The Collapse of the American Empire. What Future for Humankind?

These notes are not supposed to disparage nor to exalt an entity that has a history that goes back to at least a couple of millennia ago. Like all Empires, past and present, the Modern World Empire went through its parable of growth and glory and it is now starting its decline. There is not much that we can do about it, we have to accept that this is the way the universe works. On this subject, see also a previous post of mine "Why Europe Conquered the World "

For everything that exists, there is a reason and that's true also for that gigantic thing that we call sometimes "The West" or perhaps "The American Empire," or maybe "Globalization." To find that reason, we may go back to the very origins of the modern empire. We can find them in an older, but already very advanced, empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did, but it might be an original concept of mine), "geography is the mother of Empires." Empires are built on the availability of natural resources and on the ability to transport them. So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. This transportation system was so important that it was even deified under the name of the Goddess Annona. It was kept together by a financial system based on coinage, Latin as lingua franca, a large military system, and a legal system very advanced for the time.

Like all empires, though, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction. The empire peaked at some moment during the 1st century of our era, then it started declining. It was the result of a combination of related factors: the depletion of the precious metal mines that deprived the Empire of its currency, the growth of the Silk Road that siphoned the Roman wealth to China, the overexploitation of the North-African agriculture that fed the Roman cities. No money, no resources, no food: the Empire could only collapse and it did.

The old Roman Empire left a ghostly shadow over Europe, so persistent that for almost two millennia people tried to recreate it one way or another. But it was not possible, again it was a question of geography. The Roman intensive agriculture had so badly damaged the North-African soil that it could never recover -- still, it hasn't. The loss of the fertile soil on the southern shore divided the Mediterranean sea into two halves: the green and still fertile Northern part, and the dry and barren Southern part. Nevertheless, there were several attempts to rebuild the ancient economic and political unity of the basin. The Arabic caliphate built a Southern Mediterranean Empire based on Arabic as the Lingua Franca and on Islam as the common cultural ground. But the expansion of Islam never reached Western Europe. Its economic base was weak: the North African agriculture just couldn't support the population level that would have been needed to control the whole Mediterranean basin. The same destiny befell, later on, on the Turkish Empire.

On the Northern side of the Mediterranean sea, Europe was a region that the ancient Romans had always considered mostly a periphery. With the Roman Empire gone, Northern Europe was freed to develop by itself. It was the period that we call the "dark ages," a misnomer if ever there was one. The dark ages were a new civilization that exploited some of the cultural and technological structures inherited from Rome but that also developed original ones. The lack of gold and silver made it impossible for Europeans to keep Europe together by military means. They had to rely on subtler and more sophisticated methods that, nevertheless, were patterned over the old Roman structures. Cultural unity was insured by Christianity, with the church even creating a new form of currency not based on precious metals but on the relics of holy men and women. The church also was the keeper of Latin, the old Roman language that became the European the Lingua Franca, the only tool that allowed Europeans to understand each other.

In this way, the Europeans created a gentle and sophisticated civilization. They could maintain the rule of law and they gave back to women some of the rights that they had lost during the Roman Empire. Witch-burning, endemic in the Roman Empire, couldn't be completely abolished, but its frequency was reduced to nearly zero. Slavery was formally abolished, although it never actually disappeared. Material wealth was de-emphasized, in favor of spiritual wealth, art and literature flourished as much as they could in a poor region as Europe was at that time. Wars didn't disappear, but the early Middle Ages were a relatively quiet period with the Church maintaining a certain degree of control over the worst excesses of the local warlords. The Arthurian cycle emphasized how errant knights were fighting to perform good deeds and to defend the weak. It was put in writing only in the late Middle Ages, but it had been part of the European dreamscape from much earlier times.

But things never stand still. During the Middle Ages, the European population and the European economy were growing together exploiting a relatively intact territory. Soon, the gentle civilization of the early Middle Ages gave way to something that was not gentle at all. With the turn of the millennium, Europe was overpopulated and Europeans started looking for areas where to expand. The crusades started with the 11th century and were a new attempt to re-unify the Mediterranean basin. Europe was even equipping itself with international structures that could have governed the new Mediterranean Empire: the chivalric orders. Of these, the Templars were an especially interesting structure: in part a military society, but also a bank and a cultural center, all based on Latin as lingua franca. The idea was that the new Mediterranean Empire would be governed by a supranational organization, not unlike the old Roman Empire.

But the crusades were an expensive failure. The military effort had to be supported by the main economic resources of the time: forests and agricultural land. Both were badly overstrained and the result was an age of famines and pestilences that nearly halved the European population. It was a new collapse that took place during the 14th century. It was bad enough that we may imagine that the descendants of the Sultan Salah ad-Din could have stricken back and conquered Europe, had they not been stabbed in the back by the expanding Mongol empire.

The European Population: graph from William E Langer, "The Black Death" Scientific American, February 1964, p. 117 -- note how growth is faster after the collapse than it was before.

But Europeans were stubborn. Despite the 14th century collapse, they kept using the same trick they had been using before to rebuild after a disaster: patterning new structures on the old ones. The Europeans were good warriors, skilled shipbuilders, excellent merchants, and always willing to take risks in order to make money. They keep doing what they were good at doing and, if they couldn't expand into the East, why not expand West, across the Atlantic Ocean? It was a wildly successful idea. Europeans imported gunpowder technology from China and used it to build fearsome weapons. With their newly mastered gunnery skills, they created a new kind of ship, the cannon-armed galleon. It was a dominance weapon: a galleon could sail everywhere ad blast away all opposition. A century after the great pestilence, the European population was growing again, faster than before. And, this time, the Europeans were embarking on the task of conquering the world.

Over a few centuries, Europeans behaved as worldwide marauders: explorers, merchants, pirates, colonists, empire builders, and more. They sailed everywhere and wherever they sailed, they dominated the sea and, from the sea, they dominated the land. But who were they? Europe never gained a political unity nor it embarked on an effort to create a politically unified empire. While fighting non-European populations, Europeans were also fighting each other for the spoils. The only supranational governing entity they had was the Catholic Church, but it was an obsolete tool for the new times. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church was not anymore a keeper of relics, it was a relic itself. The final blow to it came from the invention of the printing press that enormously lowered the cost of books. That led to a market for books written in vernacular language and that was the end of Latin as a European lingua franca. The result was the reformation by Martin Luther, in 1517: the power of the Catholic Church was broken forever. Now, European states had what they wanted: a free hand to expand where they wanted.

As you may have imagined, the result of this "battle royal" historical phase was a new disaster. The European states jumped at each other's throat engaging in the "30-years war" (1618 – 1648). Half Europe was laid waste, plagues and famines reappeared, food production plummeted down, and with it population. Europeans were not just fighting against each other in the form of warring states. European men were fighting against European women: it was the time of witch-burning, tens of thousands of innocent European women were jailed, tortured, and burned at the stake. With its forests cut and the agricultural land eroded by overexploitation, there was a distinct possibility that the age of the European world empire was over forever. It was not.

Just like a stroke of luck had saved Europe after the first collapse of the 14th century, another nearly miraculous event saved Europe from the 18th century collapse. This miracle had a name: coal. It was a European economist of the 19th century, William Jevons, who had noted that "with coal, everything is easy." And with coal Europeans could solve most of their problems: coal could be used in place of wood to smelt metals and make weapons. This saved the European forests (but not for Spain, which had no cheap coal and whose empire floundered slowly). Then, coal could be turned into food using an indirect but effective technology. Coal was used to smelt iron and produce weapons. With weapons, new lands were conquered and the inhabitants enslaved. The slaves would then cultivate plantations and produce food to be shipped to Europe. It was the time when the British developed their habit of tea in the afternoon: the tea, the sugar, and the flour for the cakes were all produced in the British plantations overseas.

And the cycle continued. The European population restarted growing during the 18th century and, by the end of the 19th century, the feat of conquering the world was nearly complete. The 20th century saw a consolidation of what we can now call the "Western Empire" with the term "West" denoting a cultural entity that by now was not just European: it encompassed the United States, Australia, South Africa, and a few more states -- including even Asiatic countries such as Japan which, in 1905, gained a space among the world powers by force of arms, soundly defeating a traditional European power, Russia, at the naval battle of Tsushima. From a military viewpoint, the Western Empire was a reality. There remained the need of turning it into a political entity. All empires need an emperor, but the West didn't have one, not yet.

The final phase of the building of the Western World Empire took place with the two world wars of the 20th century. Those were true civil wars fought for imperial dominance, similar to the civil wars of ancient Rome at the time of Caesar and Augustus. Out of these wars, a clear winner emerged: the United States. After 1945, the Empire had a common currency (the dollar), a common language (English), a capital (Washington DC) and an emperor, the president of the United States. More than all that, it had acquired a powerful propaganda machine, the one we call today "consensus building." It built a narrative that described WW2 as a triumph of good against evil -- the latter represented by Nazi Germany. This narrative remains today the funding myth of the Western Empire. The only rival empire left, the Soviet Empire, collapsed in 1991, leaving the American Empire as the sole dominant power of the world. Also that was seen as proof of the inherent goodness of the American Empire. It was then that Francis Fukuyama wrote his "The End of History," (1992) correctly describing the events he was witnessing. Just like when Emperor Octavianus ushered the age of the "Pax Romana," it was the beginning of a new golden age: the "Pax Americana"

Alas, history never ends and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, all empires carry inside themselves the seeds of their own destructions. Just a few decades have passed from the time when Fukuyama had claimed the end of history and the Pax Americana seems to be already over. The Western world dominance had been based first on coal, then on oil, now trying to switch to gas, but all these are finite resources becoming more and more expensive to produce. Just like Rome had followed the decline of its gold mines, the West is following follow the decline of the wells it controls. The dollar is losing its role of world currency and the Empire is under threat by a new commercial system. Just as the ancient silk road was a factor in the collapse of the Roman Empire, the nascent "road and belt initiative" that will connect Eurasia as a single commercial region may give the final blow to the Globalized dominance of the West.

To be sure, the Western Empire, although in its death throes, is not dead yet. It still has its wondrous propaganda machine working. The great machine has even been able to convince most people that the empire doesn't actually exist, that everything they see being done to them is done for their good and that foreigners are starved and bombed with the best of good intentions. It is a remarkable feat that reminds something that a European poet, Baudelaire, said long ago: "the Devil's best trick consists in letting you believe he doesn't exist." It is typical of all structures to turn nasty during their decline, it happens even to human beings. So, we may be living in an "Empire of Lies" that's destroying itself by trying to build its own reality. Except that the real reality always wins.

And there we are, today. Just like the old Roman Empire, the Western Empire is going through its cycle and the decline has already started. So, at this point, we could hazard some kind of moral judgment: was the Western Empire good or bad? In a sense, all empires are bad: they tend to be ruthless military organizations that engage in all kinds of massacres, genocides, and destruction. Of the Roman empire, we remember the extermination of the Chartaginese as an example, but it was not the only one. Of the Western Empire, we have many examples: possibly the most evil one being the genocide of the North-American Indians, but such things as the extermination of civilian by aerial bombing of cities during WW2 was also impressively evil. And the (evil) Empire doesn't seem to have lost its taste for genocide, at least as it can be judged from some recent declarations by members of the American government about starving Iranians.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that Westerners are more evil than people belonging to other cultures. If history tells us something, it is that people tend to become evil when they have a chance to do so. The West created many good things, from polyphonic music to modern science and, during this last phase of its history, it is leading the struggle to keep the Earth alive -- a girl such as Greta Thunberg is a typical example of the "good West" as opposed to the "evil West."

Overall, all empires in history are more or less the same. They are like waves crashing on a beach: some are large, some small, some do damage, some just leave traces on the sand. The Western Empire did more damage than others because it was larger, but it was not different. We have to accept that the universe works in a certain way: never smoothly, always going up and down and, often, going through abrupt collapses, as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca had noted long ago. Being the current empire so large, the transition to whatever will come after us needs to be more abrupt and more dramatic than anything seen in history before. But, just like it was the case for ancient Rome, the future may well be a gentler and saner age than the current one. And the universe will go on as it has always done.

The real reason why we didn't go back to the Moon: The decline of spaceflight

With the massive onslaught of fake news we are subjected to, a particularly obnoxious one is that the Moon landings never took place. It is not just a fashionable idiocy, it is a symptom that the whole Western society is rotting at the core.

In a way, the spreading of the "Moon landing was a hoax" legend was to be expected -- it was even unavoidable. The society we call "The West" inflicted itself mortal wounds during the past few decades with the those technologies that go under the name of "perception management," once known as "propadanda" but now much more refined and effective. If you start using this form of black magic, it is a slippery slope that leads you to the illusions of greatness that were voiced during the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. At that moment, someone was so intoxicated by the new power of propaganda that he uttered the well know words "now we create our own reality."

That was the ultimate hubrys and it didn't go unpunished. Reality cannot be created by mere human beings. What they can do is to create illusions that look like reality and that can hide reality so well that noone can discern the true reality anymore. Losing track with reality would be sufficient punishment in itself, but it carries even worse consequence. Once you start creating your own reality, you can't be trusted any more. And if trust is lost, everything is lost. Society becomes an Empire of Lies and it is destined to fade away and disappear.

So, who would believe the story that people landed on the Moon when it was told by the same people who, later on, invented non-existing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? For everything that happens there is a reason and there is a reason also for the disbelief in the Moon landing.

Will we ever be able to restore trust? Maybe it is too late, maybe it is not even worth trying. Yet, I was thinking that the astronauts who performed the incredible feat of the several travels to the Moon deserve better than being ridiculed, as it seems to be becoming fashionable nowadays. They deserve respect and admiration for their courage and their dedication. For this reason let me address one of the few reasonable questions that may be asked about the story: why didn't we go back to the Moon? Some people are genuinely perplexed on this point: could it be because it really was a fake?

No. There were deep structural reasons that made it impossible for the Western economic system to provide again the same surplus that was used to finance the Moon program. Here, let me reproduce a post that I published in 2015 examining the trends of human spaceflight. (you can read similar considerations in a post by Antonio Turiel). Clearly, we have peaked and we are going down. It is the way civilizations end.

Monday, February 9, 2015

The last astronaut: the cycle of human spaceflight is coming to an end

Smart, dedicated, competent, polyglot, and more; Samantha Cristoforetti seems to have been invented for a "Star Trek" episode. She is shown here at the International Space Station, where she is staying at the moment of publication of this post. Cristoforetti may not be the last astronaut to orbit the earth, but it is possible that the end of what was once called "the space age" will not be far away in the future. (Image credit: ESA/NASA)

I experienced the enthusiasm of the "space-age," starting in the 1960s, and I am not happy to see the end of that old dream. Yet, the data are clear and cannot be ignored: human spaceflight is winding down. Look at the graph, below. It shows the total number of people launched into space each year. (The data are from Wikipedia - more details.)

As you see, the number of people sent to space peaked in the 1990s, following a cycle that can be fitted reasonably well using a bell-shaped curve (a Gaussian, in this case). We have not yet arrived at the end of space travel, but the number of people traveling to space is going down. With the international space station set to be retired in 2020, it may be that the "space-age" is destined to come to an end in the future.

The shape of the cycle can be seen as a "Hubbert curve." This curve typically describes the exploitation of a non-renewable resource; fossil fuels in particular, but it also describes how economic activities are affected by a diminishing availability of resources. In this case, the shape of the curve suggests that we are gradually running out of the surplus resources needed to send humans into space. In a sense, the economics of human spaceflight are like those of the great pyramids of Egypt. These pyramids were expensive and required considerable surplus resources to be built. When the surplus disappeared, no more were built. The shape of the pyramid building curve was, again, Hubbert-like.

This result is not surprising, considering that we are reaching the planetary limits to growth. In part, we are reacting to the diminishing availability of resources by replacing humans with less expensive robots, but sending robots to space is not the same as the "conquest of space" was once conceived. Besides, the decline of space exploration is evident also from other data, see for instance this plot showing the budget available to NASA (from "Starts with a Bang"). Note how the peak in human spaceflights coincides with the peak in the resources destined to space exploration.

If space exploration is directly related to the availability of resources, it is also true that, from the beginning, it was not meant to be just a resource drain. The idea of the conquest of space involved overcoming the limits of the earth's ecosphere and accessing the resources of the whole solar system. Some of the concepts developed in this area were thought explicitly as ways to avoid the dire scenarios laid out in the 1972 study, "The Limits to Growth." Proposals involved placing giant habitats at the Lagrange libration points, where no energy was necessary to keep them there. The idea gained some traction in the 1970s and, in the figure, you see an impression of one of those habitats - the "Bernal Sphere."(image credit: NASA)

Today, we can't look at these old drawings without shaking our heads and wondering how anyone could take them seriously. Yet, these ideas were not impossible in themselves and, in the 1970s, we still had sufficient resources to make it possible some kind of human expansion into space, even though not on the grand scale that some people were proposing. But we missed that occasion and we much preferred to invest our surplus in military toys. Today, we can't even dream of colonizing space anymore.

The space age is not completely over, yet, but it is becoming more and more difficult to sustain the costs of it. Right now, the Russians are still willing to launch to orbit West European astronauts. But how long will they continue to do so while Western Europe is enacting sanctions devised to cripple the Russian economy? Samantha Cristoforetti, brave and competent Italian astronaut, may well be a member of the last patrol of humans orbiting around the earth for a long time to come.

What's Emperor Trump Doing? He is Busy at Splitting the Empire in Two

Donald Trump seems to be doing what Roman Emperors like Diocletian, Constantine, and Theodosius did long ago: splitting the empire into two halves. Trump may not have consciously decided to do that, but an Empire can only be as large as it can afford to be and the American Empire can't afford anymore to dominate the whole world.

Flavius Theodosius Augustus "The Great" (347- 395 CE) was the last emperor to rule over the whole Roman Empire. His success was probably due in large part to his habit of plundering Pagan temples for the gold he needed to pay his troops. But Pagan temples were a limited resource and Theodosius himself seemed to understand that when, shortly before his death, he partitioned the Empire between his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. Afterward, the empire would never be united under a single emperor again.

The Roman Empire had been a strong centralized power during its heydays, but it never was very interested in creating an ethnical and linguistic unity among its subjects. The Roman authorities understood that it was less expensive to tolerate diversity than to force uniformity -- a typical policy of most empires. So, the Empire remained split into two main linguistic halves: the Latin-speaking Pars Occidentis and the Greek-speaking Pars Orientis. Theoretically, Latin was the official language but, in practice, the Empire remained a bilingual entity and, during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Roman elite would tend to speak Greek -- considered more refined and classy than Latin.

The split of the two sides of the Empire was not just linguistic, it was economic as well. The Pars Occidentis remained based on mineral wealth which, in turn, fueled the Empire's military power. The Pars Orientis was more based on commerce and manufacturing and it exploited its favorable geographical position as the terminal of the silk road that connected China to Europe. During the expansion period, the military strength of the West made it dominant but, with the exhaustion of the gold mines in Spain, it lost the resources needed to pay for its oversized military apparatus. In time, the Western Empire became unable to control even its own territory and it squandered its remaining resources in huge border walls. It collapsed and vanished during the late 5th century CE. The Eastern Empire lasted nearly one millennium longer but was never able to rebuild the power of the old Roman Empire.

Fast forward to our times, and it is clear that the American Empire is facing the same situation that the Romans were facing around the 2nd century AD. Like the old Western Empire, the American Empire's economy is mainly based on mineral resources: crude oil in particular. But, with the gradual exhaustion of these resources, the empire cannot afford to dominate the whole world anymore.

Emperor Trump seems to have an uncanny ability to understand the situation, even though he may not be an expert in Roman history. His actions are perfectly understandable in light of the plan of splitting the empire into two halves. One half (Pars Occidentis) will still be dominated from Washington, the other half (Pars Orientis) will have Beijing as its capital. The Western Part will retain the original Imperial language, English. The Eastern Part may switch to Chinese.

Consistently, Trump is planning to abandon Afghanistan and also Syria, both too far and too expensive to defend and he also was not interested in an all-out confrontation with North Korea. But he seems to consider South America as part of the Western dominion, so he is moving to take control of Venezuela. Trump is also acting to destroy the hegemony of the dollar as world currency. Apparently, the idea is that the Western Empire is safer from financial disasters if the dollar becomes the Western currency only. So, the economic sanctions enacted against Iran, Russia, and other countries are forcing the Eastern Empire to develop new currencies and financial systems independent of the dollar.

Clearly, Emperor Trump is facing strong resistance. Just as many Roman Emperors, he not completely in control of the Imperial military apparatus and a sizeable opposition is trying to maintain the American Empire alive in is most extended and expensive form: dominating the whole planet. But the direction is clear and the situation is simple: an Empire can only be as large as it can afford to be. The gradual depletion of the mineral resources and the increasing costs of pollution are making a global empire impossible.

The Globalized World Empire was a beautiful creature as long as it prospered, but it was burning the dynamite stick at both ends. The time of global dominance is gone and the Empire is now in a convulsive phase: retreat is the most dangerous military maneuver and it is best executed maintaining an aggressive posture. Which is exactly what Emperor Trump is doing with his threats of war. But it is also true that the game of chicken is the second most dangerous game known (the first is the Russian Roulette). So, the retreat of the Western Empire may not involve just a rapid Seneca Collapse, as it was the case for the old Roman Empire, but a final blast of fireworks in the form of a nuclear war which would end civilization as we know it. Not pretty, but that's the way things are.

There remains one point of contention: is Western Europe in the Orientis or in the Occidentis part of the Empire? Surely, Britain tends to remain part of the Western Empire because of its linguistic ties with the United States. But the non-English speaking parts of the former EU don't have this link and they have strong - practically unbreakable - ties with Russia as an energy supplier. So, they might become part of the Eastern Eurasian Empire.

It seems that Trump understands this point very well, too, and it is in these terms that you can interpret his lashing out at the NATO allies at last year's G7 meeting. Trump's message to the states once forming the European Union was simply, "Sorry, fellows, we can't afford to defend you anymore unless you pay us more money than you can afford to pay." In this sense, Western Europe could play the role of Britain and Dacia during the 3rd and 4th century CE, abandoned by the central Roman Government and left to fend off by themselves against the barbarian invaders. Who knows? History rhymes again and we might even have a new King Arthur.

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Was the fall of the Western Roman Empire a Seneca Collapse? Yes, by all means it was. Look at this:

From Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires, 1978 -- the vertical scale is in million square miles

See also "Can Donald Trump be the last world emperor?"

And you may also be interested at how Theodosius's daughter, Galla Placidia, managed to keep the Western Empire together even without plundering temples. The story is here.  

Note also that I used the term "understanding" but that doesn't mean that Trump consciously understands the deep reasons of why he is doing what he is doing in the sense of moving intentionally to the splitting of the empire. He is simply reacting to the stimuli he perceives and he moves accordingly. (which is, BTW, what we all do!!)

Those Weird Italians: do They Really Think Italy is a Sovereign State? A Comment on the Recent Failure of Forming a New Government

The political history of Europe during the past 5 centuries or so. Note how nation-states crystallized in the current form mostly during the 19th century. These entities turned out to be extremely resilient and they survived two major world wars and all sorts of disasters. Nation-states are much less important today in the age of the Globalized empire, but they are still alive and kicking. The recent events in Italy the attempt of creating a more independent national government clashed against the international political imperatives. It is all part of a general trend that may lead to the disgregation of the Eurozone and, perhaps, to a Seneca Collapse for the weaker European economies, including the Italian one.

A few things became clear in Italy during the past few days. One is that Italy is not a real "sovereign state," as it became evident when President Mattarella refused to accept a government which included people who had taken critical positions against the European Union and against the Euro. It was a necessary outcome of the situation: from 1943 Italy has been occupied by the troops of the victorious American Empire. Only a certain degree of fiction has been maintained to imply that Italy is able, in principle, to take independent decisions in matters dealing with the economy and foreign policy.

In practice, whenever Italian officers tried to take such independent decisions, they discovered that it was an unwise choice - even for their own physical survival. There have been several instructive cases in the past, starting with Enrico Mattei, president of the Italian National Oil Company (ENI). He pursued a politics of independence for the Italian energy system and he died in a mysterious (but not so much) airplane crash in 1962.

History, as usual, rhymes with itself and, recently, the winners of the latest Italian elections, the leaders of the M5s and the Northern League (now simply the League) parties, tried to form a government with a program of sweeping reforms which included an attempt to gain a larger degree of independence from the European Union in financial matters. The program didn't include anything equivalent to the British "Brexit" but it was, clearly, a step in that direction.

It didn't work, and it should have been obvious from the beginning that it couldn't. The rules of the imperial game are not based on democracy: defeated and occupied countries can't vote for their independence (it happened to Catalonia, too). Try a little exercise, imagine that, after the defeat of Queen Boudicca, the Celts of Britain had voted for a National government pursuing a policy of independence from Rome. You get the point, I think.

What's perhaps most surprising is how a lot of Italians reacted to the events. They took Mr. Mattarella's decision as an insult to the sovereignty of Italy. That is, they seem to believe that such a thing as an Italian sovereign state exists, despite the American troops occupying Italy with more than 10,000 men in at least a hundred military bases (all your bases are belong to US). And the military occupation is just a marginal element of a much more in-depth political and financial occupation.

Yet, in a certain sense, the Italians are right. In politics, often beliefs are stronger than reality - politics creates its own reality. And so, if Italians truly believe that Italy is an independent country, then at least it could become one. It is what happened in 1861, when Italy was created as an independent state for the first time in history.

Now, there are events that highlight long-term trends. The power scuffle about the new government in Italy is one of these events. It shows that the Global Empire is still strong, but also in evident decline because it could be challenged - although unsuccessfully - by the winning parties of the recent Italian elections. Empires are fragile things in the sense that they need a lot of energy to keep moving - and they tend to have a short lifetime in comparison to the more resilient entities we call "nations." Empires, in other words, are subjected to the kind of rapid collapse that I call the "Seneca Collapse"

The Global/American Empire is no exception. It is the product of the power of fossil fuels and it will persist only as long as fossil fuels are cheap and abundant. That can't and won't last forever, although at present it is impossible to say for how long. Rome was said to be eternal at the time of the Roman Empire, but it wasn't. The same is true for Washington D.C. (and for Brussels, which will probably fall earlier).

So, at some moment Italy may become again an independent state, as it was from 1861 to 1943. Most Italians, right now, seem to think that it would be a good idea. But will it be? Think about this: after the Roman Legions left Britain, were the Britons richer? Or happier to be ruled by tribal chieftains? Debatable, to say the least.

The people who are proposing that Italy should leave the Eurozone seem to think that all the problems for the Italian economy are financial and political. They don't understand the structural problems of an economy which is almost 100% dependent on the import of mineral commodities, and of fossil fuels in particular. Leaving the Eurozone or making cosmetic changes in the taxation system won't do anything to address this dependency. And, if it is true that nation-states are more resilient than empires, they too can suffer the Seneca Collapse if they lack the energy needed for their economy to function. So, the future is obscure, as always, but one thing remains clear: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 BC-65 AD)

The Seneca Cliff as an Effect of Bureaucracy

The idea of the "Seneca Cliff" is that a certain entity, from a company to an empire, tends to fall rapidly when it is subjected to a dearth of resources and, at the same time, affected by pollution. More than once I noted that there are many forms of pollution; in the model, the term indicated any kind of phenomenon that tends to grow at the expenses of the capital stock of a society. Bureaucracy clearly satisfies the definition and an excess of it may be a major cause of collapse. Here, Miguel Martinez discusses the concept on the basis of his experience in Italy, a country that seems to be especially plagued by overbureaucracy. Martinez notes several interesting phenomena, including the fact that the decline in economic resources reinforces also the problems created by excessive bureaucracy generating a near complete standstill in everything that can be overcome only by acting illegally, which creates other problems as well. So, it seems that the only cure for over bureaucracy is the Seneca Collapse!

Bureaucracy and the Seneca Cliff

by Miguel Martinez




Ugo Bardi's blog is always a great mental stimulant. His Seneca Curve made me think of another parallel curve. Imagine two lines: the first has to do directly with resources. The other has to do with the rules which govern the resources and how they are used.Rules, laws, regulations, contracts, terms, provisions, standards, obligations, whatever...

Whoever issues them, the ultimate enforcement comes from some entity related to the state; and enforcement can be quite painful, implying the end of a career, severe financial damage, heavy expenses for lawyers, gaol or at least the stress of years of worrying about all of this, whatever the outcome.

Let's start with the line of resources. Basically meaning the relationship among available resources, extraction costs and waste.

Not being a mathematician, I tend to seek practical examples nearby, so the first thing that comes to mind is what they call the Piana, an open marshy area, hosting many species of migrant birds, a few miles to the northwest of the centre of Florence, where no tourist has ever set foot.

But Florence has to put the waste produced by 370.000 Florentines and at least 10 million tourists every year somewhere.

Then the airport isn't big enough to fit yet more tourists.

And the main highway in Italy needs to be expanded, to fit more cars.

So they are now going to put a huge incinerator, an enormous new airport and new lanes for the highway in the Piana.

After that, the city will only have itself to eat up.

But I am no expert on environmental issues. I just want to speak here of the resources available to state institutions.

At least in Italy, the state has definitely gone beyond the peak, and is starting to climb down the dark side of the Seneca curve.

Critics of neoliberalism rightly point out the enormous amount of waste and corruption, and how much is spent to nourish private interests of various kinds. Very well, but still, all that money is no longer there.

When resources diminish, cuts start bottom up.

First, a regularly paid employee in some minor museum retires, and is replaced by somebody who only works there three days a week. Then an unpaid student comes there once a week to “get practice”, and finally the museum is closed.

This bottom up aspect resembles what is happening with climate change, where bottom means places on the ecological borderline, such as Darfur some years ago, and Syria recently (see this prophetic 2010 article in Le Monde Diplomatique.

These are the first places where we feel the symptoms of a changing world. Each one so small, yet they are everywhere.

Since resources continue to be poured in at higher levels - big events, big airports, big missiles, big football stadiums - business often seems to be going on as usual.

Thomas Homer-Dixon devoted a fascinating chapter of The Upside of Down to what archaeologists discovered about Roman aqueducts in Provence. A little more lime gathers year after year, because there is a little less cleaning. Then a farmer somewhere takes advantage of the fact that there are a little less controls, and drills a small hole into the aqueduct. And finally, decades later, the whole systems collapses.

Probably most people who deal with these issues come from fields like biology or meteorology. So perhaps they don't think so much about the impact of institutions and rules on these matters.

Rules were designed for times of increasing resources. And now they clash with new problems arising from diminishing resources. And turn what could have been an elegant glide downward into a painful bum crash.

I claim a limited but very intense expertise.

I live in the Oltrarno district of Florence, where the last living human community of the old city has to deal every day with gentrification, pollution, traffic, high prices and invasion by millions of tourists.

Bringing together traditional residents and craftsmen and new immigrants from countries as different as Senegal and the UK, we have turned the last garden area still available to children and families into a community managed Commons.

Commons are one possible solution to diminishing resources – another is when institutions sell off their assets to private investors. A third solution, of course, is always to sit and complain about selloffs without attempting self-management.

A local community managing its own resources for free of course means that things work better and also cost less for the institutions. We recently saved the Municipality many thousands of euros, by tracking down and closing off a leak in the water system they would never have discovered without us.

However, as public recognition of commoning is something quite new in Italy, we find ourselves having to negotiate our place.

Every day, we have to do with administration, rules and regulations, on the lowest level. Which is exactly where the first and most significant changes take place, when we start down the wrong side of the Seneca cliff.

The countless small issues we come across are like a drop of water in which one can see the whole world, which is why our story may be of some interest to you.

Italians love to blame everything on bureaucrats and politicians, and they often wallow in self-denigration about Italian incompetence and corruption.

Of course, every place is unique, but the same laws hold in all of Italy; and I suspect they are not so different from those in most of Europe, or even in most of the world.

Lobbying, vested interests, corruption flourish in Florence as everywhere, but I do not have the feeling that they are decisive, at least on the low level we know.

I consider many Florentine officials to be personal friends, and in their way courageous, intelligent people, with the best intentions. Some are state employees, some elected politicians, some with the majority and some with the opposition (here this has little do with a left-right divide).

A few days ago, I read that a court investigation has been opened against seven employees of various levels of the Environmental Office of the Municipality of Florence. This very local story has a lot to tell us about our times.

There are 74.000 trees in Florence, planted in days when the Municipality could spend much more liberally.

In those days of plenty, rules were laid down demanding strict care for each tree, to prevent the trees from becoming sick and falling on the heads of passers-by.

Then the purse strings got tighter. What money there was had to go to matters considered to be more important than trees.

The Environmental Office received less funds.

Their vehicles and tools began to break down and were not replaced. Some people retired, new employees were not hired. The last expert gardeners retired, and their places were taken by cheap and untrained labour contracted to private companies exclusively on a price basis, in a kind of reverse auction: in 2014, one company won by cutting the starting price by 75%, another by 83%.

The inevitable result was less and less control on the condition of the trees.

One day in 2014, one branch of one of the thousands of trees in Florence's largest park fell, killing two people.

The Environmental Office employees risked criminal charges.

Rules designed to be smoothly applied in times of plenty, forced them to act under emergency conditions.

So they decided to check and fix every tree in Florence. No longer having the means to do so, they employed contracted labour without any experience to do the only thing possible: chop off branches more at less at random, topping countless trees into something resembling used toothpicks.

The officials were able to write on paper that they had followed the rules, so nobody landed in prison.

However, topping, especially if not performed by experts, can seriously damage trees. Instead of one branch, the whole tree can now fall.

Every piece hacked off was thrown into chipping machines which chop everything up and then spit the residue out.

The chipped wood included that from Florence's many plane trees (Platanus orientalis). Now, Florence is considered a hotbed of the so-called “coloured cancer of plane trees”, a deadly fungus invasion (Ceratocystis fimbriata) which is also highly contagious through contact. An early gift of globalization, by the way, since it came to Europe in infected wooden crates after the last war.

This is why there are very strict laws in Italy on how to dispose of plane cuttings, especially in hotbed areas. Chipping machines are certainly beyond the pale.

Three years went by, and last August, a large horse chestnut fell down, luckily without hurting anybody. So the rules forced the mayor to act again.

Something like 300 trees were immediately cut down.

This led to loud complaints by many citizens, and finally a magistrate opened an investigation, since the officials of the Environment Office were basically accused of:

1) not having undertaken all the checks and maintenance demanded by the rules

2) not having applied the rule that sets out that in the historic centre of Florence, under UNESCO protection, the Monuments and Fine Arts Department must approve the cutting of each individual tree

3) having also cut down trees which could have been saved with a much less radical treatment.

What is interesting is that nobody doubts the good intentions of the officials.

They are paid to save both the goats (the citizens) and the cabbages (the trees).

In the past, they had the resources to do so.

Now they don't.

So they end up on trial whatever, because they cannot save both. And they will end up on trial both for what they do and for what they fail to do.

So, when resources diminish and rules stay unchanged, an official can avoid prosecution in one way only.

He must write a text demanding compliance with a very strict list of rules, and then oblige somebody else to apply them.

He passes on the lit match, and if anything happens, the list of strict rules with his signature under them will save him.

What happens when the lit match ends up in the hands of the very last in line?

There are only two solutions in such case.

The first is to do one's activity illegally.

The second is to close down the activity itself.

In Florence, a great many things are done illegally all the time. This does not mean they are also immoral. For example, cutting down a tree which looks wobbly, without waiting for permission which would come too late if ever, may (or may not) be morally justified, but it is just as illegal as cutting down a healthy tree for one's private fireplace.

In our garden, there is a building with a large amount of broken chairs and tables, lamps that don't work and a few twenty-year old computers. In the old “public” days they just piled up, but now the community wants to keep things tidy.

So we asked how we could throw away the stuff.

In Florence, private citizens can ask for the waste disposal company to come by and take bulky waste away for free. However, businesses and institutions have to pay, and the Municipality has no money for that: office after office is overflowing with useless things they don't have the funds to dispose of. Indeed, we were told that one office of the Municipality pays rent on warehouses to store the waste other offices don't have the money to pay for.

Maybe we could just call the waste disposal company and say it is the personal property of one of us? Not exactly. Walking off with a computer belonging to the state is theft, and rightly so.

So? So, I won't tell you how we solved the problem.

Mostly, one can get away with what I might call legitimate illegality. But of course when something goes wrong, the last person in the line will be stuck with a lit match in his hand. And everybody upstream will have a paper in their hands where they say that they passed the match on in the most proper manner.

Which is why the easiest answer in the end to most problems is to simply close whatever one is responsible for down.

One of the most widely used products in Florence is a flimsy white and red plastic tape, which anybody can break through, but which officials use to prove that they sealed the forbidden area off, and whatever happens, it is not their fault.

The Decline of the West: Left or Right, It Doesn't Matter

The auditorium of Fiesole, near Florence, Italy. A monster of glass and concrete, it was announced almost 15 years ago but it was never completed and probably never will be. It can be seen as a metaphor of the decline of the West: if there are no more resources to produce or to distribute goods, the whole economy grinds to a halt. 

In a previous post, Miguel Martinez examined the retreat from Moscow of Napoleon's army as a metaphor for the decline of the Left in the West. Martinez notes how the Left has normally emphasized the redistribution of the goods produced by the economy but that, nowadays, the resource crisis makes it impossible to produce enough goods to distribute. It is just like when the soldiers of Napoleon's army found little or nothing to plunder after that they had conquered Moscow.

In practice, the plight of the Right is not different from that of the Left. Traditionally, the Right emphasized production rather than redistribution. But these are two sides of the same coin: the gradual depletion of resources and the increasing ecosystem disruption make it impossible to produce goods at the same low costs as it was easy to do decades ago. The attempt of Donald Trump to restart coal production in the US is similar to the plight of Napoleon's soldiers marching in the snow during their retreat from Moscow. The only choices available to them were either to plunder cities that they had no capability to conquer or to redistribute spoils that they had not been able to plunder. Right or Left, they were are going nowhere. It is the same for us.

I think these concepts can be illustrated by the story of a building in the city where I live, Fiesole, on a hill near Florence, in Italy. In 2003, the mayor  announced the plan of building a large auditorium which he described as an "absolute necessity for the town." There followed a debate where many local residents (including myself) noted that the city may have needed an auditorium but that the proposed one was way too large. 

As you may imagine, our protests were swamped in howls of disdain. We were accused of a "nimby" attitude and told that the new auditorium would bring jobs for the inhabitants of Fiesole, money for shop owners, and turn Fiesole into an internationally known cultural center. In any case, it would mean economic growth and how could anyone be against that? 

So, the auditorium was built. It was even enlarged with the progress of the construction until it was supposed to be able to seat 312 people.  The only problem: it was never completed. Today, only the outer walls and the roof stand (and they say that the roof leaks). The reason is said to be that the city ran out of money, which is probably true, but I also think that the builders themselves, at some point, looked at what they were doing and they gasped in awe. I can imagine them asking each other something like. "'what the hell are we doing here? This thing is too damn big." I can imagine the same moment of awe for the soldiers and the commanders of Napoleon's army in Moscow, "What the hell are we doing here? It is getting damn cold."

Just as Russia was too big for Napoleon to conquer, the auditorium of Fiesole is too big for the size of the city. Imagine building New York's Metropolitan Opera House in Mount Carroll, Illinois, and you get the right feeling. Fiesole is a small town on top of a hill and it doesn't have enough hotel rooms to host the kind of events that would need a hall with 300+ seats. Bringing people there from other locations is not a solution, either. There are wholly insufficient parking facilities nearby; using buses would be slow and expensive and, anyway, full size buses couldn't negotiate the sharp turns in the roads around the Auditorium. Given these conditions, who would ever need this auditorium when there are literally dozens more convenient ones in nearby Florence? If the auditorium of Fiesole were ever to be completed, what could be done with it? Maybe we could paint it in white and have people come to look at the elephant of the city zoo. 

Doesn't this story really feel like Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Yes, Napoleon was caught in a bubble scheme of his own making where he had to keep fighting and winning bigger and bigger battles in order to have more spoils to redistribute. Eventually, the bubble had to burst. The Western economic system has been caught in the same kind of bubble, although not based on military actions (not completely, at least). Rather, it is a bubble of construction and redistribution that's bursting right now. 

So, today, walking in front of the concrete and glass giant in a square of the small town of Fiesole, one is nearly overwhelmed by a thought: how could people make such an absurd error? Surely there was money involved but, for what I can say, it was mostly done in good faith by people who really believed that the city needed such a thing  (1) (and, if you care to know, the mayor who started the whole thing was a former member of the Communist party). But it didn't matter: the Right would have done exactly the same. It was just like for Napoleon's soldiers who took the road to Moscow, convinced that they were going toward glory and riches. Looking at the errors of the past we can always learn one thing: that we never learn from the errors of the past (2). 

1. There was a certain method in this madness. A parking lot was built downhill and it might have provided a sufficient number of parking spaces for the auditorium, even though it still remained off-limits to full size buses. But to get to the auditorium from that parking lot one needs to walk up a long flight of steep stairs. So, the idea was to build an escalator to take people uphill but, as you may imagine, it was a grand plan that turned out to be too expensive. Even grander and more expensive was the idea to build a cableway that would have taken people to Fiesole from the valley below, where new hotels would be built. That would have been coupled with a special train service from Florence's central train station. These ideas were more or less equivalent to think that Napoleon's armies could advance into Siberia after having taken Moscow, until they would conquer Vladivostok, on the other side of Eurasia.

2. Evidence that people haven't learned anything from past mistakes comes from the plans for a new airport in Florence. A new oversized project that aims at increasing the number of tourists coming to Florence, all in the name of Growth. Apparently, nine million tourists per year are not enough for Florence. Do we think this number will keep growing forever? 

Lost Dreams

Marcus Kracht alerted me of this recent post of his after he had read my post with a similar title, "Where have our dreams gone?". So, I am publishing it here with his kind permission

The bear went over the mountain,

The bear went over the mountain,

The bear went over the mountain,

To see what he could see.

And all that he could see,

And all that he could see,

Was the other side of the mountain,

The other side of the mountain,

The other side of the mountain,

Was all that he could see.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain (Children's song)

By Marcus Kracht

This post was originally published on "Dictionary of Decline" on July 21, 2014

 

The Other Side of The Mountain

In the song "Susann" by Toni Vescoli (people in Germany might recall the cover version by Reinhard Mey), a young woman, fed up with her boring life in the countryside, decides to move to the city. She gets herself a job and becomes a true and content city dweller. Until, one day, her boyfriend comes home with a triumphant smile and declares that his lifetime dream has finally come true: he has bought a farmhouse and they will move there to escape this dull city life! This sums up nicely the universal pattern of modern life: we want change. It is not so much a question of where we are or whether life is good. After a while, we get bored and want to move on.

Our dissatisfaction is growing and we start to dream of a different and of course better world, where all our problems simply do not exist.Every dream that we have can turn into an obsession — which lasts until the dream comes true. Reinhold Messner in one of his darker moments said that every mountain conquered is a dream gone forever.

The same holds true of societies as a whole. They dream about the future and what it will bring them. A hundred years ago, for example, future was hoped to end diseases, hard labour, poverty, and hunger. Mankind would excel not only in arts, but also in science. And we would travel not only anywhere on earth but eventually also go into space.

And we did.

Only that once these dreams came true, we got to see the other side of them, too. Some hundred years ago, longevity had been a dream. Today we hear about a growing problem of Alzheimer or similar diseases of the ageing body. Or we see people lying in hospital connected to ever more machines. To live on is not always a dream come true. It may for some also be a nightmare.

Or think about the space that we have given to cars so that they can move us where we want to go. When I was a child, there was hardly a car around in our little street, and we roamed the street on roller skates. Today, this same street is filled with cars. So many, that they can't even get past each other on encounter. And there are no children.

The Desire to Learn

When the dreams are no longer there or have turned into nightmares, when the people do not know what to really aspire for the first that happens is that there no longer is a desire by the next generation to learn anything. Because what would be the result of learning? What is the direction they should take if we don't know it ourselves?

Indeed, this is our great dilemma. While we have lost direction ourselves, we wish for the next generation to find out where to go. We see what we have done, and we ask ourselves: was it worth the effort? We see what the world has become and we ask: where is the future? But the next generation cannot be the future if we do not do out part.

I have long thought that today's children have stopped learning because of the affluence. Or because of the long term effects of a libertarian society (as Plato proposed). But now I think that affluence isn't what has stopped them. Young children are still eager to learn. It is not until they reach a certain age when they change their mind about their goals.

One may think: maybe it is just an effect of adolescence. But remember the desire for learning used to return once the problems in our heads got sorted out. Because when we understood our place in society there were signs and directions all around us. They said: study hard, become a scientist, a programmer, a doctor, and life will be very interesting. Not only will you get a job, it will also be interesting, useful, and rewarding. They said: practice an instrument and you can perform music. You can become popular, even famous. They said: if you want and work for it, there will be a place for you.

That is no longer true. Not only are the dreams failing us. There are no true dreams left. We are dropping them one by one.

It happens to all of us. But we don't like to talk about it.

Why become a scientist if all science does is prepare the ground for the destruction of the planet? Name one invention that has not been perverted to make money rather than being used for the benefit of mankind.

It doesn't have to be genetics or nuclear physics. Anything, I repeat: anything, is being turned into money. And nothing besides that is left to dream of.

Who is dreaming of playing music? Who is dreaming of becoming a singer (as opposed to becoming rich and famous)? Who is in it for the beauty?

Or take foreign languages. What is the point of learning any language other than English? When people talk about internationalisation what they really mean is: Anglicization. Because that is what you need to make a living. Give English names to things and you are there. You are international. Foreign languages are no longer important in themselves or as a means to understand other cultures, but as a means of being economically successful. Which leaves more or less one language worth the effort of learning it.

Or take machines. Of course, we need engineers to make them. But where is the attitude that engineering is actually fun? It is gone. And, really, most factories are dead places. Full of robots. Sure, they need designing, but that too is increasingly a sterile job. The engineer hardly gets to touch the thing he is making. Instead, he is assembling them behind a screen, like a programmer.
Not to speak of programming itself. That too has become more of an assembly-line job. The spirit's gone.

Education

And so the students arrive at university without dreams except for a single one: to get a diploma so that they can get a job — and make money. And why shouldn't they want that if this is what society tells them to do?

The belief that society values science is pure hallucination. It values only the money that the science is asked to deliver. Why else are universities under constant threat to get in money regardless of the content of the research? Why do the criteria of success for German universities talk about anything but content?

Think this: the majority of people in Europe (and, as I read somewhere, also in the US) do not want genetically modified food. And yet they are being told that they have to accept it. And they are told that they have to accept it because there is no scientific proof of its adverse effects. As if it were a simple matter to stop this food once we know what these effects are. This is not only hard to accept in a democratic society. My question is: why do all this science, then? Apparently it is not being done so that in the end society gets to choose and say what it really wants to have. It is there for certain institutions to make money from it. Pure and simple.

It means that if you are against the abuse of science your only safe bet is not to become a scientist.
The logic of money is everwhere. Is it not natural that students say: I am doing all this to make money, all I want from my degree is a job? If we want them to change their minds, we should change ours first. But we are not. Instead we are dabbling on about changing the learning habits.

Different recipes have been tried to stem the tide. In the US, rising costs have led to fee hikes, and students are more and more in debt. Which will focus their attention even more on the question of where the money is in their education.

In Europe, one has tried to standardise education. Students get credit points, which supposedly are uniform in value. Universities however are subjected to a quasi-market oriented regime where they get part of their funding according to performance. Performance in turn is measured by some bureaucratic numbers. In Germany they are: number of first degrees, amount of extra mural funding, and progress in equal oportunity hiring. None are about content or quality of teaching.

None of these approaches have worked. It is not because the students are protesting. They in fact are very polite. But typically they are absent minded. The content is not what they are in for. They are asking: what do I have to know to pass the exam?

The politicians and presidents of the universities alike talk about performance but they hardly mean content. They mean money. In other areas of life you call that prostitution. It results in getting a mere substitute for what you really want. Because what you really want you cannot get by paying money.

Motivation is a primadonna. It is not singing when you want it to. It disappears once you start asking too loudly for it.

If I want my students to listen, I need to give them a story of why it makes sense to do what I am doing. Why I am doing it despite everything.

The Road Ahead

But not only the students need dreams to carry on. All of us need them. I need to have a dream as well. I need to know why I am doing what I am doing.

Increasingly however I am getting tired. The administration is turning academic life into a madhouse. We get no time to think, because that is something that can't be measured. No credit points for thinking. And we are losing hope that the next generation will have any chances to get a meaningful job in society let alone at a university. Higher education is at a crossroads, really. It needs money, and the money isn't there. To cover that up, they are making up excuses. That's it.

Increasingly, I see myself doing research not for a future generation (who would that be?) but for the people with whom I went to university. Because there hardly is a next generation. Jobs are being cut, university life is being stripped down to the barest necessities. The propaganda has it that there is less money because people aren't working hard enough, but that's not how the bureaucratic machine functions. Remember that awards are relative: you get more if you are better than the rest. If everyone works more, you have to work more just to stay even with them. And if they start working less, then less work on your part will also do.

Universities will become marginalised. Already the discussion of what its role in society is or should be is nonexistent. Because interference with politics is not desired. Intellectuals do not appear in television for fear that what they will be saying is too difficult. Their role is not any more to come up with a beautiful story but to get money in. So universities turn into private companies for funding.

And the state nods in agreement.

The dream of learning has disappeared from higher education. Yes, more and more students enroll in first tier institutions (high schools, universities), but less and less of them do it because they want to learn. Call that realism. I call it a wasted chance.

At one point the money will be so scarce that they start closing down universities. And we get to see the other side of Big Education.

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Marcus Kracht 2014-07-12