Since the international financial crisis of 2007–08, its longer-term economic and social repercussions have generated a wave of uncertainty across much of the world. Followed by Covid, chronic uncertainty is turning into despair as economic growth refuses to perk up, employment opportunities—especially mid-level jobs—have largely disappeared, and faith in the future has turned into a sense of helplessness. The much-trumpeted peace dividend of the 1990s has vanished into thin air. This is reflected in the violent rekindling of old unresolved conflicts, increasingly unhinged behaviour of America, the scapegoating of immigrants in Europe and America, and a casual resort to facile, even childish, conspiracy theories to explain everyday events and occurrences, even by so-called sober observers.
The unipolar world led by America, which was going to usher in international stability, has actually produced its very opposite. The Middle East has become much more of a powder keg following the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the joint Israeli/American attack on Iran. America, once the guardian of the ‘rules-based’ global institutional order, is in the process of not only withdrawing from it but actively undermining it. Its attitude towards the United Nations system is a case in point. Here, it has built up arrears of $4 billion in its assessed contributions that are, in fact, a legally binding treaty obligation. As a result, the United Nations, as the collective voice of the world, is limping along close to financial collapse.
On the other side of the coin, national state capacity and economic policymaking appear to be ever more firmly moored to the highly stylised framework of neoliberal thinking that became de rigueur from the 1980s onwards. Given this intellectual stasis, is the world moving into paralysis, or is it sleepwalking into a state of social collapse?
Luke Kemp (Senior Research Officer at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) has written a scholarly book on the history of civilisational collapse, titled Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, in which he attempts to answer these questions. By Goliath, Kemp means the network of powerful elites that effectively run the world and whose self-centred pursuit of power and wealth constitutes a curse for the rest of humanity.
In today’s pervasive uncertainty, the problems of global warming and increasing inequality—both of which are likely to hasten civilisational collapse in virtually every country—are considered at best non-urgent challenges among the ruling elites of the world. For them, power is wealth and wealth is power, and global warming is an inconvenient detail. The United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio regards the global warming lobby as a ‘cult’ to be addressed at some date in the future, if at all.
With respect to the latter, the evidence is that, despite warnings from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, few, if any, significant commitments or responses are currently on offer. Most big emitters of carbon dioxide talk of ‘net zero’ in terms of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 or 2060 to keep global temperatures limited to a 1.5°C rise by the year 2100, by which time organised life may have collapsed already. The only chink of light is China’s remarkable development of renewable forms of energy, predictably dismissed by the West, that should enable dozens of developing countries to transition from fossil-based energy production in a short period of time.
Neoliberalism’s twin, globalisation, has produced a nasty and unanticipated side-effect for the West: the rise of China as an economic superpower
As far as rising inequality is concerned, unlike climate change, it barely figures in the policy agenda of any country. Governments across both the developed and developing worlds remain in thrall to elite capture, and rent-seeking behaviour by individuals and corporate bodies bedevils societies nearly everywhere. Against this backdrop, effective remedial or mitigating action to counter either global warming or inequality is all but impossible. Inequality driven by booming stock markets is almost certainly the principal cause of social and economic splintering in the world today, with no relief in sight.
At the intellectual level, the problem has generated a great deal of interest, alongside a growing sense of alarm. The last few years have seen the publication of several books similar in theme to that of Luke Kemp’s, for example Eswar Prasad’s The Doom Loop, Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay, Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism, James Mittelman’s Runaway Capitalism, and David Graeber’s The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, to name a few of the best among the most recent contributions. Those with a more optimistic attitude, such as Kate Pickett in The Good Society, believe that all is not yet lost.
However, despite the likes of Ms Pickett, it needs stressing that the signs are not propitious, and governments across the world are struggling to come up with answers to reassure an anxious public. Kemp speaks of the state—that is, the institutions of government—becoming increasingly dysfunctional as elites exercise unbridled, unaccountable power with little or no regard for the wider public, or even their own long-term interests. If his analysis is correct, this will lead in due course to civilisational collapse. To understand how the world has reached this dangerous impasse, a re-examination of recent history is required.
In the 1990s, following the dissolution of the USSR, the West basked in triumphalist glory. It was claimed, most notably by Francis Fukuyama, the Japanese-American historian, that the West had not only won the non-military Cold War but also the war of ideas, ideology, and politics. ‘Western values’—supposedly enshrined in liberal democracy, freedom of association, freedom of expression, human rights, societies governed and organised based on arm’s-length rules and laws, and contested elections—had decisively won in the global marketplace of ideas.
Western liberal democracy, now allied with the strange monoculture of neoliberal economics, consisting of markets, low taxes, privatisation and a small state, not forgetting an international division of labour via globalisation, would now dominate the intellectual discourse. In this framework, the pursuit of efficiency in the allocation of resources would determine economic policies. Societies and nations would be free to fashion their lives and futures without ideological coercion, explicit or implicit, and the resultant increase in prosperity would be based instead on the wealth created by individual effort.
Indeed, it was further asserted that a cornucopia of material and spiritual riches awaited the people of the world in the new millennium, once people acknowledged the superiority of societies that had achieved success based on individual enterprise and began to emulate them. In all this, the notion of social justice was largely forgotten. In touting the benefits of neoliberalism, presumably echoing the British Prime Minister (1979–1990) Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that there was no such thing as society, governments began to dismantle the welfare state in Britain and elsewhere.
However, neoliberalism’s twin, globalisation, has produced a nasty and unanticipated side-effect for the West: the rise of China as an economic superpower. At first, globalisation enabled Western companies to shift manufacturing to low-cost production centres, principally China, and assumed that everything would carry on as before. However, within a few years of China's entering the international trading system via membership of the World Trade Organization, it had become the largest manufacturing economy in the world.
The Epstein saga proves, if any proof were needed, that legal systems can barely cope with the avalanche of egregious wrongdoing by ruling elites across the world, including in the hitherto much-admired West
The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation estimates that the West lost 20 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2020, with over 5 million lost in America alone. Thus far, this stunning Sinification of the global economy has constituted a huge economic shock primarily for the West. But its emerging longer-term political and social impacts in the West and in global geopolitics have generated a set of new and difficult challenges for both developing and developed economies. A second shock awaits the West as China gains preeminence in high-tech manufacturing. The rise of China and the waning dominance of the West can be seen in the erratic responses of America to new geopolitical events, with some observers calling it the ‘Thucydides trap’, in which the rising power of Athens instilled fear in Sparta and led inevitably to war.
It has to be remembered that although extant Western values were to be considered a work in progress rather than a finished product, all other countries and states in the Global South—constituting the vast majority of mankind—would be expected, if not forced, to make progress towards what the ‘West’ had already achieved. These countries would be patronisingly overseen by the Western institutional set-up, such as the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Bank for International Settlements, with billionaire-owned Western media sitting in judgment with its racism, bigotry and fantasies. Hence, any flexibility for them would be available only within the parameters of neoliberalism.
Also, the United Nations system would be excluded from all this as it tended to give credence to other points of view. The United Nations system had, over the years, earned the wrath of the West by not buying into the notion of Western superiority, given the active presence of the G77 within it—the group of recalcitrant developing countries, often ex-colonies of the West, who could not be persuaded that yesterday’s exploiters had become their long-lost friends. The United Nations had alienated Western governments, especially of the United States, by not joining the bandwagon of praise for neoliberal capitalism and globalisation, and by holding conferences on global warming and reminding the world of the ever-present scourge of poverty.
When the West had confidently averred that there was no alternative, the United Nations had demurred. When it was claimed by the Western media that ‘there was simply no other game in town’, the United Nations had pointed to East Asia—that is, China—and to South-East Asia, that is, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. More recently, it had begun to promote industrial policy as a means for accelerating industrialisation. It has thus become a thorn in the side of the triumphalist Western neoliberals and their cheerleaders in the media.
As it happens, irrespective of the delusions that countries might have, the harsh reality cannot be sanitised. Even before the turn of the century, financial instability had reared its ugly head in the shape of the Asian—Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Philippine, South Korean, Mexican and Russian debt crises in 1997–98. Financial crises have always been the Achilles heel of liberal, market-driven societies as they tend to appear with chronic regularity, thus gainsaying the supposed tendency towards stability of finance, which forms the centrepiece of market-driven ‘economic equilibrium’.
At first, these crises were laid at the doors of feckless Asians, Mexicans and Russians, incapable of managing their affairs with a modicum of competence. Along with a lack of democracy, these countries were accused of being partial to cronyism and tolerant of other forms of corruption. What they needed, therefore, was a heavy dose of discipline provided by globalised markets, especially financial markets. The ‘wisdom’ of the markets—no more than the groupthink of well-dressed and highly paid young men and women in Western capitals—would sit in judgment on the policies and preferences of the rest of the world and thereby solve their problems.
It needs to be stressed that, at least at the conceptual level, Western neoliberal capitalism never triumphed completely in the battle of ideas. From 1945 to 1980, a wide range of views continued to exist in both academia and international institutions. However, although neoliberal views won Nobel Prizes and secured prominent international positions, heterodox views stubbornly continued to co-exist. Economists, historians, political scientists, observers of social phenomena, and even some in the media pointed out that an unqualified belief in the efficacy of markets, the striving for a ‘small’ state on ideological grounds, and allowing globalisation and privatisation to proceed unchecked would not deliver greater efficiency but would also produce market failures such as financial crises, monopolies, systemic corruption, social conflict and environmental damage, all of which would require robust state intervention.
Moreover, an unqualified belief in markets meant that their regulation would be deemed antithetical, and hence any regulation, however well-meaning, would in neoliberal eyes do more harm than good. And so it has proved to be the case. Indeed, the idea of the small state chimed very well with the preferences of ruling elites everywhere. In fact, with the pursuit of personal and corporate enrichment sanctified by neoliberal economic ‘science’, they would be unconstrained by inconvenient rules and free to accumulate as much wealth as they liked—assisted in their endeavours by the many tax havens flourishing in the world.
In practice, therefore, as was soon realised, the small state turned out to be a weak state ripe for capture by an alliance of corporate and media power. In this milieu, accountability became a quaint afterthought—witness the corruption, misogyny and shameless greed of the rich as displayed by the Epstein saga. The Epstein saga proves, if any proof were needed, that legal systems can barely cope with the avalanche of egregious wrongdoing by ruling elites across the world, including in the hitherto much-admired West.
The beginning of the new millennium witnessed the collapse of the dot-com boom, which included numerous corporate scandals. It was followed a few years later in 2007–08 by the most deep-seated financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929, while regulatory authorities looked on helplessly as the largest banks in the world became insolvent and survived only with bailout packages financed by taxpayers. Indeed, the British economic historian Eric Hobsbawm considered the financial crisis to be capitalism’s equivalent of the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that ended the Soviet Union and its version of a collectivised economy and polity.
Man’s own better self will save mankind, not artificial intelligence, not cryptocurrencies, and certainly not the pronouncements of the World Economic Forum
Today’s impasse affecting governance and its wider repercussions on society are the handmaidens of the process that has elevated neoliberalism to the status of a religious creed. But neoliberalism survives more because it caters to the interests of ruling elites than because of its ability to explain complex economic problems. Its intellectual justification, or indeed its practical usefulness in promoting societal well-being, despite the plethora of Nobel Prizes won by neoliberal economists—economists associated with the right-wing Rand Corporation in America alone have won 33—is deemed largely irrelevant.
It is quietly ignored when it comes to, for example, the 2007–08 financial crisis, and even in America by its army of ‘bond market vigilantes’, trying these days to boost debt-financed post-COVID growth. But it continues to wreak grave damage. Apart from its failure to boost growth, much of the world today is unprepared for the more serious long-term dangers that lie ahead—floods, fires, droughts and population movements that are happening everywhere but are dismissed as unimportant, except the last-named. Here, population shifts in the form of refugees from the Global South are, however, portrayed primarily as existential risks for the West, with many thousands of asylum seekers casually allowed to drown in the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel on their way to Europe and Britain. Their real causes, such as the failures of neoliberal economics or the impact of global warming, are left unexamined.
As part of this reactionary ideology, a dehumanised, anti-science attitude prevails not just in political circles but one that has percolated into the media and academia in large parts of the world. On the political and social fronts, the post-war social contract that created the welfare state in Europe has largely broken down. More shockingly, those who do not agree with the prevailing right-wing consensus are either considered cranks or made to live in fear for their livelihoods if they express their fears for the future honestly. To top it all, nineteenth-century-style racism is on the verge of being normalised in Europe. Societies are splintering everywhere—in politics, in society, in the media and even in the arts.
In the final section of the book, titled The Roots of Our Endgame, Luke Kemp takes up topics such as Are We All to Blame?, The Agents of Doom, When Ideas Dry Up, A Second Industrial Revolution, Survival of the Richest, and Justice Lest the World Perish. There is both a sense of despair and a profoundly felt moral outrage in the subsection called Justice Lest the World Perish. Here, Kemp is not afraid to ‘say it as it is’, and his language is passionately direct and honest. He asks: Are we all to blame for any future collapse? His answer is a resounding no.
He points out that in 2004, British Petroleum hired the public relations firm Ogilvy and Mather to help deflect responsibility away from itself and onto consumers. For more than two decades, the world has had to accept a barrage of claims from oil companies that the public is to blame, not they, for any failures to tackle global warming. Corporate propaganda has seeped into our collective subconscious and become reality. How did this happen?
Ever since the nation-state became the organising framework for societies, it has subdivided its affairs into three institutional subsets. One is the state proper, with its tiers of authority, ministries, departments and functions that include the judiciary. Two are corporate bodies whose main purpose is to put nations’ and societies’ resources to productive use. Here, the profit motive is the primary, but not the sole, engine. There are voluntary bodies like churches, charities and what is loosely described as civil society. All three are meant not just to carry out their particular tasks but are ultimately expected to ‘stay on message’ as agents of the ruling elites.
As such, all three institutional hubs of the nation state ape the behaviour and attitudes of the ruling elites. They, too, now seek power because it is power that enables them to maximise their influence and, like them, their ultimate goals are status and wealth. Witness how today’s media have bought into this schema, replete with lists of billionaires, lists of corporations based on profits, billionaires with their private aeroplanes and yachts, and stories of the vast expenses incurred on socialising around the world. Epstein may be dead, but we are well and truly living in the Epstein age.
According to Kemp, we have willy-nilly become citizens of a world suffused with the ideology of Homo economicus. Homo economicus is motivated not by empathy and altruism but by the pursuit of material wealth and status competition, and, left unchecked by legal or ethical constraints, it has acquired the characteristics of pathology. A pathological pursuit of power and status not only ignores higher standards of behaviour but even regards the borders of the nation state as an inconvenience—success and status in globalised societies is what counts.
Most of the world’s wealthy are, indeed, citizens of nowhere, as was stated by the then British Prime Minister Theresa May, flitting from one tax haven to another. These wealthy nomads can simply ignore global warming, rising inequality and environmental degradation with not even a shrug of their shoulders. This indifference falls naturally within their wealth-maximising belief, sense of personal immunity and value systems.
So, where is the world headed now? As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) said in the years before the Second World War, ‘the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’. We do not know what is going to happen in the next few years. Kemp suggests that technology is usually mooted as a potential saviour for the world. Silicon Valley and its tech billionaires not only promote their technology as a potential saviour of mankind but also assert that it is critical for meeting the challenges of today. Hence, they are viscerally opposed to any form of regulation. Even some in academia go along with this, hoping for jobs in these companies and claiming that human ingenuity is a bottomless resource. They are Gramsci’s monsters, motivated by nothing other than greed, power and status.
But, in the ultimate analysis, naïve as it may sound, it will be mankind’s own better nature that will save the world from impending catastrophe. Why? Because Homo economicus exists only in the fevered imaginations of the rich. Along with selfishness and cruelty, much of mankind also possesses a better nature, which is reflected in values like friendship, loyalty, trust and empathy—human attributes that cannot be marketised. To prevent societal breakdown, the so-called ‘clever’ elites of the world, who are so good at accumulating wealth, will have to reject becoming or promoting Homo economicus and relearn what the word ‘humanity’ means.
Today, we earn wealth by destroying the ‘commons’—oceans, forests, clean air and water aquifers—and have driven the planet to the brink of disaster. Can we really carry on like this?
Kemp closes his book with the Latin Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus, which means ‘Let justice be done, though the world perish’. In other words, man’s own better self will save mankind, not artificial intelligence, not cryptocurrencies, and certainly not the pronouncements of the World Economic Forum. The world, as Kemp says, is not doomed to follow the plot of a Greek tragedy. There will be a better tomorrow for all—white, black, brown, African, Asian, European and American. But all of us will have to make it happen.