What Should We Call the Culture of Stasis
i'm trying to think of a catchy name
I’ve been reading Mancur Olsen’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. His Big Idea is the problem of “distributional coalitions.” What are distributional coalitions? Jeffrey A. Tucker describes them as
deeply networked relationships between industry, government, lobbyists, friend networks, academia, and pockets of family wealth intent on building in protection for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
But I don’t think that “distributional coalition” really does the job of describing the universal instinct to keep things as they are for me, but not necessarily for thee. For instance, take the guilds of the medieval cities. They were designed to control access to commerce through apprenticeships, limited membership, control of prices, etc. But the guy at Circulation of Elites thinks they were a good thing.
If you look around, everyone is talking about it. Here’s Bari Weiss talking with Marc Andreessen.
Back in the day there was this thing called “The Deal.” Says Andreessen:
The Deal was that somebody like me could start a company. You can invent a new technology. In this case, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. We got glowing press coverage. Everybody loved us. And then you could go public. You could make a lot of money if the business worked. You would pay your taxes. Then at the end of your career, you would be left with this giant pot of money. And then you donate it to philanthropy, to good social causes. And then that squared the circle.
But now everything is evil.
Technology is held to be presumptively evil. Tech companies are held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this evil class. Anybody who’s rich is evil.
What is going on? And why?
Here is Andreessen talking about Biden administration policy on AI.
They said, “AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition. We’re going to control them and we’re going to dictate what they do.”
What do you call a culture like this? Here’s more:
this generation of Democrats, the ones in the White House under Biden, became very anti-capitalist. They wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled, planned economy.
What is a good name for this? I suppose that ruling classes down the ages have all thought like this. But, still, today? Really?
Here’s a piece on the failure of Obamacare. Back in 1999 the annual cost of health insurance for a family was $5,791. Last year it was $25,572. Five times in 25 years? It’s pretty obvious what is going on. Healthcare is completely under the control of government and government-adjacent corporations. Of course Obamacare has made costs go up. But I wonder what Obama thought he was doing, back in the day.
Look, I get it. We humans want the world around us to stay the way it is. And it’s obvious why. We humans need to grow up and get married and have children and leave a world for our children to inherit. And instinctively, we feel that the way for that to happen is to prevent disruption and chaos. Just keep the world going for another few years, please!
But we moderns have learned that the world doesn’t work like that. We had the experiments with socialism and with “planning” and we know that the best we can hope for is disruptions that improve life, even as they seem to turn everything upside down.
But we most of us really hate the disruption of change.
One of my favorite examples of this is the Duke of Wellington and railways. The Duke, winner of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was British Prime Minister in two short terms around 1830. But he was influenced by a Col. Sibthorp that didn’t care for railways.
[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."
You can see the problem. With the lower classes moving about on railways it would completely upset the smooth running of society. And today, our liberal friends are no different. They know that SUVs and cows are going to wreck the climate, and unless we keep rigid control on AI, well…
But what do we call this hatred of new trains and gigantic SUVs that upset everything?
Do we call it “Stationary Society?” Or “Stability Society?” Or “Planned Society?” Or “Command Society?” Or “Rigid Society?”
And what is the mind virus that has infected the folks that want to limit AI to two or three firms, and want the government to control tech development? OK, we know about that. It’s a common fantasy of humans right down the ages, that if only “I” was in control, everything would work, and society would be just, and people would be happy and contented and live happily ever after.