Aurelien

Some of the most thoughtful articles that I have read in rececent times are published by a person writing under the name Aurelien on Substack (Aurelien was emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was disintegrating). He writes that he has had a long professional career in government, before and after the Cold War, and in many parts of the world. He claims to have been to enough places, met enough people and done enough things, to have some idea about how stuff works in real life (Given his age, I am presuming he is “he”). I agree with his basic premise that we are at a turning point in world history, and I believe that he has something useful to say about it.

The following quote describes the changes he is concerned about.

As you get older, you become more and more distrustful of people who tell you that, “we are living today in a tme of unprecedented change.” Normally, that’s just an excuse to make life worse for you, get money from you, or force you to do things you don’t want to do. Ironically, though, we are now at a point of major change that hardly any of the usual suspects are prepared to recognise, because, for once, it’s their version of the world which is being upended.

Put simply, we are one of those periods in history where things move extremely rapidly, and after which nothing is ever really the same again. It’s accepted that 1914, 1945 and 1989 were like that. It is pretty clear that we are now living in such a period, for all that the political classes of the West are desperately trying to avoid seeing it, and to discourage the rest of us from doing so.

Like most seemingly violent changes, this one has been building up for some time. The roots of it lie in a whole series of progressive, unconnected, but cumulatively catastrophic errors made at the end of the Cold War, essentially by people who wanted the illusion of change without the hard work of actually deciding and implementing it. True to the short-term benefit-maximising culture that has dominated the last thirty years, the future was expected to be much like the present only more so, and anyway capable of looking after itself, so we only needed to think about the next few years at any one time. Liberal political and economic ideas would spread without limit or resistance, it was thought. NATO and the EU would expand forever, without resistance or consequences. Western domination of the world economy, of international trade and international institutions, would continue forever, without resistance and ever more intensively. At some vague, indeterminate, point in the future, it was thought, the whole world would come to resemble a brown-bag lunch at a progressive American think-tank. The fact that if something can’t go on literally forever there must be a point at which it stops, was somehow overlooked. Indeed, if there is a single phrase that encapsulates the intellectual lethargy of the last thirty years, it’s “we’ll worry about that when it happens.“ Well, it’s happening now, and western elites have absolutely no idea how to deal with it (Politics is like Engineering).