The Zero State And What Comes After

Photo by Scott Rodgerson

It’s fashionable to call what we live through in the West “late stage capitalism”, but there is much more to the subject than the decline of an economic system well past its sell-by date. I don’t know about you, but personally I increasingly have an unshakeable, nagging feeling that we are indeed living through the end of times. Not in a literal sense, of course, the sky won’t fall or the Earth won’t stop rotating anytime soon… Rather, it’s like watching a zombie movie, where the peeling flesh of the walking dead began to reveal their gnarling teeth, as they mindlessly approach their pray to have a feast. Turning Garamsci on its head:

The old world is dead, and now it’s coming after you. 

Whether the new world was ready to be born, or not, doesn’t matter.

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The western financial-political-economic system has become that zombie by the mid 2010’s already. Unable to create meaningful economic growth, it has turned into a walking corpse. Real economic output and wages stagnated, and entire regions became deindustrialized. First slowly, then ever faster. In the meantime prices kept rising, eroding what little has left at the end of the month. More than two-thirds of Western citizens now live paycheck-to-paycheck, even as more people have jobs than ever. (Or at least up until recently.) “Today, 93 per cent of Europeans say they are seriously worried about making ends meet while 40 per cent of young people rank rising prices and living costs among their top concerns.” — one recent study found. Being employed in an increasingly over-financialized gig-economy with no benefits or real prospects of getting ahead is no ticket to prosperity. It has only resulted in growing inequality, wrapped in a cost of living crisis inside an outright economic recession — denied by the officialdom to this very day.

We have been discussing the material, energy and ecological root causes of this process extensively for quite some time now. Without ample access to cheap, easy-to-get energy and minerals no economy could perform well — if at all. And the price of energy — not just electricity, but all others from natural gas to gasoline and distillate fuels — is on the rise for a while now. A great deal of it comes from insane, self-harming policy decisions (1), but the underlying trend of physical resource depletion combined with the rising energy cost of getting the next barrel of oil, or cubic feet of gas, cannot be underestimated either. As a result, we, as a global civilization have silently passed peak net energy. Adding more costlier-than-ever to get fossil fuels to the mix or converting them into solar panels won’t help. What remains will become increasingly scarce and hard to get. The game of musical chairs has begun.

And still, even though our resource depletion predicament will be bad enough in and of itself, it will still take decades to a century to fully unfold. Combined with global heating, the burning of all those cheap resources caused, peak net energy puts our precious little techno-industrial civilization on track to become a low-tech, forcibly localized, scavenger economy. Yet, the political, economic — let alone financial — collapse of our world will not take nearly as long. Instead of opting for a quiet, decades long retirement plan, our elites chose to have one last, mighty big sniff from their favorite substance: war. Not sure that this was what you voted for? You’ll get it anyway.

Knowing that no one is really holding the steering wheel only makes the party even more wild. Sure, it would be much easier to blame the Freemasons (or any other secret society) for all the evil and bad things happening around the world. A closer scrutiny of details, as observed by those who actually saw how sausage is made, paints a different picture, though. The process by which governments decide to do things, it seems, is a lot more complex, a lot more complicated and a lot less rational than you might think.

After having spent two decades with large multinational companies, I can attest that things are absolutely no different there, either. In fact, its often the same people rotating in and out of politics who end up leading large conglomerates, or more commonly find themselves at their board meetings. Corporations are nothing but small versions of the society they were modeled after. (Or was it the other way around?) They, too, have their own working class, administrators, overseers, bureaucrats, and ruling elite. Political factions form around strategic directions the company should (or should not) take. Decisions, just like in any government, takes an awful long time to take, and often result in what we could sum up as ‘too little, too late’.

Top leaders in business and politics alike often emerge through repeated demonstrations of ideological loyalty, a lack of empathy or remorse, superficial charm, and a grandiose sense of self-worth. “Meritocracy” in its true sense, it seems, is reserved for the lower rungs of the carrier ladder to decide who gets the actual job done. This process has resulted in an increasingly uniform, tightly knit circle of elites rotating in and out of top government and business positions. During the past two decades this only got worse. As Aurelien, after having spent a long professional career in government, astutely observed:

“The last generation has seen a general homogenisation of the ruling class and its parasites which have only reinforced all these tendencies. This is most noticeable in Europe, where initiatives like the ERASMUS scheme have brought future elites to study together at an impressionable age. Twenty years later, after a passage through European institutions, after a thorough immersion in neoliberal certainties, often marrying each other, often with social circles consisting exclusively of like-minded people, reading and watching the same media in several languages, such people begin to accede to positions of power. Whilst it would be unfair to call them clones, the fact is they share a body of assumptions about the world, and a series of unquestioned norms, which not only make them internally very homogeneous, but also separate them from the wider assumptions and norms of the societies they govern.”

Ever wondered why reality is unable to penetrate these circles? Look no further for an answer. Mass higher education has created stratified societies in which the highly educated 30% of the population began to think of themselves as superior, despising the working class and industry altogether. Consequently our elites increasingly look down on the public with contempt; doing what they agree upon among themselves, regardless what their voters think or want. Any contrarian view or ideology quickly gets labeled as ‘populist’ and ‘far right.’ Facts on the ground and backed by evidence — being hard to refute — get dismissed as ‘propaganda’ or called ‘conspiracy theories’. Voila, an alternative reality.

In such a system bureaucracy thrives. The act of creating new organizational units, roles, and processes has become an end in and of itself. This leads to more rules, reports to be filed, dashboards and metrics to follow, and naturally an increase in the number of administrators. The increase in overhead costs and the overall decrease in labor productivity kills profitability and leads to cost inflation — presenting heads of states and businesses with the same dilemma. ‘Should I fire people from management / administration or the laborers doing the actual job?’ Well, ten out of ten opts for the latter, while keep spending on the former — thereby ensuring the bankruptcy of the organization. And there you have it: death by bureaucracy.

Failure, however, is not recognized as such: failing to do what’s best for the electorate, a country or business, is not what really matters here. Success for our elites is measured in status, achieved by jumping from position to position at the right time and by scoring points against each other in an internal competition. Policies, ideas and decisions thus don’t have to make sense — as long as they help to move forward the carrier of the individual who made them. Corruption and sexual scandals are not bugs in this system, either. They are a feature, holding together the corpse of liberal democracies through bribery, kickbacks, and if needed, blackmail. You see, violating rules together (and getting away with it) is not only terribly empowering for the participants, but also acts as a social glue, preventing defection and ensuring life-long loyalty to the noble cause of liberal world domination.

The image speaks for itself. Maintaining this status quo (in one form or another) was essential for Western “democracies” to thrive. Source

This zombified state, however, was only a step in the long descent to a complete moral bankruptcy. According to French historian Emanuel Todd, the EU has already reached a ‘zero state’, moving beyond being a mere zombie limping along. As he explained in his book, The Defeat of the West, the ‘zero state’ is the final stage of secularization, where the (Protestant) religious belief loses all influence, and where the moral and social values derived from faith have also disappeared. (This contrasts with the ‘zombie state,’ where religious belief has faded, but its cultural and social structures — such as its values and capacity for collective action — still persist and are reinterpreted ideologically.) He goes on to elaborate in the preface written to the Slovenian edition of his book:

“The zero state also opens up a metaphysical void. I am not personally a believer and I do not advocate a return to religion (I do not believe it is possible), but as a historian I must note that the disappearance of social values of religious origin leads to a moral crisis, to a drive to destroy things and people (war) and ultimately to an attempt to abolish reality. This defeat is therefore not only a ‘technical’ loss of power but also a moral exhaustion, an absence of positive existential purpose that leads to nihilism. The problem with the West is indeed the programmed death of the nation state.”

It’s important to see what’s happening in the West from a historical perspective. History did not end in 1989 with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama so proudly proclaimed. In fact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has only led to hubris, accelerating the decline of the West, foresaw by Oswald Spengler in 1918 already. The collapse of Western liberal ideology, morals and beliefs was preceded by a century-long process of slow decline. What we see today is thus the logical endpoint of this process, when “gradually” shifts to “suddenly”.

And what comes after the last bit of flesh peels off from the walking corpse of liberal democracy? Will we find ourselves locked up in the bone-cage of a hard authoritarian system, enforced by drones and AI algorithms? In a sense, we are already there, and the slowly unfolding strategic defeat of the West on the Eastern European battlefront will only accelerate this trend. The outlook, as seen by Todd, is not promising, to say the least:

“The German economy is stagnating. Poverty and inequality are on the rise throughout the West. The United Kingdom is on the brink of collapse. France is not far behind. Societies and political systems are at a standstill. Ironically, the economic sanctions that NATO hoped would bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia are about to bring a cascade of ‘regime changes’ to Western Europe.”

In an effort to prevent this strategic defeat to become obvious — exposing the long series of massive policy failures from 2008 to this day — European elites will do everything in their power to prevent any peace deal from being signed (2). When the defeat arrives — which has become inevitable at this point — there will be a great deal of reckoning to be done. After a brief rearrangement of the deck-chairs on the sinking Titanic, however, war fervor could still be revived to keep the continent united with its current ruling class in power. Seeing the nihilistic, self-harming tendencies on display, combined with an outright Armageddon-complex, war has an uncomfortably high chance of being restarted (3). This time, turning the entire European continent into a battle ground; destroying all that excess capital which cannot be used in the lack of adequate energy supplies. I can but hope, that we can still wake up from this madness and return to a more cooperative arrangement with the rest of the world. Moving past five hundred years of world domination won’t be easy, but we must start somewhere; lest the zombie of our dead world order consumes us all.

Until next time,

B

Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer. If you value this article or any others please share and consider a subscription, or perhaps buying a virtual coffee. At the same time allow me to express my eternal gratitude to those who already support my work — without you this site could not exist.

Notes:

(1) The recent round of sanctions have yet again resulted in a significant gasoline and diesel (distillate) fuel price increase all across the world.

(2) Take the 28 points, presented as a “peace plan” in response to the series of strategic defeats on the battlefront, for example. The leaked document looks rather like a hastily written draft armistice agreement packed full of contradictions — satisfying no one except, perhaps, its authors. The vehemence with which its shoved down everyone’s throat is quite indicative of the gravity of the situation, though.

(3) Should the war restart, operations won’t be limited to Eastern Europe and the Baltics, a missile barrage targeting NATO headquarters, warships and military installations all across Europe is likely to follow. Based on the NATO “advertisement” linked above, the old continent could then find itself in a state of a long — almost permanent — war on all fronts imaginable. Using this conflict as an excuse to curb civil rights, ration energy, spend all that there is on militarism, ban opposition parties, and to normalize soldiers patrolling in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere all seem to be just too convenient to ignore. Again, I hope and pray I’m wrong here and that a lasting peace can be achieved.