Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Once fairness and honesty have been stripped out of a social order, social trust collapses. Once trust collapses, society disintegrates.
It’s important to understand the dynamics of chaos before the certainties in our lives are swept away.
Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring the dynamics of delusion and breakdown:
1. our reliance on models to make sense of the world and what happens when those models no longer track reality;
2. the difficulties in adapting when our old model breaks down;
3. our growing reliance on complex systems and AI;
4. our frustration with broken systems that are impervious to reform;
5. how the status quo makes a show of reforming broken systems, substituting theatrics for substance;
6. the destabilizing consequences of extremely asymmetric distributions of wealth, power and income;
7. the erosion of our standard of living and quality of life as “progress” is replaced by Anti-Progress and an Ultra-Processed Life of transactions and synthetic facsimiles of authenticity;
8. how these forces have shaped two “fork in the road” narratives:
A. boundless prosperity for all generated by AI and technology
B. the breakdown of an imbalanced, inherently destabilizing socio-economic-political system of the powerful and the powerless defined by moral decay, the collapse of trust in institutions, widening extremes of inequality and the substitution of artifice for authenticity, a.k.a. everything is fake, to maintain the illusion that all is well.
These ideas inform my recent work:
One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One?
When Predictability Collapses, What’s Scarce and Valuable Is Adaptability
AI, Money, Human Nature and the Problem with Problems
Why We’re Helpless When Things Break Down
The Fork in the Road Ahead
Recession and Revolution: Our Experience Isn’t a Model or System
What Would Be Truly Bullish? Actually Fixing What’s Broken
There are two underlying material-world dynamics that tie all these themes together:
1. Growth / Progress–defined as higher energy consumption per capita that results in increased purchasing power of wages–is no longer robust enough to raise all boats. This reality is reflected in the declining purchasing power of wages, which is typically labeled “a rise in the cost of living” / inflation.
2. At the same time, the top 10% ownership / professional / managerial elite is taking a larger share of the pie due to a number of factors, including regulatory capture, political changes in tax laws that favor asset-owners, etc., and the explicit but unstated policy decision to give the stagnating economy the appearance of “growth” by inflating credit-asset bubbles that enrich those who already own assets at the expense of those who don’t own enough to matter.
These boil down to the distribution of “pain” and “gain”: who gets the pain and who gets the gain, and whether the pain and the gain are distributed across all socio-economic classes or are they asymmetrically distributed.
The “pain” of declining purchasing power of wages, living standards and quality of life (for example, health, financial security. etc.) is being distributed to the bottom 80% while the “gains” are distributed to the top 10% owners of capital. (A tiny percentage of the gains trickles down to the cohort between 80% and 90% who own enough capital to maintain a “middle class” lifestyle.)
As I have noted many times, humans are hardwired to be innately attentive to the three dynamics that give humanity’s social skills such immense adaptive power:
1. fairness / unfairness (justice, injustice)
2. truth / honesty / authenticity
3. trust (but verify)
Once fairness and honesty have been stripped out of a social order, social trust collapses. Once trust collapses, society disintegrates.
I consider it self-evident that extreme asymmetries of distributing pain and gain cannot be justified as “fair” nor are they perceived to be “fair” by those absorbing the pain.
I also consider it self-evident that truth / honesty / authenticity have been replaced by theater, staged performances and the self-serving artifices of making a show of reforming broken systems.
That social trust is in steep decline cannot be plausibly denied.
This raises the question: how does this disintegration manifest?
Tim Morgan of Surplus Energy Economics (highly recommended reading) has provided an insightful context for understanding how social-economic-political disintegration follows a profoundly human and inherently “irrational” emotional progression.
As he explains, in our technocratic system, causal chains are invariably presented as mechanistic: technology changes this, monetary policy changes that, and so on. We understand “how things work” as linear, reductionist, left-hemisphere mechanical processes of inputs, processes and outputs.
But humans are not machines, and society is not a mechanism comprised solely of institutions and technocratic / financial processes.
Morgan offers the missing half of disintegrative dynamics: the emotional progression of grief famously described by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, a process that in one way or another works through five emotional states: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
Morgan posits that we are collectively grieving the loss of growth without being fully aware that we’re experiencing this dynamic because we’re in the denial stage.
#323: They First Make Mad: Stress and Grief at the End of Growth (Tim Morgan of Surplus Energy Economics)
Kubler-Ross describes a system that is not linearly mechanical; it’s a progression that often veers into emotional states that can be described as “irrational” even as they are completely rational to those experiencing them.
This is a system of emotional processes and truths that can’t be understood with the conventional tools of systems dynamics or the social sciences, for the “irrationality” of each state is intrinsic to the progression.
Humans are not mechanisms, and neither is this emotional system. What appears “irrational” is not irrational; it’s the way this system works to reconcile our inner life with existential life-changing events.
The status quo’s survival strategy is to claim that the Anti-Progress of systemic decline in the standard of living / quality of life experienced by the bottom 80% is still “growth” and “Progress,” but this model is veering so far from lived experience that it’s increasingly delusional for those not being enriched by bubbles in stocks and housing.
Since we resist losing what we value and are accustomed to–a positive social identity, livelihood, security–the bottom 80% are experiencing the uneasy limbo that precedes a profound phase change that cannot be reversed.
In this temporary state of instability, they’re clinging to denial that the era of “growth / Progress” that actually improved their living standards and quality of life has ended, even as the tightening vise of decline increasingly stresses their security, social mobility and belief in the model of permanent upward mobility and prosperity.
The pain generated by decline comes in forms that don’t lend themselves to measurement: anxiety, precarity, etc., emotions that make denial a form of emotional solution. But this “solution” doesn’t resolve the anxiety or precarity; it’s only an emotional Band-Aid / coping mechanism.
Our hardwired awareness of unfairness, artifice and the collapse of trust can’t be suppressed, and these chip away at denial. Eventually the denial breaks down, much like an avalanche: the scales fall from our eyes and we see everything we’ve denied as inescapably real.
On the other side of this phase change is anger.
Denial becomes increasingly delusional as declines that would have been shocking in previous eras of prosperity are now accepted with the passive shrug of the powerless. Selling one’s blood for extra cash–once the sole domain of destitute junkies needing cash to feed their addiction–is now an accepted middle-class “gig” to earn extra cash to support a lifestyle that is slipping away:
The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By.
Another hallmark of middle-class security–the IRA/401K retirement fund–is being drained to pay for everyday expenses:
They Withdrew 401(k) Money Early, and They Have Some Regrets.
In an era of declining purchasing power of wages, the money being withdrawn is unlikely to be replaced.
This account by an anthropologist sheds light on the themes I’m describing:
“The America I move through today often feels alien to the one I thought I knew. Those who fall behind are seen not as constrained, but as having failed. The result is a pervasive, if often unspoken, alienation–one that erodes shared bonds and leaves people to navigate inequality on their own.
Most troubling is the way this environment feeds a politics of grievance. Anger and frustration are redirected toward scapegoats rather than toward the structures that concentrate wealth and power. Identity and culture become tools of division rather than sources of connection. In that context, authoritarianism finds its opening–not as a rupture, but as an extension of patterns already in place.”
Since humans are social animals, private anger that is shared becomes public anger–a much more powerful, more volatile emergent property of the phase change from denial to anger.
In this context, we can understand the “wealth tax” in California and the tax on second homes worth in excess of $5 million in New York City as precursors of this phase change from denial to anger which fuels the desire to restore some balance by clawing back some of the gains of the super-wealthy.
This is an example of what I call redress in my book Investing In Revolution: the desire to rebalance extremes of inequality to restore some measure of trust in institutions and the system. Redress can also be fulfilled by restoring previously existing limits on concentrations of power that tilted the system to distribute the lion’s share of gains to the few at the top.
Examples of the rules being changed to benefit the wealthy include stock buybacks (previously illegal), Citizens United and a long list of other regulatory changes designed to benefit those with the wealth to buy political influence.
If redress is thwarted or watered down to just another virtue-signaling performance of fake reform for show, the alternative manifestation of anger is retribution. When anger slides into rage as redress is thwarted, retribution has the potential to gain an emotional momentum few anticipate.
Absent systemic unfairness, deception and distrust, anger can proceed to bargaining without transitioning into rage: when bad things happen to us while others are unaffected, it feels unfair–but since it isn’t intentional–no one sacrificed our interests to serve their own–we eventually find ways to accept that life is inherently unfair.
But when the system is built on unfairness, deception and distrust so the few can benefit at the expense of the many, anger heats up into rage when redress is denied. This rage seeks expression, and if it’s shared by others, it quickly spreads into a volatile public movement.
Bargaining, depression, and acceptance are off the table until substantive redress is achieved or the rage burns itself out.
Chaos looks irrational due to its unpredictability and destructive potential. But when viewed as part of a hardwired emotional casual chain triggered by unfairness, deception and distrust, then not only are anger and demands for redress rational, so too is rage unleashing chaos when legitimate demands for redress are denied by those in power.
At this volatile juncture where the emergent properties of public rage take on a life of their own, the importance of shared beliefs and ideals becomes paramount: absent a narrative and model that inspires positive collective actions, the emergent properties of public rage manifest as uncontrollable chaos.
History offers several templates for what happens once the spark of public anger ignites a fast-spreading wildfire of rage and retribution. One is martial law, a military clampdown that erases public expression and replaces democratic institutions with authoritarian rule. This is the root of Napoleon’s famous quip about quelling the mob with a “whiff of grapeshot,” i.e. blasting the mob with cannons loaded with round bullets.
In other cases, an authoritarian or self-serving, corrupt neofeudal regime attempts to quell the disorder, but the force needed to suppress the public rage is beyond those being tasked to shoot down their family and friends to save the regime from the consequences of its exploitation and lies.
But the consequences of model collapse don’t go away with force. All that force accomplishes is the suppression of public anger. What’s needed to nurture a society that values, prioritizes and incentivizes fairness, authenticity and trust is a new model that inspires the disenfranchised with a coherent set of values and goals.
Ivan Illich described this in a way we can all understand:
“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step. If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”
Developing this alternative story is the point of my work. The outlines are not complicated:
1. shift the goal from “growth” (The Waste Is Growth, Everything Is Disposable Landfill Economy) to a sustainably rewarding quality of life that isn’t measured solely by material consumption but by the “prosperity” of positive social roles, upward mobility (chances to get ahead), agency (control of one’s life) and a say in decisions affecting shared interests (for example, the quality of air / water and public institutions).
2. Limit centralization and the consolidation of financial, economic and political power in the hands of the few, who inevitably use this power to serve their interests at the expense of the many.
We can understand this alternative story as a secular Reformation, a necessary response to a incorrigibly corrupt status quo whose foundational story (infinite growth via what Tim Morgan succinctly describes as “infinite monetary stimulus and limitless technological possibility”) is unsustainable and therefore delusional.
Absent a coherent, realistic, inspirational alternative story, once chaos is unleashed, there is no pathway to the restoration of fairness, authenticity and trust within a sustainable model that serves everyone’s interests.
John Maynard Keynes famously stated that “markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
The same can be said of redress-denied, rage-fueled chaos: it too can remain irrational longer than we can imagine.
