. Worse, the father as constant presence in the lives of his children had been assassinated. The presence that ‘gave things the stamp of “home”’ was now missing; the father had become ‘invisible,’ the prior fatherly sense of moral authority, having lost its incarnate reality, became invisible and abstract. This had never happened before in human history. It did not mean simply that the father had been rendered absent by separation or divorce or war, but that ‘the father imago so closely associated with the roots of our civilisation, and of the paternal instructive pattern,’ had disappeared from human culture. This, in many respects, had been a relief, for the father had often been a hard taskmaster, and it was now an occasion of satisfaction that his cough had been softened. Now he was reduced to a mere bogeyman, a kind of Dean of Punishments, at the behest of the mother, who became the largely unchecked and unmediated guide of her children, who now had access primarily to a singular mode of being — the feminine mode. This, Mitscherlich warned, had been followed hard by a ‘socialised hatred of the father,’ which had a profound unconscious effect on the father’s offspring, who had fallen into a spiral of regression, alienation, anxiety, aggression and loneliness.The banishment of the father created in the children a sense of rebelliousness that had no means of reconciling itself.
Authority had lost its substance, its affection, becoming a spectral present in the home, now stripped of its affective dimension. Beyond the home, by a process of overspill, the society in which the father’s word had been law was becoming subject to other sources of order and coercion. This led to the replacement of the father-led society with what Mitscherlich calls the ‘mass society,’ in which the role of the father as guide and mentor is taken up by the media. Among the consequences of this, he predicted, would be ‘loveless childhood and lifeless old age.’
This new type of society, he clarified, had emerged mainly out of an increase in work specialisation, which itself had arisen from the industrial revolution, which removed the working father — a competent or tolerable ‘jack-of-all-trades’ — from the presence of his children, and deposited him on a production line, into a work cubicle or behind a desk. ‘The fatherless (and increasingly also motherless) child grows up into an adult with no visible master, exercises anonymous functions, and is guided by anonymous functions,’ he wrote. ‘What his senses are aware of is individuals similar to himself in huge numbers.’ The repetitive and tedious nature of his work sends the individual home to the embrace of his television, which he uses as a counter-stimulant to release the tension that has built up during the day. Thus is consolidated what Mitscherlich calls the ‘ideological mass identity,’ whereby the individual is imbued with mass thoughts and values, and programmed for automatic mass obedience.
The sibling society stands in contrast to that which preceded it: the father-organised society in which the father was unafraid to speak or announce his authority and risk being despised by the young for so doing. A working definition of authority might be: the capacity to endure unpopularity in the interests of good, and a defining quality of fatherhood through the ages was a preparedness to be resented. The father was the guarantor and custodian of civilisation and even malcontented youth looked to him for guidance, free to remonstrate in the knowledge that affection would not be withdrawn. The Sixties tore up that Oedipal contract and now the young looked only sideways, and warily: the father was absent or suspect, the state had become a multi-breasted mother, and the hole in the human psyche where the father once manifested was invaded by demons.
‘Mass society,’ he wrote, ‘with its demand for work without responsibility, creates a gigantic army of rival, envious siblings. Their chief conflict is characterised, not by Oedipal rivalry, struggling with the father for the privilege of liberty and power, but by sibling envy directed at neighbours and competitors who have much more than they.’ This is a syndrome expanded upon by the British psychologist, Oliver James, in his 1997 book, Britain On the Couch, in which he graphically proposed one of the core cultural changes in post-war Britain as being the expansion of the pool of status-comparisons available to the average person. Back in the 1950s, the average citizen ‘knew’ perhaps a couple of dozen people, with whom he had the occasion to compare himself. Moreover, the intimacy of his cohort group enabled a degree of perspective to mitigate such comparisons: He could discount his own inadequacies against perceived deficiencies in the attainments or resources of the other. His neighbour might have had a bigger car, but was not so handsome, and so forth. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the pool of comparison available to the average citizen had become virtually unrestricted. Every waking moment, he was confronted by comparisons with celebrities, royalty, even fictional characters, who seemed to possess everything the culture adjudged to render human beings fulfilled. James linked this phenomenon to the growing unease of British society, as expressed by various indicators including what is called depression.
In such circumstances, a process of mutual emulation sets in, rendering the young increasingly individualised and yet lacking individuality, more and more dependent upon fashion and popular culture, and ultimately subservient to the state. Politicians become mere affable actors, first among equals in an anonymous mass. ‘When “no identifiable individual” holds power in his hands,’ as Mitscherlich put it, ‘we have a sibling society.’
In 1996, the year my daughter was born, Robert Bly published The Sibling Society, one of the most prophetic books of the last century. Bly took Mitscherlich’s ideas and simplified them without losing anything and adding more than a little. Merging Mitscherlich’s clinical understandings with his own work as a tireless cultivator and curator of manhood, he spelt out a scenario, two years after Charles Handy’s hypothesis of the ‘Empty (or “Empathy”) Raincoat,’ that deserved a lot more attention than it received. It struck me instantly as a book that ought to have become central to the West’s discussion of its own putative future, but largely came and went unnoticed. I recall reading it on the London Tube in the weeks after my daughter was born, and being riveted by its descriptions of the imminent society of envious siblings ‘pummelling the chests of their fathers and calling them fascists’, at a time when I was just beginning the process of running-in my own new greatcoat.
Bly, borrowing his central concepts from Mitscherlich, warned of the approach of a Peter Pan world where nobody would ever grow up, where adults regressed towards adolescence, where ‘generations of half-adults’ would try to pass themselves off as grown-ups. This process of regression, he had already argued in his seminal Foreword to a 1992 reissue of Society Without the Father, is centrally characterised by a turning away from the vertical plane, comprising tradition, service and devotion, in favour of the horizontal plane, with its self-referential culture of the young and the wanna-be young.
At the heart of this process is a vacuum left behind by the departed figure of ‘The Great Father’. In the consciousness of humanity there are three layers of fatherhood: God the Father, the State Father and the Great Father. All three were now deceased. They have been killed off, according to Bly, by Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Woodstock, Flower Power, the Pill, feminism, abortion and all the sundry voices of post-1960s rebellion and protest. Bly painted a devastating portrait of cultures obsessed by youth, suspicious of forms of authority that might seek to deprive youth of its ‘freedoms,’ intent upon destroying the heritage of what Mitscherlich called ‘vertical’ culture. The replacement ‘horizontal’ culture of pop music, movies, television, student-style politics and — latterly — social media is now universally cleaved to not just by the young, but by all the generations born since WWII. The sibling revolution had no time for glory, or effort or justice, or greatness, or duty, or patriotism, but was content with consumer durables, celebrity and shallow forms of freedom. The father’s role of stoical, authoritarian receptor for society's anger and outrage had not been filled, and so the rage of the young flew off in every direction, unfocussed and unfathomable — hate biting its own tail. Since there was no longer a father to stand rock solid while his children pummelled his greatcoat, the escalating communal rage threatened to pull everything down. Hence the growing contempt for tradition, wisdom, truth, renunciation, learning, and the resultant hollowing-out of education systems, which no longer challenged or satisfied.
This revolution had some deeper roots — in the context described by R.R. Reno in his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, which describes the period of ‘disenchantment’ in Western culture from the end of WWII, initiating a retreat into the woolly, therapeutic safetyism that followed — a contrived device to, you might say, render the West too small for its jackboots. (That part hasn’t worked out so well). In what was retroactively deemed ‘the authoritarian society’, humanity had looked upwards: to the flag atop the flagpole, to the horizon, to the heavens. Reno outlines how Western society rewrote its own programmes in the wake of World War II to prevent a return to such forms of authoritarian rule. Citing a cross-sample of such contributions — Karl Popper, Albert Camus, and the economic hyper-individualism of Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others — he demonstrates how such writings dismantled a culture rooted in strong loyalties — to God, fatherland, nobility, nation, heroism, justice, home — and supplanted them with weak, therapeutic ideals like ‘diversity’, ‘tolerance’, ‘equality’, and ‘openness’ — all constructs that inspire nothing but self-interest. According to the post-war consensus, stable convictions and strong passions had to be jettisoned in order to avoid further descents into authoritarianism. Nazism had presented a macabre pantomime of the dangers, the darkest of slapsticks arising from the collision of chaos, vanity, propaganda and human hearts unburdened of the fear of God by the fear of man’s deluded ambition to become God. Clowns became tyrants and then mass murderers. But its legacy meant inter alia that the strong gods — the great human passions of patriarchy, patriotism and piety — must be banished, forgotten. Unable to understand what had just happened, the cultural leaders of the West scapegoated the very qualities that, if purified and isolated, offered the only chance for its ultimate salvation.
In a scintillating analysis, Bly outlined how the Industrial Revolution had destroyed the four-million year-old Great Father, by removing him from the home and making his powers invisible, and then removing his political equivalent from the public square. It was not, Bly observed in a passage that summons up the ghost of the western world’s dead fathers, a premeditated killing: ‘Industrial circumstances took the father to a place where his sons and daughters could no longer watch him minute by minute, or hour by hour, as he fumbled incompetently with hoes, bolts, saws, shed doors, plows, wagons. His incompetence left holes or gaps where the sons and daughters could do better’.
For Bly, this disappearance of the father from the domestic sphere prefigured what would follow in the public sphere. There had resulted three absences: the physical absence of the father from the vicinity of his children; the psychic absence of the father from the human heart; and the spiritual absence of the very idea of ‘father’, once represented by a Loving Father called ‘God’, from the human being’s sense of his own soul. These absences were soon to be replicated at the level of political leadership.
All true, human-centred societal growth, which is to say reliable change, demands a process of renunciation, which in turn requires a strong, safe, generous agent to act as buffer and punchbag. In other words, a person of benign authority. In the normal cycle, the natural and inevitable revolt of the child is managed within a relationship rendered safe by the father’s firm guidance and resolve. Within this relationship, the child imagines himself to have a genuine problem with the father, perhaps even, for a time, to hate him. The child says ‘I want’, ‘I want to’, and the father says ‘No’. The child says, ‘I hate you, I didn’t ask to be born’. But the steadfastness of the loving father allows this natural process to work itself out. In time, like Mark Twain, the child comes to wonder at how much his father’s thinking has advanced over the course of a few short years. But when the father is absent, this does not happen. Instead, the child’s emotions, deprived of a legitimate target, lack the safe provocation that nature intended. The role of stoical authoritarian receptor for society’s anger and outrage has been decried and displaced, and with it many of the positive values of father-organised society, like security, order, risk and fair play.
In the post-father society, there is nothing at which to target our anger, which turns inward against ourselves. Moreover, since there is no longer a father there to withstand our anger, to stand rock-solid while we pummel his coat, to calm us with a pat on the head and a stern admonition to go away and be better, our anger destroys everything regardless of virtue. Without the Great Father, we cannot tell right from wrong, good from bad, or truth from mere information. The only requirement of our appetite for destruction is that the instant object in our sights be the creation of the father, and have proved its merits through time
The so-called patriarchal society was tough, straight, straight-talking and demanding of its citizens, did not waste energy in communication, but made clear, in a minimalist way, what its expectations were. Now the state is ‘tolerant,’ ‘inclusive,’ indulgent, talkative, given to explaining itself in detail, as though mostly longing to be liked. Think of the contrast between the sobriety of the founding fathers and the affable acrobats who occupy the swivel chairs of office in the present mincing, grinning, menacing regimes.
The effect on males is worse than on females. With increasing industry and zeal, we build a society where fathers have no words to speak to their sons. Masculinity is demonised and our education systems impress upon adolescent males that their fathers are inappropriate role-models. The result, by Bly’s analysis, is the creation of generations of young men who are numb in the region of the heart. The umbilical cord has been severed, but no more than that. The father can find no way of protecting or guiding his son, who remains tied to his mother’s apron. Still, deeply aware of his maleness, he shies away from adopting the emotional life of the female, and chooses to have no emotions at all. Thus, the male becomes incapable of taking on the father role himself, and the cycle gathers speed.
The paradox of this situation is that men now stand where they would if they had retained the stature of the Great Father, but without any of the strength or resilience that allowed him to withstand the onslaughts fathers have dealt with from the earliest days of humanity. Today’s man stands accused, pummelled, denigrated, not on account of his greatness but because he is weak and refuses to carry the burden of society’s grievance. His position is understandable: ‘You have taken my power away, and so cannot expect me to absorb your resentments.’ This double-bind is visible in the domestic arena of the home, where the father carries the dilemma in his very gut. As a child of the post-60s era of what is called freedom, his instinct is to spurn — forfeit — the authority which his own children still expect him to wield. It is also visible in the public arena, where the only successful leader is one who panders to the most immediate desires of the electorate, promising reduced taxes, increased public spending and solutions to everyone’s problems, but then cracking his whip when the word comes through on the wires.
At the time Bly wrote his earliest elaboration on Mitscherlich’s thesis, the effects of the society were already well in train. He reckoned that the sibling society was, at the time of that writing (1992) ‘about forty or fifty years old.’ That would date it, more or less, from the end of WWII, and, accepting that date, we note that, in 2020, the year of the global coup, it had attained a vintage of approximately 70 years, a human lifetime. By now the third-wave feminist revolution, with its added doctrines of intersectionality, transfeminism and ecofeminism had for three decades been building on common ground with other affected groups among the victimologies which had become known collectively under the rubric of Woke. These included gay and race activists, who had moved ahead of the feminists in seeking to demolish the allegedly outmoded institutions of Western society. Marching through the institututions of every Western society, they had left a trail of destruction and demoralisation, having infiltrated and captured academia, media, the arts and the legal and democratic systems, rendering them the instruments of their lethal programme.
All this made what was impossibe, in 1994, a dead cert just 26 years later. Altogether, Western society, as it presented itself in 2020, was as ready as it would ever be for a revolution that depended on the cowardice of men and the malleability of institutions. The emasculation of the male quotient of the population had reached a pitch of advancement that would have been unimaginable when Charles Handy published The Empty Raincoat in 1994.
The other two planks of the assault were technological and economic, and these had come to depend on one another in a very interesting way. In 1994, as Handy’s book illustrates by its very existence, there was a healthy public conversation about the implications of an imminent technological revolution. The chief issues to be resolved by this discussion included, first and foremost, the question as to who should own and control the technology. From whatever would emerged as the answer to this question would flow a series of lesser questions, mostly concerning the distribution of income in a highly-automated society, and the kind of cultural interventions that might be required to rebalance the ‘meaning’ and ‘dignity’ elements so as to ensure that the society might be recalibrated in a manner that maximised the welfare of its human quotient and the chances that the purposes of economics continued to include ministering to the needs of human beings.
Enter ‘prosperity.’ The American economy had been in boom mode since the early 1980s, as a result of the low taxation policies of Ronald Reagan, the collapse of communism/ending of the Cold War, the burgeoning tech revolution, the miraculous reduction of government spending and deficits under Reagan, Bush and Clinton, deregulation, and steady hands on the Fed tiller (Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan) for 27 years (1979 to 2006). The European boom took off from the late 1990s, on a wave of optimism prompted also by the the collapse of communism and the disappearance of the nuclear threat, the introduction of the Euro, the advent of Blairism, which would become the adopted leadership model of the World Economic Forum through its Young Global Leaders programme. By 1998, there were signs already of the trend towards Blair fanboys in, for example, Germany (Gerhard Schröder) and Ireland (Bertie Ahern).
A brief sketch of my own country’s trajectory, since it is what I know most intimately: In Ireland, the boom began to manifest just post the mid-1990s, and quickly became know as the Celtic Tiger, which was written up all over Europe in magazines and newspapers as the greatest miracle of the post-euro era. It was clear from the outset that the ‘boom’ was fraudulent, being largely based on runoff from Ireland’s profoundly corrupt tax system, which offered fiscal asylum at the lowest rates of corporation tax in the world, while the indigenous economy struggled and stagnated for want of investment or ideas. During this period, public debate more or less ceased on every important matter: economic questions were deemed beyond all criticism, and anyone who might have had an alternative vision for Ireland’s future was advised to keep it to himself. It was not possible to argue with ‘success.’
In 2008, however, the tiger came a cropper, as the Irish economic collapsed in a mess of bad debt and unprecedented deficits. It became clear that the entire thing had been an orchestrated boom-bust set-piece designed to asset-strip Ireland and leave it on its uppers, creating an unprecedented paper debt that stood no chance of being repaid within the imaginable future of the country.
The problems facing Irish society included not just the loss of prosperity but the fact that this prosperity, while it lasted, had served to suppress real thought and discussion about how our nation sought to move forward. The fact that the Celtic Tiger had not been built on solid native foundations has even yet failed to emerge as a coherent or definitive idea: Most people still believe that we lost something real and immensely valuable in 2008, and that there is accordingly no alternative to a policy of foreign direct investment. In many respects what happened was not merely inevitable but an intrinsic consequence of the kind of progress and prosperity pursued by those highly unsuited and inadequate players who found themselves in charge of Ireland’s destiny over the past half century or so. It was easier to farm out the imagining of Ireland’s future to interests who — it should have been obvious — had no love for Ireland or her People.
In the past 50 years, Irish life has been dominated by a series of battles between traditionalists and modernisers on various iconic questions which seemed to define two opposing versions of reality. On the one hand, the alleged traditionalists — those who followed the light of the founding fathers and mothers — clung to an idea of a pious and God-fearing nation, which eschewed materialism and valued itself mainly according to the principles of a simple faith and limited ambition, which sought, by and large, to shut out the menace of the modern world. On the other hand, there were the increasing ranks of those who argued that, to become a vibrant and prosperous country, Ireland needed to turn its back on the simple verities of the past, to embrace equality, diversity and what was called ‘progress.’ By attacking Irish attachments to tradition, nationalism, faith and family, the revolutionaries succeeded in opening Ireland up to the outside world, and creating an economic model based on this purported openness. But what they did not anticipate was the extent of the vulnerability this would bring with it. Their ideological struggle presented a false choice, implying a moment of severance between past and future, which, having been insinuated into the culture, had made it almost impossible to retain a successful line of continuity with the past, with tradition and with the essential languages of patriotism and self-realisation employed so effectively a century before in the project of national liberation.
In this period — from the 1960s to 2007 — the core idea of the modernising project — that Ireland could become self-reliant, wealthy and self-confident, by jettisoning its internal objections and national sentimentalities, adopting an imported model of modernity and opening itself up to the global capitalist system — seemed, for all its obvious contradicitons, to become irrefutable. By the early 2000s, Ireland’s chief products were pharmaceuticals and online chatter, with the top ten of such enterprises accounting for nearly half of ‘Irish’ GDP.
What collapsed in 2008 was actually the materialist model of Ireland that was constructed as a reaction to a traditionalist Ireland previously regarded as having failed, long banished behind a curtain of scorn. The problem was that, arising from a poor understanding of the workings of tradition in modernity, the favoured policy had amounted to a kind of cultural scorched-earth, which had left almost nothing behind out of which a new beginning might be effected. Additionally, there had occurred in the course of the battle a bifurcation of the national ‘we,’ whereby Irish people continued to describe themselves as before, while at the same time feeling increasingly alienated from what was being presented to the world in their name(s). There was, to a degree, a surviving collective ‘we,’ but it was not, is not, the kind of ‘we’ that is capable of summoning up its own collective energies. We say ‘we’, but only because there is no other word to describe a collective that is not a community, a state that is not a nation, a population that is not a People.
A similar picture could by then be observed right across the Free World. The constructed booms what swept across the West in that period were to last, in America, for a quarter of a century, in Europe for approximately half that. Both ended together, however, in the meltdown of 2008, and were, in all instances, followed by a period of mourning and recrimination that offered an extension of the period of public distraction from meaningful engagement with public affairs, perhaps for another decade. By the time the human race in its Western manifestation had emerged from this prolonged tantrum, the configuration of the future was more or less a fait accompli.
In retrospect, we are able to observe the remarkable coterminosity of this period of ‘prosperity’/meltdown with a massive burst of progress on the tech front, when many of the innovations that were to transform the world of personal communications in the early 2000s were refined and brought to market, and the infrastructure brought into being that would manage this on what now reveals itself as a highly concerted and quasi-monopoly basis.
By way of a clumsy sketch, one might etch out that what happened was that, in a period of constructed prosperity (which was to culminate in massive and widespread indebtedness of countries and individuals) the path of civilisational development, if not of human evolution, went underground, like a river forging its way through a mountain, so that, out of sight, its existence was temporarily forgotten. The discussion that had begun in the 1980s about the future of work, income, leisure, meaning, and dignity — all that disappeared from plain sight at the point where the democratic questions had been tabled but left unanswered. Then the party took off. Two decades later, the river burst up through the floors of our living rooms, its deciseiveness announcing that all questions had been answered and everything already decided.
These questions included: Who should own (i.e. control) the emanations of the technological revolution which for two decades had been at full tilt underground? Should this amount to public ownership, and if so how might this be framed and regulated, and how might it be rendered democratically accountable? Were there boundaries and limits on the potential of technologies to alter human existence out of recognition and/or in a manner as to affect the functions of human tools so as to change the nature of their utility and ‘responsivity’/‘answerability' to human desiring? In other words, were there things that might become possible that ought not to be developed because they would, in time, defeat the very function of scientific progress as an instrument of human development, well-being, happiness and security?
But these questions, which had osmotically started to raise themselves in the mid-1980s, were no longer anywhere to be heard. Instead, the new communications technologies that had been hatching in Silicon Valley for the past couple of decades were launched as conduits for the anti-culture of the Sibling Society, extending platforms and klaxons to the generations of the young, still frenziedly pummelling the chests of their fathers and calling them fascists.
In 1994, Charles Handy had observed many signs that conveyed to him that we were entering uncharted skies. In The Empty Raincoat, he cites Francis Fukuyama’s thesis, outlined in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which he prognosticates that by then we had entered an epoch in which imagination, daring, courage and idealism would be supplanted with ‘economic calculation, the endless solving of technological problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’ — on its face a fairly accurate summary of where we have fetched up in our societies now,
In the post-historical period, Fukuyama predicted, ‘there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.’
Handy interpreted Fukuyama as meaning that ‘liberal democracy, the tolerance which it brings with it and the affluence which made it possible, have removed the will to fight great causes.’
This was an astute, almost uncanny perception, suggesting perhaps an intuition that liberal democracy was already manifesting the seeds of its own destruction.
If there is a singular note within the clamour of 2024 society, with its abandonment of values and virtues in favour of bogus varieties of diversity and inclusivity, it is the avoidance — even repugnance — of great causes. Whereas the young of 1968 or 1975 or 1984, or even 1996, were preoccupied with expounding variegated values rooted in freedom, justice, truth and solidarity — and all this tending towards a babble of relatively constructive disagreement — the young of 2024 appear to eschew any value that does not come shrink-wrapped in the ideological packaging of what is called Cultural Marxism and/or Woke. These values, if such they can any longer be termed, are not independent, self-standing quantities that may be weighed in the balance and sliced and diced like platefuls of edibles gathered from a buffet, but resemble more a fridge full of ready meals to be opened, microwaved and eaten in front of a TV set that renders their contents and taste a secondary matter to ticking the box marked ‘Dinner’ and getting back to passive (in)activity.
On the face of things, we may have to concede that, as concerns the granular detail of things, Fukuyama was closer to the mark than Handy. As the second millennium gave way to the third, this was to become ever more clear.
Just as the internet was supposed to unleash a utopia of free-thinking and free-speaking, so, as per Handy’s thesis, it was going to liberate humanity into an orgy of creativity and imagination. Freed of the burden of material self-sustenance, mankind would blossom and expand exponentially in all directions. Now, of course, we observed the opposite of both of these promises: the opportunities of the world wide web for individual humans being closed down, one by one, as power moved in to utilise the technology instead, for an entirely opposite purpose — not least the covering-up of crimes committed in the Covid episode. One sunny dark day around the Ides of March 2020 we awoke to find that freedom had been abolished, and nobody seemed to mind. We raised an eyebrow and were shouted down: Freedom, we were told by people whose middle-name was Liberal, was ‘a far-right obsession.’
So it was, too, more or less, with hopes for a richly creative future for mankind, which had been snatched away by the robber barons who, like prospectors for precious metals, laid claim to the capacitors and algorithms that might have made this future possible. Long before we had gotten to the ChatGPT stage, it was clear that technology was usurping far more human functions than it was enabling. The benefits for the freelancer of the ‘gig economy’ were largely transitory — a bit like a building boom as a booting-up economy starts to emerge. Once everything is built and in place, the necessity for mere labour decreases, as business becomes more streamlined. Handy understood this principle well, citing the chairman of a large pharmaceutical company who once summed up his economic policy as ‘½ × 2 × 3 = P,’: ‘half as many people in his core business in five years’ time, paid twice as well and producing three times as much, that is what equals Productivity and Profit.’
All this happened outside of the remit or oversight of democratic society, distracted into the explosion of prosperity that just so happened to ‘coincide’ with this moment of possibility or its absence.
A volume (just by way of an exemplary indicator) was published at the start of 2022, that was really not so much a book as a communique. It was titled The Age of AI And Our Human Future, and credited to no less than three authors— Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher — you may read my First Things review of it here.
Really, it amounted to the announcement of a victory in a war that had never been declared, the silent war for the future of the machine that had persisted from roughly the time of the publication of The Empty Raincoat in 1994, and continued until the middle-teens of the first century of the third millennium.
In my review I note inter alia:
It goes without saying that the ‘risks’ associated with AI have nothing ultimately to do with the inert pieces of metal and plastic comprising the attendant technology, but with the people who will control it. The most important question is: Who should manage this epoch-making moment?
Big Tech already controls the world via the internet, through data harvesting, intimate surveillance, and censorship. Now it moves toward the final stage: the unity of humans and machine, but not on the terms of the human, or at least not the human race. Instead, as usual, the plan is for things to be handled by placing the self-anointed few over the befogged many, in the name of progress.
And further:
Some scientists acknowledge, rather blithely, that the moment of Technological Singularity may well result in the obliteration of virtue, conscience, and morality, and even the final exit of the human species from the world, as human beings lose the battle to justify their existence against the claims of vastly more intelligent ‘beings.’ Against these risks, scientists posit benefits like increased cognitive capacity and processing speed, leading to the possibility of more and more scientific discoveries, but rarely do they get to the question: to whose benefit?
And further still:
AI ultimately will either be a new beginning or a final ending. There is a view in tech circles that, since the human race faces extinction thanks to its own behavior, some kind of absorption of humanity by the machine may be the only way of maintaining an intelligent, albeit mechanical, human presence on earth. Thus, this thesis expands, the biological essence of humanity might have to be sacrificed, and the species maintained in the only form by that stage possible: posthumanist ‘man.’ Conversely, there is the hypothesis that the moment of Technological Singularity will bring with it a radical threat to natural selection: The machine will elevate humans according to values different from those of nature — a Superman. Where have we heard that before?
All this, one might advisedly speculate, was at play among the core agendas of the brief period of pseudo-prosperity. The underground activity took the form not of the coursing of water but the machinations of self-interested actors seeking to ready-up the future in a manner congenial to themselves and their associates. I choose/chose this book (Kissinger et al) not so much for its intrinsic merits or centrality but because it is emblematic of a syndrome we have observed now for roughly a decade — whereby, from the moment the aftershocks of economic collapse of 2008 had started to abate, there was a profound and widespread sense of a new era being announced, an era in which technology would become dominant in a manner that hitherto had been the province of science fiction, but which was now on the point of realisation and execution. The book is, of course, remarkable for the presence among its authors of Henry Kissinger (since deceased), a figure who had flitted around the superstructure of geopolitics for, at the time of the book’s publication, close on seven decades, advancing ideological programmes and keeping the world safe for globalism. Kissinger, more than any other contemporary figure, had represented the shadowy forces in the background to the theatre of the planet’s political life.
Those who know what is happening are always in a better position to know what is going to happen, and, by controlling the rollout of technology under cover of a fake prosperity, which ensured the limiting at the same time of the scope of the collective conversation, the robber barons were able to ensure their own future enrichment by a careful elision of inconvenient factors like democratic input, sovereignty and accountability. By polluting academia with poison and nonsense, they blocked one channel of collective comprehension. By rendering journalists dependent on centralised funding, they gained effective control of almost all media output. For the wealthy who had their hands on the levers of future tech, this amounted to a form of insider trading, whereby they could not only predict the future, but be the ones to create it, first in words and then in algorithms and neural networks.
Charles Handy foresaw this in a different way, almost as a feeling concerning some lack that was emerging in the human spirit. ’We are slumped in comfort,’ he writes in The Empty Raincoat (three decades ago, remember?) ‘When we compete it is for the World Cup or gold medals. Such things do not bring forth great art or noble deeds, they don’t stir the heart more than momentarily, nor do they foster revolutions. Like dogs, if we are well fed, we are content. When scientific and economic progress lead more and more societies into the contentment stage we shall see the end of history.’
Handy cites De Tocqueville’s famous passage, published the greater part of 200 years ago, about the atomisation of America, the future man (i.e. today’s contemporary citizen) who is close to his neighbours but does not see them, ‘touches them but does not feel them’:
‘[H]e exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes it upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their face . . . it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.’
Towards the end of his book, Handy touches tentatively on the possibility that democracy contains the seeds of its own undoing in the context he is describing. ‘Democratic societies,’ he writes, ‘are tolerant; they do not tell their citizens how they should live, or what will make them happy, virtuous or great. It is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoccupied with material gain and with the myriad small needs of the body.’
Then he cites Nietzsche, on the world after God, with the ‘last man’ departed ‘the regions where it is hard to live, for one needs warmth’:
‘One still works, because work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes rich or poor: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who to obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.’
Here again, he seems to be, perhaps instinctively, provoking the Combine with thoughts that might in time lead them to attempt their Great Reset, taking literally the notion that democracy — and with it too much freedom — is at the heart of the problem of the levelling out of man’s potential and desiring. Why not then decide, as Larry Fink has decided, that democracy is no longer a fit for the kind of capitalism that is best adaptable to modern and future needs — that ‘totalitarianism is better’? Perhaps, the Secret Unknowns of the Combine reflected that it was time to tell people how to live, and what would really make them happy — ‘owning nothing,’ for example, which by happenstance would make the Combine happy too? Perhaps the world had become too tolerant of things that were bad for the kind of business needing to be done, in all the circumstances prevailing?
Handy, channelling Hegal, observes:
‘In 1806 [Hegal] wrote, ‘We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment . . . when a new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Almost 200 years later we are in another time of ferment, another dark wood. It may not be the end of history.’
Humanity in 1994, writes Handy, in their lack of idealism, or passion, or pride, their dearth of desiring, were ‘all last men now.’
Maybe, maybe not: Perhaps we/they — as we, today — were/are the last men before the quasi-men to come, the posthumanist cyborgs whose imagining puts the twinkle in the eyes and the pep in the step of Ray Kurtzwell, Eric Schmidt and Yuval Noah Harari?
Or perhaps Hegal had been right in anticipating that the human need to feel pride would not be satisfied by the peace and prosperity that accompany the end of history? And that way, by the Combine’s way of thinking, lay trouble. The problem with having everything you think you need is that the next stage is getting the things you think you want. Finding a purpose, meaning, in existence is not something to be taken for granted, as it may well become when the purpose of existence is merely to exist. And humanity, satisfied of belly and libido, seeking other forms of satisfaction, is a baleful prospect for criminals who have — or whose forbears have — plundered the world for decades and centuries, and now look to the prospect of its human quotient (themselves excluded), possessed of a surfeit of leisure time in which to ponder and wonder, as a rather ominous development.
Handy cites an unlikely philosopher — Laura Ashley! — explaining why she became a designer of homesteads for humans: ‘I sense that most people wanted to raise families, have gardens and live as nicely as they can.’ Handy speculated that Ashley’s business had prospered in the 1970s and 1980s because it caught the zeitgeist of the times, ‘the generation of the last men.’ In the coming time, he said, nice things and passionless aspirations would reveal themselves as insufficient. Here, he predicted, in outline form, a coming era of ideological obsession — ’a growing search for meaning and authenticity . . . a sense of purpose, a search for identity, dignity and a quality of life prior to lifestyle (aesthetics and harmony).’ The return of the strong gods?
Perhaps this is the core foresight of Handy’s striking book: that humanity — he is speaking chiefly about Western humanity — having attained sufficiency as to material needs, would become restless and begin to search for causes, a ‘purpose beyond oneself.’ This, if you are a cunning member of the elite predator quotient, is yet another dangerous trait to be curbed, sat upon and ultimately diverted.
‘It is hard,‘ Handy concludes, rather morosely, ‘in the conditions of comfortable democracy, to find a cause which lifts the efforts of the comfortable ones. That is why some fear a return to war as a way of putting some energy back into our peoples. Making money not war has turned out to be less inspiriting. Another war would be a tasteful way to disprove the end-of-history thesis.’ It was pointless to look to the leaders of nations, he added, for nations were ‘too big, the connections not strong enough, the commitment to the future not long enough.’ He proposed we ‘look smaller’ — to local communities and organisations, to families and clusters of friends, ‘to small networks of portfolio people with time to give to something bigger than themselves. We have to fashion our own directions in our own places.’
Handy concludes his book with a Postscript, which in turn concludes:
Our people are clever, many of them. Most people are decent, given half a chance. They are not uncaring, if only because they know that a world which crumbles around them will do them no good at all. But first there has to be a general acceptance that the world has changed. The end of communism does not mean that capitalism, in its old form, is therefore the one right way. The triumph of the democracies over totalitarianism does not mean that everything in those democracies is thereby validated. The huge strides made by science in the last decades does not mean that scientists have or could have the answer to everything and that the rest of us need not bother.
It is also the end of the age of the mass organisation, the age when we could all confidently expect to be employed for most of our lives if we so wanted, and over 90 per cent did so want. Work will still be central to our lives but we shall now have to rethink what we mean by work and how it might be organised. At first sight, the challenge is daunting, but work in those mass organisations has never been unalloyed bliss for all. The mass organisation has not been with us that long. We should not think of it as a law of nature. Maybe we shall be better off without it.
The hope lies in the unknown, in that second curve, if we can find it. The world is up for reinvention in so many ways. Creativity is born in chaos. What we do, what we belong to, why we do it, when we do it, where we do it — these may all be different and they could be better. Our societies, however, are built on case law. Change comes from small initiatives which work, initiatives which, imitated, become the fashion. We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply at the end of history. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
What is ultimately most striking about Handy’s book is that its content, its analyses, its aspirations and its warnings are, in their particularities, so refined, so delicate, so filigreed with a form of sophisticated desiring that they summon up a moment of extreme contentment, even complacency, whereas the sketch that underlies the book carries a warning precisely about that complacency. It is, on the one hand, as if nothing much requires to be done not merely to avoid disaster but to attain a kind of perfection, and yet there is the cautionary notes about getting it all completely wrong. What happened was something entirely different: We simply took our eye off the ball and allowed the predators to slip in behind our backs and build their new world right under our noses, like the robbers who, dressed in workmen’s overalls, dismantle the ATM built into the banks frontage, and even borrow a screwdriver from the doorman to enable them to complete their ‘maintenance operation.’
Handy, like every other thinker and commentator of the time, assumed that the worst that would happen is that we would fail to achieve our own high expectations perhaps by virtue of an overdose of complacency; he did not envisage — nor did anyone else —that, before his book was 30 years old, the entire structure of Western civilisation would have been dismantled and marked for transportation to the landfill, and the world loaded up for transportation back to the Middle Ages.
Perhaps the limits of Handy’s tender thesis has ultimately to do with the idea of seeing human reality as in any way conforming to the laws of business. Businessmen, I have often noticed, can be extremely ingenious in their capacity to manipulate the world in order to generate wealth for themselves — and therefore benefits for others —without understanding much about how things work beneath the superficial level they need to operate within. Almost by definition, tunnel-vision is a prerequisite of wealth-generation. The entrepreneur seeking to manipulate specific instruments or circumstances so as to liberate wealth from them must adopt a disposition of relative indifference towards the world beyond those specifics. One example is ecological damage, an issue that has over time provoked the necessity for environmental protection legislation. Once, not long ago, businesses employed lawyers and other advisors to advise them how to skirt around such legislation and so pollute to their hearts’ content. The modern entrepreneur must take steps to minimise such damage, and also turn this into a public virtue, while privately regarding it as a drag on his ability to maximise the potential of his wealth-generation.
To some extent, as well as seeking to exploit circumstances for immediate profit, the businessman must remember also that profit can only be maintained over long periods by the exercise of prudence and restraint in the short and medium terms. This is a way of avoiding or delaying the inevitable operation of the law of diminishing returns. Those who seek always to cash-in without nurturing and rebuilding are doomed to destroy that on which they depend for their continued good fortune. In certain periods of human endeavour, these ideas have ebbed and flowed, sometimes favouring prudence and discretion, at other times celebrating unrestrained avarice and ecological recklessness. This latter ‘ethic’ was perhaps best articulated by Gordon Ghekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper [his corporation] but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
We ought perhaps to avoid becoming too moralistic about this, since there is an essential truth in what Ghekko says: Even the capacity to make two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does, in fact, require a certain arrogation of divinity, even a degree of ruthlessness. There will always be times and senses in which what Ghekko says will remain right and true. But this rightness and trueness are not constant, absolute or eternal conditions. What we call ‘greed’ is a necessary instrument of propulsion for the human dynamic in action in creating more and more wealth. Up to a point, this is a valorous process, since it helps to maintain the edifice of capitalism upon which all economic activity ultimately depends. The problem is that the action of greed in economic activity can only continue to function without causing damage so long as it respects, at some level, the process of ecological accountability that economies require in order to sustain themselves. The instinct of the speculator is like that of the scrap merchant: he moves in to salvage whatever he can from the debris of failure and obsolescence. But this implies and requires also some degree of mindfulness concerning renewal. In order to minimise the risk of imposing consequences of its own, the speculative move must respect the edifice of business and therefore place a limit on greed. Profiteering can be relatively painless, but it is a matter of timing, of sporadic opportunism rather than wanton exploitation. This works best on a transitory basis, i.e. it works when it occurs as an occasional process of cleansing, tidying-up, after which the wealth-generating machine must be enabled to tick on for a further while in a more or less routine fashion, benefitting in small ways those who are happy with smaller rewards.
What is happening now is quite different: it is terminal. It is an attempt to cover up the crimes of the five decades since the final abolition of the Gold Standard and the reinvention of the global economy as a roulette table, the action upon which became infinitely more important than the mere endeavours of human beings. What is happening now is the application of the logic of transitory greed to the entirety of the economic systems of the world as a kind of final process of plunder before the entire edifice is changed from one in which human work remains at least nominally central to one in which the human involvement is terminated and supplanted with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), social credit, Universal Basic Income (UBI), surveillance and, in effect, a total transfer of the ownership of the means of production from humanity in general to a tiny slice of that species (which I call the Combine, but if you prefer, ‘the FEW’, the reversal of the acronym ‘WEF’). The idea is that, in the future, most people will own nothing, and will rent whatever they need from the Combine, which will finally become omnipotent and virtually deified.
The strange thing is that those who are responsible for this ludicrous plan are never done with talking about ’sustainability’. And the deep problem about this moment, from the viewpoint of genuine sustainability, is that it is a once-off moment that is being mistaken for the first of a series of recurring opportunities. In other words, the perpetrators appear to think that, despite their having dismantled the world to break it up for scrap, it will somehow magically continue in the approximate forms it took before they started the breaking process.
They are so drunk on the prospect of their imminent gains as to be unable to see that, whereas — for certain — in that simgular moment there will undoubtedly be the opportunity for unimaginable self-enrichment by those who already control the levers of finance and corporate business, this moment will be brief and terminal. Those who lick their lips about the coming windfall are so drunk on the prospect of their exploding bank balances that they overlook to consider what will happen afterwards, which will include the turning of their bank balances to meaningless digits. They forget that, in pulling off this coup d'état against the human race, they, in effect, initiate a process of disintegration which will cause the entire edifice of the global economy to collapse, and their own empires with it.
A handful of years back, before the Covid crimes began, my wife and I were at Dublin Airport one morning to catch a flight to the United States. New machines had been in place for some time, to ‘assist’ passengers in checking themselves in, but now there were machines to check in your baggage as well. At some of these machines, there were people in airline uniforms helping people to negotiate the new system. With their help, you could carry out the entire process yourself and then deposit your tagged bags at a desk over in a corner of the check-in lounge. There were still people behind the check-in counters, presumably to assist those who were unable to figure out the machines, and also for people whose bags had failed the weight test or some such.
I was fascinated by the huddle that surrounded each of the machines, with travellers being coached in operating them by uniformed staff members. This at first struck me as absurd, but then I remembered that, of course, it was an interim, transitory measure and that, in time, the airline would be able to dispense with the supervisory staff members and trust its passengers to operate the machine on their own, or, at a pinch, with the guidance of other passengers. In other words, the uniformed staff members had been conned into becoming the allies of their own economic gravediggers.
But then something even more interesting occurred to me. Glancing at the check-in desks, I noticed that there were no queues. That made sense: all the functions once carried out by the staff behind these desks were now being done out on the floor, mostly by the passengers themselves. There were still several — I think I counted eight or nine — staff members manning the desks, but they were standing around chatting to each other. They had no work to do. I turned to my wife and pointed out to her what was happening; ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there is nobody outside the counter’. Yes, she replied, ‘that’s because of the new machines.’
It struck me that we were moving closer to a moment when there would be nobody behind any of the counters, just people milling around in front carrying out the airline’s work for it (while still paying the market price of an air ticket). My first thought was, ‘Progress!’ or some such. My second thought was that there was a problem here, not at first sight for the airline, but for the society at large, which went something like this: Since the people inside the counter would also become, at other moments, the people standing outside other counters, and they, in being rendered obsolete, would lose some or all of their consuming capacity, the overall effect of all this was not a saving of costs but a shrivelling of total economic activity. To put it another way: If you eliminate the people behind the counters, you eliminate also the counters, which is tantamount to eliminating the economies they cumulatively comprise.
I said: ‘It seems to me that unless you have people on both sides of the counter there will very soon be nobody on either side. What we are observing is a staging-post on the way to a total evisceration.’
This is something that businessmen do not seem to see, perhaps because it is not in their immediate interest to see it. For many decades now, the fashion in business has been to increase profits by what is called ‘rationalisation’ — essentially a constant process of cost reduction, trimming and downsizing. This helps the bottom-line in the short term, but eventually the law of diminishing returns begins to work its black magic. Rationalisation eventually reaches the outer limit of its useful potential, and, after that, exposes the company to risk of inefficiency and uncompetitiveness. An obsession with cost-cutting may increase profits for a time, but eventually it kills the goose that lays the golden egg. In other words, what they can look forward to is a once off — undoubtedly lucrative — payday, followed by the utter disintegration of the economic model, and thereafter perpetual penury.
And this rule applies in spades to what is happening now. Those orchestrating this coup seem to forget that, in rationalising the world, they are essentially reducing most of the human race to a mendicant serf-class of redundant operatives who will, by virtue of losing their capacity to generate income, become all but useless as consumers also. Before long, there will be nobody outside the counter, and, soon afterwards, no one inside it. They may well replace those people inside the counter with machines and AI, but this will not work with the problem they face on the other side of the counter. Thus, their windfall of wealth — fabulous though it may be — will be a short-lived and once-off boon.
These things are so self-evident that it is a little absurd that they still require to be said. What is happening is, in effect, an attempted plundering of the world’s financial resources with a view to commandeering the hard assets later, for a song. And it is being effected with the cooperation of the ‘people’s representatives’ — the political classes — the supposedly democratic media, the police forces and judiciaries paid for out of the public purse, and with the connivance of most of those who have purported to be the watchdogs on ethical economics and human freedom since Adam was a boy. It ought to be obvious: It is neither possible nor wise for members of the human race to seek to impose a terminal seizure on the functioning of human existence, or to corral their fellows in slavery in the process of stealing the fruits of their labours and ingenuity. That is not a good idea, and it always ends up badly.
Within the logic of the system as it stands, it is possible to see how those in charge of the levers have come to feel that there is no other way. It is not even that they seem oblivious that there is no way of achieving their desired outcome that will not in time result in their losing everything themselves, but that the system has been constructed in such a way that its reorientation involves incalculable risks that might result in its implosion into nothingness.
Nevertheless — perhaps — they legitimately feel that there is ‘no viable alternative.’ In a sense they are correct: Outside of the logic they have been applying, the sole alternative is an unprecedentedly radical one: tell the people what the problem is; set in train a plan to replace the system at a chosen moment, in accordance with democratic principles, acknowledging that human beings have jointly held interests and equities in the economic and monetary systems that grew out of the totality of human endeavour and ingenuity through time; and commence, enable and conduct a democratic discussion as to how this might be managed to create a genuinely new kind of world — in particular, though not exclusively, tackling the vexed question of how to bequeath to the people their just entitlement of a ‘dividend’ from the final onset of the AI economy, which would in effect put the entire species into a largely involuntary retirement.
This recourse may pose many taxing problems, not all of them economic. There would be, for example, the problem of how to ‘reinvent’ human cultures and societies for an age in which the meaning and dignity of human existence was no longer bound up with paid work. This might have involved something along the lines of what I have called a ‘redistribution of dignity,’ so as to valourise activities of the human that are currently deemed to be ‘social,’ ‘voluntary,’ or ‘recreational.’ Even writing that down, one has a sense of its impracticality, even naïveté — I mean not its intrinsic difficulties but more the effrontery of imagining that the ‘proprietors’ of the system as presently constituted, were ever going to hand it over to the people out of the goodness of their hearts.
Right now, we seem to be moving towards a kind of serviced slavery. But how long can that last — the ‘serviced’ element, I mean? Things change. For the initial period, yes, as the new oligarchs sneakily rub their hands in glee at the idea of getting away with it, the people may find themselves indulged, and the atmosphere may be, for a time, more Huxleyan that Orwellian. But then, ever so slowly, the temperature may change. The oligarchs, controlling public opinion as much as everything else, may be able to impose on the public mind, and on the minds of its constituent members, a sense of their uselessness, then of their superfluousness, then of their pointlessness. Gradually we may move towards a kind of constructive culture of self-liquidation. In five year, ten years, the oligarchs of the Combine may well ask: Why are we paying these people to just sit around guzzling beer and stuffing their faces with pizza? If you think this fanciful, the chances are that you haven’t been paying attention.
We come back here to a point of discussion which, though in a certain sense ridiculous, is one that we now know cannot be taken for granted. This is that human civilisation, built with the sweat and toil of human beings, exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to make the future better for humanity, to remove as far as possible the causes of continuing misery and evildoing, to ensure that the benefits of human endeavour are directed at these objectives and aspirations, and most certainly to arrange that these resources be diverted to the stashes of hoarders and misers, for whom the human race, when it can no longer contribute to their enrichments, is an albatross and a drag.
This is why, stumbling across Charles Handy’s now peculiar book from 30 years ago, I have been moved to raise its significance to us now as a mnemonic and a bromide-print of thinking that seemed axiomatic just 30 years ago, but is now so far removed from the content of our culture that I am moved to wonder if what is in train is not some profoundly-situated, osmotically-organised suicide pact by a People — the People of the West — who no longer know what is the purpose of their presence on this planet, or even why they ought to get out of bed in the morning.