Aurelien – So It Goes…But when does it stop?

Stein‘s Law: “if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop.“

Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”

Most people have heard at least a version of what is called Stein‘s Law: “if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop.“ To some this is a very banal insight, to others it is a mere tautology. But in fact I think it opens the way to a bigger and deeper truth, which has to do with timescales, and how far we actually know what we mean, when we talk about possible changes in the world.

Before I came across Stein’s observation years ago, I occasionally played at trick on people who tried to persuade me that some political or economic system was so well-established there was no chance of ever changing it. I asked them in return whether they thought that the system would endure for the next million years. The response was usually an irritable “obviously not!“ So what about the next thousand years, I asked? Again the response was generally irritable but perhaps less comfortable. Very well then, I said let us assume a period of 100 years instead. Is the system going to survive that long? Now that is a real question, which is to say that if something cannot go on forever, and a hundred years is a plausible maximum, it could stop tomorrow, it could stop in ten years time, or fifty years or a hundred years. In other words, life today is full of systems, beliefs, power structures and other things which have an inherently limited life, but where we have no real idea how long that life is. It is doubtful whether the present economic system will be unchanged in a hundred years time (given how much things have changed in the last fifty) but we do not know whether that system will last, in its essentials, for years, for decades or for generations. Most people don’t like being asked such uncomfortable questions, because it invites them to make judgements about the viability of aspects of our current world, and to engage in that most hazardous of all intellectual occupations: prophecy.

Thinking about it, it becomes fairly obvious that nobody really believes that all aspects of our current system, whether they like them or not, will last for centuries to come. The real issue is when and how they each stop and what the relationship between their end-dates is. This is particularly the case with things that people don’t like, and where they commonly say, often angrily, “this cannot possibly continue!” I want to spend a moment deconstructing that judgement, because I think it actually can refer to three quite different cases, two of which I will spend a fair proportion of the rest of this essay talking about.

In the first case, when people say “this cannot possibly continue,“ they are thinking in essentially moral terms. That is to say that they see the situation they are complaining about as morally unacceptable, and they assume and believe that something will therefore happen to put things right. This can be regarded as a religious attitude, because it is obviously related to theodicy, or the question of why an omnipotent God allows terrible things to happen in the world. But it goes beyond that, because even in a secular society we tend to have clear, often unspoken, assumptions about the moral structure of the world. That is, whether or not we believe that there is a supernatural dimension to life, we nonetheless believe in some kind of implicit moral order, which must ultimately be restored even if it has been disturbed in the short term. As I mentioned last week, popular culture very often features a restoration of order and moral structure at the end of a story, sometimes violently. Most of us would actually find it very difficult to live in a world in which we genuinely believed that there was no underlying moral order at all . Indeed, without a belief in an ideal underlying order of some kind, it is actually impossible to have any coherent moral views. To complain about what is happening in Gaza, for example, we have to have a view of what the moral order of the universe should be, such that these events are a violation of it and should therefore stop. In the absence of such a coherent moral framework, all we can say is “these things upset me personally. Take them away.”

So the first reason why we believe that things that cannot go on forever must stop, is that they offend the basic moral principles of the universe. But there are also severely pragmatic reasons for things to stop, and I will give some examples of those later. One type involves hard limits which will be reached at a point that cannot necessarily be defined in advance, but will be known once we reach it. The most popular example of this is the depletion of fossil fuels, where the supply is not infinite, where usage is continuous and cannot be reduced below a certain level, and thus where at some point we are going to start experiencing real shortages of certain fuels. There are various calculations of when this will be, which vary with the assumptions they are based on, but most of them suggest that this point will arrive in the uncomfortably near future. We’ll look at a few examples from the present day.

Likewise, there are situations which we can see are inherently unstable , such that a structure, a society, an ideology or some other entity is not going to last very much longer. The problem is that we cannot say how long that longer actually is. History is full of examples of situations and systems which lasted far longer than anyone thought they would, or alternatively collapsed at a point where they were felt to be still capable of surviving for a long time. It’s therefore interesting to look at a few historical examples of this tendency also, and to see whether we can learn anything that might be applicable to today. In this essay I will look at some of the principal issues in today’s world, and into which of these latter two categories they most conveniently fit, bearing in mind that many problems have elements of both. Not being a theologian, a moral philosopher or an ethical teacher of some kind, I’m going to leave my first (moral) category largely alone from now on, except for one remark about politics.

“This can’t go on,” is best understood in this (moral) context as an assertive statement that the world should be different than it is, and that it is the fault of the world for not conforming our demands. So to hear someone say ”this can’t go on in Gaza. Trump should be on trial in The Hague,” is actually to hear “the world should be different than it is. The United States should have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, lawyers and military experts should have identified specific events for which he was clearly responsible which breached one or more of the Statute’s list of crimes, and included all the Elements of Crime, attempts should have been made to put Trump on trial in the US, which have failed, and the Prosecutor has presented the Pre-Trial Chamber both with evidence that the US is unable or unwilling to carry out the prosecution itself, and that the alleged crimes are well documented, fall within the ICC’s competence, and that an indictment should be issued, that the US should therefore be asked to extradite Trump and cooperate with the Court, which it does.” Anything else is just hand-waving for effect, recalling the caricatures from my youth of the retired Colonel, reading about the latest scandal involving Young People in the Telegraph , and muttering something about “if there isn’t a law against this there damn well ought to be.” We all want the world to be different, and if there are hard limits preventing us from having what we want, so much the worse for the hard limits.

Time does not reconcile us, and we often want the world to have been different, without these hard limits, even long afterwards. Retrospectively, and indeed almost from 1939, the ‘thirties were reinterpreted as a decade when the rise of fascism could and should have been stopped, and the world not allowed to go on that way any more. Yet much of this thinking is fantasy, assuming a magic ingredient lacking at the time, or some kind of divine intervention that didn’t happen. In 1938, Britain and France threatened Hitler with war if he invaded Czechoslovakia, and a furious Hitler accepted a political solution. No-one has ever explained what else the two countries could have done (threatened war if Hitler didn’t invade Czechoslovakia?) but that isn’t the point. The argument is not historical but essentially theological: the sequence of events that so disfigured the 1930s simply should not have been allowed to occur. Some greater power should have intervened to prevent it. The result is that fantastic amounts of effort have been deployed to explain banal things in complicated ways, and cubic kilometres of books written to expound complex theories about fascism, authoritarianism, populism etc. when in most cases all we can say is that Shit Happens, or as Kurt Vonnegut memorably said , “So it goes.”

To be fair, let us add that sometimes dissatisfaction with the state of the world can lead to idealism, commitment and ultimately to positive change. But more often it can lead instead to a kind of sterile bitterness that actually obstructs change. Unfortunately, impotent anger without a practical outlet, directed against things you can’t influence let alone change, can be surprisingly addictive for some.

Accepting that the world is as it is, we can nonetheless speak of situations where things genuinely “can’t go on,” for very practical reasons, as I have sketched out above. Before plunging into what I hope will be a useful discussion of several such situations, I’d just point out a useful three-part distinction, based predominantly on time. There is often an underlying situation where either a hard limit is being approached, or the situation is so unstable that it can fall apart any time. There is then a trigger event, which transforms the underlying potential problem into a real one, and the theoretical crisis into an actual one. (It may of course be the arrival of the hard limit itself) The uncertain distance in time between these things is why detailed historical prognosis is generally pointless, and anyway, historians will later argue about whether the trigger event came inevitably at that time, or whether it could have come much earlier or later. (I’ve been reading books about the fall of Saudi Arabia since at least the 1980s. It was still there when I last looked.) Finally, and critically, there are personal factors, involvement of individuals, and attempts by actors to shape, or at least benefit from, the results of the trigger events. It is the combination of all of these that makes intelligent speculation about the future difficult, although not altogether impossible if we go about it in a measured and logical fashion.

It’s worth dwelling on that point about personal involvement. We tend to think in extremes: heroes re-making the world or alternatively great historical forces determining everything. But as Marx famously suggested, the relationship between people and their times is a dialectical one: sometimes, it is frankly accidental. Had it not been for the Revolution, Napoleone Buonaparte would have remained a junior officer in the French Army, and indeed had Corsica not become French just before his birth, he would have remained an Italian. The Revolution, in other words, with its sense of “this can’t go on” was a necessary condition for the rise of Napoleon, but it didn’t make him appear from nowhere. So it goes.

There’s also the problem that important historical discontinuities are often assumed to result mechanically from the breakdown of systems, and so historians assume retrospectively that the previous system was exhausted and needed to change. This is not always the case: changes are often the result of accidents, coincidences, pure luck or even sheer stupidity. The coming to power of Margaret Thatcher was presented even at the time, and is now nearly always accepted, to be of epoch-making importance: the final nail in the coffin of a postwar consensus that had outlived its time. Yet in fact the General Election victory of May 1979 was a combination of stupidity (Callaghan, the Labour Party leader, postponing calling an election he might have won) coincidence (an unusually severe winter) and of course the luck that brought Thatcher to the Party leadership by accident in the first place. She would have been thrown out at the next election anyway, had the Labour Party not sportingly decided to destroy its chances of winning by splitting into two separate parties fighting each other. There was, in fact, no epoch-defining change, no massive move in public opinion, no widespread demand to jettison the postwar consensus: that was a rationalisation imposed on a shambolic and incoherent set of circumstances by the official hagiographers who wrote about Thatcher later. Public opinion in Britain in 1979 was broadly centre-left, and became increasingly so through the 1980s. Desperately short of money because of their mismanagement of the economy, Thatcher’s government took refuge in privatisation, not even mentioned in their manifesto, and so started a political trend which eventually spread all over the world, and helped to create the mess we are living in now. But this was only possible at all because of mistakes made by others, as well as sheer chance. So it goes.

History remembers the names of victors and survivors, but sometimes the incompetent or the stupid play a role that is just as important, by clearing the space and establishing the terrain for the ungodly to occupy. And frequently, the triumph of these same dark forces is assumed with hindsight to have been inevitable, the product of a situation that could not go on any longer. That may happen, but as a general rule it’s at best an oversimplification. For example, for a long time, it was habitual to dismiss the Weimar Republic as a sham, as a system imposed on Germany, that perished for lack of popular support and because the social and cultural excesses of the time pushed conservative Germans into voting for Hitler. Yet more recent work disputes this: without the Great Depression, many experts now believe that the Republic would have become generally accepted, and anyway when transexual nightclubs were flourishing in Berlin, the Nazis were still a fringe right-wing nationalist party. If there was a single dominant reason for Hitler’s arrival in power, it was probably stupidity. Heinrich Brüning, who became Chancellor in 1930, chose to combat the Depression with austerity, thus making it worse. As it worsened, he tried to combat it with more austerity. This alienated a great deal of moderate and left-wing opinion, and prevented him forming a coalition with the Social Democrats, while driving his own supporters towards parties of the extreme right, notably the DNVP, the Nazis’ great rival. He took to ruling by decree instead. Brüning did more than anyone else to destroy the Weimar Republic (of which he was a lukewarm supporter), and to bring Hitler (whom he despised) to power. He left Germany before meeting the fate of many that country’s politicians, and lived in obscurity, mostly in the United States, until his death in 1970.

This is a good example of the three-part structure I mentioned above. There was a very difficult underlying situation: the Versailles Treaty, the unresolved rivalry with France, reparations and the instability of the Republic itself, would have been a handful under any circumstances and would have produced crisis and perhaps war, but, without the trigger event of the Depression, might have been manageable. The Depression undermined the legitimacy of the governments that didn’t seem to know how to deal with it, and correspondingly increased support for the extremes, including the Communists and the various right-wing groupuscules, of which the Nazis were one. But without Brüning’s criminally inept handling of the situation, and the clumsy and malign interventions of the “political general” Kurt von Schleicher, the Bavarian corporal at the head of a bankrupt political party, riven by internal disputes and fast losing popular support, would never have had a chance at power. So it goes.

Yet for most of us it’s deeply unsatisfying to look at historical events this way. We seek threads of direct causation. We invoke destiny, Great Men, great cyclic or teleological historical forces, economic determinism, and if all else fails, we invoke conspiracies. We want to believe not merely that some system has exhausted itself and change is inevitable, but also that the results of that change rationally follow from the circumstances of the time, and were therefore at least in part predictable. And if you have ever written a book—or even an article—on a historical subject, you will know that it is almost impossible to exclude a teleological component from the analysis, simply because we know how things actually turned out. Likewise, we often praise those who predicted what actually happened (or something like it) and accuse of blindness those who didn’t, even though the first may have been right, and the second wrong, purely by chance.

This is why I think that the distinctions I made earlier are important, because they enable us to differentiate between different levels of causality and probability. In particular, they mean that we can distinguish elements which truly amount to hard limits from elements where a degree of uncertainty is inevitable. To revert to an earlier example, the French government in 1938 faced a number of hard limits. Its population was only two-thirds of that of Germany, most of its industry had been devastated in the First World War and not entirely rebuilt, much of the political class and much of the financial and industrial classes were adamantly opposed to a war against Germany, and there was no chance of a parliamentary majority for war in a political system which anyway looked like collapsing at any moment, Paris was much closer to the Franco-German frontier than Berlin was, and an aggressive war was simply out of the question. Against that background, successive governments did what they could by way of rearmament, but could only plan for a defensive war. The French General Staff believed that the main German attack would come through Belgium, with a subsidiary thrust through the Ardennes, which was indeed what the Wehrmacht originally intended. But in the end the main attack came through the Ardennes. The French were well-equipped and fought bravely, but they had no answer to new German tactics, and the Germans had all the luck. The attack could easily have failed, especially if the weather had been worse, but it didn’t. So it goes.

So when we look at the impressive array of challenges facing the world at the moment, it is useful, perhaps, to apply some of these distinctions, since there are limitations that cannot be got around, and there are also great uncertainties, depending on how individuals, institutions and governments react.

Let’s start with the most obvious. It is clear that, as well as the longer-term and well-known hard limit on fossil fuel resources, there will very shortly be important hard limits on the availability of a whole range of fuel-derived products, ranging from electrical power to plastics to medicines. Because the system is global and interconnected, because it passes through so many stages, and because parts of the system have been destroyed or damaged already, these new and lower limits, although unclear in detail, can be regarded as already established. Note that these limits do not have to be at catastrophic levels: they may simply mean that there is just not enough to go round to sustain current demand. But even relatively minor shortages (perhaps 10% or so) could have major political consequences, because the world would be in an entirely new type of situation. Countries would compete against each other and no doubt bid up the price of certain products, and there is no way, for example, of ensuring that those counties in the greatest need have access to the food or pharmaceuticals they need. The only rationing system we have today is rationing by price. So it goes.

But neither are governments remotely prepared for such a contingency domestically. It may seem obvious that hospitals have a greater need for electricity than do “AI” data centres, and a greater need for sterile plastic than do fast-food restaurants. But how would you go about ensuring such a priority in practice, or even deciding what it should be? After all, in Europe countries import and export electrical power, and in most of the West we import spoons for fast-food restaurants just like we import sterile bags for storing blood. Governments may not actually have the practical ability to make choices of this kind. And even at the most banal level, how do we ensure that ambulances have enough fuel to operate even if it is at the expense of Amazon deliveries? And again, if petrol is to be limited to essential workers, is the finance director of a hospital catering company an essential worker? Modern western governments have no capacity to understand, let alone deal with, even such relatively minor challenges. The fact of having to live with hard limits, the fact that that there may just not be enough of things, has never crossed their minds, because they just assume that the price mechanism will take care of everything. And to be fair, they aren’t helped by pundits who calculate the price effects of having 20% less oil, without pausing to reflect that you nonetheless have twenty per cent less oil.

But in most western countries the political and social structures in which these problems will be posed are also changing. To an extent greater than most of us imagine, they will be determined by hard limits. In no particular order; broken families create a greater demand for housing for the same size of population, concentrated among the poorer parts of society, and requiring provision of more social services and causing greater difficulties with education. These families already exist and the children are getting older. Children of one-parent families are already born and increasing in number, leading to statistically-probable increases in crime and poor educational outcomes. The ethnic composition of the electorate in most European countries in 2040—radically different from today’s—can be calculated now. The number of lonely, bitter women living alone in retirement in ten years because they valued career, power and money over personal relationships of any kind is already fixed: they are now in their fifties. People who will require decades of treatment for obesity, diabetes or Long Covid and other infectious diseases are already suffering from them. Immigrant family groups already existing contain more and more elderly people who are more likely to be ill, and less likely to speak the language of the host country. And there’s a lot more cheerful news where that came from.

Some of these problems are theoretically manageable. For example, European nations could put enormous resources into recruiting and training teachers to make sure that children of immigrant parents, never mind the parents themselves, spoke the language of the host nation fluently. This would help to address a host of social problems, but there is no sign of any country doing it on a remotely large enough scale, and a lot of political opposition to the idea anyway. But in many other cases, even theoretical solutions are not available, and the best that can be done is to manage the problems. Yet many governments decline to do even that: police, local government and even medical services are just withdrawn from “difficult” areas and the inhabitants left to rot.

This cannot go on forever: the question is when and how it will stop. Yet it’s not necessarily the government that will decide. Our old friends the Muslim Brothers, their tactics honed over the generations in different continents, are already there, established at local level, helping people with day-to-day problems, providing education, of a sort at least, organising communities around Islamic principles. We are already seeing the rise of overtly Islamist political parties at local level, where they can have an influence on schools (segregation of education of boys and girls, girls banned from sports, for example) but they are already thinking ahead to the 2040s, when the electorate of some cities will be substantially Muslim, and could be persuaded to elect Islamist candidates. At that point, they will be able to press for their social agenda—restrictions on homosexuality and abortion for example—as the price of supporting a weak government coalition.

These subjects are not to be spoken of, and it’s very hard to know which trigger event will turn the underlying situation into a crisis and how. The most obvious way in which this could happen is through mass-casualty killings such as those that terrorised Europe in 2015-16, but that requires a level of organisation that Islamist groups currently don’t have. Non-Islamist populations have in general demonstrated an impressive level of restraint and maturity over the last decade, but that could change if there are more incidents like the recent murderous attack on a Gay Pride march in Berlin. It’s striking that politicians of various countries, usually obsessed with the potential threat for revenge from the “extreme Right” in such cases, have found the courage to condemn the perpetrator and his ideology too, on this occasion. But there is little practical that can be done now: rooting out the Muslim Brothers is possible but politically dangerous, and may well fall foul of human rights laws. In any event, the populations being radicalised are already here. It may well be that in years to come, events such as these marches will routinely have to be cancelled on security grounds. So it goes.

It would be easier if we were not up against the hard limits of declining political cultures and declining state capacity, neither of which is, in practical terms, reversible. When the neoliberal age began, both western political systems and western government structures benefited from inherited social capital from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when politics was treated seriously and government and the public service were vocations. For all the complaints about both politicians and bureaucracies at the time of its origin (and some were self-serving in the extreme) the neoliberal revolution has destroyed what remained of the integrity of western political and administrative systems, while ensuring that the minimum conditions for even attempting to rebuild them no longer exist. The old system of taking the best university graduates no longer works. Universities in many western countries are close to breaking down, and cannot be rebuilt, and it is not clear how long they will now last.

Yet whilst these neoliberal policies have increased the power of large private sector companies to make money, they haven’t, of course, provided any substitute for government services except for the rich. And many of the largest companies, depending as they do on ones and zeroes, are looking distinctly shaky at the moment anyway, as the “AI” revolution starts to come to pieces. But the endless weakening of the state and the endless degradation of the political system cannot go on forever: therefore they will stop. But they will stop because effectively they will have terminated, and people will not be able to rely on the state for even basic protection and amenities any more. There will come a trigger event such as the effective withdrawal of the state from a major city or even a region, and here we can be reasonably sure of what will happen. Organised crime, already advancing as the state retreats, will take over, and ensure “protection” and the provision of services. In most cases, as is the case now, these crime gangs with be organised around, and prey upon, immigrant communities. This process cannot be halted, let alone reversed, because the gangs already exist. So it goes.

In theory, a robust political system could survive these challenges. But over the last couple of generations, careerist neoliberal politics has destroyed the traditional major parties of Left and Right, leaving them hollow shells. The result has been the growth of what are essentially new protest parties, often based around individuals, with incoherent aims and little institutional capacity, rising and falling quickly, at a time when the level of the political class has never been so low, and the class itself so despised. Here in France, we are gloomily awaiting the 2027 Presidential election, where there are so many potential candidates, that the first round victors could be decided by half a percentage point, and the “winner” may scarcely make it into double figures. The current nightmare is a second round between Mélenchon and Le Pen, which would probably cause the political system to explode. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that undecided voters would hold their nose and vote for Le Pen, or just not vote at all, but it’s highly unlikely that her party could then form a government. That said, Mr Burnham’s recent success in Britain is interesting, as much for the symbolism (it resembled a coronation or a peaceful coup d’état) as for the encouraging signs of a government that actually intends to do something. All may not be lost therefore.

Since it was in Britain that the neoliberal gang first took power, it is fitting that neoliberalism is coming to an end there first. No policy which is essentially one of asset-stripping can last beyond the hard limits of what can be asset-stripped. No policy of financialisation can continue when there is nothing left to financialise. So, inevitably, we are seeing the beginnings of re-nationalisation, because running public services for profit cannot go on forever, and is therefore now stopping. The irony of this happening to a system to which there was “no alternative,” is almost unbearable. This will be more difficult in Europe because of EU rules, but it will come eventually. The trigger events here are a combination of problems with which only governments can ultimately deal: climate change, fires and floods, fuel shortages, new diseases and incipient state breakdown.

All of this takes place in an international environment that is rapidly becoming unrecognisable. The US has now come up against the hard limits of what its military capacity can accomplish. For a long time these limits were disguised under what I have called Hollywood Hegemony: the PR campaign to claim that the US was some kind of globe-bestriding hegemonic empire. This was apparently genuinely believed by many in Washington, and tolerated with some weariness and exasperation by much of rest of the world. Iran, more than Ukraine, will be seen as the trigger event that disposed of this collective hallucination. The problem is there is no way back: there are hard economic and technical limits on the rebuilding of US military power, and the PR campaign will have to be abandoned, no matter how many think-tanks push out ambitious fairy-tale schemes for recovering a hegemony the US never genuinely had anyway. And whilst the dollar is a powerful instrument, you can’t eat dollars and you can only buy what is for sale. So it goes.

Quite how the consequences of that will play out, I leave to those better informed about US domestic politics to debate. But my impression is that much of political Washington lives in a fantasy world, and will bitterly resist the incursion of reality. I’m not sure that the political system in Washington, nor individual politicians, are actually capable of sensibly managing a situation where the decline in US power is so stark and unmistakeable, and where other and newer players start to arrange the world in their own interests.

To survive the future, we need to be able to distinguish where the hard limits actually are, and therefore what the remaining scope for intelligent manoeuvre might be. It is surprisingly easy to oscillate between foolish optimism and the idea that all hope is lost, and it isn’t always obvious, in a hyper-connected world, where the truth lies, since much depends on obscure detail. The two extremes of denial and nihilism are already popular, and politically they are inevitably intertwined. At some point, governments will have to abandon simple denial as a posture, and start to be more honest with their publics about the hard limits on what can still be done. This will provoke anger of course, but also an increasing sense of helplessness and despair which governments will be as ill-prepared for as they are ill-prepared for most things.

The irony of course, is that under neoliberalism, governments have spent forty years progressively telling their electorates that they can’t have a decent life, good-quality education and healthcare, or security in the streets because “there’s no money” and “the bond markets won’t like it.” (has anyone ever interviewed the bond markets, I wonder?). With Covid, and even more with Ukraine, this rhetoric was abandoned, and so eye-watering sums of money were sent to Ukraine without strings attached, some of which has since been recycled to prop up the housing market in Paris. Suddenly, governments face the sickening realisation that money, as such, doesn’t really matter. It’s only a collection of ones and zeroes after all. What matters is whether the goods and services are physically available, and soon there will be less of them. That’s what a hard limit actually is. But then that’s how it goes.

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