The Lindy Bifurcation

Possible Futures, Installment 3

Investor, statistician, and all around grumpy philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a heuristic that goes something like this:
“The probable future lifespan of a piece of culture or technology is directly proportional to its lifespan so far.”

In other words, something that has lasted will continue to last, while something new has not yet proven its staying power. Printed books have lasted thousands of years, while ebooks are very new. The prudent gambler would therefore bet on books, instead of ebooks, if he wants to make sure that his library (or his bibliography) is future-proof.

Taleb named this heuristic “The Lindy Effect” after an extraordinarily long lived New York restaurant...which, ironically, was driven out of business by the Covid lockdowns, which are themselves an example of a “Black Swan Event,” another term coined by Taleb.

Nonetheless, this heuristic nails a subtle, but important point that’s relevant to our prognostications. Across natural and artificial domains, novel innovations almost always fail, while ancient ones seem un-killable, even when we would really rather this wasn’t the case. The reason this happens isn’t that “people were smarter back then, so tradition is obviously always correct.” Instead, it is the Darwinian logic of the alligator: “If I have a hundred babies at a time, one of them is bound to survive long enough to carry on the line.”

Those human institutions, artifacts, and technologies that are old have already proven they have what it takes to survive. Those that are new, that we are often most enamored with, are often the most transitory. Having an excellent utility proposition, opening exciting avenues of possibilities, and getting insanely popular are no guarantee of long-term relevance or endurance. Those qualities are incidental to the often occult demands of the evolutionary pressures humans exert on our ideas, institutions, and technologies.

Occult to us in the moment, at least.

Patterns of the Past

Over the long stretch of history, characteristic weaknesses seem to emerge from the social and governmental systems which humans build. In many cases, this weakness comes from an over-reliance upon one’s greatest strength.

The Egyptian world’s great weakness was its dependence upon the flooding of the Nile. Should a Pharaoh depend upon it too much and fail to prepare for drought years, his dynasty could end and, with his potential conscripts weakened from hunger, he might not repel an invasion by opportunists who coveted the farmland.

The Levant, like the Aztecs, suffered from cultural blood-hunger and the internal focus that blood-hunger drives. The gods must be appeased with sacrificial blood (human or animal) and when satisfied with sacrifice would provide protection. When not, it was evidence that conquering armies were more favored by the gods. Many a Levantine culture shattered under the burden of invasion from Persia and Mesopotamia—even the one which we know most about (the Hebrews) was radically remade in the image of its Babylonian conquerors.

The feudal world relied for its strength upon the King—when the King was up to the job of rallying the people, leading the army, and justly adjudicating disputes, the feudal system was robust and produced little in the way of malcontents. A just King meant a just society, as he was the Head of State who enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven, his temperament set the timbre and tune for the people over which he ruled. But when the King was spoiled, immature, venal, insane, spiteful, or in the grip of religious fervor, the system was not only a miserable one, the nastiness permeated the culture at every level, and created tremendous instability, sometimes leading to civil wars. And feudalism, robust though it was, suffered its greatest disruptions during transitions of power—in a feudal system, such transitions are difficult to manage at the best of times.

The modern world’s great strength is its feeling of limitless possibility and the heights to which that inspires people at all levels. Its characteristic weakness is, without a doubt, the cause of this feeling: its alchemical-mechanistic ambitions.

It started with Newton, an alchemist and scientist, who formulated an apparently-comprehensive view of the universe, its behaviors, and all its transformations based on some very simple math—math which Newton discovered. The universe was a Machine, like a finely tuned watch, and its unfolding was predictable.

In the hands of a Viking, this knowledge would have been a mere confirmation of the tapestry of time woven by the gods. “Determinism” is just a mechanic’s word for “fate,” after all. But Newton and his contemporary Leibniz (who made similar discoveries in mathematics—though not in gravity--at the same time) were not Vikings, they were Christians...and alchemists.

When you put an apparently ultimate understanding of the machinery of cause-and-effect in the hands of a Christian, you create moral obligation to do something to bend the course of the Machine towards good. When you put that same understanding in the hands of an alchemist, you create a desire to use that understanding to transform the nature of the Machine itself into something that can accomplish those moral ends.

In so doing, you lay the groundwork for a raft of alchemist-mechanics—philosophers such as Hobbes and Rousseau and Calvin and Hegel and Locke and Marx and Schmitt and Mussolini—who, each in their own ways, seek to fiddle with the political program to bring about a perfect (or at least perfectible) society. A society free from oppression, from constraint, from whatever sin or obstacle the thinker himself most abhors.

Movement towards this preferred end-state is called “Progress.”

This would be all well and good if this picture of the universe were accurate, but the centuries since have battered this view from all sides...which has not made the slightest bit of difference to the great “scientific” minds who, casting aside disproofs and contrary evidence, are entranced by the temptation of a world of machines that can be managed and, in being managed, transformed into something greater.

The political arrangements—and their supporting economic and cultural regimes—of the ensuing three and a half centuries are best characterized as a series of revolutions washing over the world like waves spun off from the hurricane of the the alchemical-mechanic way of thinking.

They all have one thing in common:

They are novel.

And, like all things novel, most—or all—of them will not endure over the long term.

In the Before Time

Our civilization, operating at scale, is characterized by these novel features:

It is global in scope.

It is mechanized.

It is highly centralized.

It is—or tries to be—democratic at all scales.

It is radically egalitarian.

Earlier civilizations—even large scale ones characterized by broad freedom and prosperity—were different. They were intensely hierarchical, and that hierarchy, rather than centralizing power, distributed power according to the principle of subsidiarity (i.e. power was devolved to the most local possible level in order to relieve the administrative burden that would otherwise be born by higher, more distant authorities who had more important things to worry about).

In the feudal world, dukes, earls, and other lesser nobility were the local absolute potentates, with a parallel system of government existing within the Catholic Church. In the Roman world, a similar system of devolved relatively-autonomous power prevailed, with lesser kings, regional governors, procurators, and magistrates ruling different regions according to a melding of Roman Law with the traditional forms of the regions in question.

Similar systems prevailed in ancient Sumer, the Indus Valley civilization (as near as we can tell—there are very few surviving records), Persia, and Babylon. In more rustic locales (the Celtic, Mongolian, and minor ancient near-eastern civilizations) things were more closely organized along clannish lines.

In the modern west, only Switzerland preserves this kind of system. The Swiss cantons concentrate power at the local level to such an extent that the Swiss people often don’t know (or particularly care) who their President is. Some cantons are (by American standards) very repressive and intrusive, some are fairly liberal and laissez-faire, and all are democratically administered in a system where localities are of such a size that the officials with the most power can be expected to regularly interact with their subjects, which bakes accountability into the system. National defense is handled through mandatory national military service, which bakes loyalty and solidarity into the system. It is a modern example of a very, very old way of doing things. In some very important respects, Switzerland is less a nation-state than a federation of City-States, with centralized power being very potent, but only in the domains that concern the collective actions of, and relations between, the cantons.

Before the successive Enlightenment revolutions, people were sometimes free in the ways that were important to them—sometimes even more free than we are today—but they were never equal.

They sometimes had the right to vote, and their opinion and mood was a constant concern of their political leaders, but they were never sovereign (either in a practical nor an ideal sense).

They sometimes (in some places, often) had material comfort, but their world was not run by machines predicated on supply chains thousands of steps deep crossing through dozens of different countries.

They usually had to seek official approval to practice their trade or to move to another town, but they would have considered 30% a crushing tax rate and—in many times and places—could have killed a cop that trespassed into their house and got away with it. Our free people today have liabilities that were not even imposed on slaves, and the slaves of the American Deep South had freedoms that today’s middle-class law-abiding citizen can only dream of.

The idea that they should concern themselves with the affairs of the next town would feel a bit weird—the notion that the treatment of women in an alien culture on another continent should matter would seem downright crazy.

And I won’t even get into the differences in how sex was viewed except to say that, on this topic, conservatives and libertines and progressives are all living in a fantasy world concocted by propagandists in the late 19th century.

The world that preceded the long series of revolutions was as different from ours, in every way, as can be realistically imagined. All this is not to say that their way was better, or ours is. It’s not to say that all cultures everywhere did things the same way—they didn’t.

But it is to say that—in every, single, possible way—our WEIRD world is one of the most extreme, unusual, and novelty-saturated cultures in history.

And the Lindy effect is not kind to novelty.

The Lindy Bifurcation

I’m going to bet that most of you reading this (I know this is true for me writing this) generally like the modern world with its conveniences, its feeling of citizens and voters being important—even anointed—and we’d be loathe to give it up. Our system has done pretty well.

And it’s been around a long time, hasn’t it? So there’s no Lindy reason—and certainly no real reason—not to believe that the American way of representative democracy will suffer the fate of all those other radical enlightenment experiments in government, is there?

Or is there?

The legacy of the past three centuries of perpetual revolution is a decidedly mixed one. Industrialization aids (and necessitates) radical centralization, but centralization only works if it takes a classical shape: the pyramid.

If you want to put a heavy thing way up in the air, it needs support from outside. Stick a block of cement on a stick and it has to be balanced perfectly or it will fall. Plop that same block on top of a pyramid and it isn’t going anywhere short of an earthquake. The art of architecture is the art of making heavy things float in the air by supporting them in clever ways. Arches, flying buttresses, solid buttresses, domes, step pyramids, classic pyramids, all of them so the job of stabilizing the load at the top (and all the loads of all the layers going up to the top).

Industrialization puts a tremendous amount of power into the hands of those who build industries, and this power can become quasi-governmental in nature—which the hoi polloi don’t tend to like. But all industries are subject to disruption by competition, which the industrialists don’t like. Lobbied on one side by the hoi polloi, and another side by the industrialists, governments create new power for themselves to placate both the industrialists and the commoners, and in so doing they bring more of private life under their purview. In an open democratic system this is not an event, it is one cycle of an ongoing process that, if left unchecked, spins toward a totalitarian attractor state (as described in previous installments in this series).

If Newton’s universe provides the Christian moral mandate for centralizing power (to control the Machine and bend it towards good), and Newton’s alchemy provides the aspirational fuel (to transform the Machine into something that creates good things), industrialization—which is itself the embodiment of both mechanism and alchemy—provides the pretext for turning politics into the tool of ultimate social control and moral perfection.

To pull this off, you have to make sure that you can politically control absolutely everything, from industrial policy to land use to commercial relationships to social norms to the thoughts that form in the heads of the people.

One step at a time, so slowly that it never occurs to you to zoom out and look at the big picture, you centralize power to yourself, so that you have a real fighting chance of finally doing good in the world. You bring the corporations to heel. You bring the bankers to heel. You bring the people to heel. And to do this, you must rip up one after another of the social institutions, strip the power from officials lower down in the bureaucracy, de-legitimize sources of social power that don’t toe your line. You strip mine the stable, Lindy-compliant hierarchy of your own civilization until, if you’re successful, you become so powerful that you have the ability to do exactly what it is you intended to do...

...and then you discover that, because no one below you has power to act, no one has incentive to notice or filter relevant information. Nobody really knows what to do when you tell them to. You have become a concrete block at the top of a rickety Jenga tower.

All centralized power structures are inherently unstable and, when the incentives separate the interests of the rulers from the ruled, they quickly decay into democide—that unenviable state of affairs where, in order to maintain fading legitimacy among some key block of constituents, a government demonizes, expropriates, inters, and exterminates its own subjects. The Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Indian Wars, the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing Uyghur genocide are just a handful of the literally hundreds of examples of democides in the past couple hundred years. These events happen in both authoritarian and democratic systems (including America), but the base cause is always the desire of a centralized authority to quash threats to legitimacy and rally support and solidarity among the in-group.

The ancient Greeks, who invented democracy, spotted its central weakness: in order to rally enough votes to maintain power, an aspiring ruler must divide the populace. It’s easier to demagogue one’s way to power and stoke division than it is to build consensus and common vision. Through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have seen this particular failure of democracy bring itself to a head, time and again, in the United States, in Germany, in Australia, in Canada, and in Great Britain. The Lindy Effect should lead us to believe that, sooner or later, the trend of highly-centralized, revolutionary democratic states will come to an end—first in fact (assuming that this hasn’t happened already), and, sometime later, in form.

But as this situation comes to a head, it might not necessitate the end of representative democracy—assuming that it evolves (or is reorganized) into a form that correctly apprehends which part of the current arrangement cannot continue, and which parts might well survive long term. By jettisoning the former, and re-forming the latter, we might bifurcate the current monolith of late-industrial customs and culture and institutions and re-imagine our world into a more Lindy-compatible form.

In the United States, this would mean reshuffling the power distribution between states, localities, and the Federal Government, shifting intrusion into people’s private lives (education, drugs, alcohol, sex, family disputes, weapons, etc.) from Washington to the local statehouse and county seat, while moving matters of inter-regional disputation impinging on national free trade and security (water rights, transportation infrastructure, etc.) up to the Federal level even when they happen within states. The result would be a significantly smaller and significantly stronger Federal government, bigger and weaker state governments, and stronger local governments which would vary greatly in how repressive or liberal they are.

It would also probably mean a more capricious, heavy-handed, and unpredictable approach to foreign affairs, one aimed not at maintaining world peace and global trade, but at destabilizing any potential competitors so that we don’t have to worry about making other countries like us (at least, not the ones beyond our immediate sphere of influence, which would probably include the whole Western Hemisphere). This kind of behavior, while highly unpleasant, is much much more proven to be sustainable: by setting the terms of where disorder happens, order is maintained within the sphere. It’s a strategy as old as statecraft itself.

If such a reformation were to happen, it would come during the administration that takes power in 2028, after the wreck of the 2020s plays out to such an extent that the entire population is up to try something—anything—new that might restore American hope and identity.

Faith—a sense of trust in the institutions and in the legitimacy of one’s country and leadership caste—is indispensable to the continuance of any civilization.

My generation, Gen X, was never big on that kind of faith, and yet in our teens and early twenties we nonetheless got religion as we witnessed the fall of Communism, the rise of Chinese prosperity, the dawn of the Internet, and the vibrant cultural ferment, economic boom, and apocalyptic joy of the 1990s. This faith was short-lived—vaporized by the War on Terror—but our demographically-negligible generation nevertheless retains a memory of How Things Could Be if the system could be made to work again. We know it can all work well enough, because we’ve seen it. The most jaded and anti-authoritarian generation of the 20th century are now broadly, and ironically, keepers of the flame of hopeful nostalgia.

The Baby Boomer generation, raised in a fervor of 1950s Americanism, lost their faith in their country in their youth, only to find it renewed during their thirties with the advent of the Reagan Revolution and the prosperity and optimism of the 1980s.

The Millennial generation, now in their thirties and early forties, have neither a memory of a working system, nor any experience of a renewal-of-faith. Raised to expect great things of themselves and their country, every time in their lives that the world felt as if it might be turning a corner (the election of Obama, the post-2008 economic recovery, the economic boom of the late-2010s), some fresh new hell (a financial crisis, the Snowden leaks, a pandemic, a fractious election, a bitter culture war, the current brewing depression and world war) burst onto the scene to smash their hope to smithereens.

A civilization cannot endure in a coherent fashion without some kind of renewal-of-faith in the legitimacy of the system every generation or so. If such a renewal does not come, the continuity is broken, and it is difficult—or impossible—to restore.

Restoration is a regular theme in American history. Every eighty years or so, America finds a way to dream everything up again, to create a new reality to pour into the old Constitutional forms. That time has come again. A Lindy Bifurcation is one way this might happen, one that could satisfy the desires of a geographically and ideologically divided population to go their own way while reaching a new cultural and political detente that lowers the shrieking roar of intramural conflict to tolerable levels. There are others as well.

The coming economic disruptions will, one way or another, radically re-make the way America sees itself, and the way Americans see one another.

The question regarding renewal is:
Will we pull it off again?

Because, one way or another, some idealistic collection of souls will come up with a scheme to restore the faith of the nation...

...or the nation will be no more.