Preparing for the apocalypse

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it. 

If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be.

I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. This patently unfair system is unbreakable until a crisis of gigantic proportion overwhelms it. This is because of the underlying ideas, systems and values that prop it up: There is no escape, no possibility of reform. Revolution, which some Leninist friends may dream about, only arrives after collective stupidity broke the system already - or created the objective condition. In other words, Lenin needs a Trump. 

We have got the latter, in a full, unfettered version 2, and I am not prepared for the former, but this impending crisis, when it comes, will shift the ground and create space for revolutionaries. One has to be mindful that for every Lenin, there are Stalins, Mussolinis and Hitlers lurking around in close vicinity. In fact, as we know, once we are ready to resort to violence as a means to an end, one never gets out of it. Lenin never could. It is the means which are more important than the end, because it creates the foundation of ideas that history stands upon. 

But, at this point in the story of humanity, our most distinctive ability - to imagine and to create new ideas - is truly impaired. This is because what a new idea is and how it is to be generated have been stolen. The emphasis on innovation - the premise that new ideas generate economic returns - has been disastrous for new ideas. The rich and the powerful have coddled the space, and therefore, those trying to think afresh are not battling against the vested interests but trying to further those vested interests instead. It's not me saying this: I am quoting Joel Mokyr, the newly minted Economics laureate, who points out that this is a unique situation. I am just drawing my conclusion that absent the battle against vested interests, a new idea is not going to be new or disruptive.

 

Therefore, I see no escape. If we are to seek freedom, an Internet split in walled gardens of big tech and national internets will not give us that. The universities are about to sign away their freedom in the United States, as their counterparts have already done in exchange of government funds around the world. The media, lacking courage, have become partisan. I do not expect, on top of this, government-funded or family-office backed incubators to give us ideas for change, only products that can dominate us even more.

 

There I am, on this Sunday evening, rather gloomily looking at the world. I still believe that the only route to survival is through new models of education - a balanced humanities-with-a-small-h education! This has saved us at other moments in the past, when our societies faced disaster: It has allowed the critical consciousness to persist even when we were repressed or our senses were lulled into submission.