Ruleset reset
The gaps are becoming too great to ignore, but timing is everything, so be patient
The Marxist in me anticipates inevitabilities — e.g., my economic determinism that says economics comes before politics and not the other way around. This has always struck me as the more realistic thought-pattern: people behave in certain ways to make their economic life happen (lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy) and then seek political outcomes that match those patterns, or correct/corral them, or both (corresponding to higher Maslovian levels).
Self-actualization is bullshit if you’re weak from hunger.
So economics, per Marx, leads politics, and what leads economics is technology, or human progress — the one great constant in our universe, the one inexhaustible resource that is human ingenuity.
But, to be truly Marxian in mindset, one must accept the dialectic:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic is a method of argument that uses a contradictory process between opposing sides to develop new ideas and knowledge. Hegel's dialectic is also known as dialectical thinking or dialectical idealism.
Thesis meets antithesis, yielding synthesis (or fabulous offspring if you choose wisely!).
My version of Hegel’s dialectics says economics is always racing ahead of politics, the former supplying the dynamics and the latter imposing the rules.
Roughly the same happens with technology (races ahead) and security (imposed rules and associated defense mechanisms).
When those gaps get really big, you tend to encounter system-perturbing crisis, like 9/11, or the 2008 financial crash, or — in the most natural sense — a pandemic like COVID.
Those crises trigger massive ruleset creation/resetting, the most consequential one in history being the US-led ruleset reset that established the post-WWII world order (first encompassing just the West, eventually birthing globalization, which has subsequently endured a sequence of such ruleset resets [just listed above]).
Think about our legislative process here in America: our rule is basically, do whatever you want until something bad happens, and then, post-tragedy, some new rule ensues and the game goes on.
It’s very Catholic: sin first and ask for forgiveness latter (or innovate first and ask for controls later).
It’s also a very lead-without-authority system that remains unusually open to disruption through innovation (yay!). It’s just that those periods — when the ruleset gaps get huge — tend to cause us great anxiety amidst perceived uncertainty: we keep waiting for the fix, the answer. And when that does not appear in our politics and security, then we start agitating that it should.
And once enough frustration builds in society, we’d just as soon let the bull loose in the china shop than stick with the widely-perceived-as-failing status quo.
These are often called “change elections.”
And that is what gets you Trump back in power, with a decent chunk of his support being true believers (including more than a few “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton famously dubbed/slandered them [your call!]) in the “salvation” he offers, and the other half simply being willing to roll that dice, figuring some destruction is needed before the new framework can emerge to better accommodate things, end that ruleset gap, and forge some better-performing new normal.
The problems with Trump 2.0 are manifold, but so are the opportunities.
Clearly, Trump’s focus on personal revenge is a huge time-waster.
Then there are all the conspiracy-theories to be FINALLY explored and revealed, and all of that will be a huge time-waster as well, along with being unduly tumultuous to no good ends.
Why?
It’s like I’ve said here before: for the populist anger to segue effectively into a progressive solution-set, we need a respected government and not one beat down in the public’s mind. TR and FDR cracked that code, and we need somebody of that ilk again now. Problem is, Trump is entirely incapable of that sort of leadership. Might he change as he ultimately embraces lame-duckery and legacy-building?
Doubtful, because the early-onset or “run wild” period will engender such fierce popular blowback that Trump will grow all Nixonian in his paranoia.
In short, the Boomers know what they know because they lived what they lived. They cannot see beyond their moment in history (any better than Marx could), which is what makes them so frustrating and even dangerous as leaders.
Meanwhile, if we end up with a beaten-down government (all in the name of “defeating the Deep State!”), then the Tech Bros will run truly wild — while the running is good. Right now, they’re the “Leninists” or “Bolsheviks” in this crowd: they have a firm view of the future they want (first and foremost for themselves) and they will act fast and furiously to achieve it. These are not a go-slow crowd but a grab-history-by-the-throat crowd (thus more Bolshevik than Menshevik, if you know your Russian history).
When a nation or world stands at that pivot between populist anger and progressive answers, there is — sans some disaster — no clear recognition of timing, as in, we’ve reached the breaking point and now progressivism must take the lead!
Absent a decisive tipping-point that the majority of Americans recognize similarly, those who are driving the leaping-ahead developments in technology and economics (like AI and crypto, respectively) are going to remain firm in their beliefs that pushing ahead at highest possible speed is both desirous (for them, especially, and these types tend to be power-mad) and necessary (various out-there arguments about man surviving this planet [Musk channeling Roddenberry] or more practical ones about “beating China” [something to which I adhere]).
Throughout such full-speed-ahead efforts by the Tech Bros and fellow travelers, there will always be the strong temptation to invoke national security, which is a clever way of saying to the public Wait your God-damned turn, will you?
That method of disciplining the angry mob is but a microcosm of the way the Global North has long treated the Global South: We’d love to help you out on development and whatnot, but we’re just so damned busy with our superpower cold wars and containments and zooming-to-WWIII scenarios that you JUST HAVE TO WAIT YOUR GOD-DAMNED TURN, ALRIGHT?
And this, for me, is where it gets truly interesting in terms of scenario-based planning: which crystalizing crisis arrives first?
Is it one easily reshaped into a national security crisis of familiar, Cold War proportions and dynamics?
Xi certainly has that capacity and that mindset.
Or is it one that transforms our East-West perspective into something more obviously North-South — and thus necessarily driven by a growing sense of urgency/disaster associated with climate change and the migration pressures it generates ever stronger with each passing year?
Right now the US is on the precipice of going in either direction.
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