From Infinite Progress to Delusional Despotism

Another way to think about our current situation

Ashoka the Great (304–232 BCE)

Yesterday I had the abrasive experience of getting thrown off of a WhatsApp chat for liberal, progressive men, “White Dudes for Harris”, because I suggested there might be some credence to the idea that the Presidential election was hacked and stolen. I was summarily evicted by Brad Bauman, one of the founders of White Dudes For Harris. According to the website for Bauman’s strategic consultancy, he “was one of the founders and organizers of White Dudes for Harris, which engaged and activated almost 200,000 white men on behalf of the campaign and raised $4.9 million in the early days of Vice President Harris' candidacy.” Five million is a nice chunk of change.

The way Bauman handled this (he hasn’t responded to my DMs) reinforced my sense that well-financed liberals lack courage and capacity to even consider the radical situation we have entered. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” 2020 campaign, we know from court cases, led to Trump’s cronies copying the voting software used in swing states. Musk openly boasts of his capacity to hack into any system.

For those who want to explore this at a granular level, I go deeper into this at the end of this newsletter. While I very much doubt the election results will be challenged by Harris — or, let’s say, The New York Times — I still feel it is important to share sense-making around what happened, and how, for those who care. Or perhaps, it is just the case I am stuck with my incredibly annoying (and, perhaps, as investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr describes here, perilous for my future) “fetish for the truth,” as one friend named it. Or perhaps I am a paranoid conspiracist: Let me know what you think in the comments. It could be both!

But what I wanted to focus on today was not this at all: I wanted to consider how the global movement toward despotism is linked to our deepening ecological crisis and the failure of Neoliberalism. The reality is we cannot continue a civilization based on unlimited growth, considering the increasingly fragile state of our planet. Yet Trump and his followers, including the tech billionaires, are in denial of this inconvenient truth.

Because of the irreconcilable contradiction between our social and ideological models and our actual situation, we are degrading from more-or-less reality-based, imperfect democracy to dreary, delusional despotism. While this will, inevitably, be temporary, it will, in all likelihood, unleash catastrophic destruction and mass death before it fails systemically.

The reality of what’s happening to the Earth, which we experience all around us, makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion of infinite progress which is the basis of Neoliberalism / consumer Capitalism and technocracy. This has also coincided with an incredible concentration of capital in fewer hands. I learned yesterday, for instance, that Mark Zuckerberg controls more wealth than 10% of millennials. Wealth concentration will intensify further due to Artificial Intelligence, while most of the “work” that needs to be done to protect the integrity of the biosphere cannot get funding.

One thing that intrigues me about the new situation we are entering into is that I have, through my personal networks (Burning Man, the psychedelic community, etcetera), only a few degrees of separation from some of the top echelons of the technocratic elite. I can at least try reaching out to them, indirectly or directly.

Let me try to express a somewhat intricate, inchoate idea that keeps swirling around in my head: I find it fascinating and weird that, on the one hand, human history and social development seems to be made up of vastly impersonal and almost inexorable processes. Yet, on the other hand, certain individuals appear and seem to exist as the fulcrum or “trim tab,” influencing, even directing, these immense forces. This is particularly the case, now, when we see such incredible concentrations of power in such few hands. Those few at the top could, actually, awaken morally, spiritually, and politically. Such an awakening would diffuse through the rest of society. While this seems highly unlikely, it is not impossible.

What’s fascinating is that, retrospectively, what happens always seems inevitable. To take one example: We can’t imagine a history where the first European colonialists landed in America, met the indigenous people, and collectively realized that, in many ways, the indigenous way of life was superior to theirs. Instead of seeking dominance, those emissaries decided to learn from the indigenous people: They chose, sharing, communion, between the cultures.

One example that seems to revoke the otherwise annoyingly inexorable logic of history is that of the great “Dharma King,” Ashoka, an Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty (304–232 BCE). According to Wikipedia: “His empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent, stretching from present-day Afghanistan in the west to present-day Bangladesh in the east, with its capital at Pataliputra.” According to legend, Ashoka's early reign was marked by ruthless ambition and violence: He killed 99 of his brothers to secure the throne and waged savage wars to unite his kingdom. During the Kalinga War, Ashoka witnessed immense carnage and the brutal deaths of over 100,000 people. The legend (I suspect there is more to the story we are missing) is that this initiated a moral and spiritual awakening. He embraced Buddhism and dedicate himself to the principles of dharma—righteousness and compassion.

As a ruler guided by dharma, Ashoka became legendary for promoting nonviolence, justice, and the welfare of his subjects. He renounced wars of conquest and focused on building a compassionate state, establishing hospitals, rest houses, and wells for people and animals. He planted shade trees and created roadside facilities for travelers. Ashoka also enforced religious tolerance by his edicts, commanding his subjects to respect and understand one another's beliefs to prevent sectarian strife.

A committed Buddhist, Ashoka sent emissaries to spread Buddhist teachings across his empire and beyond, reaching as far as Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. His principles were inscribed in a series of rock and pillar edicts scattered throughout the empire, emphasizing kindness, justice, and the ethical treatment of all living beings. Ashoka’s transformation from a violent conqueror to anenlightened ruler remains a compelling example of personal and moral redemption. He is an example of someone “going against the stream” of historical inevitability. Of course, the shift to Democracy in the United States and elsewhere could be seen as another example of this anti-entropic tendency.

This morning, I happened to listen to a podcast with the Irish environmental journalist John Gibbons (he maintains the website Climatechange.ie to “serve as Ireland’s one-stop source of information and opinion on environmental, climate and related issues”), who I didn’t know before, to receive a bracing dose of basic sanity. Gibbons addressed the question of why so many of the “Tech Bros” have pivoted to authoritarianism:

Trump and Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos and and all the Billionaire Boys Club, essentially, these are the modern day leviathans. They’re so rich — they’re richer than the richest kings of antiquity — they have more political power than most governments. They stride the world like Colossus. The issue is that as their fortunes get bigger their grasp on reality diminishes. You see this with a guy like Musk who's obviously an extremely clever guy on one hand. On the other hand, he's revealing himself to be extremely limited and also as infected with ideology as anybody else. 

I think the key thing here is, you can be as smart as you like, but if you're a slave to a particular ideology, then you can simply put your intellect in the service of that ideology. That’s what you see with these rich people and their ideology. Their cult is the cult of themselves: They are the gods that they worship and and that the rest of us are supposed to kneel down before. I've often wondered about this because these are clever people, but so many of them are involved in not just climate denial but in, basically, planning their own bunkers to escape as things unravel. These are people buying super estates and developing super estates in places like the north island of New Zealand. They know full well that the system is going to fall apart but, weirdly enough, they believe that they will be insulated from this by their money.

I've often thought that the possession of gigantic amounts of money has a corrosive effect on the intellect. I think it's a a very rare person who can become very rich and remain grounded and humble and also to understand their limits and their good fortune and, most unfortunately, these plutocrats fall in love, essentially, with themselves. They fall in love with the idea of themselves. You see it time and time again. 

What happens with egocentric people — you see it with Trump as well — if they ever listen to anybody, experts or advisers, they stop listening and they surround themselves with flunkies. People who will tell them, “Boss you are great. You’re one of the greatest figures in all of human history and, basically, you’re gold. Whatever you say goes. You're an amazing figure.” People get consumed by that. Within the bubble you have so many admirers. 

In our society we admire wealth almost irrespective of how people got it. This is a strange phenomenon. They can get wealth through corruption, through violence, through almost anything. Rather than being appalled by that, people seem to be enthralled, to just feel adoration of this wealth. I think, again, this is the end product of four or five decades of neoliberal thought which has basically turned us humans and citizens into just hollowed out consumers, and it's a shame. 

You asked the question initially: How did we get here? How could we be in this situation and not know our way out? I think our ability to understand our situation has been fatally compromised and instead we're left scrambling around looking for affirmation through consumption. We've been told that important people consume heavily and less important people don’t. 

Also we have the idea that “Might makes right,” we have the rule of the wealthy. We see that in conflicts around the world: What matters isn't the moral position. What matters is which powerful force is on what side of it. I think that, again, is corroding the “post World War New World Order” where we were supposed to start again and so on. But I think many people will tell you that that New World Order only really applied to the global North. It never extended to the global South. They continued to be as brutalized and short changed and colonized as ever. So our Democratic experiment has largely been restricted to the global North and it appears, sadly, that that experiment is coming to its logical conclusion.

The big difference between the circumstances now and in the 1920s and 30s is that back then, the world, resource-wise, was full. We had relatively thriving nature, plenty of easily accessible resources. The oceans were full of fish.

Fast forward 100 years, and nearly every Earth system is in a state of partial or significant breakdown, with many approaching critical thresholds. For example, in the last 50 to 60 years, we've increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by about 50%. Previously, a change of that magnitude in atmospheric CO2 would have taken two or three million years—an extremely slow process. We've concentrated that level of environmental change into less than a century, and this trajectory continues.

Around the world, we see evidence of this: earlier today, a new all-time high temperature of 48.9°C was recorded in Las Vegas—the highest ever there. We’re seeing record floods, droughts, and heatwaves, with long-term temperature records being broken daily. The strange thing is that we collectively seem like frogs sitting in a pan as it warms, thinking, "Oh, it's just a bit warmer."

Here in Ireland, for example, we’re a very temperate country. It’s about 14–15°C now. Politically and socially, there’s no widespread sense of impending danger. I’m not sure if your experience is different, but here, people don’t fully grasp how dangerous heat is. Heat is a killer, and it’s coming. Science tells us that about one-fifth of the planet’s surface is likely to become too hot for humans or mammals by 2050–2070. And 2050 is only 25 years away; 2070 is not much further. This isn’t some distant future—it’s a future many alive today will live to see.

That future includes not millions or hundreds of millions but billions of climate refugees. The question I often ask is: Where do we think these people are going to go? They’re not disappearing, just like the pollution we discussed earlier. If our actions render the global South uninhabitable, and its people move, whose responsibility is that? Do we tell those who’ve lost their homes, "You can’t come into ours"?

Unfortunately, for many observers, we seem to be entering a new age of fascism and authoritarianism, even so-called eco-fascism, where governments use ecological threats as justification to pull up drawbridges and shut out "foreigners." From a justice perspective, though, the folks in the global North have caused this crisis. It's our fault. People in sub-Saharan Africa have contributed almost nothing to the problem, yet they’re suffering the most every single day.

As I have explored in How Soon Is Now and elsewhere, there certainly is another path we could take: Through our instantaneous networks of commmunication, we could design, prototype and distribute a participatory democratic infrastructure. We could move from hyper-concentrated control of power and capital to systems of shared resources and mutual aid, with decision-making given to local communities, who can be trained in critical thinking and discernment. Probably, this won’t happen tomorrow! But let’s not forget that it could happen — it might even be easier than we think.

Was the Vote Hacked?