The Antidote to Civilisational Collapse

Metadata

Author: economist.com
Full Title: The Antidote to Civilisational Collapse
Category: #articles
URL: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse

Highlights

His latest film, “HyperNormalisation” (the trailer of which is below) argues that stability has been preserved by ideas that are somehow both difficult to believe and almost impossible to escape.
in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.
There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home; that money seems to grow on trees; that goods come from China and don’t seem to cost you anything; that phones make you feel liberated but that maybe they’re manipulating you but you’re not quite sure. It’s all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.
those in charge know that we know that they don’t know what’s going on.
he’s part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go “This is terrible, this is outrageous,” and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it’s like they’re together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go “Boo!!”. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it.
it’s a politics of pantomime locked together with its critics. And it becomes a perpetual, infernal motion system, which is a distraction. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a distraction from what’s really happening in the world.
What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It’s our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don’t want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.
old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals. Because the fundamental problem is that politicians can’t manage individuals, they need us to join parties and support them and let them represent us as a group identified with them.
What modern management systems worked out, especially when computer networks came into being, was that you could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass, but you could create a system that allowed them to keep on thinking that they were individuals.
We’re not actually that individualistic. We’re very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we’re in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we’re still individuals. And that’s a wonderful way of managing the world.
Its downside is that it’s a static world. It doesn’t have any vision of the future because the way it works is by constantly monitoring what you did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. And monitoring what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that and doing the same to billions of other people. And then looking at patterns and then saying: “If you liked that, you’ll like this”. They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour.
It’s benign in a way and it’s an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it’s always looking to the past. It can never imagine something new. It can’t imagine a future that hasn’t already existed.
The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: “There should be more investigative journalism” and I think, “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren’t paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes.
the mantra of this technocratic system of management is the word “risk”, which if you do a word analysis, didn’t really exist in political coverage until the mid 80s. It comes from finance, but as economics colonised the whole of politics, that word spread everywhere, and everything becomes about risk-analysis and how to stop bad things happening in the future.
Politics gave up saying that it could change the world for the better and became a wing of management, saying instead that it could stop bad things from happening. The problem with that is that it invites all the politicians to imagine all the bad things that could possibly happen—at which point, you get into a nightmare world where people imagine terrible things, and say that you have to build a system to stop them.
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The opposite of stability is a politics of imagination.
Those kinds of economic policies have a very good role to play. But in the 1990s that attitude spread and captured the whole of politics and at that point, they became managers. What we lost was the idea of politics where you tell a simple, powerful and romantic story of where you are going and what it’s all for.
If you take climate change, which is a serious issue, it’s been co-opted by pessimistic baby-boomers and turned into a dark nightmarish scenario, rather than saying that we need to restructure power and resources in a way that could make the world a better place. That would have been a really good way to deal with climate change. Instead, it got possessed by a dystopia which I think reflects that generation’s fear of mortality because they can’t see anything going on beyond their own death.
countries are an act of imagination aren’t they? The Economist: Go on. Mr Curtis: Everything is an act of imagination. Politics is about imagining futures and having the power to bring a collective group of people with you who give you the power to make that happen. It’s what Churchill did during the second world war. That doesn’t mean that you can’t say that there were aspects of the second world war that were not good. The problem in our country is that myths have washed over the complexity.
You know very well that in 200 years the world won’t look much like the world we’re living in now. But those who run the world now don’t want you to think that. They want you to think that this is going to go on forever because that’s the philosophy of the managerial system. If that managerial system colonises everything, then everything atrophies.
I’ve always liked “War and Peace” where the two central figures are Napoleon and a Russian general called Kutuzov. Napoleon thinks you can control the whole world and make it your own. But Kutuzov, who everyone derides in the novel and who is in charge of defending Moscow, says “No, you can’t control the world because it’s chaos—but there are moments within the chaos that you can use for your own purpose”. That’s what politics is about.
politics and journalism have become static and repetitive. I know within microseconds what an article is going to say, what a television program is going to be like and what most music is going to be like.
politics is not about desperately trying to hold the world stable. You can’t hold the world stable in the face of history. The ideology of our time, especially amongst the liberal middle-classes, even more than the conservatives, has embraced the idea of trying to hold things stable and static.
One of the reasons why you don’t get a response to climate change reports is because they’re dressed up as managerial things. They don’t say that this could be part of an extraordinary new kind of future.
In an age of individualism, it’s very difficult to get people to surrender some of themselves to an ideal that’s bigger than them. But if you do want to change the world, you’re going to have to do that, to be honest. I don’t like the word “leader,” but I do think that what we’re looking for are people who inspire us to think beyond the world we have at the moment
What I’m trying to analyse in my films is why things went wrong, and I’ve constantly tried to show that it’s to do with power. That’s a word that’s almost never discussed at the present moment. There’s enormous power being exercised on us and we have no idea how to challenge it. As you say, everybody feels like this thing isn’t working. That’s because certain people have power and they’re exercising it for their own interests and not for us.
You were talking about Richard Dawkins and “The Selfish Gene” and you suggested that the reason we find these fatalistic ideas about genetics appealing is because they let us off the hook for all our failed attempts to make the world a better place.
You can’t ask a journalist, whose job is to analyse and pull apart something, you can’t ask that person to resynthesise it. That’s the job of a politician.
“Let’s look back and see how they actually went wrong”. Think of the neo-conservatives. The idea that we are faced by a giant terrorist threat was not true. It was an ideologically-driven exaggeration of something that was true. And I was just trying to show how pessimism happens when dark things run out of control.
I have this working theory that the internet is the HR department for the world. I know because I work for a big corporation. If somebody behaves badly HR swoops in, your desk is cleared and you’re booted out of the building within hours. They never question the system that made that person behave badly. The HR people would never do that. And that’s exactly what the internet is doing at the moment. It identifies bad peoples, swoops in and ejects them. What it never does is question the system and in that way the internet reflects the corporatism of the people who invented it.
If you really want to change the world you’ve got to go and connect with people who sometimes aren’t very nice. You’ve got to go and talk to racists. Why not? It’s interesting, isn’t it? But instead, we say they’re terrible and they’re frightening and we retreat. And I just think that’s lazy and we’re waiting for somebody who has the courage to go out and actually connect with the people.
When China put all its money into dollars, it allowed America to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with no real financial consequences in their own country. It was the first time in history that they had ever managed to do that. It’s fascinating. Have you noticed that one of the strangest things in our time is that since 2001, we’ve known that there’s this terrible war going on in Afghanistan, we’ve known that there’s this terrible war going on in Iraq, but it just doesn’t seem to have any consequences here—unlike the Vietnam War, where they had to borrow so much money and raise so much in taxes that it caused a financial crisis, which led to Nixon letting money go free, which is where we are now. There’s none of that. Meanwhile, goods come from China and cost nothing.