The Future’s Been Decided For Us

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I’ve been reflecting on a certain thought lately. It’s a little hard to express well. Let me put it bluntly.

The future’s been decided for us, and it’s not pretty.

I called what we’re living in the Minimum Viable Future in a recent essay. Here, I want to shade in that picture a little bit.

What’s striking about right now that we now stand at the point of no return. In nearly every regard.

And that point of no return is made of inaction.

Sorry, I didn’t put that well. Let me try again.

Tipping Points and Windows of Possibility

We’re now entering an age of tipping points.

You can see them unfolding around us, in more and more catastrophic ways. Hurricanes that level cities once thought of as safe. Economies with no sources of growth into forever. Generations in free-fall. A world that failed to develop middle classes, from the rich West to China.

All of these, make no mistake, are inflection points. Some have to do with climate, some with the economy, some society, and some just everyday human life.

Now. There was a time that we could have done something about hitting al these tipping points.

That time is now drawing to a close.

History will say that we had until about 2025 to do something, anything, about the multiple crises engulfing us.

But we didn’t do much. Certainly not enough. The window of possibility is now closing.

In that sense, the future’s been decided for us, and it’s not pretty.

A Stagnating World is Going to be Divided into Winners and Losers

Let me try to expand on that dark picture I’ve painted a little bit.

I think that we are now about to enter a very, very ugly time.

The world will now be divided into winners and losers. In extreme sorts of ways.

I understand that college leftists will cry “that’s always been true,” but pause to think about it with me.

What does a lack of growth do? It makes us all fight each other for a share of the pie. What does negative growth—which is what most people are experiencing now—do? It makes us all fight one another, harder and harder, more and more bitterly, just to keep our share of the pie from shrinking.

The world will now be divided into winners and losers—do you see what I mean a little bit now?

Amplifying this is the failure of our institutions.

Let’s take an example that’s vivid before all of us to see. The insurance market. It’s seizing up now, thanks to climate change. You can hardly blame it. It barely has pockets deep enough to pay for a handful of cities levellled—and it’s the wealthiest industry on the planet.

Even it can’t afford the mega-scale impacts of climate change, and yet they’ve barely even arrived. So now everyday people struggle to get insurance for their homes, even in places once thought of as safe, in social classes that are bewildered that they face this problem.

This problem is an institutional failure. Of a dramatic kind. We mention it, but we don’t really see it. Our insurance infrastructure is failing right before our eyes.

Take a second to think of history. Have you heard of Petra? The city carved into the sands and the rock? How did it fall? It grew to wealth by controlling a key trade route. And it fell because it had no insurance against losing it. When insurance infrastructures fail, they tend to have dramatic, implosive effects.

This is happening, again, before our eyes.

But we’re sort of bewildered, stunned, not really taking in the full importance of it. If we can’t insure against these levels of climate impacts—which are minor, compared to what’s arriving next—then what happens?

What happens is that our financial systems go down. Our economies stagger, and shrink faster and further. Jobs go with them. Incomes go with them. And societies go with…

You see my point, perhaps.

Failure Cascades and Civilizational Tipping Points

Let me now make it clearer.

Failures are beginning to cascade through our world.

Failure cascades are incredibly lethal and wicked things. They can level the most powerful systems human beings have built—snap—just like that.

Climate. We failed to do enough about it. Failure one. Now insurance infrastructures are failing. Failure two. They’ll take critical infrastructures with them—housing, water, energy. Failure three. That’ll cause financial chaos, and economic ruin (and if you think I’m exaggerating, take a second to think about those places leveled by recent hurricanes.) Failure four. And where will all that lead?

So.

Inaction.

In an age of tipping points.

It’s created a world of failed institutions.

And what that means is that failure is cascading now through our civilization, and at each step, it snarls, accelerates, amplifies, like lightning hit by lightning hit by lightning.

Let’s take another example, which is jobs.

The way things were supposed to work was pretty simple. Get an education, or training, work hard, and hey presto, you’ll have a comfortable enough life. Because that will lead you to a thing called a career, whether a blue or white collar one.

But today, the job market is utterly broken.

For many years now, it’s been creating low-wage service work, which leads nowhere. It barely even pays the bills anymore, after a wave of ruinous inflation.

So here we are, in a global cost of living crisis, and people can’t get jobs.

But neither side cares, politically, very much. It isn’t an issue to them. But maybe, hey, it’s not worth ripping apart a democracy so that people can have jobs. Or is it? What good is a democracy if it’s just…feudalism…anyways?

You see the catch-22 here.

This, too, is a tipping point. AI. Offshoring. Etc. A number of factors have converged to cause structural changes in the labor market. In other words, the old world isn’t coming back.

So what exactly are people going to…do? To earn a living? Are young people supposed to cobble together some kind of life with piecemeal gig work? If that’s the case, are we heading straight back to Les Miserables? And what does that mean, again, for democracy? What’s the of “voting” if the choice is between misery and fascism, or, more to the point, an endless oscillation between the two?

You can hardly blame young people for being disgusted with politics.

If Nobody Wanted This Future, How Did We End Up Here?

All of this is where we are.

And in this sense, which is a grave one, the future’s been decided for us.

Not by us.

But for us.

I had an argument with a friend the other day. He’s sort of annoying guy. He was trying to debate with me about why Britain was Going to Be Totally OK. I tried patiently explaining to him that the game is already over, and worse, it’s run by ham-fisted amateurs, not professionals, serious thinkers, heavy hitters who understand the levers of global power, finance, how to restore a society to prosperity, but jokers, more or less.

But what if it was all a game, he asked me, trying to be clever. What if they were doing it on purpose, just to win votes. What, destroy their own society, I asked. He looked at me, grinning. I was dumbfounded.

But this is how people think these days. They can’t understand anymore what happened to the future, so let me put it in plain English. The future’s been decided for us, not by us, and it’s going to be uglier and uglier by the year.

He asked me, angrily: well, how would you fix the financial system?

I explained, patiently. We should all have an account at the central bank. All of us. And when the economy sours, we should automatically get a deposit, because of course, that’s what we know works, and that way, we build a kind of self-correcting system. See how simple that is?

But, I said, that’s not the world. I can tell you how to design a financial system that works. But nobody’s interested in building that one. Not Kamala, not Coach Tim, not their advisors, not their pundits, and I don’t mean to sound petulant, I’m just pointing out how the world actually works. And that is in the way of power being profoundly ignorant, except in the name of protecting its own interests, which is power, at the expense of everything else.

So nobody’s interested in building that system, I said. He fell silent, because he understood that what I was saying not only made perfect sense, it would also fix things. But he also grasped that it was totally outside the realm of the possible. But he also understood, at last, what I wanted him to:

For no good reason.

Why is it that that designing such a simple, better financial system is outside the realm of the possible? Or doing much of anything about climate? Or people having decent jobs again? Or everything not sucking and melting down?

Why is that? None of this is rocket science. There are plenty of people who’ve dedicated their lives to solving these problems. And they have plenty of answers. They might not all be right, but hell, don’t you think we should at least be trying them?

We’re not.

Our leaders are risk-averse. Maybe, in plainer English, they’re wimps, idiots, losers, cowards, chumps, go ahead, insert your adjective of choice—and again, I know that might sound petulant, until you think about the fact that here we are, hitting all the tipping points, precisely because we’ve done nothing not to.

And in that sense, the future is now baked in. We’re hitting the tipping points—climate, economy, society, culture. Hitting. Not going to. And as we do, of course, our trajectory changes.

We can’t undo the hurricanes on the way anymore. Makes sense, right? But we also now can’t undo a decade of global economic stagnation. We can’t undo the shocks rippling through the job market. We can’t undo the downward trajectory of our civilization economically, our shared failure to develop middle classes from America to China.

All of this is now set in stone.

We might have another chance, in a decade or three—that’s almost besides the point. The point, again, is that the future’s been decided for us, and it’s not pretty. Not by us, but for us. Through inaction, sheer cowardice, ham-fisted amateurism, shattering ignorance, willful idiocy.

Civilizational Responsibility and Negligence

History will call those who decided this future for us negligent, at best, irresponsible, if it’s kind, and sheer fools, if it wants to be more accurate. And in that verdict, it’s going to include Kamala and Tim, sorry to disappoint you, but their plans are about as adequate to our plight as a band-aid is on a gaping wound, of course it’ll include Trump, all vanity and no wisdom, and a long, long list of others.

I don’t mean to indict anyone. I’m just observing.

None of us wanted this future. None of us.

Not even the hardcore Trumpists, I’ll observe—they wanted decent, stable, middle class lives. And of course liberals wanted everyone to be “free,” by which they meant kind of the same thing.

The place we’ve arrived is a shudder-inducing one for a very simple reason.

Nobody wanted this future.

So how did we arrive here? This is what happens when we don’t make tough choices together, act wisely, and instead, assign the levers of power to those who prefer paralysis and inaction and the lowest-common-denominator over shared ownership of a better tomorrow. This future was made for us, not by us, even if we didn’t choose the right leaders. Because the ones we did choose, or were limited to choosing between, still should have done a better job than this.

So here we are, in the place nobody wanted to be. Watching this dismal shit unfold. Kamala vs Trump! Nation versus nation. Clan versus clan. Watching it all stagnate, fall apart, come undone. Soul against soul, life against life.

Our challenge has always been a shared one. Life against death. When we are reduced to fighting each other, when it’s life against life—my friends, then is when we are truly in the valley in the shadow of death.

This place we’re in, this future, feels this way, all these things, bad, creepy, weird, unsettling, disturbing, disappointing, grief-inducing, laughable, pathetic, for a reason.

It’s the one nobody wanted, except of course, the very worst among us, and they made it for the rest of us, through inaction on anything that matters, and a kind of insane obsession with everything that doesn’t, like lining their own pockets. Until that changes, my friends, prepare yourselves, because this is the part where…

Things go from bad, to much, much worse.

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