The problem with any scheme of normative thinking is that it is essentially proof against the disruptive effects of all learning and all experience. Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world” Photo: The Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland Last week, we discussed the huge gulf that exists between the thinking of the political class and its parasites in the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) on the one hand, and the attitudes and desires of ordinary people on the other. The latter—people like you and me—prize society, community, history and culture in a way that the elites cannot understand, and which they deeply distrust. The incapacity of these same elites to manage the problems of today, much less those about to hit us, can no longer be compensated for by the traditional solidarity among ordinary people, based as it is on society, culture etc. because too much of that has been deliberately destroyed by forty years of neoliberalism.
I didn’t have time to explore two related questions. First, why is there this enormous disparity, not just of opinion, but of belief and ethos, between those in power and their acolytes, and the rest of us? Second, and something I want to focus on especially today, since it is seldom discussed, is why elites persist in these weird ideas and beliefs even when it’s clear that they are not just faulty, but also bad for the reputations and careers, and even power and money, of those involved. I suggest that something went very wrong at the end of the Cold War, and this led to a whole series of blunders and misunderstandings, of which those involving Ukraine and Iran are only the most recent. I suggest also that some of the explanations are procedural and structural, but that some are psychological, and that in general, we need to pay much more attention to the way in which psychological factors influence behaviour in international politics.
But let’s start with the nuts and bolts. Our current political class and their advisers, but also the media wing of the PMC, which is probably more influential in determining how ordinary people see the world, have grown up and made their career in the post-Cold War world. A Political Director of a Foreign Ministry today, for example, would have been at school or university when the Berlin Wall came down. A political journalist, a tank-thinker, or a government policy-maker might well have been in nappies. Moreover, the overproduction of graduates, the proliferation of NGOs and more recently Internet sites, the end of any politics in politics, the abandonment of any real ideological distinction between major parties and the interconnections and even intermarriages within a PMC now almost completely homogeneous, mean that there is now an almost total overlap between formally separate and theoretically independent structures like government, politics, NGOs, intelligence organisations, the military, the media, and the Courts. There are correspondingly grave penalties for individuals among them who stray from the party line. And those who do so stray, in practice tend to cling together for protection in structures like the alt-media, which develop their own party lines and tend to enforce their own conformity just as fiercely.
Whilst there are, as always, differences within and between such groups, these tend to be within quite narrow limits. A journalist, an NGO advocate, a diplomat and an intelligence officer may have read the same subject at the same university, and then spent twenty years in a an environment where most people, quite genuinely, shared broadly the same opinions. They may disagree about detail in a case like that of, say Iran, but their intellectual approaches will be surprisingly similar. Everyone they meet, everyone they work with, everyone they socialise with, probably operates within the same limited intellectual perimeter, and there is increasingly a trans-national PMC as well, speaking a kind of globalised English and often educated at each other’s universities.
Which partly explains, if you like, why there tends to be a homogeneous view of the world. But it doesn’t explain why that view is almost always wrong, or at least incomplete, and at best a caricature. One mechanistic explanation is the increasing tendency towards generalist university training in subjects—such as International Humanitarian Law—which are essentially normative and theoretical, rather than descriptive and analytical, and don’t actually prepare anyone for anything intellectually, let alone practically. But let me suggest a more historically-based explanation which is also part of the answer.
The Cold War (and we’ll come back to that term) ended far more quickly than most people could process. It was not obvious why it ended when it did, or even when exactly it did end. All that was clear was that something changed violently, and almost overnight. German unification, a vague aspiration in 1988, was an accomplished fact two years later. But in any case, the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s was never a “war” of any kind, and in fact the term was unhelpful then, and is unhelpful now Apart from anything else, there was nothing really to fight about, which meant, for example, that NATO exercises to test procedures and decision-making were forced to scrabble around for any old scenario, just to kick the exercise off. A popular one was a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia following KGB destabilisation operations. (Ironically, I was told by a former Warsaw Pact planner that their usual scenario began with a NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.) The result was two massive and well-prepared armed camps glowering at each other, but with no obvious reason for fighting. However, the generation of political leaders in power then, like their advisers, had effectively known nothing else, and one of the major conceptual problems in 1989-91was trying to work out what it was that had actually come to an end, and what that meant. Understandably, there was a strong desire in many western capitals to change as little as possible, and to cling to what was known and trusted, especially since the future seemed to be so obscure. There were, however, two points that most decision-makers and pundits in the West were agreed on, and in both cases they were wrong.
The first was that the “Cold War,” whatever that had been exactly, was the source of the periodic crises the world had known over forty years. Soviet aggression and interference, or more neutrally superpower rivalry, explained why there had been so many wars and crises. With the fall of the Soviet Union, that tension had disappeared. It followed that the world could now look forward to a new era of greater peace and security. It’s worth pointing out that critics of NATO, and western policy generally, shared this delusion, albeit coming from the opposite end. They believed that, with the end of the Cold War, there would be no further need for military alliances, or even armies. What all this ignored, of course, was that many of the security problems in the world were not the product of rivalry between the two blocs, but rather that the blocs opportunistically exploited them. There was an unreal moment between roughly the end of 1989 and the middle of 1991 when it really did seem as though the world might be entering a new era. Part of the confusion and anger in Europe over the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, therefore, resulted from the bucket of cold water this represented upon all these naive hopes and reductionist analyses, as it turned out that conflicts around the world actually had causes that owed little to Washington or Moscow. In many ways, as we’ll see, the western security elites never really managed to catch up with with the continually changing nature of conflict and in many cases didn’t, and still don’t, understand what was going on.
The second was that the West had “won,” this conflict, if only because the Soviet Union and its ideology had disappeared. This had not been expected, and it stunned western policymakers, but in politics you don’t refuse something freely offered, so the West began to construct a narrative of victory: not a military victory, of course, but a political one, based on the superiority of its “system.” And importantly, 1989-90 was just at the end of the period when Reagan and Thatcher had been in power, all sorts of weirdo economic ideas had yet to be fully discredited, and the generation of 1968 was coming into positions of power. Strengthened by those who had heard of, if never actually read, that thing about the End of History, western leaders thought that they had found the one true doctrine, and that all that remained was to apply it. And applied it was, as successive generations cycled through universities and into government positions, and then into the field. The results are well enough known not to need rehearsing here. After all, if the Liberal/libertarian ideas current at the end of the 1980s really were some Hegelian final chapter in a process of ideological development (or that’s what you remembered reading anyway) then by definition, all other ideas were wrong and outmoded, including those of non-western origin.
There was no particular coherence to this ideology, except vague gestures in the direction of “freedom.” It’s ironic, therefore, that it was always inflexible and doctrinaire, and has only become more so with the passage of time. We tend to be most conscious of its economic and political dimensions (“free” markets, privatisation, western-style parliamentary democracy) but it also had a massive normative social and ideological component. Although it was the fighting in Afghanistan that got the coverage, in reality the majority of the international effort and budget was elsewhere: the country was a kind of free-fire zone for every normative social and ethical crusade that some government or organisation somewhere was prepared to fund. Needless to say, just about everything that was tried came to grief there, and wherever else in the world it was attempted.
As you might expect, the ideology and its associated activities were essentially performative, because that was the tradition of politics (“demos”, sit-ins) the new masters came from, and because they knew little about life, and, with the passage of time, were reinforced by those who knew even less. Thus, they believed corrupt political systems could be reformed by normative training courses conducted by westerners, military regimes could be reformed by creating parliamentary Defence Committees, and people could be lectured into being good, or at least being like us. It was enough to create structures, draft documents and pronounce words, and reality itself would change. Serial disappointments, for reasons we will explore, did not invalidate the ideas (they could not, since the ideas were Right) and simply led to demands for more resources and “better coordination.”
As I’ve suggested on a number of occasions, the ideology of the modern PMC is a kind of rag-bag of different ideas, contributed by different interest groups and mutually tolerated, much as monkeys groom each other. In activities overseas, from attempts at the management of major crises down to routine “governance” or “human rights” interventions, there was a remarkable coherence between the policies and activities of governments notionally on the “Left” and those notionally on the “Right.” For example, the Conservative government of David Cameron directed that all UK-funded training courses abroad had to include a compulsory module on dealing with Sexual and Gender-based Violence, whether or not that had any relevance to the subject-matter. (I was told that this approach was approved by Cameron himself.) But it was just as true of the luxurious fauna that flourished around such programmes: media, consultancies, parliamentary committees, think-tanks, NGOs, lobby-groups and others all demanded more action, more money and personnel, and more ambitious objectives. The fact that perhaps ninety percent of that effort was completely wasted, and that this undermined the limited amount of valuable work that was done, was rarely acknowledged. The critical literature discussing such interventions, both in individual countries and more generally , is still quite small.
Broadly speaking, the ideology maintained that, with the end of the Cold War, there was no reason for conflict any more. Conflicts were no longer “about” anything, and were either the result of misunderstanding, or the machinations of “entrepreneurs of violence,” who incited and profited from conflicts, and thus needed to be removed, preferably by being put on trial somewhere, for something. Peace and reconciliation were the natural outcomes of international intervention, and were the natural inclination of the populations anyway. The vast majority of those caught up in conflicts were victims (though some were bigger victims than others, which produced, for example, vicious disagreements between feuding NGOs about how to handle child soldiers involved in atrocities.)
If all this sounds a bit dismissive, then perhaps it should be. This ideology was the product of a highly normative middle-class western education, which emphasised thinking about how the world should be as opposed to how it actually was, and thus encouraged symbolic, rather than actual activities. This leads to something that I think is simply not understood properly (or perhaps even at all) in thinking and writing about international politics. The dominance of broadly Realist thinking is such that relations between states are typically interpreted through analysis of brute economic, political and military force, yet all experience teaches that this is highly misleading and incomplete.
In everyday life, we all recognise the importance of psychological factors in determining how we function, how we feel, our strengths and weaknesses, how we relate to each other, and not least how organisations and institutions work. We all feel the difference between a sympathetic callcentre operator and one who just wants to go home, or between an institution that does seem to have a concept of service and one that just wants your money, and we adjust our own behaviour accordingly. Much of our life consists of interactions with people moderated by how well we know them, what we think of them, what we hope to gain from dealing with them, and an awareness that our own personality, and our own past experiences and our attitudes, will affect how others see us.
Yet when we get to really important things—economics, politics, institutions, power—our society’s dominant ideology assumes that people act with perfect rationality, pursuing their greater advantage as they see it, almost like calculating machines. The idea of people as rational economic actors, never more than a “simplifying assumption” that got out of control, has been laughed almost into extinction (lotteries anybody?) although it still retains a cobra-like grip on the minds of the elite. Nonetheless, there is still a belief among international relations scholars, and pundits who vulgarise their theories, that nations themselves behave with absolute rationality. Of course, a moment’s thought reminds us that “nations” have no agency here. Everything is done by people. The merest history book will tell you about the influence that personalities, emotions and ambitions have on history, and of course all international dealings of any kind are actually carried out by individuals with their own histories, prejudices, ambitions, jealousies, and often complex relations with each other.
Consider the simplest example: that of a routine international negotiation. As you sit behind your national flag or nameplate, you are not thinking, or you should not be, about using your nation’s power to crush your negotiating partners. Your thoughts are much more mundane. What latitude do I have? How do I interpret my instructions? How indulgent will my boss be if I give way to this country on that issue? Then, you look around the table. A over there comes from a powerful country, but has a weak and unpopular Minister who doesn’t want arguments. B comes from a smaller country but is popular for their helpful attitude and often has good ideas. C likes to be cooperative but sometimes tries too hard to please and gets out ahead of what his Capital will tolerate. Meanwhile, X is someone I like and get on with, and we can often sort out problems over coffee. Y is from an influential country, talks a lot and likes the sound of their own voice but finds it hard to produce constructive ideas. Perhaps I need to pass them a note that they can later represent as their own proposal. Z is hopeless and often aggressive, and needs to be worked around somehow. And that’s just sizing up the room: obviously, the real work comes later.
All this is because within governments, decisions on important issues are made by people who may be clever or dense, experienced or completely new to the game, well-informed or hopelessly ignorant (or just not interested in knowing), cynical pragmatists or ruthless ideologues, with strong personal agendas or uninterested in anything except their own survival. And this is in times of relative normality, where you are working no more than sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. In a crisis, people behave in unpredictable and often irrational ways. Moreover, not all crises have the same dynamic: a crisis which you have to manage but where you are broadly in control has one dynamic. A crisis where you have to struggle to retain the initiative has a different dynamic, and a crisis where you have lost the initiative has yet a third. The last often produces extreme mental strain even on robust individuals, and can lead to governments and their leaders floating away from reality entirely, living in comforting fantasy worlds and only accepting information they want to hear. I strongly suspect something like that is happening in Washington at the moment, and that Mr Trump, in particular, may be quite close to a nervous breakdown of some kind.
What makes a crisis really bad is when you don’t understand what is going on, and why the things that are happening are happening. This is profoundly destabilising, and never more so than when you are part of a large and homogenous group that sees the world in much the same way, and thus everyone is confused together. Politics has largely lost the old ideological and conceptual divisions it once had, and entire political classes, not to mention their advisers, media commentators, pundits and the rest, now have a stultifying commonality of thought which makes intelligent discussion (let alone constructive criticism) essentially impossible. Moreover, their normative and performative upbringing and experience means that the ideas they do have in common are seldom more than banalities. If two European Ministers were to meet to discuss Ukraine, then virtually the whole of the conversation would amount to agreement that (1) we must keep up the pressure on Putin and (2) we must do more to help Ukraine. Their conceptual repertoire does not extend any further than that.
I’m not going to get involved here in the complex issue of the relationship between language and thought. But I’ll just observe that in practice it’s very hard for people to step out of discourses they are familiar with, and to understand and formally acknowledge that certain things are happening, and happening for reasons that are not to be found in their familiar standard repertoire. That repertoire consists very largely of pre-formatted normative expectations and written and verbal reactions, and a list of acceptable performative actions. Much effort therefore has to go into trying to manhandle unexpected and puzzling developments into an understood pattern, or at the very least pretending that they aren’t actually happening. This is the basic reason why the West has handled crises so badly since the end of the Cold War, and why its performance is actually getting worse, as its political class and advisers become more ingrown and incestuous with the passage of time, and sink ever deeper into their limited library of things they can understand and articulate.
Take nationalism, for example. In its wider sense, including tradition, history, language and culture, these constitute the Enemy, and are still seen as the source of many of the evils of the world. The idea that attachment to tradition, history, language and culture could actually be important to many people, and that they will struggle and even fight to defend them, is more than the current internationalist, post-national, transnational ideology can actually grasp. It follows, as I have suggested before, that such attachments are consigned on a wholesale basis to the “extreme Right,” and political or intellectual figures who articulate them are treated as pariahs. We therefore comprehensively fail to understand the behaviour of cultures that have not followed the West into transnational cultural agnosticism, still less into the West’s current auto-flagellation and denial of its own civilisation, which shows no signs of abating yet. But this isn’t just an intellectual problem, it’s also a political one. We associate “nationalism” in this wider sense, with aggression and conflict, and so we believe we have identified potential conflicts, good guys and bad guys, and most of all People like Us, and People not like Us. This tells us which political figures to cultivate, which to ignore, which organisations to fund, and which future leaders to cultivate. Meanwhile, the locals, who are often cleverer than we are, know what to say and how to behave in order to get our support. And their domestic opponents know that our position on “nationalism” is deeply conflicted: broadly, it’s OK when non-westerners do it, provided it’s directed against the West, and not against any obvious groups the West supports.
So the fact that people may actually care about some of these issues leads not just to errors of policy when dealing with the rest of the world, but to something more important: an inability to wrap our minds around the true nature of problems, still less talk about them, because we do not have the necessary concepts and vocabulary. Again, this is not ethnocentrism, which is a constant of any culture, but something much more worrying. Effectively, our political class and its parasites have a series of normative conditioned reflexes such that when a word or a concept is introduced, they immediately respond in one of a small number ways. (We’ve all known people who behave like that: it’s disturbing to see an entire political class doing so.)
For example, the West did not understand, and doesn’t really understand now, the series of events leading from the 2001 attacks on the US, to the campaign in Afghanistan, Iraq 2,0, the Arab Spring of 2011, the Islamic State, the terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015-16, up to the fall of the Assad regime. We can only act (or talk about acting) on the basis of things we can conceptualise. The theses and the functioning of Political Islam, for all that they have now been exhaustively studied and documented, still have not penetrated the minds of western elites, because they cannot be contained within the limited discourse and the terminology that the West has available. Muslims either live in countries with repressive regimes to be overthrown after which they will joyfully and spontaneously embrace our values, or if they live in the West they are the subject of institutional racist discrimination. Any other possible case is either ignored, or explained away as a result of tyrants, the activities of a few conservative thinkers, or, as a last result and if all else fails, the result of direct or indirect western involvement. The idea of giving such people themselves agency, acting according to principles they have themselves developed and believe to be true, just cannot be accommodated within the set of norms than dominates our thinking.
This is one reason why the West forgets everything and learns nothing: there are some things that cannot be learned and genuinely assimilated without sustaining psychological damage. The problem with any scheme of normative thinking is that it is essentially proof against the disruptive effects of all learning and all experience. Indeed, because we are talking about norms, rather than objective judgements or pragmatic opinions, or even facts, modification is almost impossible. It amounts to a change, and in practice the falsification, of a personal philosophy about the world. It’s a very different thing from changing your mind, and is often resisted aggressively (“I suppose you don’t think human rights are important then, and Pol Pot is one of your personal heroes!”)
Disappointments and failures, if they are acknowledged, are perceived as attacks on the Ego. After all, imagine that you are a political hack who after twenty years finally has a Ministerial position, and have been dealing for the last few months with Ukraine. Imagine that you soberly decide that the game is up, and you say so. What will happen? Well, it will be a question first of whether you resign before you are sacked, but then you will be cast into the outer darkness, lose any chance of a decent career, perhaps lose your parliamentary seat, and be thoroughly worked over by every pundit, media and Internet outlet and political rival. But that’s not the worst, because your whole life has been built around success in politics, and everyone you know, personally and professionally, will now reject you, and you will become an unperson. In practice, this amounts to something like Ego Death, so closely is your Ego bound up with your professional and institutional status, as was once the case with the Communist Party or certain religious sects. If there is a single dominant explanation for the persistent unreality of the western political class’s approach to Ukraine and Iran it probably that. How nice it would be to see headlines like FEAR OF EGO DAMAGE, DEATH, PREVENTS REALISM ON UKRAINE, EXPERTS SAY. But we may have to wait a while for that.
A consequence of a habit of normative thinking is that belief that if the world should be like that, and it isn’t, then there must be a diabolical effort to make it not so. If bad things happen, this cannot be because the world is like that (since by definition it isn’t), nor because of chance or bad luck, but because of the subversion of ideals by organised evil machinations. It’s a paradox of our culture that our bookstores are overflowing with books on personal problems and self-improvement, whilst popular accounts of the world tend to be materially reductive in the extreme. It’s true, of course, that if you are looking for the causes of some crisis or war, then it’s just easier to speculate about the malevolent role of oil companies than to consider the psychological make-up of those taking the big decisions, but history suggests it’s precisely personal factors that matter most.
For example, I’ve mentioned Apophenia several times in other essays, which is the tendency to see patterns in data that aren’t really there. This doesn’t seem to be an illness as such (though schizophrenics tend to demonstrate it to a high degree) but rather an exaggeration to pathological extremes of the natural need to identify patterns in the world that help us survive. For many people, it’s more comforting to have any pattern to events, even a threatening one, than no pattern at all, as a classic Defence Mechanism against a world that is too complex to deal with. And of course the need to find the pattern (or avoid chaos) comes first: the actual “proof” is secondary, which is why apophenics very rarely give up in the face of negative or non-existent evidence. The proof is being hidden. If the files on alien contacts aren’t there, it’s obviously because they have been destroyed. And research shows that people involved in politics tend to suffer more from Apophenia than average, which is not reassuring.
Apophenic explanations can be very attractive. There’s the fascinating case of Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB defector who managed to persuade many important people in the West that the Soviet Union was engaged in a vast deception operation, facilitated by agents at all levels in western governments, and that the Sino-Soviet split was a myth, the East German and Hungarian risings were false flag operations and the 1968 Prague crisis was a KGB deception operation. He warned publicly that the Soviet Union would pretend to be weaker and weaker, only to spring a trap at the last moment. Thus, everything that happened in Moscow, and just about anywhere else in the world, could be fitted into the assumed conspiracy somehow, and every indication that the Soviet system was starting to break down in the 1980s just meant that the trap was about to be sprung. Golitsyn lived long enough to feel vindicated, with the arrival in power in the new Russia of Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer. But his allegations (supported by others, more or less well-informed) helped to cripple the US intelligence agencies and other western governments with witch-hunts and loyalty investigations, to the point that some wondered ironically if Golitsyn wasn’t himself part of a deception operation.
But it’s characteristic of this way of seeing the world that, once an all-encompassing explanation has been found, people will cling to it whatever the objections. There’s a mordant amusement to be taken for example, from seeing how, at each stage of the unravelling of the tragic farce of US attempts over the last 25 years to remake the Middle East, then with each defeat and each failure, believers nonetheless find new ways of insisting that “this was the plan all along,” because there has to be a master-plan of course: an apophenic mindset absolutely requires one. And there are many other examples.
Our emotional attitudes to the world, which in turn shape our political opinions and ultimately what we believe about the world today, are of course the products of our youth. I’ve discussed many times the fundamentally adolescent nature of out current political class, which is becoming more serious as middle-class parents and universities seek to accommodate adolescent growing-pains by indulging them effectively forever. Adolescent behaviour is almost by definition performative, and is intended to shock. As a teenager you might wear a ghastly tee-shirt or listen to music with offensive lyrics. As a student, you might go on demonstrations against alleged events in foreign countries about which you can do nothing. As a young diplomat you enthusiastically introduce sanctions packages which look good but achieve nothing practical at all. But we shouldn’t forget either that adolescence is when we start to realise that our parents are not the all-powerful divine beings we once thought they were, but rather fallible and relatively powerless ordinary people. In some cases, the desire for parent substitutes, passing through gurus, or these days Influencers, lands on the shoulders of governments, who are also credited with the supernatural powers that we once thought our parents had. Anyone who’s worked in government is familiar with the furious attacks by the media and ordinary citizens against governments for “doing nothing” in the face of some insoluble problem or other.
But it goes back beyond adolescence. And here I want to insist on the importance of the role of mediation in the popular understanding of the world. Few people now listen diligently to the speeches or press-conferences of world leaders, or read transcripts. At best, they may read a news story, with its inevitable bias and selectivity. More normally they read something on X, or perhaps on Substack or a site devoted to political commentary which is basically an opinion piece, telling them what to think with perhaps a few citations. And so low are the barriers to entry that today, there is an almost infinite range of prepackaged opinions to choose from. Like will tend to attract like.
One of Sigmund Freud’s greatest insights (confirmed by modern neurology) was that there are memories hidden so deeply in our minds that we do not even know they are there, and so cannot even talk about them (thus, they are called “non-declarative” memories.) All of the memories of the first few years of our lives are like this, and we only know about them at all by the indirect consequences: the sense of unmet needs, for example, and how we grapple with them. More generally, when we are young we absorb a view of what the world is like which is done largely or completely unconsciously, and which is generally proof against any amount of experience or contrary evidence. So it’s easy to see, for example, that growing up in a family with a domineering parent or parents will predispose you to see the world in terms of stern and hostile forces that you can’t control, and you will naturally be attracted, as an author or reader, to arguments featuring Hegemony and Empire. Similarly, growing up in an atmosphere of repression and tension where some things are never said and there are secrets that cannot be discussed, will incline you to a belief in hidden powers and secret conspiracies. (I say “incline” because of course there’s nothing deterministic here: we’re talking about tendencies.)
That much is straightforward enough, and most people would agree with it after a moment’s thought. The problem is that it isn’t possible to construct a general theory on such a basis, because, bluntly, people are different and react differently to different situations. The calm intellectual self-confidence of the Marxist or the Islamic or Christian fundamentalist may be misplaced and superficial, but at least it produces an internally coherent view of the world. But if we can do nothing else, we can try to shake off our addiction to reductive materialist explanations, and accept that in politics, perhaps more even than elsewhere, people are strange .
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