Against cyberpunk. For barbarism.

There is no third option

Soon, the state will know your thoughts before you think them. Smartphones, pocket traitors, will perpetually drip-feed remote artificial intelligences that can model individual behaviour. Across the cloud, electronic shadows of you will flicker into life, buy, vote, love, age, and die: all before you do so yourself. There will be no surprises in the digitally-enhanced total bureaucracy. Before a seed of rebellion falls into your mind, a chance encounter, internet meme, or passing phrase will sterilise it. In the human soul, only the crops the system plants will grow. We will not even love big brother. That excess will be superfluous. We simply won’t imagine any other world.

Images like this, pictures of techno-dystopias sketched from current trends, can be captivating; but they should not worry us too much. This is not our path.

I don’t deny that something, call it the Machine, is guiding us towards mechanised social control. Quite the opposite. I am a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist of the first order when it comes to this. I see a demonic influence in every government of more than a few villages, every company of more than a few friends, and every farm of more than a few hundred acres. Insofar as they sacrifice the particular to the general, they sip venom. Insofar as I write these words instead of sorting out the old hedge, so do I. Insofar as I have a readership with faces I do not know, I poison them.

I don’t think that the Machine will win, though. I don’t think it can. The drive to control is like the old lady who swallowed a fly. The solutions only exacerbate the problem. For the Machine, the problem is contingency: the sheer unpredictability of the world. To kill that fly, it swallowed the spider of hierarchy, the top-down view; but that was not enough. Centuries later, under mechanical influence, we cram down a T-Rex of lies just to convince ourselves that our social world makes sense. It doesn’t.

What do I mean by contingency? The living world is like a tree. Structures and shapes reappear at different scales. Look at a tree and it has pattern, form, wholeness. Look at a single leaf and, though only a tiny part of the tree, it too has pattern, form, wholeness. If your only interest in the tree is firewood, then the wholeness of the leaf doesn’t matter. If, though, you wish to understand a living tree, you get nowhere until you see the wholeness of the leaf. This is the source of contingency. What happens at leaf-level is almost infinitely variable, but reverberates up all the scales to the biggest. And this is the Machine’s great weakness. If its eyes were allowed to see the fractal subtlety of the leaf, then its mind could not devise a system for controlling the tree. It would be lost in contemplation. So it abstracts out the life. Leaves becomes Lego pieces and people become numbers. Rather than measure the world, the Machine always measures a proxy. This is how it will fail.

How do I know this? The Machine itself is an organism, although it does not know it, and organisms die.

Two decades ago, the UK government was desperate to improve standards in Accident & Emergency, so it imposed a target: 98% of patients should be diagnosed and begin treatment within four hours of attending A&E. It backed up its commitment with money; but in the first year, fewer than half of all departments reported meeting the target. In the second year, though, the target was met: 98.2% of people attending A&E began treatment within four hours.

This is not a success story. Hospitals responded rationally to their incentives. They prioritised improving their ability to meet the target over improving the standard of emergency care. There were widespread reports of patients being discharged ‘before they had been properly assessed or stabilised’; and soon every hospital had a ‘medical assessment unit’ that could deal with initial diagnosis and treatment without having to meet A&E targets. About five years later, the target was reduced from 98% to 95%; and performance ‘almost immediately’ dropped by exactly the same degree. The numbers had never measured the ability of the emergency healthcare system to effectively process patients. They measured only its capacity to juke the stats.

To the organisational mind, it is obvious that if something is a problem, then creating a unit or managerial post to address that problem will help. This is because the organisational mind belongs to the Machine, and when it looks at society it sees Lego bricks instead of leaves. Departments and managers live, though. They have their own agenda: their own survival and flourishing. This self-interest is not necessarily opposed to the survival and flourishing of patients, but that is besides the point. When a choice must be made, and it always must, whatever isn’t an entity’s first priority is soon forgotten. And so the increasing amount of money spent on the NHS creates a thousand bureaucratic empires, each dedicated mostly to expanding its own influence. As each grows, it forgets even the initial targets that led to its own creation.

This self-interested drift in organisational function leads to the next predictable twist in the tale, the part where the old lady feels the cat thrashing around inside her and calls out for a dog. The divisions created to service the proxy target no longer prioritise that task, so the system’s ability even to falsify the numbers drops. Ability to meet the four-hour target has declined dramatically over the last few years, even as the overall number of A&E attendances has increased only modestly. In the face of foreseeable winter pressures, the system is visibly collapsing. We are back where we were in the early 2000’s, when the target was first introduced; but with an extra layer of complexity and jargon.

This process is not unique to the NHS, Britain, or modern states. It is an old thing. The heart of the Machine is impersonal coercion; but coercion always inverts the epistemic triangle. What do I mean? Coerced people hide the truth and tell the bully what they want to hear. It is a matter of self-preservation. But an impersonal coercer like the state cannot see for itself. The coerced are its eyes. Trusting those that must lie to it to survive, its abstracted bureaucratic vision is further misled by ten thousand small omissions and tiny fibs. Those with power know nothing, and those that know anything have no power. It is always so. And this is how kings fall, empires crumble, and the Machine grinds to a halt. Those that cannot see their own mistakes cannot correct them, cannot learn from them, and cannot avoid the cliff edge before the fall.

Those in the middle of this image are no better than the extremes. They have either just enough understanding to cause problems they cannot fix or just enough strength to cause problems they cannot see. This has always been the way. As Zhuangzi says ‘I have heard of letting the world be, of leaving it alone; I have never heard of governing the world’.

No-one in British public life, apart from perhaps the late queen, has this understanding. They cannot; for to be a public figure is to stand near the apex of power; where knowledge is as thin as the air on Everest. Oakeshott had a measure of it, and his footnotes make his debt to Zhuangzi plain; but insofar as his words are true, they are useless. We are left with a meaningless war between two idiot teams.

One team, think of Mr Johnson or Mr Blair in his first term, see that the system is not delivering what it promises; and think that bold steps are needed: ‘constitutional reform’, ‘levelling up’, all those big lying words. They do not see that fixing the system is a systematic task, and that a system incapable even of small tasks will not be capable of fundamental self-reform. In other words, they see the system is broken, but not that it cannot be fixed.

The second team, think of Mr Sunak or Mr Blair in his second term, see that there are no big steps left to take; so they promise to preserve what we have: ‘responsibility’, ‘prudence’, all those small lying words. They do not see that there is no status-quo to preserve, that the centre did not hold, and that their small measures will soon be crushed by huge events. In other words, they see that the system cannot be fixed, but not that it is broken.

What neither team dare discuss are the limits of civilisation. It doesn’t matter whether you tear your empire to pieces in a frenzy of revolutions or allow it to slowly collapse under its own bureaucratic weight. Either way, it dies. It would be better to learn acceptance. The end of a civilisation is not the end of the world. It is not even the end of the human world. It is merely the end of the the culture of the cities: a passing phase that encloses even the most remote countryside now, but which is not all we have been or can be.

Sooner or later we will have to cross the line between civilisation and barbarity. What do I mean? In civilisation, the world you inhabit is made by man. The limits you face are imposed only by society, by other people. It was not always so and will not always be so. The barbarian lives in a world humanity did not make: a world that they must adapt to, not one that they can shape to suit passing fantasies.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind ...Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

- Robert E Howard

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Image: 1920 - before the storm by Jakub Różalski (CC BY-SA 4.0)