Only socialist radicals and their sibling rivals, libertarians, mistakenly believe that we have to choose between pure socialism and pure capitalism. In technological societies, what has been called the “mixed economy” is clearly superior, combining technological dynamism and private initiative with social solidarity, industrial policy, and infrastructure and human development delivered by the state. In the 21st century, socialism — the dream of a new generation of Leftists in the DSA — is as impractical as the free-market fundamentalism of the Libertarian Party and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. 

No purely capitalist economy has ever existed or ever will. Even in the supposed era of laissez-faire in the United States between the Civil War and the New Deal, there was a mixed economy at all levels of government. The feds intervened in trade to protect US industries with tariffs, lavished subsidies on railroads and colleges, and restricted immigration for good reasons (high wages) and bad ones (racism). 

Meanwhile, American states possessed sweeping “police powers” that they used to enforce moral laws, including “blue laws” that limited commerce on Sundays. The apartheid regime in the South, the heartland of hypocritical “limited-government” conservatives, intrusively regulated every aspect of life, from the most intimate — marriage — to the most commercial — dining and shopping — in the defense of white supremacy.

Contrary to libertarian mythology, the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, and the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, didn’t replace a free economy with a statist or socialist one. The New Deal merely altered America’s existing mixed economy in important respects, providing organized labor with federally enforced rights, enacting a federal minimum wage and maximum-hours laws, and creating earned benefits like Social Security that codified earlier mutual-support networks established by workers themselves: not taxpayer dole, but a share of workers’ own earnings withheld, to be disbursed in old age.

The civil-rights movement, meanwhile, expanded freedom in American society. It diminished illiberal statism at the local level, freeing people to marry whom they wanted and to shop where they wanted, regardless of race. The elaborate structure of group preferences that was assembled later under the rubrics of “affirmative action” and “equity” was a betrayal of the civil-rights revolution, not its logical fulfillment.

America’s technological dynamism has always been based not on “free enterprise” alone, but on what might be called “mixed enterprise” — in which private firms, government, and nonprofit institutions work together to promote growth and advancement. 

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This sort of burden-sharing has proved especially fruitful in the realm of science and technology. Since the 19th century, technological innovation in the United States has benefited from federal intervention of various kinds, including the $30,000 (equivalent to more than $1 million today) that Congress granted Samuel F. B. Morse in 1843 for an experimental telegraph line from Washington, DC, to Baltimore. 

Atomic energy, space travel, and computers all depended in their early stages on civilian or military government funding or procurement, even when private enterprise entered the sector later. In these and other cases, governments and sometimes tax-favored universities and nonprofit foundations helped to develop new technologies with markets and commercial applications that came only later.

Such has been the success of the modern mixed-enterprise system that even communist countries like China and Vietnam have abandoned pure socialism for their own authoritarian versions of the mixed economy, blending markets and government bureaucracies, public and private entities. To the extent that the Cold War was a contest of economic systems, it was a contest between Marxist-Leninist state socialism and the Western-style mixed enterprise system, not between socialism and capitalism.

Far from being relevant in today’s world, pure socialism and free-market capitalism are both quaint and irrelevant ideologies. Both date back to the early 19th century before the modern industrial economy developed. Both are dogmatic secular religions, not practical public philosophies capable of being corrected by experience. The proof lies in the fact that their adherents tend to return to the same founders and early texts. Despite everything we have learned from the evolution of industrial civilization in the last two centuries, socialists still read and re-read Marx, whose Communist Manifesto was written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, while libertarians quote Jean-Baptiste Say, who died in 1832, and David Ricardo, who died in 1823.

By the time Marx died, in 1883, Marxism was already discredited by the fact that the development of industrial capitalism in mixed economies failed to produce the immiseration of the proletariat and the socialist revolution that his theory had predicted. After 1900, the Marxist tradition split into Leninism, a model of top-down, technocratic rule by a totalitarian party in which the economy was subordinated to politics, and social democracy, which sought to bring about a socialist economy through democratic elections and reforms. 

It is often said that Marxist-Leninist regimes proved that state socialism was doomed. But this is wrong. The Soviet Union survived for seven decades and hard-core communism survives in North Korea to this day. But such regimes were and are less efficient than mixed economies, and Marxist-Leninist dictatorship is inherently tyrannical, whether the tyranny is that of a single strongman or a politburo. Political oppression and relative poverty explain why millions of people fled these regimes — and also why millions of people did not try to move to them.

By the second half of the 20th century, the other successor to orthodox Marxism, social democracy, became a mere variant of the mixed economy. Germany’s Social Democratic Party jettisoned the last traces of orthodox Marxism in 1959 with its Godesberg Program. Likewise, Labour in Britain dumped socialism in 1995 by excising clause 4, demanding “common ownership” of the means of production, from the party’s constitution.

What, then, are we to make of the DSA and those who, at this late date of 2026, insist on calling themselves democratic socialists, as distinct from ordinary Left-of-center progressives? If we ignore neo-Stalinist and neo-Maoist “tankies” — a term originally referring to Leftists who supported Soviet crackdowns in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War — the actual economic program of most self-described democratic socialists is merely a more generous version of the mixed economy, with more social insurance and maybe more public provision, such as Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores, alongside the market and nonprofit sectors. 

Outside of university campuses and some DSA cliques, then, social democracy has melted into a center-Left version of the mixed economy in Europe and the United States, while Marxism-Leninism has mutated into Market Leninism in China and Vietnam. Generations of efforts by democratic-socialist eggheads to define a third way between Marxist socialism and the mixed economy has produced nothing but some journal articles and academic papers about cooperatives and land banks and the like. Oh, no, not the Mondragon Cooperative and Yugoslav communist self-management again! 

The other utopian ideology of the early 19th century — libertarianism or “classical liberalism” — is equally irrelevant in the 21st century. While Marxist true believers are housed in the intellectual zoos that are university campuses, libertarians today are found chiefly in think tanks subsidized by rich donors who don’t like paying taxes or negotiating with unions. Within the framework of the mixed economy, socialists and libertarians may win small policy victories now and then — an expansion of social insurance for socialists, a libertarian-backed tax cut for their wealthy donors. But the means of production in the United States aren’t going to be socialized by politicians inspired by Marx and Engels, and Social Security and Medicare aren’t going to be abolished in favor of the privatization schemes peddled by policy wonks funded by rich admirers of the libertarian gurus Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek.

Marxist socialists and libertarians share other characteristics, in addition to pushing antiquated ideologies. For generations, there have been socialists and libertarians who have claimed that the mixed economy can’t exist — except as a way-station to something worse. That something worse is usually defined in political terms. For some Leftist radicals as much as for Hayek and his followers, the slippery slope leads from FDR to Hitler; moderate social democracy is “social fascism.” For some libertarian radicals, moderate welfare capitalism is scarcely different from full state communism. 

Neither sect can acknowledge that some version of the mixed economy might be — indeed, is — the successor of both socialism and libertarianism, after these ideologies fail in the real world.

To be sure, claiming to stake out a socialist position to the Left of progressive Democrats can still impress an audience of underpaid university adjuncts and nonprofit apparatchiks. Just as the men and women who attend the Right’s dumber rubber-chicken dinners will applaud as speaker after speaker denounces the Democratic Party as a conspiracy of communists or “cultural Marxists” or “Islamo-Marxists” threatening capitalism, the Founding Fathers, and Jesus Christ (in that order).

But tedious debates among disciples of the discredited 19th-century ideologies of socialism and libertarianism distract the rest of us from the only serious debate, which is not about whether to have a mixed economy, but about what kind of mixed economy we should have.

All mixed economies assign some functions to government, some to for-profit enterprises, some to nonprofit philanthropies, and some to self-help by individuals or families. Which functions are assigned to which sectors is a legitimate matter of debate, for which there is no single best answer, only different approaches that reflect different social values.

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Consider the case of childcare. Before the Industrial Revolution, with the exception of young aristocrats whom upper-class mothers could hand off to wet-nurses, infants were nursed by their mothers and cared for by their parents and other family members. In today’s industrialized societies, in which plastic bottles can mimic a mother’s breasts, there are other options, including nannies (often low-wage immigrant women) and various kinds of care outside the home — public preschool, nonprofit church kindergartens, for-profit childcare centers. In a contemporary mixed economy, should the government subsidize care at home by mothers, fathers, or other family members, in order to promote strong families? Or should childcare be provided outside of the home, to maximize the number of young mothers in the workforce, whether to promote feminist principles or corporate profits or national GDP?

The size and composition of the nonprofit sector is another subject about which reasonable people who otherwise agree on a mixed economy can disagree. For most of American history, philanthropy tended to be small and local and limited to functions like college endowments and help for the poor and charitable hospitals. Beginning with the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, however, the swollen fortunes of tycoons have endowed huge, bureaucratic foundations with the power to shape public policy and discourse for better or worse. And in the last half-century, governments have increasingly relied on nonprofit groups funded with taxpayer money to carry out state functions like helping immigrants or working with the homeless, as an alternative to hiring more full-time, salaried civil servants.  

Should taxpayers subsidize the private foundations of billionaires through tax breaks, allowing them to spend huge sums promoting the personal views of their rich founders or boards of directors? Are nonprofits whose income is derived partly or wholly from government grants as transparent and accountable to the citizenry as formal government employees would be? 

Another debate over the composition of the modern mixed economy involves the relative responsibilities of employers and taxpayer-funded government agencies in providing an adequate income to wage-earners. I have described the current American system as a “low wage/high welfare” system in my book Hell to Pay. Millions of Americans are paid too little by their employers to make ends meet. These low-wage workers need to be rescued by the government — that is, by the taxpayers — who top up their poverty wages with cash subsidies like the earned income tax credit, or EITC, and in-kind goods like food stamps and housing vouchers.  

Today’s low-wage/high-welfare systems benefit employers, who can keep labor costs down while knowing that their fellow citizens won’t let their workers starve. America’s low-wage/high-welfare system also benefits some consumers, to the extent that smaller labor costs reduce the prices of certain goods and services. The losers are the working poor, who have to cobble together a living income both from market wages and from various government welfare programs; and American taxpayers, who, by subsidizing the working poor, are indirectly subsidizing low-wage employers and their customers. In our contemporary version of the mixed economy that blends cheap-labor capitalism with welfare-state socialism, America’s low-wage employers are allowed to privatize the benefits of cheap labor while the costs are socialized.  

In politics, all three issues — childcare, philanthropy, and wages — cut across Left-Right divides, if the Left is defined as socialism and the Right as free-market capitalism. In debates about childcare, progressive feminists — for whom a woman’s place is in the workplace, not the nursery — are allied with the Chamber of Commerce and other employer organizations against pro-family conservatives and populists who believe that policy should strengthen families, not erode them in the name of individual rights or business profits.

When it comes to nonprofits, there can be common ground between Leftist critics of billionaire-endowed philanthropy and Right-wing populists suspicious of concentrations of economic power in the nonprofit sector. Conversely, many progressive neoliberals unite with cheap-labor conservatives in praising wage subsidies like the EITC. Meanwhile, the demand for a living wage paid by employers — a wage that doesn’t need to be supplemented by welfare — is a proposal that can conceivably unite the Labor left and the populist Right.   

These are all big debates worth having. But the debate between socialism and free-market capitalism was over by 1945, if not by 1900. And the winner was … neither. The mixed economy is the proverbial Chinese menu. You can take some items from one column and some from another. In our mixed-enterprise system, you can be in favor of school vouchers and also in favor of socialized medicine. Or you can be for public daycare and for privatizing the Post Office. Given a choice between state, market, and philanthropy, you are free to answer: all of the above, please.

Most people don’t make such remarks simply because they’re stupid. If the government threatened to drive a motorway through their back garden, they would wise up on the planning laws quickly enough. They come up with such clichés because they don’t know much about politics, for the reason that the kind of politics we practice doesn’t seem to know much about them. The country, like much of the rest of the world, is gripped by a profound crisis of legitimacy. Great swathes of the population no longer have the faintest trust in its political institutions. It’s as though the passengers on a train greeted an announcement that they were approaching their destination with hoots of derision and snickers of skepticism. Politicians are about as popular as pimps. As far as institutions go, a lot of people still admire the Royal Family; but this is partly because the royals don’t really impinge on their daily lives, as politics is supposed to do. The fact that royalty does nothing of importance is one of the major reasons it stays in power. Most citizens see no more point in abolishing it than in ridding humanity of Morris dancing or the Yeomen of the Guard. There’s no harm in adding a few useless decorations to your domicile.

Widespread disaffection can lead to political revolution, were it not that people are sometimes too disaffected to be revolutionary. Astonishingly, however, a third of Britons told a recent survey that capitalism had failed and that a communist revolution was necessary. Or so The Times reports. It’s hard to believe that it’s true. A quarter of those polled declared themselves open to supporting enemies of the state like Russia and Iran, which is to say that the bespectacled bank clerk opposite you on the Tube train might well be a fifth columnist. The prospect of a collapse of legitimacy is why Edmund Burke appealed in the wake of the French Revolution for government by popular consent. This is one reason why he was a Whig and not a Tory. Power must respect the values and customs of the populace. Governing classes in Burke’s view survive only by engaging the affections of their inferiors, and a loveless sovereignty is politically bankrupt. India must be ruled with due respect to its indigenous culture, not with the ham-fisted brutality of the stereotypical imperialist.

Nations in Burke’s view aren’t primarily governed by laws, but by a set of affinities and tacit understandings between rulers and ruled. What holds them together is more cultural than political. If colonies like America can associate being subordinate to the Crown with their own civil rights, the more perfect will be their obedience. The only firm seat of authority, Burke declares, “lies in the minds, affections and interests of the people”. If this fails, and the common people take to the streets, then of course you unleash on them the full force of your repressive powers. There’s always a coercive fist within the consensual glove. But to unleash your powers is to risk an even more drastic loss of legitimacy. It’s better on the whole to woo your citizens than to shoot them down. Governments who do the latter have won and lost at the same time.

Cynicism about the political class isn’t quite such bad news for the Establishment as it might appear. People don’t live by politics alone, even when they trust and admire their politicians. The dull inertia of everyday life may be enough to keep them from tearing up the cobblestones. Most of them spend most of their time simply trying to keep their heads above water. What absorbs their attention isn’t the break-up of the social contract but the price of bacon. This is one way in which economics takes precedence over politics. What Marx calls the economic base is what Americans call the bottom line. A certain amount of economic pain has a distracting effect which may benefit the guardians of the system, whereas too much of it poses a threat to them. Even so, regular visitors to Davos may console themselves with the thought that revolutions only occur when people can glimpse an alternative to what they have now which strikes them as both feasible and desirable. If the problem isn’t simply a specific political regime but politics as such, this isn’t likely to happen. In the view of a disillusioned populace, even Lenin would simply be more of the same.

“They’re all the same” and similar sentiments may not be true, but the impulse behind them is surely authentic. People are right to be cynical about politics; it’s just that a lot of them are cynical for the wrong reasons. If the political sphere can’t bring genuine change, it’s largely because it’s severely constrained by the banks, major corporations, domestic bureaucracies and international capitalist institutions. In this sense, globalization breeds an erosion of political trust at the national level. The same is true of geopolitics, which forces political states into crippling amounts of expenditure while underfunding the institutions that ordinary people rely on. Besides, capitalism is the fastest-changing system in human history, which can make political promises hard to keep. Politics shrinks to a cramped arena in which room for maneuver is drastically curtailed. Nations become agents of forces they can’t control. The Britain that once ruled the world is now ruled by it.

There’s a false solution to the widespread prejudice against politics, which is to make a politics out of it. This is known as populism, which is currently sweeping the globe. You can denounce international set-ups while being bound hand and foot to the global corporations, and cheer for the Common Man while supporting the world-wide financial markets which are pushing him toward the breadline. You can even make a fortune on those markets yourself, while blaming immigrants for the social damage which such financial forces wreak. You can castigate elites in the name of the common people while stashing away millions of pounds or billions of dollars yourself and owning a large number of posh houses. You can also speak out for some ordinary people by demanding an end to immigration, while not speaking out for others who demand better health care and a decent standard of living. A figure who represents the whole of this hypocrisy is currently king of the world, able to change the rules of international football with a flick of his fingers. Pretty soon he’ll be setting the menu at McDonald’s. We’re in danger of a return to absolutism, when politics was a matter of the monarch’s will.

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Some MPs claim to have been drawn to politics by sheer altruism. They prop up the Commons bar out of an insatiable desire to serve their country. Most people, however, are driven to political action by material reasons, not fancy ideas. Where the populists have the advantage is that these reasons exist in plenty — failing health service, crumbling schools, unemployment, buckling social provision  — and with consummate sleight-of-hand can all be attributed to a single source: immigration. Anti-immigrant politics means changing the population rather than changing the system. Moreover, populism combines its material grievances with deep-seated cultural ones, and this is a formidably powerful fusion. Who would have thought that culture, of all things, should play such a key role in the political realm? It is, however, culture in its most potent sense, which is to say issues of identity, rather than Balzac and Beethoven. Populism feeds on a profound human fear of the Other, along with an anxious attachment to the familiar. In blaming this monstrous Other for most of the nation’s woes, it refuses to recognize that capitalism has always generated private wealth and public squalor as sides of the same coin. It’s a form of life which populism wants to deepen and defend, whatever its apparent concern for the standard of living in Southend.

If “They’re all the same” is the mantra of the disillusioned citizen, what are the most common words spoken by politicians? “To be clear.” “I’ve been very clear from the outset.” “Kemi has always been clear about our policy on…” This is curious, because it suggests that people consider obscurantism to be the major vice of politicians, which surely isn’t true. They may be distrusted, thought to break their promises, spout a lot of garbage or be paid too much for doing too little, but not to obscure their meaning. They may lie from time to time, but they usually do so lucidly. Some of their deceptions are wonderfully transparent. Besides, clarity can be overrated. Part of the fun of everyday life lies in its ambiguity, as with the notice “Refuse To Be Put in This Basket”, the meaning of which varies according to which syllable of “Refuse” you stress. I pointed out many years ago that the instruction “Dogs Must Be Carried”, sometimes found on escalators in Underground stations, might be thought to exclude those who approach the escalator without a canine in tow. There’s an apocryphal story about the rockstar Bono opening a concert with an appeal for starving children. Clapping his hands, he says: “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” “Well stop fucking doing it, then,” someone in the audience shouts in mock-indignation.

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One of the finest ambiguities in the English language is built into Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend a fabulously rich young American woman, Milly Theale, whom they discover to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that Milly and Densher may marry and Densher may inherit Milly’s wealth when she dies. In an extraordinary twist in the narrative, Milly is told on her death bed of the plot against her, but bequeaths her fortune to Densher even so. The result of this act of forgiveness causes him such deep remorse, as well as such love for Milly’s memory, that he refuses to accept the bequest, and he and Kate part forever.

A question, however, lingers. Milly’s generous act breaks up Kate and Densher’s relationship as surely as might a bout of sexual infidelity. But did Milly foresee this consequence? Is that why she left Densher her money? Is her forgiveness a devious act of aggression? And is Densher’s penalty for deceiving her to be besotted with a corpse for the rest of his life? As often in James, the issue is undecidable. We shall never know whether Milly was saint or schemer. Life, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, is like a rough ground, not a sheet of pure ice. Clarity is only occasionally to be attained. It’s there for the most part in the discourse of politicians. But sometimes they’re lying even so.

That is because it has always been a crossroads, the rocky harbor in the heart of the Mediterranean. The Arabs bequeathed the islands their distinctive language, while the Normans began fortifying their harbor. It is said that Ottoman troops, taken hostage after the Siege of Malta, furnished the locals with coffee before even Venetian traders knew of its pleasures. Later still, Malta was French and British. Both contributed to the national character, yet it was the last which endowed Malta with its legal system, a fondness for beer, and red phone boxes.

If foreign influence was one constant in Malta, grinding poverty was another. Even after an Axis siege brought the country close to famine, a lack of opportunities also saw thousands of Maltese men — including my wife’s grandfather — taking their families to the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth in search of work. The maritime heritage of their homeland meant they often found employment in the docks of Australia, Britain and Canada: something which also explains why, when the Maltese came to Britain, they gathered in places like London and Portsmouth. Independence in 1964 brought sovereignty but not prosperity, much as the new state tried to embrace tourism and logistics. So, like Ireland before it, Malta became defined by emigration. Between 1948 and 1967 almost a third of the population left.

Today that history, of economic stagnation and depopulation, is a fading memory. EU membership, and an increasingly globalized economy, means the country has become a hub for not only tourism, but financial services and online gambling too. By one measure Malta’s output per person is now higher than that of Britain, France or Sweden. Of even greater cultural significance, though, is the comparison with Italy. As recently as 1990, Malta’s neighbor to the north boasted a GDP per capita almost 50% higher. But where Italian television, radio and football once offered the island a window onto modernity, today it is young Italians who cross the Maltese Channel in search of work. If you are an ambitious young person in Catania or Palermo, you might hear advice that nobody has proffered for a millennium: go south and get ahead.

Indeed, this economic revolution has been mirrored demographically. The nation that once watched its sons and daughters depart by ship for distant shores now draws workers from across the globe. Today, 41% of Malta’s labor force is foreign-born. First are the young workers filling labor shortages in lower-regulation sectors, from Italian hospitality staff to Indian workers in construction. Then there are wealthy foreigners, drawn by Malta’s favorable tax environment; the country’s millionaire population grew by 74% between 2013 and 2023. Finally there are the internationally mobile companies choosing warmer climes and 5% corporation tax. Last year SkyBet moved to the country, and it won’t be the last British firm to do so.

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All this is doubly noticeable given Malta’s compact size. At the turn of the millennium, the islands were already home to 400,000 people, squeezed into little more than 100 square miles. Since then, Malta’s population has risen by almost half, with one recent projection suggesting it could reach 630,000 by 2030. For all the claims that Britain is overcrowded, an equivalent surge would mean our population approaching 90 million. Nor does this extraordinary trajectory show any sign of slowing. In June 2023, finance minister Clyde Caruana even said the country’s population should rise to 800,000 by 2040.

Combine that with record-breaking tourist numbers — last year saw around seven tourists for every resident, the equivalent of almost half a billion visitors to Britain — and property prices are soaring. The average asking price for an apartment now stands at €414,000: almost 10% higher than a year ago and roughly 16 times the average wage (in England this ratio is seven-to-one). Because this transformation is relatively recent, Malta still enjoys high rates of home ownership. But for younger citizens, the ladder has effectively been pulled up; buying a home, and with it the prospect of starting a family, is increasingly impossible.

That is also new. Just a few decades ago, my mother-in-law and her husband could buy a two-bedroom holiday flat in St Paul’s Bay — Jesus’ favorite disciple is said to have been shipwrecked on a nearby island — despite being a seamstress and bus driver in Portsmouth. Today, such a purchase sounds fantastical, not least for blue-collar workers. Amid all this, the remarkable thing is that Maltese leaders don’t seem too concerned. As far back as 2014, Joseph Muscat, the then-Prime Minister, spoke of Malta emulating Dubai — where 92% of the population is foreign-born — through absorbing unprecedented amounts of overseas labor.

Almost universally, of course, this model has led to adverse social and political consequences. And if, for the moment, the Maltese economy continues to motor, some locals now have doubts. What, they ask, was all of it for? Does the average Maltese family now enjoy a better quality of life? The answer is far from clear — and their worries go beyond just surging house prices.

One of the things the Maltese are most proud of is their language. A Semitic tongue, it remains somewhat intelligible to people in Tunis or Benghazi. Centuries of contact have left their mark in other ways: the Latin script, for one thing, even as Italian words like ciao, allora (‘well then’) and kuċina (‘kitchen’) sit alongside the term “Al Madonna”, cried in moments of anguish. In other words Malta boasts a linguistic jewel arguably unique in Europe: ancient, resilient and deeply bound to the identity of the islands.

It’s ironic, then, that it wasn’t a millennium of colonialism that posed the greatest threat to the idiom — but self-government in an age of globalization. For while Maltese remains widely spoken, and is taught as the country’s official language, it is quickly being replaced by both English and Italian, with the internet and Sicilian baristas succeeding where Mussolini and the Luftwaffe failed. On more than one occasion I’ve gone to a restaurant with my wife — who speaks some Maltese — only to find that the staff can converse only in Italian.

Nor are such moments limited to the tourist traps of Valletta. Ghajn Tuffeiha — you say it “ayn tufiya” — is a stunning beach at the top of Malta and utterly unpronounceable to anyone north of Syracuse. Perhaps that’s why the beach has come to be known as “Singita Miracle Beach“: part of an Italian-owned chain of luxury beach clubs. Once again, all the staff there appear to be Italian. That’s no bad thing if you want a good espresso, but it’s another vivid example of how Malta’s unique culture is being overwhelmed by the forces of global capitalism. Is this how languages die in the 21st century? Not at the end of a Gatling gun, but because of hippy entrepreneurs performing “sunset rituals” using words you don’t understand.

Of course, one could argue that Malta has embraced the Promethean promise of modern capitalism: unleash growth first, solve problems later. Isn’t that the path China has followed for decades — a model that many on the Left, including myself, have praised? Yet Malta presents a more complicated picture. Unlike China, or the USSR, this is a tiny island rather than a continental landmass, boasting a fragile culture and delicate ecosystem. What’s more, despite its economic boom, the island’s infrastructure remains underwhelming. Simply put, the average Maltese has shockingly little to show for decades of development, besides a loss of tranquility and a spot on the beach.

Take public transport. Once upon a time, Malta had a railway. Built under British rule, it operated until the early Thirties and connected Valletta with nearby Floriana. But it would be abandoned as the combustion engine redefined island mobility. Presumably, however, nobody expected that, a century on, Malta would be home to almost half-a-million registered vehicles, making it the world’s most congested country.

What was once a tranquil pearl in the Mediterranean increasingly feels like a giant car park. Perhaps a Maltese Tony Soprano is involved in the highway construction business — because, failing that, the lack of alternative explanations is baffling. Either way, this moment of national prosperity increasingly feels strangely regressive, with growth becoming an end in itself rather than the means to a larger national purpose. As one Maltese commentator lately put it about language, the country spends “huge amounts of money protecting species and biodiversity, so why should it be that the one thing that makes us singularly human should not be similarly nourished and protected?”

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A good question. Being in hock to a certain idea of capitalism, where GDP charts in the back pages of The Economist matter more than a sense of local place, is clearly part of the answer. Another is the European Union, and specifically the Eurozone. Whatever the accomplishments of both, not least for the Maltese exchequer, they have served to fuel a politics of inadequacy in Europe’s south: where being a “normal” country came to mean adhering to the policy prescriptions of the Dutch and Germans. Eurozone membership itself became synonymous with escaping Mediterranean backwardness. As a result, and in order to overcome an absurd inferiority complex, the likes of Greece, Italy and Spain — to say nothing of Malta — sought to do neoliberal modernity better than their northern cousins. The idea of an identity and culture peculiar to the region became either secondary, or something to be actively assailed.

Step back and all this is arguably connected to the tsunami of falling birthrates right across the Greco-Roman basin. Where Maltese families were once large, today they are distinctly East Asian in scale, with the country ranked 224th when it comes to making babies. Perhaps, collectively, the national consciousness has come to regard the future as being tied with economic “development”, and infinity annual growth of 4%, rather than stewarding a sustainable future for Malta’s children and grandchildren.

It would be unwise to say Malta has clear lessons for other, larger countries — least of all on migration (it’s a nation the size of Edinburgh). But it’s also undeniable that Malta has taken certain global trends, visible across the West and beyond, to their logical conclusion. Unlike Maltese, English has hugely benefited from globalization, becoming the indomitable lingua franca of the 21st century. But the obsession with economic growth as an end in itself, and a flattening of cultural difference in the name of a consumerist cosmopolitanism, is just as visible in small-town England as in Melliha or Bugibba.

Indeed, if anything, Britain is further down the line than its one-time Mediterranean redoubt. Here, the boom years have faded, and we are coming to terms with failing to spend our treasure wisely. Despite the economic bonanza of the Thatcher and Blair years, and the jackpot of North Sea oil, we boast barely any high-speed rail or trams, and have failed for decades to build new homes or reservoirs. But Malta also shows how a critique of growth, and recognizing some things are worth more than money, can bridge conventional assumptions of Left and Right. Political scientists call these “post-material” concerns. They are anything but. Issues of identity, collective meaning and spiritual nourishment pre-date capitalism by millennia. They are perennial questions.

As for Malta, it has been blessed by nature and history. And yet, speaking personally, there’s a fascination that lies beyond its monuments and beaches, for Malta exhibits the defining contradiction of our age. Never before have the islands been so prosperous, even as young Maltese feel less able than ever to buy a home or raise a family. And while, after centuries of foreign rule, the country is finally free, its fortunes are ever-more determined by global capital and the European Central Bank. Capitalism wants to flatten what is unique about any place; in the words of Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. But the islands bring to mind the call by Aimé Césaire for a different kind of cosmopolitanism, a “universal rich with all that is particular”. Call it rooted cosmopolitanism, if you like.

Then, on 4 July, at Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in midtown Manhattan, the billionaire pop superstar wed Kansas City Chiefs American football star Travis Kelce, in a celebration attended by 1,000 of the couple’s closest friends. There were barriers, and guards. No phones were allowed at the ceremony.

It was both the most public and the most private event of the year. It took place on the day of America’s 250th anniversary, and bore all the hallmarks of Swift’s longstanding talent for narrative reflexivity. And, above all, it offered proof positive that the 21st century is, once again, a time of lords and princes. Ironically, nowhere is this more evident than in the nation founded by those who left England to escape the medieval past, and its hierarchies.

Despite the secrecy, a few details have emerged. Notably, we’ve seen photos of the wedding favors received by every guest: a lace napkin embroidered with a special logo and — startlingly — a line from one of Swift’s most darkly self-destructive songs, “Blank Space”. It’s an odd choice of quotation for a wedding favor: the song is anthemic for every girl who has ever chased wild passion, knowing it’ll end in disaster. “So it’s gonna be forever,” reads the napkin. No one more deftly refracts her own self-image through her fanbase like Taylor Swift; the line was surely chosen knowing fans would immediately fill in the blank space, where the song’s next line would be: “Or it’s gonna go down in flames.”

Swiftological omens aside, what was so remarkable about the event was how much of a blank space it remained. Despite New York City surely having one of the highest densities of camera-phones per square mile anywhere on earth, the only footage to have leaked so far is a short clip filmed from the edge of the stadium’s interior. Guests can be seen processing toward a stage-set structure, decorated by greenery. There are verbal reports of the décor and food, but that’s it.

Outside in the streets, throngs of adoring Swifties gathered to participate in this radically exclusionary, wildly opulent, maximum-security event simply through proximity. And later, after the feasting was over, the catering company distributed left-over wedding desserts to fans, who screamed, scrabbled, and fought to consume a holy, sweet fragment from Travis and Taylor’s nuptial feast.

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By Mary Harrington

No one could miss the eucharistic parody here — nor the echoes of feudal bounty, bestowed by the great within to the peasants at the gate: a form of lordly munificence that has largely vanished from the modern world. It survives today mostly as quirky traditions: for example at my alma mater, where the Masters celebrate Ascension Day by throwing pennies into the quad from the towers, and local children scrabble to gather them up.

Such gestures of charity to commoners were once part of the ordinary fabric of social life. Historian Eamon Duffy describes the liturgical calendar of pre-Reformation Christian England as including some 40-50 celebration days, on which “servile labor” was partly or wholly forbidden. On these days, those with means were often expected to show their wealth, and piety, by contributing towards communal feasting in charity to the poor.

This medieval holiday regime was scuppered in the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with Rome. Shortly thereafter, the Crown abolished most of the local and national feasts, especially during the summer months, because all this liturgical partying was getting in the way of agricultural productivity. Nor was this dour onslaught on Merrie England’s pre-modern cakes-and-ale schedule the last: not long after, Henry also dissolved the monasteries, selling their lands to his friends and in the process ending a whole form of subsistence peasant life.

The more profit-focused new owners of former monastic lands didn’t always exhibit the same sense of obligation to the poor as their predecessors. Unscrupulous rent-extraction and callous landlordism became a persistent social problem, and songs and folklore from the period express an angry sense that the rich had reneged on what was expected of them. It got worse, in some respects: a century later, even kings were abolished, and the brilliant, ruthless Roundhead general Oliver Cromwell set out to transform England into a Puritan paradise — to the still greater detriment of that old regime of feasts and holy days. No more partying, even at Christmas.

A Royalist broadside ballad from the 1640s blames the loss of charity and free feast-day goodies on the Puritan leveling instinct:

To conclude, I’le tell you news that’s right, Christmas was kil’d at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

But in other respects it got better. The same reforms also drove the creation of a new middle class, shook up laws governing heredity, and kicked off a revolution in agriculture. The resulting transformation would remake modern England, driving the Industrial Revolution, turbocharging growth, and impelling the uprooted English outward into the empire — including her then-colonial lands in America.

The irony behind Taylor Swift’s opulent extravaganza is that the origin story of the United States lay in those Puritans who left England in the 17th century, in pursuit of still greater leveling than could be managed in the Old World. Some were disappointed by the failure of radical Puritan measures during Cromwell’s Protectorate; more were underwhelmed by the religious compromises and royal Restoration that followed Cromwell’s death. These radicals sailed away, to create their shining city on a hill somewhere unburdened (as Kamala Harris put it more recently) by what has been.

Now, 250 years in, the nation that spun off from those pioneers counts more billionaires than anywhere else on earth. And, ironically, their rise is downstream of a great hollowing-out of America’s own middle class, characterized by urban geographer Joel Kotkin as a coming age of neo-feudalism. This, he suggests, is sweeping away the middle-class characteristic of the modern age, in favor of a huge subsistence peasantry, a comparatively small “clerisy”, and an unthinkably rich aristocracy.

Kotkin’s book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism was intended as a warning, and a call to arms by the beleaguered middle class. Conversely, among the new aristocracy, many seem keen to lean into the corollary of this neo-feudalism: that just like in the olden days, the new lords and princes will be obligated to dispense alms to some portion of the peasantry. Tech plutocrats, especially those producing AI of the supposedly job-destroying kind, periodically float (and sometimes pilot) “Universal Basic Income” proposals that are post-modern variants on pre-modern subsistence peasant life. The subtext, whether explicitly stated or not, is that if things continue in the current direction the wealth gap will soon be so immense that some kind of redistribution will be prudent, simply as a hedge against revolution.

All of this makes for a much sweeter pill when refracted through the prism of lordly magnificence. At least one fan interpreted Taylor Swift’s pastry distribution thus, gushing in suitably feudal style that “She loves us”. But does she? Set against the eye-watering expense of her celebration, distributing a few left-over slices of cake to fans outside isn’t much in the way of hospitality. Was it even Swift who authorized the pastry distribution? Or just a departing caterer’s van that knew the cakes would otherwise go in the bin?

The question bites much more sharply for those who have grown rich not through entertainment, but more controversial (or even job-destroying) lines of business. The last household-name billionaire wedding to hit the headlines was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a man who acquired his unthinkable wealth rendering high-street hardware shops obsolete, and algorithmically optimizing delivery-drivers and warehouse staff to the point where they need to pee in bottles to keep up the pace of work. This time last year Bezos and his bride Lauren Sanchez took over great swathes of Venice for a three-day wedding that cost somewhere in the region of $50 million, and attracted at least as much criticism and protest as excited rubbernecking.

Bezos also seems to be fumbling toward lordly charity — at least, by proxy. He asked his guests not to bring gifts, but instead to make donations to local Venetian charities. Despite this, his wedding still attracted protestors. Perhaps this reflects a misunderstanding of how aristocratic bounty is supposed to work: Bezos didn’t spend any of his own money throwing a party for the Venetians; he just asked that his guests dispense alms at their own expense, in lieu of wedding gifts. Those pre-modern peasants who expected goose pie now and then might have thought this a contemptibly cheapskate approach, especially given the degree of magnificence expected of a figure such as Bezos.

But a simpler interpretation is that the protests are a natural reaction to what figures such as Bezos represent: both in terms of financial inequality, but more profoundly still in power. Taylor Swift has the kind of reality-altering wealth that can close entire streets in midtown Manhattan on the nation’s 250th Independence Day holiday weekend, and build a fairy-tale film-set castle inside an iconic concert arena, in near-total secrecy. Normal people, quite naturally, find this unnerving. What else might she do with that power?

Swift evinces little interest in more hard-edged uses of her clout. But her wealth — in old-fashioned terms, we’d say “rank” — abuts the kind of individual power that can change regimes, massage markets, or redraw continental maps. All the hue and cry over other household-name billionaires, such as Bezos, the Soros family, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, ultimately turns on this recognition of power on a par with nation-states. Are the individuals wielding it friends, or enemies? Does it even matter what any of us thinks? If we rubberneck at billionaire weddings, and project fantasies or protests onto their lives and desires, it’s because we correctly intuit that they could do things we might never even dream of. They are, in a very concrete sense, not like us.

Is this new hierarchy gonna be forever? Some think AI will make it vastly more extreme. Should we simply accept this state of affairs, and say thanks for the left-over pastries? Resisters say we can tax these new plutocrats back into line: can the faltering middle classes still resist? Is this all, as Taylor Swift’s wedding favors didn’t say, gonna go down in flames?

It’s probably too early to tell. But if I were to guess, I’d say that in the end the excited queue for pastries will outnumber the angry mob. Provided, that is, our new, glittering overclass manage to re-learn the lordly art not just of magnificence, but also of feast-day hospitality.

“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur. 

This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.

Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.

This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.

A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.

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The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”

Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.

Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media —  accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns. 

Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves. 

Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.

The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.

Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.

All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.   

Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.

Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.

It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.

Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgment as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks. 

For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.

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Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.

Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.

This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.

Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman —  as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within. 

The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.

Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labor, discipline and self-control.

Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it. 

Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.

There are reasons to wonder if these poles, and much else in the Rockefeller Wing, should be on Fifth Avenue. But here they are. And wandering through the halls recently, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window-walls, I realized how badly I had missed them for the last four years — while all of this was closed for renovations. When I first entered the southmost part of the room, where the bis poles used to stand, and they weren’t there, I panicked for a moment. Had they been… repatriated? I accepted that if so, it was probably quite correct. But I felt depressed. I sidled up to a guard in big shoes, and asked if there wasn’t some stuff missing in this room. He said no, that stuff was now next door.

Sure enough. Standing there beneath these human trees, strangely relieved, I was suddenly struck by the sense that the room in which I was standing — each elegantly balanced case and each careful label — delivered a precisely aimed punch in the nose for our moment, a wake-up slap for this bad dream.

After all, we in the US — as well as folks in the UK and Europe — are in the throes of intense conflict concerning “diversity”. In recent years, a longstanding and broadly operational national consensus around affirmative action policies (aimed at addressing legacies of racial and gender discrimination) has cracked rapidly into hostile camps: on the one hand, defenders of DEI policies and progressive identity politics; on the other, defenders of the “Enlightenment ideal” of free and equal persons judged on their substantive merits, without reference to sex or skin color. Each side accuses the other of bad faith, in addition to bad ideas. If it’s diversity you want, say MAGA pundits, how about we get some Republicans into your philosophy department? If you hate non-white people, counter the Brooklyn socialists, why not just say so, instead of pretending that you care about free speech?

Meanwhile, the Asmat bis poles look on, and they must be laughing hard in their woody cores: “Diversity?” one can hear them thinking, “How dare these cretinous buffoons babble on about diversity!”

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By Matt Feeney

After all, those looming funeral pylons, together with all the other majestic Melanesian artifacts around them, which hail from hundreds of totally diverse cultures, can see clearly the truth to which we are mostly blind: our world, the world of modern America and much of what lies beyond these shores, is, at this point, almost perfectly monolithic. Big picture, we all share one simple cosmology. Call it the “moneyworld”.

I know what you’re thinking: “That can’t be right! Look around! We are Christians and Jews, atheists and futurists, men and women and everything in between, black people from the South and recent immigrants from Asia. We are all so distinctive. And we believe a million different things. How dare you call us all the denizens of a single cosmology — and a counting-house ‘moneyworld’ at that!”

Almost. But not really. What we are, mostly, of course, is moderns, and what that means is that we navigate a world mapped in money values. A world shaped by ever-more-powerful programs for aggregating and augmenting “wealth” — wealth measured in dollars and cents. The masters of our universe are the financiers who look ceaselessly for ways to make their capital return new and bigger profits. We follow them, and pay tribute, when we can, with our little mutual funds. And we, too, as consumers and life-long market players, try to figure out how to win in the ledger book of existence: to buy the stuff we want for prices we can pay; to get ours at the auction block where we sell our wares, our time, our eyes, our minds. Indeed, we play the market with our whole beings, since we do everything we can to be rational self-maximizers in the continuous competition of the workforce, which demands that we conceive of ourselves as human capital, and “invest” in ourselves, through education and training, to optimize the ROI of our lives.

So what matters to the moneyworld? Money matters. What is “meaning” in the moneyworld? A billion dollars is meaning — everyone gets that. Are there other kinds of meaning? Sure, maybe. Like “happiness”, perhaps? True, we know it is a thing. But the good news is that economists can make you a model for it — denominated in dollars, naturally (they have no other units). What their models cannot capture is squishy at best. It might be real stuff, but it is so hard to quantify. Better pick a major in college that pays real dividends. In cash. You can puzzle about happiness after you make your first million.

Let me be clear about my view here: money is fine. Yes, yes, it is indeed a powerful technology for coordinating human behaviors, and markets can do good things at scale — allocate resources, drive innovation — in ways that are unmatched by any other social system or set of beliefs. I get it.

But the moneyworld is a world organized by price, a world of pure and continuous calculation. It is a world that only a machine could love — and the machines do love it. They run the numbers and keep the accounts. They have the data, and they use it — to monetize us, actually. Indeed, it is increasingly their world, and we only live in it — with many of us feeling more and more alienated and angry and unsure of what comes next.

A turn in the Oceania gallery of the Met is a chance to be reminded of how strange our machinic moneyworld really is. It has engulfed the planet as a ubiquitous system of meaning and order — but it has no soul whatsoever. No imagination. It knows, in the end, nothing about the stuff that makes us what we are as human animals: the dreams, the nightmares, our unique ability to find each other and tell stories powerful enough to make the earth a home and turn perfect strangers into kin — all the mad and magnificent ways we have worked to make sense of the experience of being alive on this planet. What makes us human, ultimately, is our ability to make meaning, not money. And we have done that in millions of ways, across millennia.

In New Guinea alone, a single island, there are some 800 different language communities. In some regions a mere 50 miles separates groups who are farther apart in linguistic and cultural traditions than China and France. How different are these worlds? Very. Look over here, at this “yam mask” from the Abelam people of the Middle Sepik River, over the ridge from the Asmat. It was placed on giant, man-sized tubers in rituals of fertility and initiation. It sits in a case, here, as a small and mysterious fragment from a very different cosmology of meaning and practice. Little of that world survives, of course: the grandsons of the makers of that mask probably work for the moneyworld now, logging in Malaysia.

Will a stack of greenbacks someday sit in a museum case on Mars, as artifacts of our globe-spanning but heedless and apparently self-destructive worldview? Who can say. But I like to imagine what the curators would write on the label.

For now, we have our work cut out for us. It is time to dig in and think hard about the different ways our ancestors have made meaning. Because what it is to be a human being is an urgent question to which every one of us had better have an answer. The rise of super-powerful human-emulator AI systems — which are both the flower of the moneyworld and its killer app — has made the question of our actual humanity the blazing question of our time.

We have been and believed so many things. That diversity, now, is a powerful inspiration as we face the monolithic moneyworld we have made. How can we arm ourselves against dehumanization in all its brutal forms? I don’t know. But I do know that there is no whitepaper that is going to save us. And that our museums, most of them, remain open. Some of the thinking we need is going to happen in their halls. It must.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Leftie, I think I have the right to say this: if Trump is in the White House, it is our fault. If too many Britons blame migrants for a secular stagnation that has nothing to do with them, it is the Left’s fault. If Europe is fragmenting and warmongering, yes, you guessed it, that too is on us. If green investments are despised on an overheating planet, it is because the Left failed to wrestle the green transition from the clutches of Wall Street types who profit from phony pollution markets.

Am I being too harsh on us Leftists? Not really. Big Finance and Big Business did not, of course, need us on their boards to devastate people’s lives in 2008. They did it all by themselves. But we on the Left had the tools to see the crash coming and to push sensible policies afterwards to tend to the wounded majority. Instead, we fell in love with our own voices as we delivered fiery speeches at otherwise splendid gatherings: Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi. While we wasted our energy debating irrelevant issues, the likes of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Europe’s social democrats were concocting — often in our name — schemes to transfer the bankers’ losses onto the shoulders of society’s weakest. In short, we had the opportunity to shield the many from the greed of the few. And we failed, resulting in the surge of nativist proto-fascism that masquerades as unbowed patriotism and realist geopolitics.

But here is the greatest paradox of our era. Though never before has the Left been so weakened and discredited, never before has it been so necessary. The reason is that only the Marxist Left is even interested in rethinking the one thing that can re-align our technological capacities with our need for freedom and prosperity: property rights over machines, algorithms and scarce natural resources.

Where are we at today? Capitalism was defeated in 2008 almost as decisively as Soviet communism was in 1991. Since then, austerity for the masses and state “socialism” for Big Business and Finance inadvertently funded the explosion of Big Tech’s cloud capital: machines that produce no commodities but generate enormous power directly to modify our behavior.

The resulting permanent stagnation reflects the post-2008 Twin Peaks problem: a massive pile of monies (the first peak) that won’t flow into productive investment, and an equally vast pile of public and private debt (the second peak) that such investment could have canceled. Rising discontent and the return of the ultra-Right were inevitable — it’s what happened the last time Wall Street collapsed, in 1929.

A new technofeudal ruling class, using its cloud capital and power to shape our behavior, seized control of markets and siphoned off profits as rents, deepening systemic stagnation. Competitive markets are now infeasible, except in communist China. Across the Western world, capitalist markets are shrinking while cloud capital threatens the very idea of the liberal individual and the neoliberal fantasy that growth could come from shrinking the state. Social democracy is also dead in the water, a sad reflection of how welfare states can never be funded by taxing mercurial tech lords and unhinged private equity outfits who own both our states and the means directly to modify our state of mind.

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By Yanis Varoufakis

As cloud capital develops its AI powers further, it is overriding what remains of our property rights over our thoughts, intellectual output, even our audio-visual image. By privatizing the dollar through stablecoins and the military-industrial complex through the combination of drones and AI, our tech lords have begun to develop a new transhuman ideology — techlordism — which will replace neoliberalism.

Regulation, anti-trust laws, and wealth laws cannot rein in these exorbitant, feudal-like powers. In a world where technofeudalism advances by masquerading as dynamic capitalism, all other ideologies — liberalism, neoliberalism and social democracy — are now as extinct as the feudal ideals of chivalry or the divine right of kings.

The old ideological clash between free-market ideologues and social democrats no longer describes our reality. True political power comes from control over property rights — the only way to make our brilliant new technologies serve humanity is to democratize control over them, particularly in the workplaces where they are deployed. Who else but a revitalized Left can make that case?

But first the Left must regain the trust of a deeply skeptical society. It can only do so by distancing itself from five cardinal sins.

The Left fell into the trap of welfarism once it abandoned its ambition to drive social progress by intervening in the workplace. Having forgotten what makes production tick, social democratic parties ended up as the parties of pensioners. Redistribution is essential in any civilized society, but a society stuck in a welfarist mindset won’t stay civilized for long.

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Then there’s laborism. As William Morris so eloquently warned, the celebration of mind-numbing work as virtuous is stultifying and misguided. Industrial robots and cloud capital, once wrested from the tech lords, must be the Left’s tools for liberating labor from laborism and for steering the masses toward creative, artisanal work that not only satisfies the soul but also produces high-quality stuff.

Green Keynesianism is theoretically splendid but severely circumscribed in practice. As Michal Kalecki predicted decades ago, even if the ruling classes permit the state to boost their aggregate profits through public investments in socially necessary projects like green energy, their dominant strategy is to take advantage of public monies but end Keynesian policies well before the majority benefit from them.

Accelerationism can also be useful in the right context but is a disaster when applied unthinkingly. The idea that, if things get much worse, the majority will come to their senses and rise up to protect their interests, is as deluded as the tech lords’ conviction that we shall all become happy and glorious if their AI-driven cloud capital takes over the planet tomorrow. Preventing the deterioration of society’s circumstances through redistribution and Keynesian policies in the short run is essential as long as the Left does not fall into the trap of seeing welfarism and Keynesianism as permanent solutions.

But perhaps our worst sin has been that which we rose up to defeat but ended up embracing with grim gusto: authoritarianism. Those of us who spent our youth in Leftist circles can recount the horror stories. But the rot began earlier when our precursors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels among others, failed to foresee that our powerful prescriptive texts attract disciples and believers. Before long, Leftists abused comrades, built their personal power base, deplatformed rather than out-argued opponents, sought positions of influence within the system they were supposedly fighting against, bedded impressionable students, took control of the Politburo and threw anyone who resisted into some gulag, actual or metaphorical.

Assuming that we are capable of putting these sins behind us, the task ahead is clear: to demonstrate that the radical democratization of workplaces and core economic infrastructures is not merely a radical ideal, but a practical requirement for authentically freer, richer, and happier lives.

Any theory of change must begin with a vision of a future worth fighting for. But it can’t end there. To be useful, the Left must outline the tangible steps it would take to get there — not just tomorrow, or in six months’ time, but in one year or five years from now.

Beginning with the long-term vision, the Left needs to inspire confidence that technology can become a liberator, rather than the handmaiden of exploitation and oppression: that it will forever be as long as machines are owned by the 0.001%. It must, then, illustrate what this means for how corporations function, how money is created and how land and other natural resources are used. To explain fully how these three realms — production, money and land — are to be managed by an empowered demos, would take many pages. Indeed, I had to author a political science fiction novel to outline them.

Nevertheless, the foundations of any long-term Left vision can be summarized in a single word: democratization. First, that means democratizing corporations by means of new corporate laws that incorporate the principle of one-employee-one-share, and one-person-one-vote, alongside citizens’ juries (as opposed to bureaucratic overlords) that would oversee newly democratized corporations. Second, that means democratizing money, by deploying digital payments systems to establish a monetary commons which harnesses our collective capacity to create money. This would be a decisive step toward providing a non-inflationary trust fund for all. Finally, any serious Left must democratize land, and other scarce natural resources, via a new system of land use that divides socialized land into commercial and social zones, using proceeds from the former to invest in the latter.

With production, money and land democratized (but not nationalized), there is no limit to imagining a realignment between humanity’s technological capacities, our collective interest and our personal freedom. Indeed, the only limit is the hard question: OK, even if we agree that this is where we want to go, how do we get there? The answer must include tangible, verifiable goals every step of the way, from tomorrow morning to the next decade or two.

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By Ben Burgis

These steps must include practical solutions to the aforementioned Twin Peaks problem (the transformation of idle cash into productive, non-damaging investments); the termination of fake electricity markets; the revival of our depleted (health, educational, environmental) commons; the task of restraining Big Finance and the technofeudal ruling class; the liberation of swathes of people from the shackles that hold them back; and the misunderstandings that cloud their thinking.

At the level of ideology and prose, meanwhile, the Left must correct the great mistake that, in the first two decades of the 20th century, caused it to veer off into a mire of authoritarianism and, inevitably, failure. Though the Left has its roots in the emancipatory movements of the 19th century — from women’s liberation to the trades unions — sometime around the Great War both the communist and the social democratic traditions ditched liberty in favor of something nebulous and ill-defined that Karl Marx rightly rejected: equality. In this way, the Left gifted freedom to the liberals (who only cared about their freedom, not that of the majority) and itself drifted into authoritarianism and, eventually, ill-repute.

The Left must now ditch airy-fairy notions that it cannot define, like fairness and equality, and instead proclaim as its highest calling the universal freedom from others’ extractive powers — powers that, in modern society, stem from highly skewed property rights. Put slightly differently, property rights must be the main plank of the Left’s program, along with the defense of freedom from concentrated (corporate or state) power and intolerance (including the intolerance of the intolerant).

In this technofeudal world, where capital has triumphed by mutating into a variant that controls our minds directly, we do not even own ourselves. As the 21st century’s dystopia unfolds, a libertarian Marxist mindset is the Left’s last chance to be relevant and useful to a species struggling not merely to reform a problematic system — but, ultimately, to survive as a species capable of both freedom and prosperity.

It is a challenge, and an opportunity, for reformers in government and business: unless policies address the fundamental economic crises shaping this socialist surge, our market system, particularly in cities, will weaken in the face of collectivist urges. Capitalism can only be saved by addressing issues like housing affordability, lack of upward mobility, and a dearth of good jobs. In doing so, the forgotten midcentury model known as social democracy offers a promising blueprint.

The social-democratic model rescued capitalism from overthrow in the last century, in both Europe and America. The model’s origins lay with fiercely anti-Communist politicians like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in Germany. In the United States, it took shape as the New Deal tradition, running from FDR even to Richard Nixon.

Conservatives, then as now, framed social-democratic and New Deal initiatives as a “communist plot.” The very opposite was true: measures like Social Security, Medicare, and the Wagner Act (which legalized and encouraged labor organizing at a national level) were intended to mitigate socially destabilizing inequality and thus served to ultimately preserve the enterprise system.

The key is to try to make the system work better for the asset-poor majority and create more wealth to distribute. By contrast, even in our supposedly populist age, the predominant conservative response to capitalism’s crises is to offer free-market bromides. Figures like Phil Gramm refuse to even acknowledge massive and growing inequality, and debilitating concentrations of wealth, treating complaints about such phenomena as a kind of Leftist plot. Others point to heart-warming cases of ordinary workers getting rich through shares in companies like AutoZone, Nvidia or Microsoft, even though such cases represent a sliver of the population.

Chanting mantas from Adam Smith or Ronald Reagan won’t save capitalism from the Leftist tide. In a few short years, the Democratic Socialists of America have gathered strength not just in New York but Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, and other cities. The coalition they are putting together is broad, including economically stressed young professionals, poor recent immigrants, and the pre-existing welfare class. The critical force was a shift among younger voters who drove record turnouts for Mamdani and backed him by over 70%.

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Instead of meeting the challenge with libertarian rhetoric beloved by academic economists, the best option will be to adopt, and expand, social-democratic policies that have existed within the context of the market system, and are widely supported by the public across the board.

What the young Left promotes, however, is not genuine social democracy. As Michael Lind has argued in these pages, the Mamdani agenda isn’t about growing the pie and empowering workers relative to capital so they can get a larger share of it through wages — the wage-based predistribution that was at the heart of the New Deal. Rather, Mamdani is mostly pursuing the same old post-tax redistribution that neoliberal progressives have long favored: free buses, public grocery stores, and subsidized pre-K education allow businesses to keep on paying low wages while putting the costs on the taxpayer’s tab.

The public budget ends up covering the transportation and schools that, in turn, allow the service-industry worker to get to her low-wage job. But such measures don’t fundamentally grow the economy, create new opportunities, or alter the balance of bargaining power between the asset-poor and the asset-rich.

The Mamdani agenda supplements this with the identity-obsessed social deregulation that has become characteristic of blue-city governance. For example, he’s pledged to underwrite legal defense for migrants targeted by ICE — another pro-employer measure, since illegal migration creates a shadow army of cheap and vulnerable labor for the DoorDash economy. And he wants to legalize prostitution, allow homeless encampments, and create so-called safe injection sites for drug addicts: measures that, again, will not alter the balance of bargaining power between workers and capital, but will blight working-class and minority neighborhoods in the name of “emancipation.”

The late DSA founder Michael Harrington (I took his course in Marxism at Columbia while still in high school) would barely recognize his offspring. To be sure, Harrington favored industrial policy and antitrust action (like both Joe Biden and Donald Trump). But he also detested Communism and its Third Worldist offshoots. He supported the right of Israel to exist and defend itself. And he didn’t think democratic socialism should mean the breakdown of social norms, all contra today’s urban Left.

Social democrats have traditionally embraced  patriotism, family, freedom of speech, self-government, and personal property. But today’s DSA prefers Third Worldist rhetoric. It embraces the Marxian radicalism of Kwame Nkrumah, after whom Mamdani got his second name, as well as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and even Islamists supportive of Hamas.

That this version of “socialism” has the wind in its backs should be read as a symptom of a deeper social crisis. What is now widely described as “late-stage” capitalism by hopeful Leftist ideologues seems to  disturbingly mirror Marx’s bleak assessment of capitalism’s future as a repressive and impoverishing force for most people. If a decisive share of people in America (and Europe) experience the market system in this form, it will be a boon to the Mamdani agenda — and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, to hard racialists on the Right.

The depth of the problem can be discerned in the ever-greater concentration of assets, notably in housing. Today housing affordability stands at the lowest level for which there are data series (up to 60 years). A new Institute for Family Studies report found that since 1970, the share of young adults who own the home they live in has declined from 50% to as low as 25%.

At the same time, this same generation faces diminishing economic prospects, declining earnings and a job market getting tougher, even for college graduates. This could be further exacerbated  by the rise of artificial intelligence, at least in the short run. Oligarchs like Mark Andreessen and free-market advocates like Phil Gramm naturally insist that AI “will bring prosperity” to the masses. But 82% of Millennials fear AI will reduce their compensation.

Even geeks may find out that they are vulnerable to what economists refer to as “skills-based technological change.” According to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. Companies like Amazon are consciously employing technology to reduce their workforces, laying off 30,000 workers while enjoying record profits. There seems to be a corporate race to see who can lay off the most people, while wages for those still working have increasingly stagnated.

Here’s how you build a constituency for resentment Leftism. Already barely half of all people under 30, according to one survey, have full-time jobs, while many simply drop out of the workforce. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged.

Meanwhile, the ultra-rich are invested in a future shaped by a kind of technological elitism, spending fortunes on making designer babies and finding ways to live forever. Some, like Google co-founder Larry Page, even conceive of intelligent robots not only taking jobs, but insist that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in “cosmic evolution.”

All this nurtures the politics of resentment and redistribution. A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that the share of those who see a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American Dream — that if you work hard, you will get ahead — no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys. Negativity was particularly pronounced among Democrats, with 90% holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as much as among Republicans.

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So support for mass redistribution grows. Even in the United States, the majority of young people now embrace socialism as a better model. There’s growing US support for expanded government and greater income redistribution, with the majority under 40 strongly in favor of limiting wealth. Perhaps even more remarkable, one survey found that a majority favors restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits under $1 million annually.

This is a perfect environment for demagogues of various stripes. Mamdani and his ilk, as I’ve argued, are mainly dabbling in Third Worldist and identity-based resentment politics, not authentic social-democratic reform. But in the absence of the real thing, the corrosive Mamdani version — blue-city misrule on overdrive, featuring minority entitlement, anti-Israel antics, green degrowth hysteria — can have great popular appeal among two credible voting blocs: stressed educated whites and often hard-pressed recent immigrants.

Ultimately, we may face a situation somewhat akin to Weimar Germany, with radical politics driven by what historian Eric Weisz identified  as “the proletarianization of the middle class.”  Just as the Industrial Revolution, particularly in its early stages, created Marx’s revolutionary proletariat, we are rapidly creating a vast new constituency for radicalism. Over time, we may find that no power on earth is more fearsome than what one Marxist scholar described as “the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.”

Social democracy — the real thing, not its Mamdani mirage — is part of the answer.

The brilliance of social democracy lay in its broad national appeal. Lyndon Johnson, a Texas New Dealer, used his power to bring electricity to his native, and historically poor, southern part of the Lone Star State. Projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam powered once-remote parts of the south and southwest. Throughout America, we still admire, and benefit materially, from the social-democratic achievements of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration.

Although there is much dispute as to the New Deal’s economic effects in ending the Depression, America’s experiment in social democracy created a nation strong enough both to win World War II and ensure mass prosperity afterward — the so-called “30 glorious years.” In more recent times, the social-democratic policies of California’s Gov. Pat Brown, through massive investment in education and infrastructure, laid the foundation for California’s late-20th-century ascendancy, a legacy that still benefits millions of people in the Golden State.

Something of the same spirit is needed today, if not the exact same policies. No, universal basic income isn’t it. That’s another form of what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag”: it doesn’t fundamentally empower working people, it doesn’t boost their wages and autonomy in the workplace or their agency in the marketplace. UBI merely blunts the misery (the useless eaters can spend it on palliative weed and porn, is how many of its advocates in the tech world really think).

But this approach is not sustainable, even for the oligarchs, particularly in a stagnating economy.

It makes sense, even for capitalists, to look into a modern revision of the old social-democratic playbook with its focus on policies that would bring more opportunities to the now struggling middle and working class. What’s necessary, at its core, is a restoration of America as a builder country — of houses, advanced-manufacturing products, healthier foods and cheaper electricity. This would mean significant reform of our current costly, ineffective education system, and an emphasis on skills training. It’s an approach that worked well for decades in northern Europe, and would meet the country’s debilitating lack of trained technicians, artisans and mechanics. It would also encourage new development in areas, like some inner cities and the periphery, where price is less of a factor and locals are largely in favor of it. Modern social democrats might use government as a prod, but they’d also look to the genius of the market, as we did so brilliantly in becoming last century’s “Arsenal of Democracy.”

Of course, like all political philosophies, social democracy can warp over time and needs persistent reform and rethinking. But given the choice between authoritarian Third Worldist pseudo-socialism and an untenable, and unsustainable, elite economy, maybe it’s time to give social democracy another chance.

With modern science, we can do better. The Sun is about 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth. Impossible. Think about it too long and your brain starts leaking out of your ears. But we have images of other stars, far away, a billion times the volume of the Sun, in distant galaxies a million light years across and a billion light years away, each containing 500 billion stars. But as big as reality is, our numbers can go larger. According to Biblical tradition, the universe is around 7,000 years old. We now know that this is a hilarious underestimate; the real number is just under 14 billion years.

But ancient Indian civilization, which had the number zero and the decimal system much earlier than Europe, could conjure arbitrarily large numbers whenever they wanted. According to the Bhagavata Purana, one of Hinduism’s central texts, we are currently in Kali Yuga, the lowest era in the universal cycle of world-aeons. Kali Yuga has been going since 3,102 BC, and we’ll have to suffer under it for another 427,000 years. After that there’ll be a cataclysmic war and the world will be restored to the righteousness of Satya Yuga for 1,728,000 years. A full cycle of the four Yugas lasts more than four million years. A thousand Yuga cycles, or four billion years, is equivalent to a single day for the creator god Brahma, which is followed by the Naimittika Pralaya, or the Night of Brahma, in which all of creation dissolves into chaos for another four billion years while he sleeps. Then, in the morning, it starts again.

A year for Brahma is around three trillion human years, and he will live for 100 of those years. After that, he dies. It’s currently the day after Brahma’s 50th birthday, so our universe has been going for 155 trillion solar years, a number so large that it means the actual 14-billion-year figure is closer to the Old Testament estimate by several orders of magnitude. But our Brahma is just one of innumerable creator-gods, and on the scale of Absolute Reality even his 300 trillion year lifespan is incredibly brief. Brahmas are constantly popping into being like bubbles in the ocean, and constantly bursting again into the void.

Anyway, that sense of terror before extremely large numbers is how I’ve started to feel when I hear Americans talking about money.

Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas stations based in Texas. If you get a job as a car wash manager at Buc-ee’s — a role requiring no previous experience — your starting salary is $125,000 a year. This is twice what you make as a senior journalist at the BBC, considerably more than a senior civil servant, software engineer, or mid-level investment banker, and about even with what you get as an MP. Buc-ee’s are known for paying well, but not exceptionally well. In fact, according to some Americans, this is a poverty wage.

Every so often, the financial press there produces an article about how you need to make $300,000 a year to be middle class, or $350,000 to be middle class in New York; the latest dustup is over the asset manager Mike Green’s claim that thanks to rising asset prices, the real poverty line is around $140,000. Six figures is not impressive any more, not when the first of those figures is a one or a two. Get the right job and maximize your overtime, and you can make six figures rolling burritos at Chipotle. A janitor on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system managed to pull in $270,000. These are baby figures. According to one survey, the average annual income that Gen-Z Americans think they’ll need to be financially successful is $587,797. More than 70% of respondents thought they might achieve financial success in their lifetimes.

Americans have gone insane about money, and young Americans are more insane than anyone else. Like a lot of millennials, I came of age just in time for the 2008 financial crash. It colored an entire generation’s way of thinking about the economy: we decided that having an economy seemed like a generally bad thing that caused more trouble than it was worth. We wanted to change the world through collective action, build something fairer and gentler, that wouldn’t be able to suddenly immolate all our hopes and dreams because a few asset traders had invented a new and unstable kind of derivative. Our slogan was that “another world is possible”.

We made banners with that slogan and hung them from occupied university buildings during student protests that all imploded in various undignified ways. We came out in our millions to support socialist electoral movements that imploded with even less dignity than before. Another world might have been possible, but it didn’t seem to want to be anything more than a possibility. The new crop of young people are different. Their formative crisis was the pandemic, and it seems to have taught them the opposite lesson to us. Absolutely nobody is coming to save you. Collective action is a scam. Politics is for losers. If you want to survive, the only way is to make as much money as you possibly can.

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Maybe making as much money as you possibly can has always been the secret content of American life, but at least it used to be secret. Once, mad covetousness could dress itself up as a set of civic values, all freedom and democracy, patriotism and the nuclear family, hot dogs and Jesus and the Fourth of July. Not any more. I used to find American patriotism vaguely baffling: all those grinning apple-cheeked aliens proudly hoisting a flagpole over their enormous lawns, as if they needed to remind anyone what country they were in, as if anyone could have mistaken this endless tract of treeless suburb for Belgium or Bhutan.

But I might miss it when it’s gone, and it’s going. According to a 1998 Wall Street Journal poll, 70% of Americans said patriotism was extremely important to them; by 2019 that had slipped to just over 60%. But since the pandemic it’s accelerated: in 2023, only 38% of people were driven by a fanatical adherence to the national cult. They don’t care about getting involved with their local community either: 61% of people said that was very important in 2019, and 27% in 2023. Religion is down nine points over the same period; having children is down 13. The only thing that’s more important than it used to be is money.

Making money doesn’t work the way it used to. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to involve getting a job. Selling your labor is a kind of impediment that cynical powers have put in the way of your getting rich. What you really want to do is move to Miami and start day trading. Sign up to some kind of convoluted crypto scam. Buy an apartment that will be underwater by the end of the next decade, then fill it with the most aggressively hideous art ever created. Coordinate a short squeeze. Defraud the government. Everything that exists is just money in potential. For everything in the world, there’s also someone who got incredibly rich selling it. Your purpose in life is to puncture through the veil of mere things and commune with the surging spirit-world of pure money that lies beneath.

This attitude isn’t entirely new, because that last insight isn’t mine. It belongs to JR Vansant, the 11-year-old monster at the heart of William Gaddis’s prophetic 1975 novel J R, which I’m legally required to describe as a “sprawling postmodern epic”. Gaddis first conceived of the novel in 1957, the age of mass union membership and the 91% marginal tax rate, long before Reaganism or Bitcoin. Yet already he saw something in embryo. This is the spiel JR delivers to his baffled teacher in a school corridor. “Did you ever think Mrs Joubert everything you see someplace there’s this millionaire for it? Like right now there’s this water fountain millionaire and this locker millionaire and this here lightbulb one I mean like even the lightbulb there’s this glass millionaire.” Mrs Joubert doesn’t much like this. She tries to make him look up at the Moon. “Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that? Does there have to be a millionaire for everything?” But JR doesn’t get it. He is the perfect and original instance of a type that’s taken over the 21st- century: a bright-eyed and innocent American child, totally obsessed with money.

In a way, JR is Joubert’s fault. The story begins, more or less, with her taking his class on a field trip to the Stock Exchange in New York to buy a single share in Diamond Cable, which is also a share in America. “The boys and girls will follow its ups and downs and learn how our system works, that’s why we call it our share. Teaching our boys and girls what America is all about.” But after their little lesson about shareholder democracy and the free market, JR and one of his friends sneak into the executive bathroom, where they overhear the titans of capital discussing some less upstanding aspects of the world of high finance. Crooked tax schemes, insider trading. There’s a plot to start a civil war in Africa over a government cobalt contract. Inevitably, JR and his friend are caught snooping:

—Well by, what the devil are they doing here, get an earful did you boys?
—No we didn’t even…
—Why not… he tore off a paper towel and blew his nose, —hear more straight talk in the washroom than you will at twenty board meetings, anything else we can tell you?
—Well I just wondered what you said about…
—Are you a millionaire?
—Millionaire? What would you do with a million dollars, you tell me that.
—Me? First I’d get this great big place with like these electric fences and…
—Be a damn fool too wouldn’t you. You in this class of Mrs Joubert’s are you? Mean she’s never told you the only damn time you spend money’s to make money?
—She did too hey I mean that’s what we’re having where she said your money should work for you or it’s like this here lazy partner which you…
—Think she’s pretty smart do you?
—Sure she’s real smart, like…
—Real smart is she? She ever teach you what money is?
—Like anybody knows that I mean, wait, like this here quarter is…
—What most damn fools think, next time you just tell her money is credit, you get that?

After that, JR’s rise begins. This snotty, gobby, grubby 11-year-old kid starts buying up penny stocks, practically worthless scraps of equity in failing companies. He ends up buying a dying textile company called Eagle Mills outright, which isn’t worth much except for its pension fund, which he leverages to buy a decrepit brewery. It turns out that the beer they brew contains trace amounts of cobalt, which allows JR to claim tax relief under a mineral depletion allowance. From there he hops from one firm to the next, buying up forestries and shipping firms and publishers, guided by tax loopholes and weird synergies.

JR is not an ethical businessman. When he buys a publisher, he has the brilliant idea of putting adverts in everything it publishes, including school textbooks. It doesn’t matter. Everything ends up dissolving into the J R Family of Companies, and before long, practically everyone in the novel is, without their knowledge, working for an 11-year-old boy. They start reverentially referring to the hidden genius behind the J R Family of Companies as the “Boss”. Meanwhile, the Boss is running his business from a pay phone in his middle-school hallway, buying up the adult world one piece at a time.

But despite the name, J R barely spends any time with JR Vansant himself. The bulk of the novel takes place in the adult world, among a cast of deranged businessmen, hapless administrators, frustrated artists, tormented writers, and despairing composers, whose paths only glance against the boy wonder. The most entertaining of these is Jack Gibbs, a kind of splenetic hyper-version of Gaddis himself, a failed writer, disheveled and rambling. Gibbs is not a happy person. When someone suggests the autumn leaves are beautiful, he belches: “See life draining out of everything in sight call that beautiful? End of the day alone on that train, lights coming on those little Connecticut towns stop and stare out at an empty street corner dry cheese sandwich charge you a dollar wouldn’t even put butter on it…” His friend Eigen is just as miserable, another artist reduced to writing corporate copy. Their friend Schramm sensibly kills himself. The novel follows this bewildering multitude as they fuck and scheme and manipulate each other, but before long it becomes very clear that absolutely all their interactions are mediated through money. At every stage, there’s some old stock certificate, or an ex-husband’s residual 10% stake in the family company, or a suicide’s inheritance: nothing happens in emotional life without money seeping in.

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This has not made the book unanimously popular. Probably the most famous exegesis on Gaddis and J R has been “Mr Difficult”, Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker essay, in which he publicly renounced the complex, ambitious, sprawling postmodern epic and made the case for his turn towards writing the kind of novels that get recommended in Barack Obama’s summer reading lists. The problem with J R, according to Franzen, is its haughtiness. “The first ten pages and the last ten pages and every ten pages in between bring the “news” that American life is shallow, fraudulent, venal, and hostile to artists.” J R, in this telling, tries to uphold art against the degrading, populist tide of money and entertainment, and it does this by being obnoxiously, pointlessly difficult. “Difficulty in fiction is the tool of socially privileged readers and writers who turn up their noses at the natural pleasure of a ‘good read’ in favor of the invidious, artificial pleasure of feeling superior to other people.”

And Franzen is right that J R does not read like an ordinary book. My edition is 770 pages long, and almost all of that text consists entirely of unattributed dialog. No he saids, no she saids, nothing to explain how many people are even in the room, just a constant rising hubbub of voices, all aggressively miscomprehending each other and refusing to let anyone else even finish a sentence. When there are a few scraps of ordinary narration, it’s written in a kind of inscrutable Joycean warbling. Here, for instance, is Gaddis describing the sound of a distant train: “And clear the mile away the wind might bring its sound from the tracks when the wind lay right, blowing off the day and finally letting the darkness settle, and damp, for day to return like a rumor of day and lurk in the sky unable to break.” Personally, I find this very nice to read. But it is not, I’ll admit, entirely easy.

I think Franzen’s problem, though, is that he was writing in 2002, which was too early; J R is absolutely a novel for the present, our present. That protean slop of unattributed voices doesn’t read so much like an obnoxious literary technique any more. Rather, it’s essentially the same as a form we’re now all deeply familiar with: social media. Thousands of nameless people, all chattering inanities, all of it pouring out of nowhere into your awareness through some algorithmic process we can barely manage to conceive of. If you only know how to read self-satisfied middlebrow novels, J R is difficult. If you know how to listlessly scroll on your phone, it’s a breeze.

More fundamentally, though, I think Franzen has managed to totally miss the point. The message of J R isn’t that all our human relations have been poisoned by money; it’s precisely the other way round. For almost all our characters, money means something important: love, power, sex, artistic fulfillment, revenge. The straightforward pursuit of wealth has been polluted with these messy libidinal drives. But not for JR Vansant. Unlike almost everyone else in the book, JR is a blank. We don’t ever see his home life. We learn nothing about his wants or desires. He doesn’t really seem to want anything at all; he takes over the world for essentially no reason. At one point the J R Family of Companies (well, technically the J R Foundation) ends up buying the middle school where its head has lessons every day. But the only thing he wants to do with his newfound power is organize more school trips to New York, so he can surreptitiously hold business meetings there. JR is a monster, totally indifferent to everything good and beautiful in the world, but in the end it’s very hard to dislike him. Unlike all the messy cynics around him, he is pure. An innocent of the world.

What does it mean to simply want money? The young people who think their life is a failure unless they make half a million dollars a year, who’ve abandoned every pompous old value for just making the number go as high as possible — what do they actually want? Usually the desire for money is conflated with the desire for lots of stuff, the luxuries of life. Money can, notoriously, be exchanged for goods and services. But in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx makes an interesting point. Because money is a universal equivalent, it can be exchanged for anything — but this means that to take its specific form as money, it has to negate everything else it could be. “The less you eat, drink, and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc, the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital.” This is the capitalist principle of thrift; what money wants, more than anything, is to expand itself. You don’t fritter it away on stupid pleasures. You annihilate your own life to let it swell. As JR learned in the executive bathroom, “the only damn time you spend money’s to make money.” When young people say that the only thing they care about is making as much money as possible, what they really mean is that they want nothing, nothing at all, a blank and empty world.

We were there to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, as we would do nearly every year into the future. The Pabst is a stunning venue, the kind of place that makes you think your town is special, though as I got older, I realized just about every American city has its own version of the Pabst: a local magnate’s eponymous temple to the arts, built with spoils from the Industrial Revolution. 

This makes it the perfect home for Charles Dickens. In the mid-19th century, as A Christmas Carol debuted, Milwaukee was a grand city in the style of Chicago, infused with German culture and European elegance. The city’s prosperity, however, often did not extend to the laborers who produced the wealth. Humbug! 

Captain Frederick Pabst immigrated from small-town Germany in 1848, marrying into the Best family and eventually growing their brewing operation into the largest in the United States. By his death in 1904, he had “left his mark on the city of Milwaukee, investing in real estate projects like the Whitefish Bay Pleasure Resort and the Pabst Theater and making financial contributions to welfare, education, and arts organizations,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Indeed, when the opera house that became the Pabst Theater burned down in 1895, the captain is said to have cabled, “Rebuild at Once!” Each Christmas, Pabst and his wife supplied 100 families with baskets of groceries to get through the harsh Wisconsin winter. Ebenezer Scrooge, he was not. 

Christmastime makes the world of Dickens bearable, cozy even. And for me, a Christian, Christmas is not a holiday about trees and eggnog and piles of gifts and overspending, but about Christ, who makes our world possible — and bearable and cozy, too, if we can see his light.

Dickens was a complicated Christian: he was born in the Church of England, but later turned away, toward Unitarianism. He focused on the social good produced by Christian principles, but was a vehement critic of the church hierarchy, as well as of clerical hypocrisy and abuses. The light of true faith shines in his profound commitment to charity and the social good. 

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Metaphors of light and dark abound in his work, serving as a commentary on wealth and poverty, patronage and exploitation, individualism and community, and damnation and salvation. In A Christmas Carol, he contrasts Scrooge’s “gloomy suite of rooms” and his “neglected grave” with scenes of how the miser’s former employer, Fezziwig, ran his business. Fezziwig’s warehouse was “snug, and warm, and dry.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred, another of the book’s positive role models, throws a party in a “bright, dry, gleaming room.” (Light and dark are clearly delineated in Dickens — a deeply Christian concept; no moral relativism here.) Dickens describes many wonderful things as “bright” in the book, making obvious the motif of light and dark. His characteristically precise illustrations of both worlds have a jarring effect on readers, fostering the visceral appreciation for warmth that occurs when you step in from the cold.

One passage, as Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present approach Bob Cratchit’s residence, is perfectly Dickensian. “The sky was gloomy,” the author wrote, “and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.”

Scrooge finds that, inexplicably, “the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” 

This is the source of a light so bright that even the summer sun could not compete with it. And it is the reason that Christmas Carol is Dickens’ best work — in a macro sense, his stories are really all Christmas carols. Christ is the flame that lights the West, bringing comfort to the poor and a burden to the rich. Blessed are the meek.

Scrooge, who represents darkness and the other side of the equation, has replaced this light with a “golden” idol. We see this clearly in the scene where he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to watch his former self part ways with a girl to whom he was once betrothed, and she reproaches him for having chosen this idol instead of their love.

The younger Scrooge replies, “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“Gently” the girl answers, “You fear the world too much.… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Critics might say that this detachment from the woes of the world — which are a realistic source of fear — excuses predatory capitalism. Believers who focus on the next life might be tempted to ignore the ills of this one. However, Christian apologists argue that it is precisely this kind of fear of the world that causes predation. And the fear can only be overcome by faith in Christ. The Ubermensch — the godless man who makes himself the measure of value — takes no prisoners on his way to evading material poverty, just as Scrooge stiffs Crachit. Dickens demonstrated that the great miser’s fear leads to a combination of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

Dickens’s Christian ghost stories and Victorian spiritualism were a counterargument to the other dominant philosophies of his time, those of Frederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, each of whom proposed materialist solutions to the ills of human life. Marx decried the material horrors visited upon workers by Victorian capitalism, but saw no solution, no peace, beyond more struggle. Transcendent values — the ones that might’ve justified his concern for workers — were so much, well, humbug. Weber took a more nuanced view, believing that hard work and the system of capitalist prosperity was a religious good, but acknowledging that it came with dangers. 

“Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion,” said Weber. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” Of “religious asceticism,” he wrote that “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” The “modern economic order,” Weber believed, “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” 

“Perhaps,” he added, “it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” 

Coal is a theme in A Christmas Carol, as well. One of its last lines invokes the ever-important coal of 19th-century England. Scrooge says: “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!” he remarks. “Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” This greeting comes with “an earnestness that could not be mistaken.” Scrooge has been changed forever. 

Cratchit was hardly burning the last ton of fossilized coal, nor are we approaching that landmark even now, though Dickens’s carol and the spirit of mercy persist, even in the modern world. In his showing, we may gain wealth and power, but only if we do good with it. In the modern world, we may be trying to forget about his form of charity, but we haven’t entirely. As technology companies with power that rivals great nations erect sprawling data centers, moguls like Elon Musk promise “there will be universal high income” in the near future. Shame lingers, at least for now. 

Tom Holland once described “the supreme paradox of Christian history” as the existence of “a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless.” The challenge for Christians in the industrial West is to find every Scrooge in our midst and make a Pabst out of him. Starting with the Scrooge inside ourselves, of course.

Severance is a classic “mystery-box” show. Prototyped by J. J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), mystery-box narratives offer audiences a series of puzzles, with the promise that they will all be satisfyingly resolved eventually. In real life, there are no writers scripting our reality (so far as we know). However, the paranoid forms of political explanation taking shape on both the contemporary Left and Right share an affinity with the speculative uncertainties of the mystery-box show. 

Conspiracy theories (“fan theories” about reality) abound, and not just on the fringes of the far Right and far Left, but among the sensible denizens of the establishment center as well. The spread of a conspiratorial worldview reflects our current crisis of authority. But more than this, it distorts our understanding of what is really happening. We find ourselves searching for hidden hands and shadowy conspirators rather than facing our problems.  

In Britain since Brexit, neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have relished being in power. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sometimes seemed as if he were trying to pass himself off as the leader of the opposition, promising to “put things right” after the next election, rather than when he lived at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Since Labour came into power in August 2024, both it and large portions of the British media have often behaved as though Reform UK (with five MPs) and the far Right (with no MPs) were the actual government, and Labour only the beleaguered opposition. As with The Board’s speaker in Severance, it is by no means clear where the voice of authority in Britain is actually radiating from. The suspicion that political power always lies somewhere else, and that whoever purportedly possesses it is actually power-less, provides perfect conditions for conspiratorial thinking.

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In the United States, meanwhile, the sense that power itself is out of power is a mainstay of political discourse. The Trumpians and the online-Right more generally are fond of speaking of an amorphous “they” directing the course of events. “They” don’t want you to know. “They” want you to live in fear. A permanent elite called “the regime” — a Left-leaning cabal comprising elements from the media, Big Tech, education, the NGOs, and “woke capital” — really controls things. The background assumption behind such rhetoric is that although it controls all three branches of government, the Trump GOP is, in fact, still at the mercy of malign and hidden forces.  

Like the world of Severance, our political imagination appears to be fundamentally adrift in time. Many on the Left have convinced themselves that their Right-wing political opponents are literal throwbacks to 20th-century fascism. Conservatives have succumbed to the same tendency: for them, the political opposition are really communists. For the Right, corporate DEI, “woke” capitalism, the use of critical race theory in schools, the increased emphasis on heritage justice issues, and the new zeal in progressive circles for open borders — all have become signs of old-school Marxism. 

Conservative commentators seem unable, however, to explain why supposedly extreme Left ideas have been so successful at capturing what were until recently slow-moving, conservative institutions and corporations. So they offer us spy-novel scenarios in lieu of political explanation. Conservative writers such as Christopher Rufo describe a multi-decade “long march through the institutions” by a global cadre of far-Left conspirators, who are now supposedly poised to bring about the revolution. As with the “Right-wingers are really fascists” thesis, there is a sense of time-slippage at work in these narratives. We are being invaded by the forces of a nightmare past. Unmask your opponents, and the eternal enemy will stand revealed.

A more plausible explanation can be found in the writings of the Left-conservative French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Rather than a battle between communism and fascism, Michéa sees a struggle taking place within contemporary capitalism. Two forms of contemporary liberalism — economic liberalism (or neoliberalism) and cultural liberalism (progressivism or so-called “wokism”) — are working together and reinforcing each other, in order to enable global capitalism to function. Indeed, according to Michéa, it is “dual liberalism” that typifies the current establishment.

Michéa, in his 2007 book, The Realm of Lesser Evil, describes contemporary neoliberalism as a “vast, humanity-crushing machine” that is busily “dissolving the extraordinary diversity of existing cultures into the icy abstraction of the global market.” Neoliberalism dictates that there must be unrestricted flows of capital, goods, and labor across borders. To achieve this, it redefines the world in terms of transparency and metrics. During the ’80s and ’90s, under the New Public Management or so-called audit culture, public sector bodies were compelled to recant their previous objectives and justify their existence in value-for-money terms. The long-term result has been a kind of capitalist version of the Leninist permanent revolution. When applied to institutions, it produces a new normal of continual restructuring. All existing organizational structures are turned upside-down and inside-out. Whatever was there before must be reformed. All sense of prior mission and long-term stability is lost.

Rather than resisting neoliberalism, Michéa observes, many progressive elites have allowed themselves to be recruited into its service. Whereas socialist politics was once concerned with protecting the interests of working people and safeguarding national populations, the progressive or neoliberal Left is hostile to the nation-state and any sense of continuity with the values of past cultures. Elites have thus created a highly selective, pared-down version of Left-wing ideology that is compatible with the needs of global business, and manifests itself as the current iteration of “woke” cultural liberalism. 

This new liberalism embraces the principles of openness and boundary-breaking, and focuses on overcoming what it identifies as society’s dominant norms. In doing so, it claims to free people from the oppressive structures that restrict human potential. In reality, it is attacking the last vestiges of the pre-capitalist traditions that once made societies distinctive entities. Unburdened by past values or cultures, nations can be redeveloped in the standardized terms of the new global capitalism. 

Schools and universities have accordingly aligned their teaching curricula with environmental sustainability goals and “global challenges,” and now go about the business of producing outward-facing global citizens, rather than passing on traditions. Heritage institutions, such as museums and art galleries, have sought to make themselves relevant to the current moment by critiquing their own former missions, turning their collections into exercises in moral repentance rather than commemoration. Dissent has become compulsory, so long as that dissent is aimed at the status quo. Of course, what this means is that our actual dominant norm is the compulsion to attack dominant norms — which conveniently fulfills the larger neoliberal project of dissolving all prior structures. 

Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are not opposing forces. Rather, they work together to further the interests of the current system. Once we view the contemporary workplace through the lens of this dual liberalism, much that might have otherwise seemed puzzling begins to make sense. Corporate DEI and environmental and social governance frameworks are not, as many on the Right would have it, forms of “Marxist” indoctrination that have somehow captured the corporate sphere. Instead, they enable the extension of managerial logic into new domains, both legitimizing private enterprise and providing new opportunities for growth. 

The “woke” capitalism that emerged in many corporate workplaces during the 2010s was a particularly evocative example of dual liberalism at work. Corporate managers once defended the value of the work they did in the old “audit culture” terms of efficiency and value for money. After the 2008 financial crash, however, capitalism sorely needed a new justification. The restatement of corporate missions in moral terms, as well as the new corporate tolerance for workplace activism, reassured progressive employees that their workplaces and professions had meaningful responses to contemporary crises. And management’s newly compelling moral framework silenced dissent. How could anyone defy managerial decision-making when management had become fluent speakers in the languages of social inclusion and environmental justice?

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By the end of the 2013 film The Congress, much of humanity has mentally migrated into a simulated world, leaving their withering bodies (and the physical world itself) neglected and abandoned. Our current tendency to operate within a dreamland of historical analogies is strikingly similar. The ubiquitous accusations that one’s political opponents are really fascists or communists are an easy means to win an argument — but also to evade reality. 

In truth, dual liberalism creates problems for both Right and Left. As Michéa observes in The Realm of Lesser Evil, Right-wing conservatives champion free markets and then purport to be shocked by the world those markets create. Their focus on communism allows them to not follow economic incentives to their logical conclusions. And it also allows them to blind themselves to the fact that woke is simply what neoliberal capitalism had evolved to look like in the late teens. Right-wing populism of the sort offered by Reform UK has no intention of breaking with economic liberalism, and thus no answer to economic problems. Instead, the party proposes reviving exhausted Thatcherite economic policies. There is no recognition that these policies have already been tried and that they led here, to this precise — and problematic — moment.

The realities of dual liberalism are just as disquieting for the Left. While progressive rhetoric might resist marketization, progressive principles — choice, openness, autonomy — inevitably create spaces and opportunities for the free market to exploit. Relaxed border policies and the low-wage precarity of the gig and outsourcing economies are inextricably linked, as much as moral defenders of the former might decry the social consequences of the latter. Whereas anti-globalization was until recently a mainstream position on the Left, suggestions that we should reimpose restrictions on cross-border labor flows are now increasingly labeled “fascist” or “far Right.” The influence of the economic strand within dual liberalism — a deep commitment to flows and radical progressive change for its own sake — has rendered the contemporary Left strikingly different from previous Left-wing traditions.

One of the complaints from viewers of mystery-box shows is that their final reveals are usually disappointing. The buzz surrounding online fan theories conceals the less-appealing reality that the writers don’t have the answers, and are making it up as they go along. We can have answers, if we choose to, but we must wrench ourselves out of the dream world of rhetoric, and confront the escalating problems that face us in the real world.

The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.

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There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.

This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favorably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.

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So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.

Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.

There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.

There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.

Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.

Progressives arguing over whether we should only be talking about democracy and “kings” or the oligarchic power of the super-rich — that’s a stark reminder that our century is growing to resemble the 19th: a world of hyper-exploitation and overweening tycoons; trade protectionism and blatant imperial land grabs; constitutional instability and simmering class conflict. There is no better guide to such a juncture than the 19th century’s greatest dissident thinker, Karl Marx.

Marx’s value as a Virgil-like guide to the darker depths of our condition is highlighted by a pair of recent books: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold, which explores the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s thought, and Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean, which seeks to update Marx for a world that Dean thinks is starting to look less like the classical industrial capitalism he wrote about than a kind of high-tech feudalism. Though varying wildly in both style and substance, both books remind us that 19th-century debates about economic inequality remain all too relevant to 2025.

Polls suggest that Slotkin is, in fact, wrong about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. But the issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.

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Putting aside Slotkin’s concerns, the deeper problem with “oligarchy,” popularized by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, is that the term isn’t terribly specific. After all, most societies since the agricultural revolution have been “oligarchies,” in the sense of being dominated by one kind of elite or another. If we want to be precise, the better term hovering just offstage of most popular discourse is capitalism.

At the most basic level, capitalism is a system in which most economic enterprises are owned by private individuals (“capitalists”). The rest of the working-age population, in order to survive and reproduce themselves, are forced to sell their labor power like any other commodity in exchange for a price — wages. Nearly 160 years since it was first published, the most historically important analysis of what’s distinctive about this system remains Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital.

In it, Marx argued that capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism, ancient slave societies, and so on in that “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or wage-laborers) have to perform “surplus labor” in addition to “necessary labor.” Necessary labor is the labor you do to meet your own needs and those of your dependents. Surplus labor is the time you spend laboring to enrich a ruling class, whether it’s made up of slave-owners, feudal lords, or modern capitalists.

Capitalism is dissimilar to these other systems in two ways, however. First, unlike feudal nobles who were just trying to extract enough for themselves and their families and retainers to live in luxury, capitalists are engaged in market competition with one another, giving them a bottomless incentive to squeeze every possible drop of labor from their workers. Marx memorably called this capital’s “vampire-like thirst” for surplus labor.

Second, unlike slaves or serfs who are legally bound to their masters, modern wage-laborers are “doubly free,” as Marx taught. They are free in the sense that they’re able to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them; they’re also “free” from any alternative means of supporting themselves.

As Marx documented in the last part of Capital, the British working class came to be “free” in this second sense through a long and brutal process of enclosures, whereby peasants were driven from their ancestral lands and forced into urban labor markets — a passage described in much greater detail by the Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi in his magisterial The Great Transformation, first published in 1944.

Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).

Nineteenth-century radical republicans were far from indifferent to the “social question.” But they worried that collective ownership by workers would turn into the subordination of workers by a tyrannical state. The experience of the deeply flawed and authoritarian experiments in state socialism that played out in the following century shows that this was indeed a valid concern, even if some of us continue to believe that better forms of socialism are possible.

Non-socialist republicans’ preferred alternative was to use various mechanisms, including leasing state-owned land to small farmers and establishing grants for artisans, to turn back the clock and restore small-scale production. Here, Marx’s side of the argument has been vindicated by subsequent economic history.

Factory and network effects involve increasing returns to scale, rendering mom-and-pop production simply irrational, not to say impossible, in the age of the machine. Rather, high-tech modern production involves the collaboration of vast numbers of people (often spread over a vast swaths of territory). There is no way to turn back that clock without a staggering reduction in the standard of living of working-class citizens of developed societies, and it’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.

Even so, by the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.

Today, parts of this analysis are directly applicable to us. Other parts of Capital, though, can give a contemporary readers the same feeling they might have reading Charles Dickens novels: that they’re getting a lurid glance at an alien world that has, quite fortunately, receded into the past: only think of his harrowing accounts of child workers chained and flogged to keep them going into the 13th and 14th hour of labor, and other horrors of the kind.

The historical successes of the labor movement and the regulatory state in curbing such abuses are so enormous, in fact, that when we see a return of labor practices without these protections, we temporal natives of the 21st century are tempted to take up far older reference points. Discussing proposals for labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.”

Rendon is no economic historian, and he may have been simply reaching for a vivid way of evoking unjust forms of power and domination. But Jodi Dean takes the analogy seriously in her new book, Capital’s Grave: Neo-Feudalism and the New Class Struggle. In it, she argues that capitalism is in the process of giving way not to the collective ownership and workplace democracy Marx envisioned, but to a high-tech form of “neo-feudalism.”

Dean, a political theorist at Hobart and Smith Colleges, doesn’t go as far as to claim that our society today is already neo-feudal. But she does think that’s the direction in which we’re transitioning, and that the capitalist or semi-capitalist order around us already has many neo-feudal elements.

Feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of class society involved a whole lot more direct, non-economic coercion than capitalism: witness the fate of the Hebrews under the Egyptian yoke. Although early capitalism did involve some brutalities of this kind, capitalism for the most part relied on what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of hunger to goad workers into the factory. This was progress, of a kind. Meanwhile, the imperatives of competition at least forced the exploiters to constantly innovate and make production more efficient.

Today, Dean sees the dialectic of history going into reverse. Rather than doing productive labor, the workforce of the 21st century is increasingly concentrated in the service sector, and capitalists are increasingly turning toward “accumulation strategies” that rely not on out-competing other capitalists through greater efficiency, but hoarding wealth through political corruption, rent-seeking, and predation. She sees an analogy to medieval kings enriching themselves through conquest, for example, in the process of “blitzscaling,” whereby wealthy investors pour money into companies like Uber with the understanding that they’ll be unprofitable for years as they undersell and obliterate the competition.

One problem with all of this is that, in seeking to update Marx’s analysis, Dean shows that she misunderstood it. Marx emphatically doesn’t exclude “service workers” in toto from the commodity-producing working class. In explaining the distinction between productive proletarians and unproductive servants, for example, Marx uses the examples of a cook in a hotel and a cook in a private home. The former is helping to generate the revenues out of which his capitalist is paying him. It’s hard to imagine that Marx could have picked an example closer to a Starbucks barista (the archetypal “service worker” in our time) without access to a time machine.

And a deeper problem is that so many of the trends Dean is talking about are reversions not to the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, but to the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s. What is Uber if not a high-tech application to the transportation sector of exactly the kind of casual and insecure labor practices previously tamed by organized labor and the regulatory state?

Nor did the monopolistic robber barons of the 19th century restrict themselves to accumulation strategies that would meet the approval of libertarian economics professors. Andrew Carnegie had no more scruples than Elon Musk about calling in political favors.

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Dean sees “parcellated sovereignty” as loosely analogous to medieval practices of vassalage in everything from the rise of private security contractors to national sovereignty being limited by international treaties. But the Pinkertons that robber barons like Carnegie would bring in to crush strikes were far less hesitant about spilling blood than contemporary security contractors (at least in developed nations); and the most salient shift in recent geopolitics has been the collapse of the postwar system and the re-emergence of the kind of spheres of influence and land-grabs that defined the military and diplomatic histories of the 19th century. We even have a land war where one of the most hotly contested issues is the status of Crimea.

Finally, the 21st century increasingly resembles the 19th in the role of antitrust politics as a popular solution to the problem of economic oligarchy. Witness the enthusiasm of the mainstream American Left (and even portions of the populist Right) for the Biden administration’s crusading antitrust czar Lina Khan. In conditions where the logistics of production have made a quantum leap from those of 19th-century capitalism, though, the limits of this approach are more obvious than ever.

Antitrust may well deliver enough benefits to ordinary people as consumers to be worth the candle. But it can’t do much about the conditions in which the vast majority of the population spend their working lives. We can make firms as small as they can be consistent with the conditions of modern production, and it would still be mathematically impossible for most adults to make their living as owners, rather than workers. If the republic of labor Marx wanted can feel impossibly utopian given the current state of the Overton Window, a republic of small farmers and small artisans has long since become a technological impossibility as a matter of cold fact.

Whether a powerful workers’ movement of the kind that emerged around the world in the 19th century will coalesce in 21st-century conditions is an open question. The future isn’t settled. What’s certain is that, if labor doesn’t find new ways to assert itself, whatever comes next is going to be bleak.

The United States government sensibly stockpiles a number of materials in case of an emergency, including oil, military gear, medical supplies and gold. But what is the point of hoarding cryptocurrencies which lack any intrinsic utility? Especially if you have constrained yourself, as Trump has done, never to sell the crypto you stashed away? The logic of strong-arming the Federal Reserve into creating a crypto stash is one part self-serving bluster, one part trolling, but also one part strategy.

The self-serving bluster part was made painfully obvious as Donald and Melania Trump pocketed tens of millions of dollars from the otherwise pointless meme coins they issued three days before his inauguration. The trolling part was also on display as he signed the executive order. While ceremoniously putting his exuberant signature on the order’s dotted line, he beamed with the grin of a cheeky peasant who, having just broken into the baron’s pristine drawing room, spoils the splendor of its Persian rugs with his muddied boots. That’s how Democrats and mainstream Republicans felt as they watched Trump elevate the cryptocurrencies favored by libertarians, cranks and criminals to the lofty status previously reserved for solid gold and US Treasury bills.

However, amid this cacophony of creepy profiteering, triumph and despair, it is easy to lose sight of the interesting role that Trump’s strategic crypto reserve plays in his broader economic masterplan. And that would be our mistake.

To recast the global economic order in America’s long-term interest, Trump has a two-pronged, seemingly contradictory, strategy: to devalue the dollar while maintaining its global dominance. By boosting US exports (as the dollar becomes cheaper) while pushing down the US government’s borrowing costs (as foreign wealth piles into US long-term debt), the President seeks to increase US hegemony while also bringing back manufacturing to America. Tariffs, in this context, are the country’s chief weapon, pressuring friends and foes to unload their dollar holdings and buy more long-dated bonds (exceeding 10 years).

But what does crypto have to do with any of this? To get a whiff of the answer, take the case of Japanese banks which hold more than $1 trillion, the result of decades of exports to the United States. Trump wants to bully Tokyo into either investing in the US or dumping most of their dollars into the money markets (thus driving the dollar down) while also not converting them into euros or renminbi (which would risk strengthening the reserve status of rival currencies). What could do the trick? How about convincing, or strong-arming, the Japanese to swap their dollars for crypto? That would work, especially if the Federal Reserve dominated the crypto scene. What else could Trump have meant when asserting in this executive order that the US “has not maximized its strategic position as a unique store of value in the global financial system”?

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More intriguingly, four days after the executive order, Trump endorsed stablecoins. In so doing, he added a fascinating new dimension to the idea of forcing non-American institutional investors into moves that serve his economic masterplan.

What are these stablecoins and why are they particularly promising tools for Trump’s twin strategy? Marketed as crypto versions of the dollar, stablecoins such as Tether, USD Coin and Binance are, by design, a contradiction in terms. The whole point of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was to stick it to the man — to central bankers and their fiat currencies, the dollar chiefly. But stablecoins, which are mainly used for cross-border payments, are dollar-denominated crypto-currencies that offer you the anonymity, versatility and universality of Bitcoin — while also claiming to guarantee full convertibility to the dollar on a one-for-one exchange rate. Indeed, some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions are keen to issue stablecoins which are popular in emerging markets. Last month, the CEO of Bank of America suggested it might launch its own, following the examples of PayPal, Revolut, Stripe and many others.

But how can stablecoins promise to keep their value tethered to the dollar, and is this promise credible? In theory, this promise can be met if the stablecoin issuer holds, in some vault, one dollar for every token issued. But, of course, holding zero-interest-bearing dollars in a vault would be anathema to any self-respecting financier. So, even if the stablecoin issuer truly owns an equal amount of dollars to the tokens it has issued, it will immediately trade these dollars for some safe, interest-bearing, dollar-denominated asset — like 10-year US Treasury Bills. This way the issuer is true to their word of backstopping their tokens with real bucks while, at the same time, earning interest. It is an arrangement after Donald Trump’s heart and, I believe, at the center of the idea of his strategic crypto reserve.

By setting up a crypto reserve containing dollar-backed stablecoins, the US authorities are signaling to foreign dollar holders that the US government endorses their ownership of these cryptocurrencies. During upcoming negotiations with various governments, with tariffs dangling like the sword of Damocles above their head, the President will drop subtle hints about how pleased he will be if foreign investors buy these stablecoins using their own dollars. If they do buy them, the dollar supply will increase, the dollar exchange rate will dip, no other fiat currency will emerge as a potential suitor to the dollar’s reserve currency status, and dollar-denominated stablecoins will rise in value. As these tokens will now be worth more than a dollar, their issuer will have an incentive to issue more tokens to restore the one-to-one exchange rate with the dollar. In the process, they will buy, with proceeds from the additional tokens they issue and sell, more long-dated US Treasuries to backstop their increased token supply. Bingo! Trump’s twin strategy is fulfilled: the dollar is devalued while demand for long-term US government debt rises, thus pushing down US Treasury yields and his government’s debt servicing costs.

Upon hearing this, deafening alarm bells should sound in our heads. For if this strategy works, and stablecoins become a pillar of American hegemony, Trump will have planted a time bomb within the foundations of the global monetary system. Monetary history is littered with the corpses of schemes guaranteeing the convertibility of some new-fangled currency with a time-honored store of value. The Gold Standard itself was such a scheme, the post-war Bretton Woods system another.

Take the latter as an example, which coincided with capitalism’s Golden Age — the Fifties and Sixties. The idea behind Bretton Woods was that the West’s currencies would be tethered to the dollar with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, the dollar itself would be anchored to gold at a fixed conversion rate of $35 to an ounce of the magic metal. As long as the US remained a surplus economy, exporting to Europe and Japan goods and services of great dollar value than that of its imports, the system worked fine. America’s surplus dollars were sent to Europe and Japan (in the form of loans, aid or direct investments) and then were recycled back to the US with every Boeing jet or Westinghouse refrigerator that European and Japanese customers purchased.

Alas, by the late Sixties, this recycling system broke down irreparably. The US had turned into a deficit economy, flooding Europe and Japan (later China too) with more and more dollars to finance US net imports. Provided that non-Americans were happy to hoard their dollars, there was no problem. But, the more dollars they had, the more skeptical they were that the US government would honor its promise to hand over an ounce of gold to anyone with $35. Indeed, when several “runs” of America’s gold took place, President Nixon tore up the Bretton Woods agreement, ended the dollar’s convertibility to US government gold, and messaged the Europeans in Trumpian style: “the dollar is our currency but it is your problem.”

So, here is the point: if the mighty US Empire, at the height of its world hegemony, could not honor the anchor of the feted postwar financial system, that is the fixed conversion rate, what gives us the confidence to imagine that a private outfit, such as Tether or Binance, can do it sustainably? Nothing! Indeed, logic dictates the opposite because of the structure of the incentives built into Trump’s strategic crypto reserve. Think about it: as more dollars go into stablecoins, US Treasury yields are lowered and the issuers of stablecoins have a stronger incentive to invest in less stable assets. Indeed, they may even risk issuing additional tokens without backing them with additional dollar-denominated safe assets. The more this goes on, the greater the reliance of the US government, and of the global monetary system, on privateers whose incentives are to act less responsibly. Does this classic case of moral hazard remind you of anything? If not, I would recommend watching The Big Short again.

Their thinking is hard-wired onto a misconception of how capital, trade and money move around the globe. Like the brewer who gets drunk on his own ale, centrists ended up believing their own propaganda: that we live in a world of competitive markets where money is neutral and prices adjust to balance the demand and the supply of everything. The unsophisticated Trump is, in fact, far more sophisticated than them in that he understands how raw economic power, not marginal productivity, decides who does what to whom — both domestically and internationally.

Though we risk the abyss staring back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his thinking on three fundamental questions: why does he believe that America is exploited by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new international order in which America can be “great” again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we produce a sensible critique of Trump’s economic masterplan.

So why does the President believe America has been dealt a bad deal? His chief complaint is that dollar supremacy may confer huge powers on America’s government and ruling class, but, ultimately, foreigners are using it in ways that guarantee US decline. So what most consider to be America’s exorbitant privilege, he sees as its exorbitant burden.

Trump has been lamenting the decline of US manufacturing for decades: “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country.” But why blame this on the dollar’s global role? Because, Trump answers, foreign central banks do not let the dollar adjust downwards to the “right” level — at which US exports recover and imports are restrained. It is not that foreign central bankers are conspiring against America. It is just that the dollar is the only safe international reserve they can get their hands on. It is only natural for European and Asian central banks to hoard the dollars that flow to Europe and Asia when Americans import things. By not swapping their stash of dollars for their own currencies, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of England suppress the demand for (and thus the value of) their currencies. This helps their own exporters boost their sales to America and earn even more dollars. In a never-ending circle, these fresh dollars accumulate in the coffers of the foreign central bankers who, to gain interest safely, use them to buy US government debt.

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And there’s the rub. According to Trump, America imports too much because it is a good global citizen which feels obliged to provide foreigners with the reserve dollar assets they need. In short, US manufacturing has been in decline because America is a good Samaritan: its workers and middle class suffer so that the rest of the world can grow at its expense.

But the dollar’s hegemonic status also underpins American exceptionalism, as Trump knows and appreciates. Foreign central banks’ purchases of US Treasuries enable the US government to run deficits and pay for an oversized military that would bankrupt any other country. And by being the linchpin of international payments, the hegemonic dollar enables the President to exercise the modern-day equivalent of gunboat diplomacy: to sanction at will any person or government.

This is not enough, in Trump’s eyes, to offset the suffering of American producers who are undercut by foreigners whose central bankers exploit a service (dollar reserves) America provides them for free to keep the dollar overvalued. For Trump, America is undermining itself for the glory of geopolitical power and the opportunity to accumulate other people’s profits. These imported riches benefit Wall Street and realtors but only at the expense of the people who elected him twice: Americans in the heartlands who produce the “manly” goods such as steel and automobiles that a nation needs to remain viable.

And that’s not the worst of Trump’s concerns. His nightmare is that this hegemony will be fleeting. Back in 1988, while promoting his Art of the Deal on Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, he bemoaned: “We are a debtor nation. Something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep on losing $200 billion a year.” Since then, he has become increasingly convinced that a terrible tipping point is approaching: as America’s output diminishes in relative terms, the global demand for the dollar rises faster than US incomes. The dollar then has to appreciate even faster to keep up with the reserve needs of the rest of the world. This can’t go on forever.

For when US deficits exceed some threshold, foreigners will panic. They will sell their dollar-denominated assets and find some other currency to hoard. Americans will be left amid international chaos with a wrecked manufacturing sector, derelict financial markets and an insolvent government. This nightmare scenario has convinced Trump that he is on a mission to save America: that he has a duty to usher in a new international order. And that’s the gist of his plan: to effect in 2025 a decisive anti-Nixon Shock — a global shock that cancels out the work of his predecessor by terminating the Bretton Woods system in 1971 which spearheaded the era of financialization.

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Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)? He knows that the markets will never deliver this of their own accord. Only foreign central banks can do this for him. But to agree to do this, they need to be shocked into action first. And that’s where his tariffs come in.

This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamor to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation.

Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man. His ideal world is a hub and spokes model, like a bicycle wheel, in which none of the individual spokes makes much of a difference to the functioning of the wheel. In this view of the world, Trump feels confident that he can deal with each spoke sequentially. With tariffs on the one hand and the threat of removing America’s security shield (or deploying it against them) on the other, he feels he can get most countries to acquiesce.

Acquiesce to what? To appreciating their currency substantially without liquidating their long-term dollar holding. He will not only expect each spoke to cut domestic interest rates, but will demand different things from different interlocutors. From Asian countries that currently hoard the most dollars, he will demand they sell a portion of their short-term dollar assets in exchange for their own (thus appreciating) currency. From a relatively dollar-poor eurozone riddled with internal divisions that increase his negotiating power, Trump may demand three things: that they agree to swap their long-term bonds for ultra-long-term or possibly even perpetual ones; that they allow German manufacturing to migrate to America; and, naturally, that they buy a lot more US-made weapons.

Can you picture Trump’s smirk at the thought of this second phase of his masterplan? When a foreign government acquiesces to his demands, he will have chalked up another victory. And when some recalcitrant government holds out, the tariffs stay put, yielding his Treasury a steady stream of dollars which he can dispense with any way he deems fit (since Congress controls only tax revenues). Once this second phase of his plan is complete, the world will have been divided into two camps: one camp shielded by American security at the cost of an appreciated currency, the loss of manufacturing plants, and forced purchases of US exports including weapons. The other camp will be strategically closer perhaps to China and Russia, but still connected to the US through reduced trade which still gives the US regular tariff income.

Trump’s vision of a desirable international economic order may be violently different from mine, but that gives none of us a license to underestimate its solidity and purpose — as most centrists do. Like all well-laid plans, this may, of course, go awry. The depreciation of the dollar may not be sufficient to cancel out the effect of tariffs on prices US consumers pay. Or the sale of dollars may be too great to keep long-term US debt yields low enough. But besides these manageable risks, the masterplan will be tested on two political fronts.

The first political threat to his masterplan is domestic. If the trade deficit begins to shrink as planned, foreign private money will stop flooding Wall Street. Suddenly Trump will have to betray either his own tribe of outraged financiers and realtors or the working class that elected him. Meanwhile, a second front will be opening. Regarding all countries as spokes to his hub, Trump may soon discover that he has manufactured dissent abroad. Beijing may throw caution to the wind and turn the BRICS into a New Bretton Woods system in which the yuan plays the anchoring role that the dollar played in the original Bretton Woods. Perhaps this would be the most astonishing legacy, and comeuppance, of Trump’s otherwise impressive masterplan.

It is as if, somehow, conservatives imagined that the cultural worldview best expressed by T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” could long thrive in a capitalist culture. As if Eliot’s view, that the true significance of an artist’s work lies in the relationship between the artist and those who had come before, could be compatible with capitalism, an ideology that is by definition “presentist” and utterly disdainful of the past. Or, to put it another way, as if what Daniel Bell described as capitalism’s “radical individualism in economics, and [its] willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process” could somehow still leave room for traditionalism in culture.

For tradition is, at least in the long run, the cultural, and perhaps even the moral, opposite of innovation which is what the free market perpetually aspires to. To use the business school boilerplate, new technologies give rise to new industries, which in turn produce new goods and services. In the process, social relations are transformed. Even if it is correct to believe that capitalism, through what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”, is the best economic system in history for creating prosperity, the price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.

In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell rejected Marx’s idea that culture was a reflection of the economy — that it was “integrally allied to it through the exchange process”. Instead, Bell argued that culture had become ever more autonomous. And yet the connection he made between the growth of discretionary income, and the advent of a cultural order that proudly proclaimed itself the adversary of the established social order, actually fits in better with Marx’s view than his own. Towards the end of his essay, Bell conceded that the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system was, in fact, brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.

But Bell doesn’t seem to have understood something quite crucial about the role of the arts. It is unquestionably the case that from the middle of the 19th century, despite a few dissenting voices such as Eliot’s, artists in the West saw their mission as the dissolution of the social status quo. With hindsight, however, it is clear that their more important role, in world historical terms, was to serve as a kind of inadvertent avant-garde of the free market: by systematically destroying the Protestant Ethic with all its moral and economic commitments to what Bell called “Malthusian prudence”. Bell’s language is elegiac. American capitalism, he wrote, “has lost its legitimacy, which was based on a moral system of reward, and the Protestant sanctification of work”. And, writing as he was in 1970, it is understandable that he thought that the replacement of Protestant moralism with hedonism, with a new “voluptuary system” of “social permissiveness and libertinism”, would be unsustainable.

And had it stopped there, perhaps Bell would have been right. Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.

High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist.

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And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. The madness of wokeness and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism” are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and, probably, in parts of Latin America and Western Europe as well. And this despite the Rightward turn, because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia are no more committed to high culture than to the preservation of the environment. In Western Europe and Latin America, high culture has at least for a century not been a monopoly of the Left — from Borges to Houellebecq, a conservative tradition remains alive. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.

Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the woke/anti-woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there aren’t any people of talent in both camps. But, if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilisations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini said that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he wrote. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.

If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will certainly not be born of wokeness, of neo-tribalist nostalgia, of notions of race that would have pleased the worst 20th-century race scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the place it reached so gloriously in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities? There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. One can be materialist here, but not too materialist; allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.

***

A version of this essay appears in David Rieff’s new book, Desire and Fate, published by Eris and out now.

1. Negative Partisanship

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

4. Reminiscence Bump

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked — morally, politically, economically, artistically — whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

5. Region-Beta Paradox

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

6. Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle

Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other “dark tetrad” personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others. As Aldous Huxley wrote: “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour righteous indignation — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

7. Protégé Effect

The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.

8. Baumol’s Cost Disease

As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages — and prices — in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labour-intensive services like healthcare and college tuition cost more.

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9. Stockdale Paradox

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism (which leaves you unprepared for adversity) nor pessimism (which destroys motivation), but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ozemponomics

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are threatening “limbic capitalism” by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 spends around 10% less on snacks. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.

11. Explanatory Inversion

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realise poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

12. Event Bias

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.

13. Pie Fallacy

Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.

14. Golden Law of Stupidity

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

15. Goal Dilution Effect

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

17. Sheepskin Effect

Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). What students learn is not as important as demonstrating that they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.

18. Deviancy Amplification

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously would not have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

19. Rumsfeld Matrix

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

20. Left-Brain Interpreter

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient’s right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

21. Blue Dot Effect

The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.

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22. Overview Effect

Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the Earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. In the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “on that fragile little sphere… all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.” When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.

23. Barrow’s First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle)

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

24. Ichi-go ichi-e

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

25. Sphexishness

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion. Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’re not intended as rigid rules, only as food for thought.

This is an edited version of a list that first appeared on The Prism.

My heart goes out to the producers and retailers affected by this scam; I have only made one or two jokes about organised gangs of criminal Labradors. But wherever the stolen cheese has been taken, the story invites questions. How could cheese have come to warrant a sophisticate heist? Is there really enough of a ruthless, well-heeled underground cheese cognoscenti in Russia or the Middle East to warrant sending tons of stolen cheddar there, as one producer speculated?

And yet it clearly is that meaningful. And this is because artisan cheesemaking — artisan everything, really — has become a paradoxical phenomenon, which turns place-bound rootedness and a meaning-rich life into products, which are then sold at a premium to people who got rich by stripping precisely those qualities from their own and everyone else’s lives.

For the cheesemakers themselves, the meaning of cheese seems to be social as well as gastronomic and economic. One of the affected cheesemakers lamented the way the robbery represented a “violation of the atmosphere of good faith and respect that all of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s trading relationships have personified over the years”. Artisan cheesemaking, he said, is “a world where one’s word is one’s bond”. But considered end-to-end, it’s also true that such high social trust and lovingly craft-oriented communities as artisan cheesemakers rely, for their existence, on wealth that’s often generated by parasitising on exactly that kind of trust.

It’s not a coincidence that Neal’s Yard Dairy is in Covent Garden, the high-gloss, brand-heavy cultural epicentre of the great London economic centrifuge. London is more or less the only economic bright spot in a Britain that would, if you subtracted the capital, have a per capita income on a par with Mississippi, America’s poorest state. The capital makes the lion’s share of its money in services, especially finance, IT, management consultancy, and related professional services. It is also, according to Oliver Bullough, epicentre of our national transformation into the world’s obsequious butler and financial facilitator, in which capacity it offers a large and shady ecosystem dedicated to laundering credibility, assets, property, and dodgy money for the world’s criminals, oligarchs, and tyrants.

The sparkle on the surface of this cut-throat, financialised, and often deeply dodgy economy is the many appealing, appetising, and delicious products available for sale in its retail shops. Such products, especially the gastronomic ones, often place special emphasis on provenance and other intangible values. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs with the mix of aesthetic, moral and commercial vision required to bring such products to the lucrative London market are often drawn from a distinctive subset of the creative class: one characterised by social researcher Louis Elton as  “Bopea” or “bohemian peasant”.

Bopeas have opted to leave London’s dog-eat-dog existence in favour of more “authentic” and usually rural lifestyles, characterised by artisan craftsmanship and a turn away from consumerism. Though the Bopeas had forerunners in the hippy generation and Good Life smallholding efforts, it’s a sensibility that began snowballing in earnest with the Britpopper generation.

Small wonder, then, that artisan cheese is Britpopper-coded. For self-consciously attending to the provenance of one’s consumer goods first became fashionable in the Cool Britannia era, in part as a byproduct of the economic changes this brought. It’s clear that we began collectively attending to the provenance and meaningfulness of our consumer products at the very moment Britain’s economy began its long slide toward the contemporary basket-case model of high finance, rentier capitalism and human quantitative easing. Accordingly, the 2000s boom years brought an efflorescence of organic veg boxes, hand-made homewares, Jamie Oliver of course, and – bringing the whole shebang together – the transmutation of Blur’s bassist Alex James into an artisan cheesemaker and (latterly) creator of a sparkling wine called (what else) Britpop.

Oliver himself is one of the most well-known individuals to have turned this kitchen-table sensibility into a commercial sensation. No wonder, then, that he was first off the blocks condemning the heist, in terms seemingly custom-tuned to the leaden humour of those centrist dads who did well under Blair, and are now approaching retirement with cash to spare for Neal’s Yard cheese: Oliver’s warning to his fans about the robbery cautioned them against taking up under-the-counter cheese deals that seemed “too gouda to be true”.

Nor is Oliver the only such Bopea success. The fashion brand Toast, for example, was started out of a Welsh farmhouse in 1997 by two pioneer Bopeas, emphasising natural fibres and small-scale artisan production. The clothes themselves (full disclosure: I’m a fan) are pricey, and — we might say — pair well with Neal’s Yard cheese. And the brand’s success in turn reveals the bigger paradox: the website celebrates craftsmanship, “slow” production and a “circle” ethos, and there are free repairs and clothes-swapping services. Meanwhile, though, 75% of the company’s shares are now owned by Bestseller, a conglomerate that also owns Vero Moda, a “fast fashion” brand whose ethos is, to say the least, the antithesis of the Toast sensibility.

None of this is a criticism of Toast per se, or any other Bopea lifestyle brand. Nor is it to be the gotcha guy in the Matt Bors webcomic, insisting you can’t critique the social order while also participating in it. It’s simply to observe that the ostentatious accretion of “ethical” credentials for real-world products tends, in Britain’s postmodern economy, to be offset by the strip-mining of those values for profit in other domains.

Everyone is familiar with the experience of returning to a familiar, trusted brand — say, a high-street pizza chain — only to discover that what used to be a great middle-class product has become rushed, overpriced, and shoddy. The usual culprit is private equity: predatory firms that will acquire a brand, cut costs ruthlessly, usually to the detriment of whatever made the products popular in the first place, and then sell the hollowed-out shell on a few years later having trousered the difference. High-end brands are often better placed to survive this phenomenon; trusted mid-tier ones are regular prey for this kind of looting. And the aggregate effect is a thinning of the middle ground, between high-end brands for the wealthy and shonky ones for everyone else.

For every Toast, there’s a Vero Moda; the cheese equivalent is hand-made small-batch Britpop cheese on the one hand, and on the other the Plasticine bricks you get in your local Londis. Those scouring the mid-range for reliable quality, meanwhile, find the field increasingly bare.

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Does it matter? Well, everyone still gets cheese, of one kind or another. But what grates is the hoarding and artful aestheticisation of “meaning” itself as a consumer product. If we take “meaning” as a crude shorthand for a nexus of goodwill, effort, commitment, and interpersonal relationship that adds up to basic good-quality products and services at a reasonable price, in effect this productisation of “meaning” and “authenticity” as consumer goods comes at the cost of its draining away from the rest of the world. The real cheese robbery already happened, some way upstream of the scam that defrauded Neal’s Yard last week.

But again, perhaps this is all just revealed preference. Britain’s food chain industrialised a long time ago, and while commentators may lament the loss of localism and meaning and so on, if more of us really wanted to be involved in that kind of production we’d already be doing so. In the meantime, I’m glad someone is hand-milking rare breed herds and doing regenerative farming and organic batik and all the rest of it. The world is surely a friendlier and more interesting place for all the Bopeas doing cheese deals on trust; maybe the best we can hope for is their continued patronage by the meaning-hungry private equity class.

So perhaps the meaning of artisan cheese is simply that it exists at all, as a flavourful monument to Britain’s refusal to give in to nihilism. However ambivalent the larger economy that enables it, what it stands for is little slivers of meaning: those aspects of life that people actually care about. Qualities such as belonging, craftsmanship, skill, tradition, and trusting relationships may all have been transmuted into products, to be sold in slices or stolen by the truckle. But we don’t really need to know what the cheese means, to know it matters.

Joseph Schumpeter, who famously recognised that capitalism and innovation are intimately linked, wrote in 1942 that capitalism “never can be stationary”. It has to take risks and fund the most radical ideas because “creative destruction” is the driver of economic change. At the time of Schumpeter’s writing, America’s mid-century golden age, technologies were both the cause and consequence of the country’s massive industrial expansion. Everything from automobiles to consumer appliances to commercial air travel became part of everyday life. Through a technological feedback loop, prosperity was sustained for years.

But, with the exception of the brief computer and internet-fuelled boom at the turn of the millennium, US productivity has been in decline since the Seventies. This downward trend has occurred in spite of consistent increases in spending on research and development, the numbers of patents and PhDs conferred, and scientific articles published. For some economists, such as Robert Gordon, this is because our current technological developments are just inherently less conducive to growth and innovation than those that powered the last once-in-history boom of the second industrial revolution. The implications of Gordon’s analysis are that the days of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” are over: the technology of the future will be just more diversionary apps on marginally improved iPhones.

The potentially revolutionary technological breakthroughs, though, the stuff of the next great boom, are here for anyone who cares to look. Quite apart from the hype around Artificial General Intelligence, existing breakthroughs in modular construction, energy extraction, and nanotechnology could help realise the visions of futurist thinkers and presidential candidates alike. Even the clichéd trope of flying cars, invoked by Peter Thiel to lament the flailing state of American innovation, has found expression in prototypes of eVTOLs or “electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles” that could bring us closer to Jetsons-like skylines. Many of the “nice things” of the future are already here. The problem is that they are not reaching Americans at an everyday level.

What explains this gap? Well, novelty and innovation are not the same thing. Unlike the former, the latter doesn’t simply happen once an invention is unveiled. As Schumpeter observed, it requires diffusion of breakthroughs across the economy, which is in turn reshaped by it. Research, development, and commercialisation phases were closely integrated in mid-century America. It was the heyday of the fabled corporate research lab, such as Bell Labs, RCA Laboratories and General Electric Research (GE), which helped to convert innovations for consumer markets. Corporations were willing to devote considerable resources to creating improved products which would bring greater profits, even if it meant waiting longer.

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But the wave of financialisation that swept American business starting in the Seventies and Eighties scrambled this system. Capital responded to heightened international competition, not by doubling down on technical investments to out-compete ascendant rivals in East Asia and Europe, but by selling off the very material and scientific infrastructure that formed the basis of an industrial economy. The new economic model prioritised financial returns over pioneering innovations: thus America was transformed into a “capital-light” entity of the neoliberal era. Corporate labs were closed and vertically integrated firms like GE were hollowed out. And though America still generated scientific research, particularly at universities, producing and harnessing innovations domestically became increasingly difficult.

And so began the process by which finance subsumed industry. While there had previously been a complementary relationship, a perverse dynamic of “uncreative destruction” now ensued. The drive toward material innovation that had once underpinned the industrial economy metastasised into a craze for noxious innovations in finance itself. Ever more complex financial products were created, and as a result the economy crashed in 2008.

As America divested its industries, Deng Xiaoping opened up China and provided a convenient market for low-end manufacturing. Indeed, “invent in California, make in China” was the new motto. Hoping to move from mere imitation to true innovation, China adopted precisely those principles which had gone out of fashion in the US. And its authoritarian leadership was able to execute a far more disciplined form of industrial capitalism, with hyper-focused, decades-long investment strategies that wouldn’t be possible in today’s Western economies. Even as Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 1999 and formally accepted free trade principles, it continued to use a range of methods, such as subsidies, forced tech transfers, and manufacturing funds, for strategically important innovations like 5G and electric vehicles and batteries.

In America, capital became more averse to risky long-term investments. Businesses racked up short-term profits and hoarded the capital that should have been injecting back into the real economy. As a result, the US now has a “capital inertia” problem — it has abundant stores of accumulated capital (or a “savings glut”) that it can’t, or won’t, invest in large-scale projects such as re-industrialisation, automation, infrastructure, and energy development. This is the contradiction in American capitalism that holds back the next great wave of technological growth. It is the problem the next administration must attempt to solve: how to transition from capital inertia toward the capital intensity that characterised America’s industrial zenith.

The US is only now stumbling toward a proper industrial policy in which innovations can theoretically be diffused en masse, but policymakers still have not rediscovered how to do it.

America’s efforts are hamstrung by the expectation that it should be the US government writing the checks, spending taxpayer dollars (or issuing endless tax credits), and by and large assuming the bulk of the fiscal burden, which can’t be sustained either fiscally or politically.

The federal government, then, has to devise bold new ways of restarting capital intensity. Public development and infrastructure banks, for example, could lighten the burden of risk for the financial sector: by directing and de-risking investments, these public-private institutions can be used to forcefully restimulate the financial industry out of its current atrophied condition. Such concentrations of capital could directly fund economic development, just like Alexander Hamilton’s creation of a national bank did in 1791. State contracts can employ firms to build the promised new cities or manufacturing facilities, restarting the virtuous circle of technological development. As the federal government facilitated the construction of canals, railroads, and highways in previous centuries, so too could it build the vertiports needed to host tomorrow’s flying cars, or at least the expanded energy grid needed to power electric vehicles.

In this scenario, through a reformed and revitalised capitalism that takes innovation seriously, Americans could begin to not just have “nice things” again, but also resilient infrastructure and industrial base. And in a century when both geopolitical competition with China and extreme weather events like Milton are set to intensify, the ability to build will be more than a necessity.

Some stereotypes contain a grain of truth in grossly distorted form. The Irish — to stick with them for a moment — are sometimes thought to be indolent as well as anarchic; and though neither accusation is of course true (it was Irishmen who built many of Britain’s roads, railways and canals), both have some basis in historical reality.

Planting potatoes, which is how a lot of the Irish traditionally survived, demands no great labour; and on a rented smallholding hard work might not be particularly profitable for the tenant, since what mattered was the size of your farm rather than your rate of productivity. All this might well have looked like laziness to the industrially disciplined masses of Britain. As for the charge that the Irish are a lawless crew, it’s worth recalling that for several centuries the law which governed them was imposed by a colonial power largely in the name of its own interests. If the common people were occasionally somewhat cavalier about it, it’s hardly surprising.

There’s a belief on the streets of Belfast and Derry that you can tell whether someone is a Catholic or Protestant simply by looking at them, a conviction that all good liberals would naturally find outrageous. Even so, there’s something in it. By and large, Ulster Catholics and Protestants belong to different ethnic groups, either Irish Gaels or Scottish Gaels, and generally speaking these groups have different physical characteristics, just as Swedes and Chinese do. A women with black hair and blue eyes is likely to be an Irish Gael, and thus Catholic in background, while a short, ginger-haired man is probably of Scottish origin, and thus of Protestant lineage. There may well be black-haired, blue-eyed women in Ulster who burn pictures of the Pope, as well as short, ginger-haired men who are prepared to die for him, but to think that this refutes the point is simply to misunderstand what a stereotype is.

Ulster Presbyterians are not renowned for their zany, surrealist wit or darkly iconoclastic sense of humour, but this is because of their Scottish Puritan heritage, not because of their genes. British sangfroid says less about the nature of the British mind than about the need not to betray weakness in the eyes of your colonial subjects. Norwegians are typically taller than the Welsh. Black working-class Britons have a far higher chance of becoming mentally ill than Keira Knightley, a fact suppressed by those who refuse to put people in boxes. The citizens of Bute, Montana, don’t typically go around dressed in long crimson garments while declaiming from Dante’s Purgatorio, or at least those who do are advised to walk warily at night.

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We can deduce a great deal about individuals from the sparsest bits of information about them. Men are far more likely to throw people through windows than women, and most readers of The New York Times are unlikely to believe that the best way to rid Los Angeles of gang warfare is to detonate a small nuclear weapon over the city. Until recently, Americans were more likely to use your first name on first meeting than the English, though this is changing. When I was a student at Cambridge, my tutor called me “Mr Eagleton” in my first year, “Terence” in my second, and “Terry” in my third. Who knows what teasingly erotic nickname he might have come up with had I stayed on at his college?

Labelling people can be useful. Nobody likes being called Fatso, but plenty of people are glad to be called anti-racist. Critics of stereotyping feel that it reduces the rich complexity of individuals to a crude category, but nobody thinks that being anti-racist is all there is to say about you. It is true that some stereotypes are odiously offensive, but there is nothing wrong with offensiveness as such. No doubt there are those who feel that Jesus should have moderated his language when he denounced the Pharisees as a brood of vipers, but he seems not to have been constrained by modern middle-class etiquette.

Other stereotypes aren’t so much abusive as absurd. Some 19th-century phrenologists held that nations with smaller heads were more easily conquered than those with large ones, while the founder of phrenology, Franz Gall, believed that the moral and religious faculties were located at the top of the brain, this being the area of the skull closest to God.

“Everybody’s different” is a popular slogan these days, intended as an antidote to stereotyping. The only problem is that it isn’t true. If everyone differed from everyone else, there could, for example, be no mental health services, since psychiatry assumes certain uniform patterns of behaviour. Economics would become impossible, and so would sociology. Why are queues at supermarket checkpoints always roughly the same length? Because you can take it as given that people have no great zest for performing certain tedious but necessary domestic tasks, and you can deduce from this that they will gravitate to the shortest queue, thus evening the queues out.

To be an individual is to be incomparable — the mistake is to imagine that the incomparable is always valuable. Oswald Mosley was unique, but many would consider that we would have been better off without him. The same goes in my view for J. Edgar Hoover, whose birth an all-seeing Deity might mercifully have prevented. There won’t be another Jimmy Savile, which is heartening news. William McGonagall’s poem “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is incomparable in the sense of being incomparably bad.

Nor is what we have in common always to be devalued. Having a set of stereotypes at our disposal allows us to form the kind of rough expectations of others without which social existence might grind to a halt. It’s hard to conduct a conversation with your bank manager if he is dressed in a gorilla costume. Freedom isn’t a matter of being free from conventions, but free from oppressive ones.

The problem with capitalist society is that it treats individuals as exchangeable in economic terms but unique in ideological ones. Nobody cares about your incomparable individuality when you apply for a job as a cleaner, but our civilisation is loud with rhetorical appeals to the preciousness of each person, the dangers of reducing them to a dead level and the soullessness of stereotyping. It’s a contradiction neatly caught in a quarrel between Willy Loman and his son Biff in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. Biff angrily urges his deluded father to back off from his fruitless search for individual recognition with the cry “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” To which Willy returns the dignified response “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!” And of course they are both right.

This passion for excellence over exuberant attention-seeking mirrors the wider British luxury industry. Unlike France and Italy, we lack iconic listed luxury growth engines. There is no British Louis Vuitton-Moet Hennessy (£285 billion market cap) or Ferrari (£71 billion). Our greatest champions of Burberry (£2.4 billion) and InterContinental Hotels Group (£12 billion) languish at the bottom of the FTSE 100.

Of course, Britain is still a playground to the wealthy. As Butler to the World, we serve the globally rich with private schools, real estate, and a historically handy tax regime. Savile Row and Jermyn Street are luminaries of menswear. Our luxury automotive industry remains iconic, albeit foreign-owned. However, our disdain for poor taste and glitzy tat prevented us from becoming a gigafactory of shallow status symbols. Unlike our continental counterparts, we have failed to feast on the desires of the growing hordes of global affluence.

But what if this snobbishness was a well-placed long-term bet? Over the past two years, I have been conducting anthropological research into the lives and desires of ultra and high-net-worth individuals — or “(U)HNWIs” to the brands and banks that seek their riches. From Manhattan and Monaco to Singapore and Seoul, I have found that the aspirations of the global rich are undergoing a subtle but tectonic shift. The superficial brand mythologies and logos that have fuelled much of the European luxury boom are fast falling out of fashion.

Instead, these HNWIs are embracing deeper forms of luxury, rooted in a different set of values. They are increasingly rejecting the obvious and explicit badges, instead preferring more subtle, meaningful, and nuanced forms of distinction. “I used to spend lavishly on clothes, mostly buying major French and Italian labels,” explains Bao, a venture capitalist based in Guanghzhou, China. “Now, I spend more pragmatically. I buy less and focus on quality, long-lasting items. It should have its own special story and design, not just a logo.”

Among the global new elite, there is a feeling that not only are conventional status symbols no longer markers of distinction, but they also fail to satisfy deeper emotional needs. “There’s a sense of emptiness, of just consuming things, because they’re showy, or they’re pretty and you get that kind of consumer lust for them that you want to sate,” explains Nadia, a jet-set entrepreneur living between Dubai and Monaco. “It has an emptiness that a new handbag won’t fill.”

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None of which is to say that the rich no longer care about status. Quite the opposite: expressing “status” is now increasingly about conscious virtue rather than chest-beating dominance. To these HNWIs, distinction is not about having the shiniest watch, but signalling an appreciation of craftsmanship, community, patronage and planet.

What’s driving this shift? First, the sheer scale and growth of HNWIs is galactic, and the wealthy need new ways to distinguish themselves. UBS’s 2024 Global Wealth Report estimates there are currently 59.4 million millionaires globally. That number is expected to grow to 86 million by 2027. In a slightly more exclusive tier, there are 243,000 ultra-high-net-worths — those with over $50 million. This cohort of living gods is projected to rise to 372,000 by 2027.

In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen argued that luxury is essentially a symbolic social performance where the excess time and wealth of the rich are displayed through unnecessary, conspicuous consumption. Yet, in a world where 100,000 millionaires are born every week, signalling that distinction has become harder. Behind these astronomical numbers and opaque acronyms, the reality is that owning a Rolex does not set you apart. Being rich isn’t rare anymore.

To further distinguish themselves in a crowded elite world, HNWIs are embracing what Giana M. Eckhardt et al. call “inconspicuous consumption”. This holds that, amid the flash and the fakes, true distinction now comes from signalling to their in-the-know micro-peers groups. The masses are now cottoning on with the Succession-inspired #quietluxury TikTok trend garnering half a billion views.  While online mainstream interest in the trend might have dipped slightly since its zenith in 2023, it still represents a paradigm shift. Over the past 12 months, the stock market value of quiet luxury’s poster children Brunello Cuccinelli (+21%) and Hermès (+15%) far outstrips the now shrinking LVMH (-13%).

Related to this, the global rich are also increasingly mindful of impact of their spending. Endless studies indicate that younger luxury consumers seek sustainability. By 2030, the wealthy youth will make up 80% of the global luxury consumer base. “These younger consumers are more interested in the ethical aspects and the stories behind the products than older generations,” explains Helen Chislett, co-author of Craft Britain: Why Making Matters. In this new landscape, the ethical origin is no longer a side perk but essential to the foundations of the luxury myth. As Chislett explains in a distinctly Carolean tone: “They now seek products that tell a story, with authenticity and a clear lineage. This isn’t just about luxury; it’s about connection and understanding the provenance of the things we bring into our lives.”

Which brings us back to Britain. In this shifting cultural environment, many of France and Italy’s maisons have sold out the quality and authenticity to fatten themselves on the fruits of globalisation. Britain’s luxury artisans, by contrast, stood their ground. Save for the prodigal Burberry’s years in the wilderness, the local industry has consistently maintained its reputation for sustaining a tradition of tasteful craftsmanship, understated timeless design and ethical leadership. As the nouveau riche reach their era of maturity, Britain can feast on the Europeans’ lunch.

In her introduction to Walpole’s 2024 British Book of Luxury, CEO Helen Brocklebank emphasises Britain’s unique opportunity. “All the elements for success are there,” she writes, “a growing market, a new generation of young, savvy consumers, and a shift in what luxury means towards qualities and values where Britain has always excelled.”

And yet, few in Britain seem to care. Parliament endlessly debates the importance of building Tech Britain, which certainly makes some sense: the tech sector contributes £150 billion to our annual GDP. However, the luxury sector, despite contributing £81 billion annually, supporting 450,000 jobs, and paying in £25.5 billion to the exchequer, is almost never discussed by politicians. Apart from stopping Russian oligarchs from buying luxury cars — they get them via Azerbaijan now — and occasional attempts to bring back VAT-free shopping, the British luxury is hardly on the political agenda.

Why ignore this engine of growth? Most likely, it is seen as frivolous. As Brocklebank writes: “Luxury brands create some of the most beautiful, exclusive, and desirable products on the Earth and yet our industry is rarely seen as serious… [It is seen as] indulgent, transient and nonessential.” More cynically, it’s likely that pseudo-salt-of-the-Earth politicians seek to avoid association with a sector they perceive as intrinsically serving the rich and powerful. When Prime Minister Keir Starmer explained last week that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden”, he obviously only meant taxes. Actively persuading the rich to volunteer their cash through craft and charm is nowhere near the agenda.

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Elite commentators often reflect this myopia. Writing in The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh recently suggested that luxury is “Europe’s joke on the world” and “profits from the cultural insecurities of other regions”. While he accepts that these businesses pay taxes and employ people, he critiques the supposed “ghastliness of the products” and international consumers’ “postcolonial urge to ‘mimic’ the metropole”. But what if, rather than being merely a job and tax revenue creating “joke”, the luxury sector is something deeply good for both the economy and the spirit of the nation?

In her four-part review of Kenneth and Gillian Bartlett’s The Renaissance in Italy, Angela Nagle explores the historical realities of an industrial policy that celebrates luxury and beauty. Focusing on the glass-blowing industry, Nagle argues that “the first lesson of Venice is that industry and beauty are not incompatible, as some sentimentalists believe, but can be entirely complementary. This is especially true if you choose to invest in producing luxury or high-quality goods and take pride in their quality.”

This is just as potent a force in Renaissance Venice as it is in 21st-century Sudbury. Employees across the silk mill beamed with glee at the splendour of their businesses. Even beyond the creatives, this pride resonates. “I used do accounting at a sock business, we were just making black socks all the time, you wouldn’t feel the same investment in that,” says one woman in the silk mill’s finance department. “But here there’s a lot of pride that goes into what we do, because we’re always creating something different.”

Her colleague continues: “We make high end fabrics, for absolutely everybody. It’s not an off-the-shelf process — it’s a collaboration of all the people that want to make something very special. From start to finish, everyone is involved, and when we see some of our fabrics on TV or in a magazine, we all think ‘I’ve got a piece of me in that’. Everyone feels connected when we produce a finished product.”

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By Louis Elton

In this, we find a vision of British industry that is truly inspiring. In stark contrast to the soulless WeWorks of London, where dead-eyed graduates, over-qualified and under-skilled, waste away their twenties selling B2B software subscriptions, we encounter a vibrant, joyful community of art and commerce. Here, highly skilled creatives, manufacturers, and professionals work seamlessly together, united by their shared admiration for the craftsmanship of a truly exquisite product.

In 18th-century Britain, there was a deep pride in luxury craft. In a 2023 essay Fired by Creativity, Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A and former Labour MP, delved into the epoch-defining impact of Josiah Wedgwood — porcelain industrialist extraordinaire. In Wedgwood’s time, Hunt explains, there was no embarrassment in celebrating the merits of high-end craftsmanship. On the contrary, the intertwined economic and cultural significance of openly supporting and taking pride in one’s luxury industry was regarded as a noble pursuit. As Hunt puts it: “There was nobility and virtue in seducing the buyer, in pleasing the consumer, and in expanding the provision of material goods” to sustain the region’s thriving industries. Quoting Prime Minister William Gladstone, Hunt further emphasises that “Wedgwood was the greatest man who ever, in any age, or in any country…[who] applied himself to the important work of uniting art with industry.”

In an era where the winds of luxury are once again turning in Britain’s favour, we could do worse than reanimate Wedgwood’s spirit. And there are endless policy reforms that would unleash British luxury — from reinstating tax-free shopping and making exports easier to protecting IP rights and apprenticeship reforms. First, however, we must renew a sense of pride. Once that’s achieved, we will still be a long way from Making Britain Cool Again. Perhaps, in the meantime, we can make it craft again.

Some nationalists look fondly to a past utopia before the colonial invader pitched up on their shores. There were patriotic Irish scholars in the 18th century who claimed that Irish was probably the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. One shouldn’t, however, be misled by this archaic impulse. Nationalism is a thoroughly modern ideology, which stretches back no more than about two and a half centuries. It was only around then that Europe was seized by the novel idea that to be a nation entailed having one’s own political state. There was a direct hook-up between the ethnic and the political. Human beings (which didn’t for this purpose include women) had the right to self-determination not just as people but as peoples. A crucial hyphen was inserted between the words “nation” and “state”, and a new phenomenon came into existence.

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There were problems with this revolutionary notion. For one thing, almost all so-called nations were ethnically hybrid, with the odd exception such as China, so why shouldn’t each of these ethnic groups have its own state? For another thing, nations at the time were defined largely by imperialism and colonialism. These sovereign powers played a major part in drawing up the frontiers between territories, mostly in their own material interests, so wasn’t revolutionary nationalism just an inverted mirror of its antagonist? Anyway, by what mystical logic did being Tibetan or Peruvian automatically afford you the right to your own political state? There were, to be sure, forms of so-called civic nationalism for which being Peruvian meant simply being a citizen of Peru whatever your ethnic origin, and this was to be the foundation upon which most nations were constructed; but the Romantic desire to affirm your difference, uniqueness and possible superiority as a people never lost its grip, and has recently been active on the streets of Britain.

In a long historical perspective, this summer’s rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of its social superiors. For a world of empires and dynasties to give way to one of autonomous nation-states, a seismic cultural transformation was required. People who previously thought of themselves in concrete terms as tenants of a feudal landowner and more abstractly as loyal servants of the monarch had to learn how to become French or British or Portuguese citizens. Their identities had to be remoulded and reoriented. Some of the British were rich and powerful while others were semi-destitute, but there was a bond between them — Britishness — which seemed to render such divisions irrelevant. Rich and poor could forget their quarrels and unite in the face of a demonised outsider. This, needless to say, could prove highly convenient for the rich. All social classes could come together against a common enemy, and in Britain both the French and the Irish have traditionally served this function. What also proved vital to the nation’s sense of shared identity was Protestantism, which was sadly lacking in both France and Ireland.

The problem is that this robust national identity, which answered well enough at the time to the needs of mercantile and industrial capitalism, is less and less capable of doing so under current conditions. Capitalism is now a global phenomenon, and along with it the labour market. National unity is still politically and culturally imperative, but it is increasingly out of step with the contemporary global marketplace. Culture and the economy are out of sync. This, of course, is often the case, since culture usually changes with glacial slowness while the economy can shift in an instant. But this difference has been intensified by the transition from national to transnational capitalism. Working people whose mentality has been moulded by centuries of allegiance to king and country are now being implicitly asked to acknowledge the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. There are no exclusively British values which outsiders can’t or won’t share. You have been sold a fantasy by a national state in whose interests it was for you to buy this illusion, but which has transformed its nature while you have remained the same.

What you can’t accept is that transnational capitalism doesn’t care about culture or skin colour or what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden as long as it has someone to squeeze a profit out of. It is as woke in its own way as a Guardian editorial. It is the most impeccably liberal of set-ups, welcoming Malaysians to Denmark and Danes to Malaysia if this will suit its economic purposes. No mode of production has been more culture-blind. Unlike some of those who live under its rule, it is largely indifferent to questions of identity, including national or ethnic identity, since identity is a straitjacket which stops you from being mobile and adaptable. Only adolescents obsess about who they are. There are no natives any longer; instead, everyone is an expatriate, some of whom cling to the mirage of a mono-cultural country which vanished decades ago but which they still like to think of as home.

There has always been a conflict in modern capitalism between its drive for political unity and its economic plurality. As Marx points out in The Communist Manifesto, it is the most hybrid, mongrelised of life-forms, restlessly overriding boundaries, pitching bizarrely different phenomena together, mixing opposites and toppling hierarchies. Yet this diversity at the level of the marketplace must be sustained by unity at the level of the state. If we are anarchists in the shopping mall, we must be responsible citizens in the pew, classroom, polling booth or family hearth. This isn’t a contradiction that the current system is capable of resolving, any more than it can reconcile the need for cultural cohesion at home with great tides of migration surging in from abroad.

Marxism offered working people an alternative to chauvinism. It was known as internationalism, which means that a lorry driver in Sheffield has more in common with a waiter in Seoul than he has with the millionaire proprietor of his company. Such internationally based identities aren’t an illusion — think of being a Roman Catholic — but they are harder to sustain than more local ones, given that human beings are bodily creatures bound to a particular spot. Only a tiny number of zealots are likely to throw themselves on the barricades shouting “Long Live the European Union!”, let alone “Up With World Government!” How do you develop forms of consciousness which correspond to a globalised world? This has been no problem at the level of popular culture, where Taylor Swift is as much a universal commodity as money, but there are older forms of such culture to do with national pride, resentment and fear of the Other which don’t take so easily to such cosmopolitanism. The more certain citizens feel most at home in the VIP lounge of airports, the more certain others will wrap themselves defensively in the Union flag.

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Some of those who recently threw bricks at the police showed the anger and frustration of a neglected underclass, while some of them just hated foreigners and wanted to beat them up. The grotesque irony of the former’s behaviour is plain: who do you target if you are poor, humiliated, excluded and without a future? Why, the only social group (refugees) who are even poorer, more excluded and more humiliated than you are. In this sense, the centuries spent breeding patriotism and loyalty to the Empire in the common people have had a certain pay-off. The Empire was built among other things on the conviction that people of a certain culture and skin-colour were inferior to the British, a conviction that was inculcated into millions of ordinary Brits who were looking for someone to feel superior to. It’s no surprise that some of their descendants should harbour similar sentiments about Afghans and Syrians, not least when they refuse to stay obediently in their far-flung domains but have the impudence to come knocking on your door.

Our rulers look with genuine horror on the burning of hotels and the battering of the police, but they should also feel relieved that this explosion of rage isn’t directed at themselves. For it is they, after all, who run the system which causes great masses of men and women to feel that they don’t really matter. This, to be sure, is no excuse for trying to incinerate immigrants. You can feel rejected without throwing in your lot with a lout like Tommy Robinson. What the government, media and legal system don’t dare to acknowledge, however, is that this experience of rejection is entirely justified — and that unless it is addressed, the rioting will break out again.

More recently, however, Hayek’s economic ideals have lost their glow in Right-wing circles. Even former Prime Minister Liz Truss, the “free-market fairy godmother”, appears to be faltering, as populist politicians from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni retreat to the comforts of economic nationalism.

At a time like this, it’s worth remembering that the free market wasn’t always betrothed to the Right. In the early days, its advocates could instead be found on the internationalist Left, particularly among the leaders of the transatlantic anti-imperial and peace movements. In 1846, Britain’s Left-wing free traders set a precedent by overturning the protectionist Corn Laws. Overnight, Britain became the first modern free-trade nation.

For Left-leaning intellectuals in the 19th century, global free trade was a moral necessity that augured millenarian visions of a world without want or war. It meant cheap food and a world at peace. Richard Cobden, Britain’s foremost free-trade prophet, believed that free trade would work by “drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace”. He predicted that: “The desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.”

His vision even convinced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, residing in Britain in the 1840s, gave it their cautious approval. They believed that free trade would unite the world’s workers and that it represented the next progressive capitalist step on the path towards socialist revolution. Protectionism, by contrast, was regressive.

Cobden and his fellows assumed that Britain’s inspirational Corn Law reforms would set the world ablaze, initiating a peaceful and prosperous free-trade era. He was sure that industrialising imperial powers would soon follow Britain’s liberal lead. And yet, despite his best efforts, economic nationalism persisted for some time beyond the enlightened borders of Britain. The onset of a global economic depression in 1873 sent Britain’s imperial rivals — most notably the United States, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan — cowering behind ever-higher tariff walls.

As protectionist monopolies and trusts grew in Europe, so did the frenzy for colonisation. Conservative protectionist politicians in the late-19th century were on the lookout for new markets in the hope of exporting surplus capital and exploiting raw materials. The result was the European Scramble for Africa and the carving up of Chinese markets.

Left-wing free traders — a motley international crew of liberal radicals, feminists, Christians and socialists — redoubled their efforts. And in 1879, the liberal radical US political philosopher Henry George published Progress and Poverty, which quickly became an international bestseller. George called for a “single tax” on the estimated value of land that would provide all the revenue that a government required and thereby eliminate all other forms of taxation, including tariffs. As a bonus, the single tax also promised to break up land monopolies the world over. Absolute free trade, prosperity and peace would surely follow.

The single tax movement spread from the US to Britain to the Asia Pacific and Latin America. “The Land Song” became a rip-roaring tune for Edwardian Liberals. Leo Tolstoy believed George’s single tax on land would “usher in an epoch” and dismantle Russian serfdom. Meanwhile, single tax “colonies” were formed across the globe. Lizzie Magie, a turn-of-the-century feminist radical residing in a single tax colony in Arden, Delaware, even invented a board game to teach about the evils of land monopoly: Monopoly.

With the dawn of the 20th century, socialist internationalists increasingly worked alongside their liberal radical capitalist comrades to overturn the protectionist imperial order. Political parties including the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party of America and Germany’s Social Democratic Party explicitly endorsed free trade. And influential German Marxist theorists such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky found themselves in agreement with socialist internationalists such as Japan’s Toyohiko Kagawa, Britain’s Bertrand Russell and Crystal Eastman in the USA.

Yet it was still an uphill battle. In his bestselling book, The Great Illusion (1910), British journalist Norman Angell sought in vain to warn nationalistic politicians and businessmen that, because the world had become so interdependent, nobody could win from war, not even the so-called victors. When the First World War inevitably broke out, Left-wing free traders blamed it on the rise of economic nationalism and colonial expansion since the 1870s.

The horrors of war galvanised support for free trade, partly through the international women’s peace movement. As these “mothers of the world” saw it, women and children suffered most during trade wars and military conflicts. Their aim was therefore to democratise foreign policymaking further to curb men’s tendency towards economic nationalism and war. And they supported free trade because it meant that women and children would no longer go hungry. For them, free trade meant food security.

Take Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer and figurehead of the interwar women’s peace movement, who had witnessed horrific scenes of starvation during her tour of south-eastern Europe in 1921, three years after the Great War had ended.  She noted how “food resources which were produced in Europe itself and should have been available” weren’t because “a covert war was being carried on” through “import duties and protective tariffs”, as these small European states erroneously “imitated the great Allies with their protectionist policies, with their colonial monopolies and preferences”.

The winds of change finally began to blow once a free trader, Tennessee’s Cordell Hull — “Richard Cobden reincarnated” — became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and went about liberalising US and world trade during the Thirties and Forties. He believed that a free-trade world could only be effectively maintained by subordinating national sovereignty, thereby keeping nations from falling into the same economic nationalist trap that had led to two world wars and a worsening global depression. With the support of his Left-wing globalist allies, he laid the groundwork for the United Nations and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), which became the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

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After Hull left the US state department, the Left-wing free traders became outsiders once again. They quickly lost their influence over the GATT, which during the Cold War became more beholden to the profit-seeking demands of multinational corporations than to the workers and consumers of the world. And their envisaged Pax Economica, seemingly within their grasp in the late Forties, looked ridiculous against the Manichean backdrop of the Cold War.

Over time, conservative Western governments grew more receptive to freeing global markets. But rather than enlisting the help of Left-wing free traders, they turned instead to anti-communist economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Hayek. With paranoid cold warriors seeing “red” everywhere, democracy from the Left came to be seen as an impediment to free trade, rather than its accompaniment. This led to a series of Western-backed coups d’état and military interventions in the name of defending free-market capitalism.

Bertrand Russell, British socialist free trader, philosopher, and peace worker, perhaps portended the fate of the Left-wing free-trade movement a century ago when he wrote: “It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.” Yet perhaps, with Right-wing populists trampling over free-trade ideals, the time is ripe for a comeback.

Fragments of the movement remain hidden in plain sight. They can still be found within regional integration projects including the EU and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and in Fair Trade’s moralistic global vision that prioritises economic justice over corporate profits. But today’s Left-wing internationalists cannot hope to forge a new Pax Economica without first reclaiming their history from the ideological citadels of the Right.

Montaigne left such pursuits behind in the 1560s, at age 38, when he retired from public office to embark on a life of contemplation, thanks to which we have his published work. In solitude, he gave himself over to the world and his own mind — his “back shop”. He was there for the weeds.

A similar gardening metaphor appears in the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s recent book, Vita Contemplativa. Like Montaigne, Han, the author previously of the bestselling The Burnout Society, has left behind an active life of status and striving to dwell in the inner sanctum of his mind. According to a profile in El Pais, he writes “just three sentences a day”, devoting most of his time to his plants and classical music. His latest book is a paean to contemplative inactivity, which he correctly sees as “not just the absence of activity but a capacity in itself”.

Think of the difference between paddling upriver and floating downstream. Tranquillity — what Han calls the “freedom from purpose and usefulness” — is the end toward which activity ought to be directed. That is the “basic formula for happiness”. Aristotle, Epicurus and others arrived at similar conclusions over 2,000 years ago, but the insight bears repeating in a culture that has grown ever more obsessed with “purpose”, particularly of the professional variety. This has happened not despite the escape from poverty and material constraints, but because of it. The cliche now runs that many workers no longer want to just do work — they want to make the world a better place. Judging by a recent Time magazine profile of young, purpose-oriented professionals, this can mean working as a branding manager at a yoghurt company that is taking pains to decarbonise its supply chain (while also still upholding its fiduciary duty to maximise value for shareholders, of course). Set against such a culture — it is basically Calvinism without the theology — the Hans of the world seem destined to constitute a small minority.

I do not mean to belittle those who demand that their job be more than just a job. It is a reasonable request, given the circumstances of contemporary economic and cultural life. But put aside the fact that “meaningful” jobs allow those employers to get away with paying less. The more fundamental question is how we arrived at such an impoverished search for meaning. Now that we are in another wave of hype about technology and its potential to cause widespread job displacement (AI-powered “brand management” is already here), age-old arguments for the vita contemplativa — an obvious substitute for delusional workaholism — take on a new urgency.

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Enlightenment, Kant proclaimed early in the Industrial Revolution, is the “courage to use your own understanding”, not only to think for yourself, but to do so publicly with neither fear nor favour. For too long, the bulk of humanity had outsourced this quintessential human capacity, deferring to clergy on matters of religion, to physicians on matters of health, to princes on matters of state, and so on. But even a pastor must mind his church’s teachings in his ministrations, and members of any profession must conform to certain expectations. A priest qua priest “is not free and cannot be such because he is acting under instructions from someone else”, Kant writes. But who, then, is free? Even the most senior priest is ultimately subject to “someone else”. The same goes for any professional, any employee, and any boss.

No; for Kant, only someone fulfilling the role of a scholar (even if merely temporarily) is completely free to “use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind”. The vast majority of us must fill prefabricated roles that then become our identities, dictating what we ought to say, do, and think (a predicament that of course afflicts scholars, too, nowadays).

The result is a society of dissemblers, the denizens of LinkedIn who doth insist too much that they are “passionate” about digital marketing, sales portfolio management, or “leveraging data to help clients achieve their goals”. These are the lies we live by, and one is reminded of the Athenian Apollonius: “To speak falsely is the mark of a slave.” Enlightenment is available only to select members of those societies that satisfy certain basic conditions of freedom. But satisfying such conditions requires no shortage of unfreedom. The beating heart of it all, Kant believed, is mankind’s “heartless competitive vanity” and “insatiable desire to possess and to rule.” Without such appetites, humanity might have remained no different from its beasts of burden. It would have fallen short of its true and natural purpose, which is to develop its capacities, ad infinitum.

Kant’s understanding of progress as capability-building has obviously prevailed, culminating in the present age of endless hype about world-changing technologies, Mars missions and digital platforms to connect all of humanity. Yet one can still question his conclusions about human nature and the purpose of society. Though developing our capabilities does allow us to develop ever more capabilities, surely it also could allow more of us, someday, to get off the train. The fact that we dare not, Han believes, is a product of our economic system: a “hell of unbridled competition”, performance, and achievement, where the only constants are “hyperactivity and hyper-communication… Capitalism is nurtured by the illusion that more capital creates more life, increases the capacity to live.”

This God-is-dead explanation rings true, but it is incomplete. The problem cannot be only “capitalism”. Socialist regimes, too, fetishise action and champion their respective Stakhanovites. No, the historical transformation of waged labour from an indignity into a higher calling required more than just coercion. Beyond the rise of a particular economic system, we are also suffering the loss of an older sensibility. Those with the privilege to “do good” by “changing the world” simply assume that that is indeed what they are doing. Such conceits used to go by the name of presumption. In the cult of purposiveness, the old wisdom that recommends against hubris is not only ignored but inverted. Nowadays, Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, boasts that: “We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it. Let’s go work even harder.”

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Coming from industry leaders, such proclamations will always fit Montaigne’s description of a “fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover”. But they have also come to reflect genuinely held, quasi-religious convictions. Like traditional religious faith, faith in one’s own purpose serves a consolatory function (especially for the secularly minded), warding off all those usual irksome existential questions about the meaning of finite lives in an apparently arbitrary cosmos. The cult of purposiveness crowds out those concerns by requiring an always-on, all-consuming asceticism, especially among its lower-ranking members.

Yet as Nietzsche — another contemplatavista who disembarked the train early on — understood, an ascetic is a paradox. By taking what looks like the difficult path, he makes “life easier for himself” through a “complete subordination to the will of another or to a comprehensive law and ritual”. By fully embracing purposiveness, and a career through which to realise it, you need not worry about what to do with yourself, or even about taking responsibility for your actions. Even supposing your (or your company’s) plans to change the world backfire and produce malign unintended consequences, at least you tried. Rarely does it occur to anyone to ask whether the world would have been better had more doers with grand designs simply abstained. In the Nineties, charities started paying ransoms to free enslaved people in Sudan; in response, the enslavers rounded up even more victims for a bigger payoff. Such examples are legion. At least they tried.

If one truly wants to make the world a better place, perhaps one ought to give more attention to how things could go wrong than to how they might go right. The problem, as contemplavistas have long known, is that our intentions are rarely as pure as we think. The ostensibly selfless act always offers its own hit of personal pleasure. Pity, as Nietzsche saw, confers a sense of superiority, just as public philanthropy brings recognition, even glory — one of the most dangerous inducements of all. Righteous indignation can veer all too easily into self-indulgence. It is an open secret that some professions and activist groups owe their existence to the perpetuation of the problem they purport to solve. But the dilemma doesn’t stop there. The economists Ruben Andersson and David Keen have documented similar dynamics in the US “wars” on illegal immigration, drugs, and terror. Each has generated its own private industry of contractors and other stakeholders (an overused term that actually fits in this case) who would be out of the job if their “purpose” was ever actually achieved.

That the purpose-driven individual’s motives include not-so-noble elements seems indisputable. That is just who we are. The sheer potency of glory and prestige is what led classical Epicureans to counsel not only retirement from public life but anonymity (though this precept proved too much for either Lucretius or Epicurus or Montaigne, for that matter). They saw the pleasures offered by a hectic, active existence as too fleeting and contingent to be worth the trouble. With wealth, public achievement, or approbation comes the fear of losing what you have won, and fear of any kind is antithetical to the tranquillity that happiness requires. Better to do away with all sources of anxiety — insofar as you can — and embrace the life of the mind (or of therapeutic tinkering, hobbies, exploration, and the like) and the pleasure of good friends. The fruits of the vita activa are perishable, Epicureans observe, whereas those of the vita contemplativa grow only sweeter with time.

Could any ethical tradition be more out of favour today? As ancient philosophies go, Stoicism is the reigning champion, not least among trade publishers and influencers. While sharing some of Epicureanism’s common-sense insights about what really matters, it is easily cherry-picked, and boasts the advantage of being practical for modern career-oriented and entrepreneurial strivers. For those selling Stoicism (a lucrative gig, to be sure), the original school’s rejection of status and other such pleasures tends to be overshadowed by its principles for maximising performance in a workaholic culture. Hence, in its offerings of “ancient wisdom for everyday life,” The Daily Stoic gives us “7 Essential Stoic Productivity Tips (from Top Performers)”. Marketed predominantly to younger male careerists, there is no better pablum to keep noses to the grindstone.

It is not surprising that Han is better known in continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon world — especially the United States. There has always been a strain of European radical thought that sees through the cult of purposiveness in affluent, “post-scarcity” societies. In Vita Contemplativa, he echoes (largely without attribution) post-war European Situationism, whose exponents argued that the neuroses of affluent societies lay in their ideological underpinnings, implying that no amount of policy tweaking would get to the root of the problem. Instead, more people first would have to abandon the presumption of purposiveness in roles where it holds no purchase. That may seem unlikely — not everyone wants to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace — but contemplation need not be as narrow as it sounds. Freedom from tormenting demands — not least those we place on ourselves — is what matters.

The irony is that these “inactivities”, too, would be productive in their own way, creating the conditions for the art, fellowship, and social cohesion that make human lives human. We should not wish for everyone to give up on purposiveness, of course. Large efforts are underway to commercialise solar energy and battery storage, even as others are making progress against hitherto incurable diseases. But millions of others are just fooling themselves. Another piece of “ancient wisdom for everyday life” warns that you can always have too much of a good thing. Purpose may now be one of them.

Born in Austria in 1886, Polanyi was raised in Budapest in a prosperous German-speaking bourgeois family. Even though the latter was nominally Jewish, Polanyi converted to Christianity — or, more precisely, to Christian socialism — early on. Following the end of the First World War, he moved to “red” Vienna, where he became an editor of the prestigious economics journal Der Österreichische Volkswirt (Austrian Economist), and an early critic of the neoliberal, or “Austrian”, school of economics, represented among others by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. After the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, Polanyi’s views became socially ostracised, and he moved to England, and then to the United States in 1940. He wrote The Great Transformation while teaching at Bennington College in Vermont.

Polanyi set out to explain the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime: the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication. He traced these upheavals back to a single, overarching cause: the rise of market liberalism in the early 19th century — the belief that society can and should be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations. Land and labour, in particular, were not treated as commodities but as parts of an articulate whole — of life itself.

By postulating the allegedly “self-regulating” nature of markets, economic liberalism turned this logic on its head. Not only did it artificially separate “society” and “the economy” into two separate spheres, it demanded the subordination of society, of life itself, to the logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system”.

Polanyi’s first objection to this was moral, and was inextricably tied to his Christian beliefs: it is simply wrong to treat the organic elements of life — human beings, land, nature — as commodities, goods produced for sale. Such a concept violates the “sacred” order that has governed societies for much of human history. “To include [labour and land] in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market,” Polanyi argued. And in this sense, he was what we may call a “conservative socialist”: he opposed market liberalism not just on distributional grounds but also because it “attacked the fabric of society”, breaking down social and communitarian bonds, and breeding atomised and alienated individuals.

This relates to the second level of Polanyi’s argument, which was more practical: market liberals might have wanted to dis-embed the economy from society and create a fully self-regulating market, and went to great lengths to achieve this, but their project was always bound to fail. It simply cannot exist. As he writes in the opening of the book: “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”

Human beings, Polanyi argued, will always react against the devastating social consequences of unrestrained markets — and struggle to re-subordinate the economy, to some degree, to their material, social and even “spiritual” wants. This is the source of his argument about the “double movement”: because attempts to disembed the economy from society inevitably invite resistance, market societies are constantly shaped by two opposing movements. There’s the movement to constantly expand the scope of the market, and the countermovement resisting this expansion, especially insofar as “fictitious” commodities are concerned, primarily labour and land.

This leads on to the third level of Polanyi’s critique, which dismantled the orthodox liberal account of the rise of capitalism. Precisely because there is nothing natural about the market economy, which actually represents an attempt to disrupt the natural order of societies, it can never emerge spontaneously — nor can it self-regulate. On the contrary, the state was needed to enforce changes in social structure and human thinking that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy. The proclaimed separation of state and market is an illusion, Polanyi said. Markets and trading in commodities are a part of all human societies, but in order to create a “market society”, these commodities have to be subject to a larger, coherent system of market relations. This is something that can only be accomplished through state coercion and regulation.

“There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course,” he wrote. “Laissez-faire was planned… [it] was enforced by the state.” Polanyi wasn’t just referring to the “enormous increase in continuous, centrally organised and controlled interventionism” needed to enforce the logic of the market, but also to the need for state repression to counter the inevitable reaction — the countermovement — of those bearing the social and economic costs of disembedding: families, workers, farmers and small businesses exposed to the disruptive and destructive forces of the market.

In other words, the support of state structures — to protect private property, to police the dealings of different members of the ruling class with each other, to provide services that are essential for the reproduction of the system — was the political prerequisite for the development of capitalism. And yet, paradoxically, market liberalism’s need for the state to function is also the main reason for its enduring intellectual appeal. Precisely because pure self-regulating markets cannot exist, its advocates, such as contemporary libertarians, can always claim that capitalism’s failures are due to the lack of truly “free” markets.

And yet, even Polanyi’s ideological enemies, neoliberals such as Hayek and Mises, were perfectly aware that the self-regulating market is a myth. As Quinn Slobodian has written, their aim was “not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy”, by using the state to artificially separate the “economic” from the “political”. In this sense, market liberalism can be considered a political project as much as an economic one: a response to the entrance of the masses into the political arena from the late-19th century, as a result of the extension of universal suffrage — a development most militant liberals of the time were vehemently opposed to.

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This project wasn’t just pursued at the national level but at the international one too, through the creation of the gold standard, which was an attempt to extend the logic of the allegedly self-regulating (but actually enforced) market to the economic relations between countries. This was an early globalist attempt to marginalise the role of nation-states — and their citizens — in the management of economic affairs. The gold standard effectively subordinated national economic policies to the inflexible rules of the global economy. But it also shielded the economic realm from the democratic pressures building as suffrage spread across the West, while at the same time offering a very effective tool to discipline labour.

However, the gold standard imposed such massive costs on societies, in the form of destructive deflationary policies, that the tensions created by the system eventually imploded. First, we saw the collapse of the international order in 1914, and then again following the Great Depression. The latter prompted the biggest anti-liberal countermovement the world had ever seen, as nations sought different ways to protect themselves from the destructive effects of the global “self-regulating” economy — including by embracing fascism. In this sense, according to Polanyi, the Second World War was a direct consequence of the attempt to organise the global economy on the basis of market liberalism.

The war was still ongoing when the book was published. Yet Polanyi remained an optimist. He believed that the violent transformations that had shook the world over the previous century had set the stage for the ultimate “great transformation”: the subordination of national economies as well as the global economy to democratic politics. He called such a system “socialism” — but his understanding of the term differed significantly from mainstream Marxism. Polanyi’s socialism wasn’t just the construction of a more just society, but the “the continuation of that endeavour to make society a distinctively human relationship of persons which in Western Europe was always associated with Christian traditions”. In this sense, he also emphasised the “territorial character of sovereignty” — the nation-state as the precondition for the exercise of democratic politics.

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A bigger role for government needn’t necessarily take an oppressive form, according to Polanyi. On the contrary, he argued that freeing human beings from the tyrannical logic of the market was a precondition for “achiev[ing] freedom not only for the few, but for all” — freedom for people to start living rather than just surviving. The welfare-capitalist and social-democratic regimes implemented after the Second World War, though far from perfect, represented a first step in this direction. They partially de-commodified labour and social life, and created an international system that facilitated high levels of international trade while buffering societies from the pressures of the global economy. In Polanyian terms, the economy was, to some degree, “re-embedded” in society.

But this ended up engendering yet another countermovement — this time from the capitalist class. Beginning in the Eighties, the doctrine of market liberalism was resurrected in the form of neoliberalism, hyper-globalisation and a renewed attack on the institutions of national democracy — all done with the active support of the state. Meanwhile, in Europe, an even more extreme version of the gold standard was created: the euro. National economies were once again placed in a straightjacket. Just as under previous iterations of market liberalism, this old-new order impoverished workers and laid waste to our industrial capacity, public services, vital infrastructures and local communities. Polanyi would have argued that a backlash was inevitable — and indeed it came, beginning in the late 2010s, though the populist uprisings of the past decade also failed to replace the system with a new order.

The result is that, just as a century ago, the intrinsic contradictions of the “international liberal order” are once again leading to a breakdown of the system, and to a dramatic intensification of international tensions. If Polanyi were alive today, he probably wouldn’t be as optimistic as he was when he published his book. We are definitely in the midst of yet another “great transformation” — but the future it heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order he envisioned.

The Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville is today neither well-remembered nor wholly forgotten, but his work may hold some helpful insights for the present moment. His most infamous tract was The Fable of the Bees (1714) in which he argued for recognising self-interest, rather than other-regarding sentiments, such as solidarity or altruism, as the soundest basis for organising society. Even more than David Hume, Adam Smith, and the classical economists who were to follow, it was Mandeville who best embodied the emergence of what we now understand as liberal-capitalist modernity, sounding the death knell for the pre-liberal forms of private and communitarian morality that still held sway among the political and ecclesiastical classes.

Mandeville’s intervention, taking place in the years after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, gave expression to the transformation then unfolding in public life, from the passionate (and violent) preoccupation over moral sectarianism and ultimate ends, which so brutally scarred the 17th century, and toward the relatively peaceful and civilised pursuit of wealth and affluence that characterised the 18th. One wonders if the West is overdue for another paradigm shift from solidarity to self-interest as the animating principle of politics.

First, it is worth considering the difference between the two paradigms. Enacting such a change would not eliminate conflict from public life but radically alter its direction and outlet. It is one thing for there to be sharp divisions structuring political exchange, but conflicts over competing material interests or economic programmes can be hashed out in rational processes of give-and-take; whereas the kind of reductive battles over intangible values — what is known as the culture war — has led to the wrong kind of conflict, one in which humanity’s natural tendencies toward solidarity and communal morality degenerates into rigid, zero-sum stand-offs. The result is stasis and stultification. Compared to this, there can be little doubt that a renewed politics of self-interest would be conducive to more dynamism and material progress: the only question is how do we get to such a place from where we are now?

The England to which Mandeville immigrated from Holland in the 1690s was already one generation removed from the apocalyptic, often theologically motivated bloodshed of the Cromwellian era. It was in the midst of the post-1688 commercial boom and financial revolution, on course to becoming the world’s richest nation.

Yet even as England’s social complexion was changing, the moral outlook of many of its elites (embodied by Lord Bolingbroke and his magazine The Craftsman) remained mired in antiquated notions of virtue held to by the Old Whigs and Commonwealthmen, whose agrarian, puritanical, and civic republican sensibilities derided the new forms of mobile financial wealth and concentrated state power arising under the Court Whig government of the day as harbingers of a plague of “corruption”/ This corruption was attributed to the spirit of avarice encouraged by the new economy; and it was contrasted with the selflessly patriotic and solidaristic ethos of virtue espoused by the anti-Court opposition. It was in this context of conflicting moralities that Mandeville became the centre of national controversy when the 1723 edition of his book led to a presentment before the Grand Jury of Middlesex. He was accused of wishing to “run down Religion and Virtue… and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all vices, as being necessary to Public Welfare… tending to the Destruction of the Constitution,” a line of attack that paralleled opposition polemics against the Court Whig regime, with which Mandeville became identified.

But just what exactly did Mandeville write for such a charge to be levelled against him? The core of his argument was that impulse and ego were the main drivers of human behaviour and that this fact necessitated the construction of a public morality based on self- deception by cunning elites, who had an interest in subduing the unruly passions of men. And while the insight was not new, with antecedents going back to Lucretius and Epicurus, Mandeville’s innovation was to draw out its implications in a modern setting and propose an alternative counter-model of society to that held up by traditional morality.

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Mandeville’s vision accepted impulse-driven self-interest as its sole premise and in so doing, radically affirmed the imperatives of the emerging liberal-capitalist system. To illustrate his view, he took the beehive, oft-used symbol of virtue and frugality by the opposition writers, and turned it on its head. In Mandeville’s telling, the bees were not selfless citizens devoted to the public interest but greedy, self-seeking creatures whose competitive appetites made the hive a more prosperous place: “Thus Vice nurs’d Ingenuity / Which join’d with Time and Industry / Had carry’d Life’s Conveniencies, / It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, / To such a Height, the very Poor Liv’d better than the Rich before / And nothing could be added more.”

And so, it became the duty of wise statesmen to devise ways by which this self-interest could be transmuted into socially productive endeavours: successive Whig ministries were able to do that by sponsoring and regulating the development of complex financial institutions such as the new Bank of England and the growing trade of joint-stock companies, including both the wildly successful East India Company and the ill-fated South Sea Company. The same capitalist superstructure that the opposition denounced as a source of venality and injustice functioned, in the hands of men like Sir Charles Montagu and Sir Robert Walpole, as the instruments by which the greed of England’s magnates (the “bees”) contributed to the growth of its national wealth, power, and prestige. The Whig government achieved this by providing means to concentrate and de-risk large capital investments, enabling the funding for prohibitively costly and otherwise unsustainable ventures, like imperial expansion overseas and economic modernisation at home.

This process of enrichment through doux commerce led to greater refinement, and to England becoming the “polite nation” to which Addison and Steele’s Spectator addressed its lessons on manners and etiquette, a far cry from the violent and brutish ways of the previous century. British history under the Court Whig oligarchy could be understood, then, as firm validation for The Fable of the Bees and in particular, one of Mandeville’s central insights — that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits”.

With the triumph of Walpole, the austere, virtue-seeking sensibilities of the men who attacked Mandeville — represented by John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Bolingbroke — would have passed quietly into history had it not been for the strange process of moral transplantation by which their ideas and values migrated across the Atlantic through pamphlets and reprints. For they later formed the intellectual nucleus of the American Revolution, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated in his magnum opus, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The editorials of The Craftsman practically served as templates for the Patriot press in its denunciations of the Stamp Act and, later, of the whole British political and economic system, from the King on down: in American eyes, the empire itself had become irredeemably corrupt and had to be severed like gangrene.

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Like Bolingbroke, the rebels embraced a classical morality rooted in the example of the ancients, of Cincinatus and Cato, whose willingness to sacrifice all for their country’s liberty inspired the founders to wager their “lives, property and sacred honour”. The American idiom has since been inflected with republican notions of the “common good”, understood differently but present nonetheless on both the the Right and the Left. Even when politicians acknowledge self-interest (or get caught acting on it in embarrassing ways), the moral instinct is always one of deferring back to the same communitarian ethos. (Reagan’s rhetoric was emblematic of this tension, with its praise for both the selfishness of the profit motive and the selflessness of patriots past.)

As Mandeville would argue, however, such ideologies are forms of self-deception that elites employ, whether knowingly or not, to cover up their competing base impulses and egoistic desires. For instance: today, the professional managerial class speak the language of social justice even as they preside over new forms of hierarchy and domination that do little to help the lower classes they claim to represent; while conservative elites in the small-town millionaire class speak the language of “America First” patriotism even as they engage in horribly regressive and exploitative industries that stand in the way of true national development.

The culture war is essentially the moral economy of recognition of these elite classes, where competition is waged between and within the ranks of the two enemy tribes. Solidarity is the symbolic currency of this economy: and their virtue-signalling on behalf of their party’s respective ideological value sets (whether it’s “pronouns and Palestine” or “guns and God”) is an expression of this principle.

What is needed now is an American Walpole who can see beyond the facade, take this impulse toward pride and amour-propre among the elites, and turn it toward something more productive and beneficial in the material (as opposed to the moral) economy. A Mandevillian politics would channel these drives away from the false pursuit of virtue and connect them instead to economic aggrandisement, through which both the elites and the nations they lead can attain new riches and power. In this scheme, politics would become a lot more rational, instrumental, and manageable as it would come down to the brokering of interests (difficult but doable) rather than a contest over values (impassable and never-ending).

Of course, the cultural antagonisms between Americans are still much too great for this change to take place anytime soon, and it may take a few unstable election cycles before America moves from its Cromwellian age of moral absolutism to its next Mandevillian age of enlightened self-interest. But that doesn’t me we shouldn’t start now. Faced with our overbearing embrace of solidarity, a bit of “private vice” wouldn’t go amiss.

The ex-Prime Minister has tried to put renewed shine on her political career, culminating in a reappraisal of decisions that almost crashed the economy and foreshortened her premiership. But a bit like The Wizard of Oz, the book also invites readers to consider some intriguing counterfactuals, at least inadvertently: would the eventual political outcome have been any different, had our protagonist only had more brain or more heart?

As far as the former goes, Truss seems unable to defend the Reaganite values she espouses by giving intellectually persuasive reasons for them. Her favourite word is “instinctively” — as in “I see myself as an instinctively anti-establishment figure” and “I am someone who instinctively wants to shake things up”. There’s little attempt to put rational flesh on the basic neoliberal bones. At one point it looks like she might try — “politics has to be about… the conservative values of patriotism, freedom, and family” — but then immediately retreats into gut feeling again: “We know instinctively why they are better than those of our opponents.”

Throughout her career, colleagues are always gently taking her aside to suggest she should approach issues in a less pugnacious, more collegiate spirit, but she flatly refuses (“they are never going to agree, so it is pointless to try to persuade them”). In place of thrashing out complex ideas, she prefers “ideology”; without which politics “is like trying to navigate a hazardous mountain range in the dark without a compass”. Translation: she has found a few simplistic mantras that appeal to her, and by God, she is going to stick to them. Again, there is no attempt to argue with sceptics: “you either believe in big government running everything or you don’t; you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t”.

And just as she has no interest in arguing about why she is correct, when it comes to her ideological opponents — Leftists, educationalists, environmentalists, Tory wets, the legal establishment, the Westminster blob — she is equally uninterested in explaining why they are wrong. Everything she disagrees with is basically the fault of Michel Foucault, who she “discovered while taking a course in political sociology”.

In place of rational justification comes a deluge of contemptuous invective. Left-wingers are lily-livered do-gooders, wracked with liberal guilt and self-loathing; educationalists advocating for child-centred play in nurseries are “so-called experts”; environmental campaigners are “watermelons” (green on the outside, red in the middle); world leaders “pontificate” at “jamborees” and “shindigs”; the media is essentially trivial and personality-obsessed; Tory dissenters to the Truss doctrine have forgotten what real Conservatism is; and so on.

She is just as scathing about former senior colleagues. Cameron indulged in “too much wishy-washy flannel about ‘the big society’ and ‘general well-being’”; while Gove and Cummings are both guilty of one of the worst possible offences in Truss’s eyes — having “anti-growth instincts”. Only ordinary party members are as far-sighted and clear-minded as she is, acting as a kind of reassuring mirror whenever she loses faith: “On everything from solar farms (I hate them) to women not having penises to quangos being too powerful to taxes being too high, we were on the same page.”

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All in all, then, the former PM does not seem the most obvious candidate for a proposed revamp of The Brains Trust; but nor, unfortunately, would she be much good on The One Show. Warm expressions of empathy appear profoundly alien to her. When, after a demotion from Theresa May, Sue Gray tries to give her an “unsolicited embrace”, she is frosty: “I am not a hugger”.

As Boris Johnson lies in hospital nearly dying of Covid, she seizes the moment as Trade Minister, and gets him “to sign off on starting trade talks with the US… I knew he would have his mobile phone on him and be free of nefarious Downing Street influences.” At another point, she chases him down a fire escape to get him to agree to her meeting Trump.

By her own confession, she is not “a great people manager”. Fellow human beings seem to baffle her; she can’t understand why they don’t see what she does, as she gazes lovingly into the eyes of her twin obsessions, freedom and economic growth (“I hadn’t gone into politics to deal with floods or fix prisons”). She isn’t worried about any of the familiar critiques of neoliberalism, in terms of its causing obscene wealth gaps, community deracination, or cultural homogenisation, for instance; indeed, she doesn’t appear to have heard of them. Technology is good if it leads to growth, and bad if it inhibits it; so fracking and genetic modification of crops are in, and “bat bridges” across motorways — which she seems to think are designed for bats to scurry across on folded wings — are out. One reason we need to stand up to China is that if we don’t, they are going to beat us on growth; and we should copy the brutally draconian Chinese methods of teaching children in order to keep up with them.

At least in the political arena, she seems to dislike groups of all kinds, from trade unions to some large corporations; and is unable to muster any positivity about things like community or solidarity between fellow tribe members. All she sees are “vested interests” constantly thwarting her bold schemes for freedom and growth — as when, for instance, plans as a junior minister to lift limits on the number of children per childcare worker were foiled by “vested interests in the nursery industry”.

Thatcher thought there was no such thing as society; chastened by her eventual humiliation as leader, Truss goes one better and tells readers there is no such thing as “the market”: instead “there are groups of influential individuals in the financial establishment, all of whom know and speak to one another in a closed feedback loop.” It turns out that, even among capitalists and self-described free marketeers, there was cronyism and corruption all along, a result which seems to surprise and sadden her.

It is easy enough to see what Truss hates, then, but what does she love? What is all the hard-won freedom for, as far as she is concerned? She likes getting out in the open air, and staying in budget hotels. Musically speaking, she confesses to pumping herself up before leadership debates to “a soundtrack of Queen and Whitney Houston hits”. There is little affectionate talk of times spent with friends, and she doesn’t seem much of a foodie. Where others might see the EU’s “504 different classifications of biscuit” as a sign of an advanced gastronomic culture, she emphatically does not. She doesn’t seem to have enjoyed her childhood with Left-wing, environmentalist parents much either — “it seemed all about beetroot tarts, composting toilets and talking about the dangers of overpopulation”.

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There is a similar lack of enthusiasm for the progressive education she received at her Leeds comprehensive school; for some reason she seems particularly offended at having been asked, aged 13, to stand on her desk and pretend she was on “Sir Francis Drake’s ship, The Golden Hind”. She does seem quite enthusiastic about Australia — “like Britain but without the hand-wringing and declinism” — and also professes herself “a long-standing fan” of the Baltic states and Poland, because of their “visceral love of freedom and democracy after having spent so many years under communist terror”.

Truss’s much vaunted political instincts are not always wrong. There are a few wise attempts at self-deprecation in the book, even if they don’t quite convince. She has embraced several good causes in her career, including making the legal system more meritocratic, extending the use of video evidence for rape victims in court, trenchantly rejecting transactivist nonsense in institutions, and arguing against Chinese slavery practices. Still, having read her book, I couldn’t swear with confidence she didn’t hit upon these commendable attitudes accidentally.

But still, being charitable — as Truss is not — perhaps the book was not written to win over opponents like me. Rather it might have been intended as a stentorian call to fellow-travellers; roughly, saying she’s the biggest, hardest, most tax-cutting freedom-loving neocon in the room. There are also signs that she might have a US audience in mind: for instance, in her introduction, where she dramatically recounts the death of the Queen and crams in some backstory that insular yanks might not know (who Truss is; who Boris Johnson is; who the Queen is). But if this is right, then once again the famed Trussian people skills have let her down — for in the service of winning over supporters abroad, she has irredeemably alienated a far larger number of potential converts at home. Keir Starmer should ship copies to every teetering Tory constituency in the land.

The unintended moral of this book is that if we can’t have high intelligence in a politician, we should at least insist on empathy and good understanding of others; and vice versa. It would be nice if we could have both but beggars can’t be choosers. Without either, we might again end up with a leader who, without any warning, takes a wrecking ball to the status quo at an already profoundly anxious financial moment, in the pursuit of goals relatively few people accept as desirable — and who, two years later, thinks it was mostly the fault of everyone else for not grasping that it was really a precious gift all along.

***

Liz Truss will be discussing her book at the UnHerd Club on 3 June. Buy tickets here.

I would venture that most people would find this scene, relayed to me by a friend, largely innocuous. At the risk of stating the obvious, faceless corporations don’t care about your mental health. And they don’t care about the “stigma” surrounding the expression of feelings. To them, your feelings are just one of many unpredictable variables that must be brought to light, their risks neutralised, managed and controlled.

Yet many on the Left have received the sudden and unprecedented attention to mental health over the past decade as a triumph. Unions, understandably seeking to protect workers from new work hazards, routinely demand attention to emotional wellbeing in the workplace; their student counterparts, meanwhile, have moved from the fight over fees to overseeing the expansion of “mental health” to include an ever-broadening array of human experience.

And in both cases, they are pushing at an open door. For ultimately, managerial jabber about breaking down stigmas is a thin veneer for their view of you as a liability. Your unruly emotions are a potential risk to business, institutions, even society as a whole — you could go off sick, you could go on strike, or you could otherwise be unpredictable in ways that hurt the bottom line. But the corporate obsession with mental health is only the most obvious and easy-to-critique manifestation of a much more profound societal malaise: our whole culture has shifted towards a deep and pervasive concern with human behaviour — to the point that humanity itself is a risk.

Every day, we are told that we are living in the “Anthropocene”, whereby the “irreversible impact of human activity” has permanently scarred this planet. Part of the story of how humanity got too big for its boots is its apparently erroneous belief in its own rationality. If we could approach people as they truly are — not the mythical rational subject of the 18th-century Enlightenment but as truly emotional beings — then we could harness our feelings and transform them from risks into assets. Maybe “climate anger” can be harnessed for climate activism, suggests one study. Maybe the “mindful consumer” can change the world, offers another.

As a good person, employee and citizen, you learn to consider that exercising your free will without the careful consultation of expertise as reckless. You must consider yourself not just as “at risk” but also “risky”. You should be perpetually insecure, constantly surveilling your inner world, and ready and willing to seek guidance when you find a problem. Core to this worldview is disclosure. You must not only be on the lookout for risky thoughts, feelings and behaviours in yourself and others, but must openly identify them since doing so opens the door to training.

Bupa, for example, enjoins us to “open up” and make “mental health a normal topic of conversation in the workplace”. Doing so entails four steps, the first two dealing with identifying and expressing potentially risky emotions and “issues”, and the latter two with “training” and “treatment”. Its “Managers guide” even recommends adding staff discussing their wellbeing as a standing agenda item in team meetings. Unilever suggests embedding “wellbeing ‘rituals’ into the everyday”. A mental health toolkit for construction workers states that a “sound mind = a safe site”. Those who do not disclose are a workplace safety hazard. Emote — then seek the rules, the guideline, the script.

At the heart of these initiatives lies a concerted effort to cultivate a new mindset among employees and citizens — one where individuals are encouraged to view their thoughts and feelings as risks, who bring their “whole self” to work so that it can be assessed for hazards that can be managed and controlled. This is a necessarily “inclusive” mission: your whole self includes the expression of everything about you. No one and nothing must escape the lens of the bureaucratic machine. Everyone, it’s time to talk.

But what are we supposed to talk about? Here, talking about your feelings is the only safe, neutral territory. Translate material problems into the language of feelings and these can be converted into something safer, something more productive, something less risky and unruly.

Of course, many interventions and advice for maintaining mental health are harmless in and of themselves, and will undoubtedly help many people. But populations have been doing this for decades — and there doesn’t appear to be a movement of “mindful consumers” changing the world, or young people with self-esteem so high it’s vaccinated them from social ills; there are no fewer “mental-health problems” and no drastic decline in suicide. And every time, despite each intervention failing, bureaucrats fail to ask themselves whether emotion management really was the best path to solving problems. Instead, they become more pessimistic about humanity. And they become more zealous in their pressure to penetrate deeper, to exert more control.

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The underlying propulsion toward bureaucratic control extends to the use of mental health as a governing strategy at the beginning of the 20th century. Back then, however, it was called “mental hygiene”. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, those in power had found themselves frustratingly bound by the willingness of the lower orders to work or not work and their reluctance to fit into the new world of round the clock production. Mental hygiene was intimately and unabashedly tied up with control of populations, treating their unruly behaviours like diseases infecting the healthy social body. Expanding the purview of emotion management to the healthy, it promised to cure social ills through education, adjustment of self, life and work, and “breeding out defectives”.

Mental hygienists adopted the view that emotions were central to all behaviour and personality development. This new class of bureaucratic servants pioneered large-scale survey instruments that promised to quantify the emotional reactions of populations. Once expressed in a measurable format, emotions, like a lack of worker or soldier morale, could now be pinpointed as the source of problems and “rehabilitated” accordingly. For instance, the phenomenon of soldiers losing the will to fight had long been an issue for those waging wars. New forms of emotional surveillance allowed them to identify and label these potentially destabilising elements and offered up new scripts that contained their distress. The horror of what these individuals had been through and their unwillingness to endure any more could now be safely identified, given a destigmatising medical label, quarantined from infecting the remainder of the military body, and honourably discharged.

This may sound well and good. But mental hygiene had a darker side. Its two-pronged focus on maintaining as well as preventing mental ill-health meant that eugenics had been an integral part of the movement from early on. While vociferous proponents of eugenics for the promotion of national mental hygiene, such as the German psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, initially emphasised voluntary measures, they would eventually oversee the forced sterilisation and murder of psychiatric patients during the Second World War.

This isn’t a Reductio ad Hitlerum. The point is that underlying both the kind and extreme versions of mental hygiene was a strong belief that, if only people could be made to feel, think and behave in the “right” ways, business could proceed as usual. Some were simply more hopelessly resistant to intervention than others. From this perspective, you can’t be trusted to have an inner world that is all your own because it is that inner world that is pivotal for business, social and economic success. And if any of those things are threatened, so too is your freedom to think and feel freely and, above all, privately.

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Tarnished by this dark history, the term “mental hygiene” fell out of favour during the Forties. However, many mental hygiene organisations simply rebranded themselves with a concern for “mental health”. This more recent concern is obviously charted much more humanely than the bleak path its forebear travelled. Yet its fundamental understanding of the role played by unruly emotions remains just as intact as it is mistaken.

It is tempting to believe that all of this is going somewhere. But it is precisely because society has given up on having any kind of goals at all that such an outlook can flourish. Today, the path to freedom is no longer located in the outside world, in grand projects of societal transformation, but instead in the heads of individuals. Big ideas have shown themselves capable only of leading humanity to ruin. And so the modern individual has learned to understand freedom and emancipation as a kind of “self-care”.

In this world, expanding the regulation of everyday life, subjecting it to rules and increasing its predictability become ends in themselves. If those in power cannot solve social problems, they can at least teach fragile subjects to be “resilient” to a world beyond their control. As Christopher Lasch wrote back in the Seventies, modern people don’t seek religious transcendence nor even worldly success so much as “mental health” as the “modern equivalent of salvation”. And as a result, we are being sold our own bureaucratic iron cage as a kind of freedom.

The Scottish savings meters evoke a 20th-century practice known colloquially in Ireland as “the manage”, where working-class women budgeted for their families by separating cash into envelopes and jars earmarked for special purposes — one for Christmas, one for electricity bills, another for new shoes. In poorer households, while men brought home most of the money, managing that money and making it meet the demands of a household was women’s work. It was often an impossible task, somehow making two plus two add up to seven.

This is the kind of social practice that fascinates the Princeton economic sociologist, Viviana Zelizer. Her work focuses on the points where the business of money meets the not so business-like subjects of intimacy, community and the sacred; money when it mixes with sex, with parenting, and with romantic love. She is particularly insightful on the difficulties of negotiating the transfer of domestic money from a husband to his wife.

Women’s money in the 20th century was distinct from everyday cash, which implied a level of patriarchal freedom. Instead, ordinary cash was transformed into tokens with strings attached: “pocket money”, “pin money” and “dole”. But defining the terms of that transition was always difficult. Should women’s money be a payment, an entitlement, or a gift? Framing it as something she was due, Zelizer writes, conferred a dangerous level of entitlement. And yet a payment implies something a little too close to a working transaction: demanding a wage undermined the assumption that some kinds of work — such as childcare or homemaking — were natural to women. If you were paid, it was no longer a “labour of love”. In fact, as feminists involved in the “Wages for Housework” campaign in the Seventies pointed out, getting paid for housework might be the first step in refusing to do that work entirely. The notion of this money as a gift, however, implied layers of subordination and precarity, being subject to some man’s whims and inclinations. There was no such thing as a perfect transaction.

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While working-class women struggled to make ends meet, women in upper and middle-class households rarely handled cash at all. Instead, Zelizer writes, they “relied almost entirely on ‘invisible’ dollars”, and had to resort to “asking and cajoling and begging” for addi­tional cash. If this failed, there were always other “underground” tactics, from “home pocket-picking” to “padding bills” — which usually involved asking a dressmaker to send a bill for an inflated sum and pocketing the excess.

This image of the angel in the house “begging” or scouring her husband’s pockets for loose change while he shaved in the morning is jarring. And Zelizer realised that there were more important questions to ask than just whether or not a woman had money. The middle-class women that Zelizer studied were, by all classical economic measurements, comfortable and well-off. Their husbands provided for their every material need. And yet, they had no money of their own and, as a consequence, no real freedom.

I remember having an awkward conversation about household budgets with my own mother, who was married in 1966, three weeks after her 20th birthday. “Your father decided that £5 a week would do it,” she said. “That was to pay for my food Monday to Friday.” And what about clothes? “Well, sometimes he was paid in postal orders and he would give them over to me to cash in. Those were for clothes and children’s toys, days out, treats, that kind of thing.” The conversation hitches and stalls, as it often does with money and family. It feels intrusive. It feels too on-the-nose. By asking about money, I’m asking her to sketch out the power dynamics in her early marriage. But what if you just wanted something? I hedge. “Your Dad was always very generous,” she doesn’t quite answer. “He always bought me things to make life easier for me.” She recites the Sixties housewife’s ultimate wish list: “I had a dishwasher before any of my friends, a hostess trolley, a microwave, a tumble dryer… Wait! — I nearly forgot the fur coat.”

The weight of our conversation would not be lost on Zelizer. Before she came along, much of the sociology of money, from Karl Marx to Georg Simmel, took the view that money reduced every human exchange to a transaction and every “thing” it touched to its price. In their eyes, money was cold, hard and calculating. Zelizer, by contrast, shows in her book, The Social Meaning of Money (2017) that money is a deeply social technology. She points to all the ways in which things that aren’t meant to be for sale are routinely exchanged: engagement rings for brides-to-be, complex treat economies for courting couples, settlements in the event of the accidental death of a child. She also shows how money can be used, not just to buy things, but to express morality, norms and social values. There’s a reason, for instance, that the poor are offered alms or food stamps rather than cash, which has long been seen as a dangerous form of relief.

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We might believe that there is a vast gulf between the legitimate transactions that underscore romantic rituals — the treats, meals out, and jewellery — and the illegitimate ones, such as paying a stranger cash for sex. But Zelizer argues that it all depends on how the meaning of money is transformed through a transaction. By attaching values to money, we can make dirty money clean and clean money dirty. We can communicate power, obligation and vulnerability. For women in the 20th century, money communicated ideas about their place in the home. Unlike cash, the “invisible dollars” of pin money and housewives’ allowances not only made the work women did in the home invisible; they also hid a range of financial constraints and chokepoints — even financial abuse, where one partner takes control of bank accounts and forces the other to account for how every penny has been spent.

In 2024, it’s tempting to think we are worlds apart from Zelizer’s accounts of gender-based financial dependence. But women still earn 85p for every pound earned by men. This tends to make women more reliant on their male partners if they choose to enter into traditional romantic partnerships or have children. And contrary to the tropes of gold-digging ex-wives cleaning up in the divorce courts, women are far more likely to lose out in the aftermath of a marital breakdown, with men typically holding 2.5 times the wealth of their female partners and women’s household income falling by 41% following a divorce.

Furthermore, women continue on average to give up more of their time and income to look after children than their male partners. In the United States, the number of women describing themselves as stay-at-home mothers gradually decreased in the latter half of the 20th century, falling from 49% in 1960 to 23% in 1999. But by 2012, the number had risen once more to 29%, with women citing childcare costs and income stagnation as the motivating factor for returning to the home. The same is true in the United Kingdom, where, for the first time in decades, the number of women not returning to work after having children is on the rise. This leads us to question whether, in heteronormative relationships, women can ever fully escape their economic dependency on wage-earning men. For many women, the financial problems identified by Zelizer have never truly disappeared.

And yet, rather than wake up to the fact that green capitalism is a myth, Western leaders are doubling down on their commitments to green growth. From President Joe Biden to former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and British Labour leader Keir Starmer, public figures in both Europe and the United States have succumbed to the siren call of a Green New Deal: a miraculous renewable energy and electric car investment programme that will supposedly spur a transition to a sustainable green economy.

The problem is that even the most radical Green New Deal will never achieve its aims. After all, a green revolution will require not just a transition to electric vehicles, hydrogen planes and renewable energy, but a complete overhaul of our material world. Every single resource we depend on — from agricultural machinery and chemical fertilisers to iron and cement for construction — will have to be replaced by a newer, greener version. And so any feasible Green New Deal will only reduce carbon dioxide emissions relative to GDP, not absolutely, before 2050. In other words, carbon dioxide levels will continue rising, albeit at a slower rate.

The vision of a Green New Deal is alluring, however, partly because it allows us to continue our consumerist frenzy without worrying about the environment — all we need to do to relieve our guilt is buy a Tesla — and partly because it has been hailed as a silver-bullet solution to economic inequality. The dream is that a green transition will create more stable, better-paid jobs for the working class, especially in the former industrial heartlands of America and Europe. Yet the world’s poorest will pay the price for a Western jobs boom. Already, the world’s richest 10% — mostly in the Global North — are responsible for half of worldwide emissions, though the poorer half will be the first to suffer from the effects of climate change. A Green New Deal will shift even more of the burden to the Global South. It is hardly a desirable solution to global poverty.

Take electric vehicles, for instance. Their lithium-ion batteries are made from rare metals found in the Atacama Salt Flats of Chile. Yet lithium extraction is highly water intensive: a single corporation can extract 1,700 litres of groundwater per second. This is already taking a toll on the nation’s ecology, with locals unable to access fresh drinking water. Another crucial metal is cobalt, of which almost 60% of the world’s supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest nations in Africa. There are around 40,000 children working informally in Congolese cobalt mines, some as young as six or seven, a number of whom have been buried alive in the tunnels. But as long as such neocolonial exploits remain out of sight in the West, they are out of mind too: Western nations continue to plunder the Global South under the guise of making capitalism sustainable.

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Some techno-optimists believe that fantastical, still-to-be-invented carbon capture technologies will solve the problem of climate change. Yet these Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) could inflict even more damage on the environment and the Global South. The leading model, Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), would require farmland twice the size of India to produce enough biomass energy to keep carbon emissions down. Will we steal this land from the Indians or Brazilians who need it to cultivate food? Or will we simply slash down more of the Amazon rainforest? Meanwhile, the technology would also require an enormous amount of water: 400 million metric tonnes of it, in fact, to produce enough electricity to power the US for a year. And even if that’s possible, there’s a high chance that carbon dioxide stored beneath the Earth’s surface will end up seeping back out. By then, it will be too late to think up a better solution.

In effect, then, a Green New Deal will simply shift the dirty work of resource extraction to global peripheries — as capitalism has been doing for centuries. As far back as the mid-19th century, Marx realised that capitalism had a knack of making its ill effects invisible by displacing them elsewhere. He recognised three types of displacement: technological, spatial and temporal, all of which were vulnerable to collapse. And none of which bode well for the Green New Deal. The first idea, that technological advancement can overcome environmental crisis, we have shown to be a techno-optimist fantasy. The second, that we can export our environmental and social problems to the Global South, is a cruel form of ecological imperialism. And the third, that we can dump our problems on future generations, is the epitome of human folly and selfishness.

But if green capitalism isn’t the solution, then what is? The answer, I believe, can be found in Marx’s later writings, many of them unpublished. What many people don’t realise, including those on the Left, is that Marx underwent a drastic theoretical shift towards the end of his life — when he finally realised that technological progress and productivism, far from being forces for the common good, were in fact destroying the Earth. In the five years before his death in 1883, Marx devoted himself to studying the natural sciences, and eventually concluded that capitalism’s quest to accumulate value disrupts the metabolic relationship between humans and nature, creating an “irreparable rift” on a global scale. From then on, he advocated a style of communism that would end capitalism’s exploitation of both workers and the planet, and bring production back in sync with the slower cycles of nature.

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While Marx died before he was able to lay out his degrowth communist manifesto in a single work akin to Capital, his vision can be conjured from his scattered ecological critiques of capitalism. Capitalism, he wrote, disturbed “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”; it hindered “the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”. Almost a century and a half later, it is time we heeded his warnings.

Of course, I am not suggesting a return to the dark communism of the Soviet Union or 20th-century China, where modes of production were nationalised by tyrannical one-party states. Marx never advocated this form of communism anyway. Instead, we should draw on his concept of “the commons” (equality of economic conditions) to steer a third way between the extremes of US-style neoliberalism and Soviet-style nationalisation. The idea is that certain public goods — such as water, electricity, shelter, healthcare and education — should be managed and shared by every member of society, independent from the markets. What is important is that, in contrast to the administrative monopoly by capitalists or socialist bureaucrats, all the affected people participate in the decision-making process and democratically manage the commonwealth. This is far from a form of top-down climate Maoism, but a grassroots movement that challenges the power of capital.

Once power has been handed over to the people, how can we possibly begin to slow down the economy? We can start by re-reading Marx’s Capital through a degrowth lens. First, we should transition, as Marx instructed, from an economy based on commodity value to one based on social utility (or use-value). We must prioritise the production of goods that are necessary to respond to the climate crisis, rather than desirable luxury goods that are useless and ecologically destructive. Once we stop producing so much meaningless junk, we can start cutting down on general working hours, as well as getting rid of “bullshit jobs” — such as investment banking, marketing and consultancy — whose sole purpose is to make money. Other capitalist extravagances, such as same-day delivery and 24-hour supermarkets, would also be obliterated. Not only will liberating people from wage slavery in this way help the environment, but it will also improve peoples’ lives, allowing more time to devote to childcare, caregiving, education and leisure. In this new system, fulfilling material needs and improving quality of life will become a far more important measure than GDP.

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On top of this, we should heed Marx’s call to make work creative and “attractive” again by abolishing the tiresome division of labour that condemns employees to repetitive, inhumane work. In an ideal world, the time that we spend at work should be satisfying, not torturous: workers should have the chance to become masters of industry and rotate between tasks, even if that means their work becomes less productive. Meanwhile, we should place a higher value on emotional labour, such as care work. While this labour-intensive work is crucial to the functioning of society, it is also not economically productive — and therefore is undervalued in a capitalist system. Helping a child or elderly person eat, drink or wash does not boost GDP, but it is a deeply human act of service. Indeed, decelerating our economy in these ways will not only save the planet, but also make our lives richer, more meaningful, and more humane. The phrase buen vivir (“to live well”), originating from the indigenous people of Ecuador, and now used by Leftists all over the world, reminds us to keep challenging the corrupted value system of Western capitalism.

For ultimately, the only thing lacking is the political will. We cannot solve a problem created by capitalism while still preserving capitalism. And while toppling capitalism and the elite 1% who control it will be difficult, it is not impossible. All that’s needed to bring about major political change, according to Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, is the non-violent support of 3.5% of the population: the rest will follow. This is all it took for the “People Power Revolution” to take down the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1984, and to start the 2003 “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia that culminated in the resignation of then-President Eduard Shevardnadze. Surely, there are already enough people in the West who care about the fate of the planet to ignite a rebellion.

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Kohei Saito’s book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, published by W&N, is out on 18 January.