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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Martin Gurri
Read between
April 13 - May 1, 2023
The public of the eighteenth century had been composed of networks of persons with knowledge of science and the arts, connected virtually, by correspondence. They called themselves, informally, the Republic of Letters, and their labors proved almost indecently fruitful: they helped popularize the scientific revolution, articulated the principles of liberal democracy, and inspired political revolutions in America and France.
mass producers invented a mass public with tastes that matched what was actually produced.
2011 marked the moment when the public first equalized the asymmetry in power with government. It did so by deploying digital tools to mobilize opinion and organize massive street protests.
The British rioters acted as if the government, the police, and the law lacked legitimacy. I freely grant that they didn’t think this through. They didn’t write manifestos or shout clever political slogans. But neither was theirs a silent scream: they stole, and burned, and sometimes killed, because they could. They embodied the change the political protesters kept calling for. While the latter rejected the political and economic system under which they lived, the rioters acted out the consequences.
The masters and regulators of finance had placed large foolish bets, but when the bottom fell out in 2008 it was the public, not them, who paid the losses.
This was a new thing under the sun, and it became possible only in the altered landscape of the Fifth Wave. Digital platforms allowed even rioters who wished to loot London stores to organize and act more intelligently, for their purposes, than the authorities.
When told that people believed only three scientists in the world could understand general relativity, Eddington grew quiet. “I’m just wondering who the third might be,”
Government favor is the single most important factor in science research today. It’s disingenuous to imagine that such favor would be granted without considerations of power and political advantage.
Uncertainty and impermanence are symptoms of social life under the conditions of the Fifth Wave.
Between libertarian and anarchist, it may be, the distance can be reduced to a quarrel about private property.
The community organizer is expected to expose, denounce, whip up indignation. He dwells constantly on the many injustices of the established order, and he demands change on a heroic scale. The change itself is pushed off to some other responsible party—usually, a government agency. The organizer deals in negation, not action.
A satire in the liberal New Yorker hammered at the same point: “President Obama used his radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has ‘played no role whatsoever’ in the US government over the past four years,”
Presidents and prime ministers, congresses and parliaments, appeared remote, self-serving, hopelessly bureaucratic at best, debauched by money at worst. The public did not feel represented by their elected representatives, and spoke of them as a class apart.
When the important decisions are all made outside democratic politics, the center-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for an intercession.
The public has options: that is the single defining feature of the Fifth Wave.
I can’t command a complex social system like the United States, but I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality.
We can never know with certainty that any proposition is right. We can only try to show that, so far, it hasn’t been proven wrong.
My thesis describes a world in which, as a result of changes in information technology, two structural forces are found in permanent collision: the public, organized in networks, and government (authority), organized hierarchically.
More broadly, I’d expect politicians and governments in democratic countries to promise more while risking less.
Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history.
complex systems often look indestructible just before they collapse.
“The federal government does a lot of things well. One of the things it does not do well,” the president noted, “is information technology procurement.”
the democratic process is in peril of self-negation. The public’s mood swings are driven by failures of government, not hope for change.
Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine has not experienced a genuine revolution, merely a change of elites,”
The keepers of established wisdom now know they got reality terribly wrong, even if they are too dazed and disoriented to work out just how.
The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. The industrial model of democracy is dysfunctional and discredited.
The recovery of truth requires the restoration of trusted authority.
In one possible future, all democratic countries will be Switzerland.
the re-formation of liberal democracy, and the recovery of truth, must wait on the emergence of a legitimate elite class.
integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example.
President Trump, however, is a prisoner of the public’s repudiations, of the attempt to impose a narrow symbolic framework on sprawling reality. The president, I stated above, perceives the world from a fractured place. That’s another way of saying that his life has shown the opposite of integrity. He is not the one we have been waiting for. Legitimacy depends on a shared interpretation of events: and to be shared, to be perceived equally by contradictory perspectives, a story must go light on raging at symbolic phantoms in favor of the demonstrable and the concrete.
The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight.
