Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

The cities, because of their crowded conditions, are an intensification of existence and therefore of politics.

Nobody will declare his or her views as driven by ideological abstraction and crowd psychology because he or she happens to live in a teeming urban setting or an architecturally and socially conformist suburban one. But it will be there, just below the surface, having its effect, multiplied by billions.

The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Kristallnacht, Maoist China’s Cultural Revolution, and the Iranian Revolution are some examples of the madness of urban crowds coupled with the irresistibility of extremism

Urban riots are almost always a common element in regime crises,

The 21st century, in other words, will be increasingly tumultuous. Indeed, the heart of dictatorship is to prevent the formation of spontaneous crowds, which can form more easily than ever before because of social-media technology.

Though technology has kept evolving, the roots of the permanent crisis in the 21st century continue to lie in what went wrong in the 20th. Nazism and Communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

mindless crowds cast off all humanizing and historical tradition, including religion, and thus give themselves up to ideology in one form or another. They do this by destroying the memory and existence of the individual: who, being an individual, may deviate from the political direction demanded by the crowd.

Crowds and Power,

Elias C...

He and Arendt both understood that the worst tyrannies had their origins in the isolation and loneliness of the individual, which leads to the most fearsome crowd formations. That is, as we shall see, the mob is made up of lonely people.

The crowd, Canetti writes, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others.

It is only within the crowd that he can escape the innate human “fear of being touched” by a stranger. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. He was nothing before the creation of this crowd and now he is everything. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, rescuing others from their loneliness, and consuming all hierarchies, since the goal of a lonely individual is always to be noticed and to dominate his betters. “Within the crowd there is equality,” Canetti emphasizes.[46] Yet the crowd feels persecuted and demands retribution, because lonely individuals are always bitter about something. Thus, the crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue. After all, the lonely individual, in his own thoughts at least, can do no wrong. And he receives justification of this inside the crowd, where for the first time he feels he has power. This is how tyranny begins.

A principal aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous, like those on the wrong side of history, because, after all, to pronounce someone as such is to presume to know the direction of history, a category of knowledge not given to anyone.

“hunting pack”

“baiting crowd.”

public executions,

Canetti says its most blatant and riveting form is that of the “questioner,” that is, of the accuser.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,

As Julia, a character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, says, “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a totalitarian society where the past is always being rewritten to conform with the reigning opinions of the present.

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

the world that Orwell and Huxley describe signifies Spengler’s decline of the West and Canetti’s tyranny of the crowd. This is all happening and starting to happen before our eyes.

The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation were always delivered from the top down.

The 21st century has produced an inversion of all this, whereby individuals can work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

This does not end tyranny from the top down, as we know from present-day Russia and China. But it does add another dimension to the battle in defense of free thought.

The point is that social and digital media in the world-cities will ignite more domestic and geopolitical turbulence, even if it is periodically toward a good end against truly tyrannical regimes. Social media in the world-cities are a key reason why politics will continue to get harder, more complicated, and more difficult to succeed at.

the development of literate working and middle classes, though it counts as progress, can lead to instability, since the population is no longer fatalistic and expects more of government. Middle classes are just tougher to govern,

virtual crowds that, while professing independence, will operate on the basis of a brutal conformity.

Whole populations, in the grip of some political frenzy or other, tapping feverishly on their smartphones in unison their approval or disapproval, will increasingly resemble the mores of teenage girls, in which the worst fear will be that of ostracism.

The challenge is still one identified by both Canetti and Arendt: individual loneliness and atomization that creates blind obedience to crowds. For the crowd signals a rejection of reality in order to create an alternative reality: something that is doable provided a large number of people believe in it. This is something that technology itself can help with, with possibly frightening consequences. The future will be a contest of crowds: those imposing reality and those demanding a new reality.

AI will reshape information to conform to our preferences—potentially confirming and deepening biases, and, in so doing, narrowing access to…an objective truth.”

can become a weapon of the ruling mob, like Google algorithms that not only pick winners and losers but merely amplify the lowest common denominator of popularity in the contest of ideas.

An elite few may control AI: a scientific mandarinate answerable to nobody,

While the tyranny that can be produced by bottom-up social media in many cases has a different style than top-down Industrial Age authoritarianism, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should not only be denounced but destroyed.

It is the lust for purity and perfect virtue that, when combined with social media and other forms of communications technology, becomes particularly acute, since it puts power in the hands of the young,

in every case, it will make geopolitics more unpredictable and more tumultuous. Regimes, good and bad, throughout the world will be constantly in danger, contributing to a general anxiety and claustrophobia reminiscent of Weimar, where public life and politics were always in turmoil. And the two are entwined, since everything it seems is political now.

The decline of the West began not only with the rise and elaboration of Eliot’s bleak, “Unreal” cities, delinked from the soil and beset by crowd frenzy, but with the birth of modernism itself, both of which are themes in The Waste Land.[56] Modernism signaled indifference to (and independence from) the past, leading toward what the Marxists called “progress” and away from sacred traditions with their self-imposed limits, a process which encouraged disintegration and extremism.

Unmoored from the past and its sacred traditions, modern politics reinvented group, ethnic, and religious identities in starker, ideological terms.

This counterintuitively released an “instinctual power” over politics—that is, the release of raw emotions—according

disturbing modern art

the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud,

and the ideological, mass-market anti-Semitis...

Men and women were not necessarily destined to be liberal. They could also be tribal, defining themselves in modern ideological terms by geography, group, ethnicity, and/or religion.

weakening of Western civilization, since all civilizations rest to a significant degree on the repression of tribal and other instincts

But civilization is now in flux. The ongoing decay of the West is manifested not only in racial tensions coupled with new barriers to free speech, but in the deterioration of dress codes, the erosion of grammar, the decline in sales of serious books and classical music, and so on, all of which have traditionally been signs of civilization.

The West has crested, in other words, and with it has crested the main invention of the West, the sanctity of the individual and individual thought, that is by definition opposed to the crowd.

In short, elites are increasingly conformist and the masses, especially the underclass, are more ignorant, as schools and other public services decline.

the mechanization, automation, and routinized bureaucratic procedure imposed by experts (and by science itself) are bound to absolutely enrage a fair number of us, leading to the very loss of repression against instinct that civilization is supposed to impose in the first place. The more constrained we are all forced to be in our behavior and our beliefs, in other words, the more that political extremists, including violent and crazy groups, will seek to overturn the prevailing order.

The very expansion of knowledge creates ever more intense and minute fields of specialization, which drives workers into little cubbyholes of experience, making everything beyond those cubbyholes, aside from immediate psychological and carnal needs, unreal and prone to manipulation by, for example, social-media demagogues. Such phenomena will help define city life of the future; or increasingly of the present,

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