More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Martin Gurri
Read between
December 27, 2024 - January 3, 2025
But the public never disappeared under the weight of the masses. That is a crucial claim of my hypothesis.
The public never became an inert prop on the social and political stage. Public opinion retreated to a reactive mode, but it remained a factor, it always mattered—even
My story—I repeat—concerns the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so. My misgiving is that democracy will be ground to pieces under the stress. An immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict. This gulf is filled with dark matter: distrust.
Henri Rosanvallon, one of the few interesting political analysts today, has written of the “rise of the society of distrust.”1 The public, in a complex society, must depend on specialists, experts, and intermediaries such as political representatives, organized institutionally and hierarchically. When the experts fail, the public can only appeal to other experts, often from the same failed institution. The process has resembled a mutual protection pact among the elites. Failure typically gets blamed on insufficient support: the CIA, for example, demanded and received a bigger budget after
...more
The indignados struck an inclusive pose, but it didn’t require much depth of analysis to discern the leftist flavor of the anti-capitalist, anti-“system” demonstrations.
Contemplating the wreckage, some of them reconsidered the wisdom of neither-nor. To write off the socialists as “the same old shit” had been wrong, wrote one regretful indignado: “they may be a shit, we’d have to discuss it, but it isn’t the same shit . . .”9 This was as incisive as the movement’s political analysis got.
It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.
Compared to recent Spanish history, the demands of the indignados sounded strangely out of tune. Take the dismissal of representative democracy. For 40 years, until 1975, Spain was ruled by a military dictatorship. This regime tolerated no dissent, much less public protests. A movement based on street protests and occupations of public places became possible only because of the rights of expression guaranteed by liberal democracy, which the movement wished to do away with.
A similar dissonance applied to economic matters. Spain had been a very poor country within living memory. If “capitalism” meant the economic practices and institutions dominant since the end of the dictatorship, its accomplishments had been remarkable. In 2011, three years into the crisis, per capita GDP was five times what it had been in 1980: around $32,000 compared to just over $6,000. By the standard definition of such things, Spain was now a middle class country, no longer a poor one. Percentage of imports to GDP, always a good measure of wealth, had nearly doubled, from 17 percent in
...more
I don’t believe it would be an exercise in phrase-making to say that liberal democracy and capitalism created the class out of which the indignados and their protest emerged.
In the view from above, the indignados appeared in revolt against two distinct foes: the political and economic elites in Spain, and the historic forces which had brought them, the protesters, into being.
If the indignados somehow managed to destroy the system they so deeply despised, they will have extinguished themselves and their movement by eliminating the conditions that made both possible. This is not a riddle or a paradox, but a political pathology frequently encountered in the wake of the Fifth Wave.
The view from above portrayed the indignados and their movement, in certain moods at least, as a preternatural hybrid of revolutionary aspirations and a societal suicide pact.
Whether they were a fig leaf, as the protesters claimed, or sincere compromises, the Trajtenberg-inspired laws would never have received consideration if it hadn’t been for the tent city revolt. In this sense, they represented a triumph for the rebels. That was not the way they saw it. To people with boundless faith in the powers of government, small bounded steps appeared like craven obstructionism.
To a remarkable extent, the Occupiers lived virtually. They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online.
When the media ignored the initial occupation, the organizers forgot their anti-consumerism and turned to a commercial public relations firm, Workhorse Publicity, for help with spreading the word of their revolution. The company did so well that it actually won a professional award for its efforts.29
If the rebels wanted to abolish history, the political elites were imprisoned by it, and behaved, in each case, according to the logic of their time and place. Government actions thus appeared strangely tactical, local, disconnected from ideology.
But like rebels in other democratic countries, they effected a strange mental separation between the life they wished for and the structures which made that life possible.
The rioters existed in a world of effects without causes. However dimly, they envisioned a desirable mode of living—one weighed down with mobile phones, video games, plasma TVs—but they vandalized the processes which made that life possible. They behaved as if desirable things were part of the natural order, like the grass under their feet. Detestable systems of authority only stood in the way.
Sectarian to the core, the public would have felt corrupted by the thought of assuming the functions of the Center.
The consequence wasn’t revolution but the threat of perpetual turbulence. The authorities felt, and still feel, their incapacity keenly.
That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them.
Like money and marriage, legitimacy exists objectively because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. If enough people change their minds, the authorizing magic is lost.
The street protests of 2011, while ostensibly political, were part of a global assault on the guardians of authority across every domain of human activity. The protesters stood in the same relation to government that bloggers and social media did to newspapers, YouTube to television, Napster to the recording industry, massive online courses to universities, Amazon to shopping malls, the open science movement to the scientific establishment.
Authority, as I use the term, flows from legitimacy, derived from monopoly.
An important social function of authority is to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is a destroyer of trust and faith.
The crisis of authority hollowing out existing institutions didn’t arise because these institutions prostituted themselves to power or money. That was an explanation after the fact—one that happened to be believed by much of the public and many experts. The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.
An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat. Though
Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies.
Instead of voicing his doubts openly, he developed a tortured style of communication which allowed different observers to draw diametrically opposed conclusions about what he had said.32 He called this “constructive ambiguity.”33 Every word Greenspan uttered in public was parsed for meaning, like holy writ. Even his silences were interpreted as conspiratorial.
The rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, designated by the government to assess investment risk, gave the complex, untested subprime securities a AAA rating: when all was said and done, Moody’s had missed the mark by 20,000 percent.
The public has imposed a single all-important demand on business, the same as it has done on government, politicians, educators, media, and service providers: that every transaction treat the customer as a person, with active tastes and interests, rather than as a passive and undifferentiated member of a mass.
“The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” they argued. “Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”
Half the firms listed on the Fortune 500 in 1999 had dropped out by 2009.60
According to Richard Foster, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has declined from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today.
I am not saying that business has been smarter or more effective than government. Corporations invest heavily in being smart and effective, but Paul Ormerod has shown that, allowing for the difference in time scales, the failure rate of businesses recapitulates the mindless, random pattern of species extinction.
To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”
Among the patterns I would include exaggerated expectations by the public, abetted by exaggerated claims of competence by authority. I
A second causal pattern would be the elites’ loss of control over the story told about their performance, particularly when it has failed to meet expectations.
A third pattern would be the rise of alternative centers of authority. This is a corollary of the loss of monopoly. Once the conversation broadens and the public takes command, the dynamic isn’t that of Einstein scrutinizing the cosmos from his mountaintop, but of Michael Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looking over their shoulders at Steve McIntyre and his blog.
Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning.
“The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”
There’s a belief that digital is forever—that the naked photos of your youth will haunt you to the grave. The opposite is closer to the truth.
The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets.
These people were indifferent or hostile to religion, and tolerant, in principle, of what John Stuart Mills called “experiments in living.”
The purpose in each case was to engineer perfection in social relations by the application of political power.
President Obama, however, is very much a man of our own day: what I propose to call, in this context, late modernism, to capture the prevalent feeling of the times. The political landscape around him has grown flatter. The circle of possibilities has contracted.
Late modernist governments have asserted their claims of competence from the same peak of ambition which launched the high modernist projects. This has placed them in a false and dangerous position.
High modernism failed, but it involved governments in actions of monumental proportions, which dazzled elites and public alike by the scope of their objectives. The story told about these projects wasn’t one of failure but of epic activity, high drama, reaching for the stars.
It is too late in the day now for such romance: government has lost the w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.