A Last, Longing Look

And a Glance into Futures Most Likely

So, at last, we finally come to what kind of future I really think we’re in for—but before I do that, I just can’t resist giving you a quick peek into the future I wish we were in for. Partly this is to cleanse my own mental palate so I can be as unsentimental as possible, partly it’s to give you a look into my own prejudices and biases, hopefully giving you more tools with which to evaluate where I might be putting thumbs on the analytical scale that I can’t see.

Given my own druthers, I’d pick a future that looked quite a lot like a combination of the best of all the eras of the Post-War order:

• Moderate birthrate with low-ish, but non-negligible, infant mortality.

  Why non-negligible?

  When infant mortality is too low, deleterious genes grow more common AND family sizes shrink to the point where only-children are excessively common. Only-children are unequivocally a bad thing, both for the only-children themselves and for civilization as a whole.

  Only-children are almost always over-parented, even in conditions of poverty, and why wouldn’t they be? All their parents’ eggs (metaphorically and literally) are in one basket, and they have every incentive to over-protect, coddle, spoil, and otherwise ruin their children in ways that prevent them from growing into competent, self-possessed adults.

  Even when they do grow into competent adults, only-children do not have to compete for attention and resources. Thus, they do not learn the art of compromise with siblings, so their egocentrism doesn’t get tempered into something useful. Only-children tend to be worse at all the skills needed to run self-governing societies, and also tend to be more prone to narcissism, depression, and anxiety. Humans work better at all levels from the individual to the global if families have more than one child, and if some of the children who are born die through illness and misadventure. Mother nature is a cruel bitch, but she’s the only bitch in town.

• Reliable food supply pretty much everywhere (excepting the occasional famine caused by small-scale regional political unrest).

• A steady rate of cultural churn caused by waves of creativity washing from fairly wide fringes into the mainstream through the arts.

• A loose international Pax governed by a country that doesn’t depend on the trade for its own survival.

• The return of space travel and the exploratory spirit.

• The return of cultural ghettos to break up the monotony of the thoroughly mixed cultural stew (while still preserving a mainstream characterized by that stew).

• The return of control over health insurance, unemployment insurance, and other such matters to mutual aid societies formed around affinity points such as locality, profession, interest, religion, and ethnicity.

In my estimation, while the above list is not without its contradictions or drawbacks, it would strike a good balance between a near-utopian level of safety and flourishing while preserving an invigorating churn of ideas and danger and art that keeps life worth living.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the world I’ve outlined here could ever exist, or that those eras from which I’ve pulled these points were ever more than a passing phase in the unfolding of human history.

In the New Year’s Day blog series that led to this series, I ended every post along these lines:

“This too shall pass—we will get to a better world on the other side, so long as we hold our nerve.”

After walking through the entire picture from all these different angles, I’m dismayed to report that my perspective has changed. The fictions that form the foundation of the WEIRD worldview, which tend to inform futurists, are so deeply mistaken and mythological as to be not-even-wrong, and looking at them all at once makes it very clear to me that this world simply will not be able to continue.

Foundational Fictions

What are these foundational fictions?

This world of ours is happier, healthier, wealthier, and better than at any time in the past. This is strange, because it is both true and false at the same time. We are wealthier than ever in aggregate, and we live better than those who came before when it comes to top-line luxuries (i.e. entertainments, variety of available hedonic experience, access to high-end drugs, etc.)—though we are no longer doing better where wealth is concerned when you consider the mean rather than the aggregate.
Similarly, we are healthier than most preceding generations if you measure health by metrics such as “infant mortality,” “deaths from infectious disease,” and “life expectancy,” as well as with our ability to survive certain kinds of cancer—but we are less fit, less vital, less healthy all around in just about every other respect. Is that “healthier?”
One thing’s for sure: we aren’t happier. A quick glance at the popular arts, popular social pastimes, and the willingness to breed, play, and fight will quickly disabuse you of that notion. So will a look at our “theraputic” psychoactives, which are ubiquitous and bring less pleasure or joy than any of the historic pleasure-chemicals (alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, psychedelics, cannabis, caffeine, etc.).

We have come up with some fantastic innovations in our WEIRD world that I love, but the center has long since rotted out—we have, culturally speaking, met the fate of all other major empires in history: a million little leeches, having attached themselves to the political, religious, and commercial sectors, have finally sucked the host dry enough that those who are not in the parasite class are merely food.

Human beings are basically good and/or perfectible. They aren’t. If they were, our multifarious experiments in utopia over the last two hundred years would have worked. Instead, the most effective of these (our own) merely took a little longer to succumb to rot.

All humans are created equal. This is a theological and a moral statement, not an empirical one. Losing sight of this (as the WEIRD world long since has) turns it from the basis for legal game theory in a free society into a cancerous lie that destroys cultures. In its service, we have eliminated every kind of status hierarchy except for those secured by vast wealth (such as celebrity culture, entertainment, and sports), credentialism (such as academia), and/or violence (such as politics). As a side effect, we have driven fraternal society, public displays of beauty, and freethinking communities virtually extinct.

Progress is an inexorable fact of history. It’s not. We have this illusion because we stand at the end of a five-hundred-year cycle of rapid, unrelenting technological advancement. Some of that advancement has allowed us to engage in radical—and in many cases very desirable from an individualist’s point of view—social experimentation and re-engineering, including:

• The end of legal slavery

• The emancipation of women

• The individualization of sex

• Radical, community-independent individualism

• Rapid, cheap international travel

• Easy international trade (and the material wealth that proceeds from it)

And so many more that we are tempted to see all of these things as moral advancement.

The truth is that technology itself is directional and progressive so long as the know-how is not lost. History is cyclical—just as humans have life cycles, so do cultures, nations, and civilizations. Historians call these macro-civilizational turns of the wheel “secular cycles.” Dark ages—times after the collapse of a civilization where most knowledge is lost—are a regular occurrence on this globe.

Power flows to madmen with crazy ideas. The innovators run the world. The truth is that while culture is kept alive and vital by madmen in the arts, engineering, and business, the nature of power is that it gradually accretes to those who know how to run balance sheets and actuarial tables, as they know how to harvest the profits from advances made by the madmen.

Noble Lies and Difficult Truths

All of the above can be fairly characterized as lying somewhere on the spectrum that stretches from half-truths to understandable mistakes to noble lies, and that can be a bit hard to swallow. But if you look back just a few generations, you’ll find other dogmas, all with similar levels of popular buy-in, that governed civilization (both our own and in others): Eugenics, the Divine Right of Kings, legally-enforced chattel slavery, paterfamilias, the favor of Allah, etc.

That things are thus should not be a surprise. As I discuss at lengths in my forthcoming volumes Reclaiming Your Mind and The Art of Agency, human consciousness builds models of reality rather than interacting with reality in-the-raw. This allows us to navigate a startlingly complex world through a kind of mental short-hand, and as long as it is reliable enough to get us by, that’s all that matters.

One of the reasons that civilizations rise and fall is that they are founded by peoples whose models of the world that have far more explanatory power than is needed for navigating their here-and-now. Armed with this cultural head-room, their imaginations fired by a very good model of the universe, those in the civilization reach higher and farther than their neighbors. They invent, stretch, and improvise on a vast canvas until, eventually, they reach the limits of what their models can accommodate—at which point they must build new models.

But building new models requires a concentration of consensus that simply doesn’t happen during times of prosperity. Models are built to solve coherent problems, and if everyone in the civilization is scattered-to-the-winds, culturally speaking, and disunited in their aims, there is no common ground upon which to build new models and choose between them.

When humans have no other basis upon which to agree, they fight. When enough people (and their models) are effectively killed off, and everyone else is tired of fighting—especially if there is an obvious winner standing over the rubble—the model-building can start again.

The models that underpin our civilization-as-it-stands have reached their end-state. There is no more head-room in them. We are now in a period of war between model-makers.

I don’t know who’s going to win. What I do know is that, if you wish to see technological civilization continue to build to the point where humanity infects the galaxy, the winning model must take into account as many as possible of the following hard realities:

Substantial technological and cultural changes emerge only from the disaffected fringes. If these fringes (or those posing as their members) run the show, civilizational stability goes out the window. If these fringes are tightly controlled, the civilization chokes out. These fringes are to a culture what blood is to the body: blood distributes nutrients, but if it crosses the barrier into the brain the entire body goes haywire. Such fringes must have a space in which they have a free hand in order for their experimentation to benefit, but not devastate, the rest of their civilization. This is a trick that large corporations (such as Lockheed) and the military (with DARPA) figured out during the post-WW2 era, but the wisdom of such practices has largely fallen out of fashion. Software developers call this sort of arrangement “sandboxing.”[link]

Regulations are not what they seem. The ostensible intent of regulations is to moderate and reign in the behavior of a given party before it can do damage. The nature of regulations is that it gives the regulator a rent-collection mechanism. The effect of regulations is to limit technological innovation to large corporations, who have every incentive to prevent the disruption of markets they control. Regulations are like kudzu—they’re very pretty when they’re young, but when they mature they consume the ecosystems they infect. All top-down social control mechanisms (from social credit to moralism to priestcraft) behave in the same fashion.

In a voting-centric governmental system, culture can be united or divided by the incentives formed at the top. The US culture wars began in earnest when the Warren Court changed the way that districting was done. The result was that areas previously united by geography became divided by class and ethnicity, which removed incentives for the rich-and-privileged to invest back into their own communities. It also had the secondary effect of shattering the state (as in 1-of-the-50 states) as a political interest block. The fault lines thusly opened created opportunities for political entrepreneurs to pick apart the body politic for their own gain, and changed the social character of the United States from one of a family with quite toxic internal squabbles to one of a hordeland full of warring factions and blood feuds. Future turns of the wheel would be well-advised to apportion political power with an eye towards preventing power blocks that are too united in vision, identity, and interest—doing so incentivizes a winner-take-all system where the ballot box is the key to plenary power which one might then use to persecute, expropriate, and exterminate one’s political enemies.

Any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization will face demographic collapse unless sociality is a top cultural priority. Fertility, family formation (in whatever format), and local culture all easily collapse in a civilization where technological amusements are prized above social solidarity. The Rise of the Beautiful Ones is the demon lurking in the shadow of prosperity.

When a population is declining, automation will exacerbate, rather than fix, the problem. With more finished goods chasing fewer-and-fewer customer dollars (those dollars being limited both by depressed wages and by declining population, each of which limits demand), production collapses to such a point where there is no choice but to rebuild the industrial plant by hand. Those of a Polyanna-ish disposition where economics is concerned tend to think “the market is wise, and this will prevent catastrophe.” Those of a controlling disposition tend to think “humans are smart, we can plan things so this doesn’t happen.” What both parties neglect is that the economy is a natural system, and as a natural system it responds to local stimuli and incentives, and thus goes through macro-cycles of correction and counter-correction, always overshooting an ideal equilibrium. Since we all depend on the economy for our lives, future model-makers would be well advised to treat economics like a Miami resident treats the weather—since one cannot control it, one must survive it and find ways to profit from it. Enjoy the sunny days, but stock up for hurricanes.

Deficit spending always and everywhere results eventually in the bankruptcy of the state. The singular exception is when debts are run up to fight a war; when the war results in plunder or growth that can pay back the debt AND the debt is paid back, things turn out all right. This has happened, but rarely. Usually the headroom provided by the extra money is so useful that deficit spending becomes a habit, and the State itself goes into a death-spiral that ends with state collapse, social collapse, and often civil war.

Humans are not perfectible, even in theory. This might be the most important one on the list, as genetic engineering has finally given us the tools (if not the will) to achieve the eugenicist’s dream of genetic health for the human race. There are two problems, though, which will forever vex eugenicist ambitions.

First, fitness is relative, not absolute. “Desirable characteristics” will always vary by environment. Those things which would make for an ideal human among the elite set (ruthlessness, gentility, conscientiousness, high intelligence, beauty, a lack of brutishness in bearing and temperament) would mostly not confer advantage to a hunter-gatherer (or even a tradesman). Since we cannot foresee what life will be like a few generations from now, any deliberate selection for desired characteristics risks the long-term survival of the species on the altar of “genetic health.”

Second, genetics are chaotic, rather than Mandelian. Genes on their own rarely do anything interesting, but when combined they produced outsized effects. The same complex of genes involved in high intelligence are also involved in schizophrenia, for example. The complexity of the human genome means its permutations and their effects may never be mapped, and it means that the deliberate elimination of any gene or gene complex from the germ-line risks future human adaptability.

Like all models, the next model that defines civilization will ignore some parts of reality and champion other parts of it. In my view, the above factors are the most important hard constraints that our current model has ignored—if the next model does not take account of at least some of the above, I do not expect it to do a good job at lifting our eyes once again to the horizon. The best we can expect from such a model is a long-slow disintegration such as that which the western Roman Empire experienced in its final two centuries of life.

The Last Scenario

So what do I expect to happen, really?

I expect that the next twenty years will be a period of protracted, straggling, persistent warfare across the globe. We will see a long decline, lasting from one-to-three generations, and a decline of the global population of between thirty and fifty percent.

Authoritarians will attempt, everywhere, to crown themselves kings of the ashes. They may win for a while, but against the force of falling demography, they won’t be able to maintain their power. Ideology will not be sufficient to pull humanity out of the behavioral sink.

The economic crisis will spur an attempt to totally centralize control of the financial system under the national banks (and ultimately the US Federal Reserve). Under the guiding hand of Modern Monetary Theory, they will attempt to use the ability to allocate funds and to control the spending habits of the hoi polloi to stabilize credit markets and prevent activities that might destabilize the system. I believe this attempt will fail for two reasons:

First, such a system will require a fully-integrated and robust industrial plant with ever-evolving cryptographic technology. This requires a massive cadres of both workers and engineers, which simply isn’t in the cards given the demographic outlook (not to mention the other legal and practical obstacles to the fostering of creative engineering genius that have accreted over the past two generations).

Second, it will meet the fate of every planned and managed economy in history. The inability of the modelers to account for the unseen factors in the economy will short-circuit the many small, invisible feedback loops that keep it running. People will abandon the economy in any way they can, and the system will rot and collapse (either from attrition or in violence).

We will see famines again, on a wide scale, first in North Africa and other areas that do not grow their own food, and second in places like Central Africa and China where the ability to grow food is dependent upon imported fertilizer. I don’t expect a lot of these to make the news in the West—we’ll have our hands full with endless wars and internal problems—but there will be a LOT of money to be made in the agriculture business (or did you really think that Bill Gates and his crowd were buying up all that farmland just so they could grow bugs? Tsk tsk tsk).

In the United States, the southern border states will quickly become the dominant power block, due to their loose regulatory environment and their proximity to the industrial economy in Mexico. As they do, they will slowly begin to accrete regulations and bureaucracies that, in the long run, will make them look a lot more like Detroit and San Francisco, but they have a few generations before they reach those end-states. The consequent shift in power balance will mean that, for the first time in American history, the Confederate (and, now, Latino) Catholic and Southern Baptist cultural traditions will set policy (at least for a while).

As a result, we may well see attempts of several US States to secede from the Union—and they may not be the ones you’d expect if such a move were to happen today. I consider it very likely that, in order to keep the Union together, many of the New Deal legal theories that allowed the Federal Government to seize control of commerce and culture will be rolled back or seriously modified.

The Problem of Decentralizing Technologies

Throughout this series I’ve brushed up against the decentralizing technologies that have grown up in the wake of the digital revolution:

• Private cryptography

• Decentralized currency

• Anonymous browsing/encrypted tunneling

• The Dark Web

• Trust-less digital currencies

• Digital Autonomous Organizations (DAO) and digital contracts

• Decentralized file sharing

• Mesh network routing

• Home-built firearms

• Drones

• Cheap machine tools

• Remote power generation (solar, wind, wood gassification, etc.)

This technological stack could, theoretically, enable a more-or-less completely balkanized civilization of small city-states with most of the advantages of empires. The pain points in such a scheme (resource brokering and physical distribution) could theoretically be solved with a network of treaties—humans have done such things in the past, after all.

While I remain enamored of the potential of all the above technologies to create a much more robust, resilient technological infrastructure, and for their potential to serve as a decade-long buffer in the event of state or civilizational collapse, they all suffer from a fatal vulnerability:

They require a lot of brainpower to maintain.

To create or maintain a technological revolution, it takes a creative, synthetic minds that enjoy the challenge of working around hard limits. That kind of creativity must also co-occur with enough raw-horsepower intelligence to do incredibly high-level abstraction, and the education that gives them short-cut access to the tools and empirical wisdom to pull it off without chasing down too many blind alleys. We’re talking around 1 in 100,000 people (at best) who even have the ability to do that kind of work, let alone the inclination and education. And we can’t have them all going into one field—we have bigger problems.

The power grid, which was rolled out throughout the United States during the 1950s, is reaching end-of-life on its major components. Nearly all of the bridges in the United States built after World War 2 were built with steel-reinforced concrete, a fantastic technology when it comes to strength and seismic resilience, but one that doesn’t last very long. As moisture soaks through the concrete, the rebar rusts, which makes the metal expand, causing the concrete to spall, structurally compromising the bridge.
The same is true for many of the highways in those areas of the country where hard freezes are an infrequent occurrence. The same is true for the nation’s sewer systems, and water systems, and erosion-control systems. The generation that followed the post-World War 2 build-out, in accordance with their general generational narcissism, didn’t keep up with the maintenance on the infrastructure that was left to them. Those of us who follow them get to make up that debt, which will be an interesting trick considering the other debts they’ve left to us.

Or we could do without.

Those of you in the tech industry will be familiar with the term “tech debt,” which refers to deferred upgrades and maintenance in a company’s infrastructure. The WEIRD world is drowning in tech debt.

So, in a world of demographic collapse, where will we get the cream of creative minds with which to maintain our civilization? How will we even find them when we’ve taken a broad-scale turn against inequality of any sort, and tasked our institutions towards punishing exceptionalism wherever it emerges?

In his book The Storm Before the Calm, George Friedman points out that the United States has stood at the brink of collapse before, and it was saved each time by a technological revolution that catalyzed a new golden age. Will this happen again? Can it happen again? Or do we have to collapse hard and bounce first?

If a new tech revolution does happen, my money isn’t on AI, or automation, but on biotech. Biological machines can be grown anywhere, and the substrate and chemicals one needs to grow them are much easier to source than gold and molybdenum and silicon wafers. Forget “a chip in your brain” and start looking out for “brains grown as chips” (I’ve already seen a few—it’s not just “coming,” it’s already here in garages and experimental labs around the United States). Such technology can scale faster and survive deeper disruptions than can technologies which depend on international industrial supply chains.

Decentralization and Empire

All empires fall, but the logic of empire is inescapable. After ours falls, whenever it does, a new one will eventually arise.

Assuming that decentralizing technologies survive the current crash, we can expect their adoption to create a series of geopolitical catastrophes as they re-make resource maps around the globe.

If Bitcoin (or one of its siblings) manages to displace the central banks, it will re-make the entire map of human power. National banks will fade in prominence, giving way to new cabals of people who are canny enough to corner the market on whatever currency becomes the global reserve. They will be able to use this market power to dominate other sectors of the economy, but they will (likely) not be able to use it to limit the individual’s freedom to transact.

More interesting is the picture for energy. The oil market has already started decentralizing, having recently shifted from global to regional—a large motivation behind the war in the Middle East right now is the American absence from the Persian Gulf. Without the big dog in the area to enforce the rules, the little dogs (Iran and her allies vs. Saudia Arabia and its allies, which include Israel) are struggling for the Top Dog spot. Whoever wins will control the energy supplies for Africa, Europe, and China.

Inside regions, assuming that Small Modular Nuclear Reactors prove out, the centralized power grid will quickly re-shape, with power over energy resting in the hands of towns and counties instead of states and nations—and, of course, with the manufacturers of the reactors having some kind of leverage in terms of parts and maintenance availability.

And, again inside those regions, solar power will continue to provide smallholder the ability to cut the cord and avoid some forms of surveillance and control...so long as the supply chains hold up (which they may not).

Therefore, the empires of the future will centralize power on different pretexts than have the empires of the past, and their governing structures may wind up looking far more like that of the Holy Roman Empire than the British Empire.

Human history is driven by technology. Technology conditions the salience of resources, geography and the public will, which in turn sets the ecological stage upon which ideologies compete, which in turn conditions what directions technological development will take. Because the available technologies in each imperial age are different, and the available world-models at the germ of those ages vary, each turn of the wheel looks different than the one before it.

Mark Twain described the cycle thusly:

“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

So instead of looking at history as either a circle or a line of progress, it is perhaps more accurate to view it as a corkscrew. The wheel plunges and wobbles through time, and we ride it out whether we want to or not, until either it, or we, simply aren’t, anymore.

So what of our future?

Unless something changes soon, the day is rapidly approaching when there will be no living person on Earth whose feet have touched the moon. The voices of those who doubt that men ever visited the moon will grow, and the idea that this is something humans can do, would do, or consider worth doing will slip from “obvious” to “legendary” to “mythic” to “mere fancy,” until that next golden age where madmen are once again lauded as heroes.

For the sake of our progeny, let us hope that this crash doesn’t plunge us into another multi-century dark age.

Eschaton

Which brings us, finally, to the end of the series I had initially planned. I hope those of you who create science fictional or fantastic worlds—or who write thrillers—gleaned from it enough about the complex mechanics of how a world functions to find the exercise useful.

For the rest, some final thoughts:

While the above is a downer, all is not lost. The human race has survived worse and come out stronger. In eight thousand years, we’ve gone from learning how to write to walking on the moon, and fully three thousand of those years were spent in dark ages. While it is always possible that we may finally go extinct, my money is on our survival. Humans are tenacious critters, and we always seem to struggle back to our feet even after we land on our face.

If you are one of those who buys the central moral dogma of our civilization (i.e. that the greatest good is achieved when you “make a difference” and “change the world”), there is hope. Although we plebs have absolutely no control over the turning of the wheel, we can influence future turnings. Start now with having children and passing on to them those parts of their heritage that you deem most valuable, most empowering, and most conducive to long-term human triumph, whether those things are material crafts, mathematics, literature, history, legends and myths, music, poetry, and/or family parables. Teach them how to think well, and do all you can to give them the room to grow resilience and self-reliance; they will need it to build the future. Foster community bonds wherever you can; as many of us learned when watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the lights go out it is your neighbors and their goodwill who will insure your survival.

You are reading this today because behind you, to the beginning of time, stretches an unbroken chain of heredity. You are also reading this because, behind you stretches an unbroken chain of cultural transmission, walking hand-in-hand with your genes, that helps you make sense of the strange and chaotic world we inhabit. Along the way, we’ve built civilizations to help us forge new links in those chains. When our civilizations falter, we still must forge on. You are the next link; don’t let it end with you.

And finally, one last note of hope:

When revolution comes, it comes for the powerful. Sometimes, as in China and Soviet Russia, it comes for the commoners, but most of the time it is the elites, and not the plebs, who lose their heads. Do your best to prepare for some bumps in the road (both materially and socially). If you do, chances are very good that, no matter how bad it gets, you will survive it.

No matter how dark it gets, no matter how long the darkness last, on the other side of the darkness awaits another golden age.

Do your best to make it one that you’d want your children to see.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Future installments of this Substack will track current events as I find them interesting and relevant to the issues discussed here, in the hopes of refining my analysis and correcting my mistakes.