Dominic Cummings on Dostoevsky
(and other things)
Extract From:dominiccummings@substack.com
We’re into a new cycle of regime change
We’re experiencing something very similar to the 1840s-70s.
The old generation who fought in World War II has retired and is mostly dead. Their personal memories of the bloodshed are no longer part of discussions in Cabinet rooms. The people who really studied nuclear weapons have almost all died/retired and their successors in Cabinet rooms — even those personally responsible for briefing leaders on Great Power confrontation and nuclear escalation today — are often ignorant of the dynamics of summer 1914 and the dynamics of the Cuban crisis.
New technologies are spreading, most obviously AI, robotics, and biological engineering. Along with great gains will come faster and more destructive disasters (as von Neumann predicted in Can we survive technology?).
New social-material forces: industries being totally disrupted, large categories of employment facing automation with large political consequences (e.g roughly 0% of SW1 are aware that ~100% of customer support can now be automated by LLMs that barely hallucinate, the limiting factor in replacing all this human labour is the world’s friction not scientific progress).
The spiritual crisis visible from the 1860s-70s, politically briefly less explosive in the 1990s after the relieved tension of 1989-91, is all around us and bubbling up in new forms. It’s not coincidental that Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are much quoted today in the WhatsApps of the most powerful billionaires, or that Wang Huning, perhaps the most-powerful-not-famous-politician, studied this intensely (cf. America Against America). New mutant versions of old ideas are spreading among the educated young, including a new joy in ideas of violent revolution and rejection of Anglo-American liberalism and capitalism. ‘Rationalism’ is self-sabotaging, as Aristophanes described in The Clouds — the world’s first stab at Rationalism being 5th Century Athens — and as Dostoyevsky depicted in Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment. And the far Left today is most determined to attack and destroy liberals such as JK Rowling, just as we see in the rows between the generations in the 1840s-70s and in the determination of Nechayev et al to destroy the liberals first.
The old institutions of the ancien régime have stretched and stretched but can’t cope, they are hollow and disintegrating. The old parties like the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour; the old bureaucracies and institutions like the Cabinet Office, the US national security state, the EEC/EU, UN and NATO forged by World War II and the Cold War, the WHO, IMF etc; the old universities of Oxbridge and Ivy League; the old media like the BBC and NYT that created ‘consensus reality’ since 1945; the old scientific institutions for peer review and publication (hijacked during covid to spread misinformation about misinformation) — they’re all disintegrating in a self-reinforcing cycle of collapsing performance, collapsing trust and moral authority, spreading chaos, growing accusations of ‘madness’, and a widespread feeling that our system has been stretched to or beyond some invisible-but-critical threshold.
Institutional failure has become increasingly pathological, a doom loop that seems to spin faster and deeper each year. Our ancien régime shows less awareness of its crisis than their equivalents of the 1840s and instead of accepting any errors, each failure has led to further doubling down. There is not just no learning but what seems like a form of anti-learning, a bitter-hostility-to-learning.
Brexit and Trump in 2016 were signs of the coming floods and the doom loop. After Insiders were stunned by defeat, they doubled down on a weird mix of creating and spreading lies then believing their own lies, such as the ‘Russia-gate’ hoax — misinformation about misinformation created by Democrats to exonerate themselves for the incompetence of the Hillary campaign and to undermine Trump in Washington, and spread by some who knew it was fake and some who didn’t. Then they blamed the voters for being ‘fooled by misinformation’. After covid, across the West there was practically no interest across the political spectrum in facing the extreme failures of the old bureaucracies and fixing them; instead, everybody has rallied in their defence against ‘populism’. After covid and Ukraine, across the West there has been an extreme resistance to even discussing issues of procurement and industrial capacity that are absolutely central to our failure: even in a war of attrition, the old institutions won’t engage with our procurement horrorshows. Instead, our pathological old regimes have done all they can to distract attention, and themselves, from the failure of core institutions. They close things that work such as vaccine research and sewage monitoring. They continue with abject failures that kill people and guarantee disaster such as systems for procurement and energy.
Faced with collapsing trust in them, they deny it is justified by their performance and instead are trying to stand athwart history shouting ‘just go back to trusting us, let’s all go back to the wonderful nineties, don’t be fooled by misinformation, don’t support FASCISM’. The regimes push: higher taxes, higher debts, more wars they they botch, visible collapse of state authority over borders and citizenship, more political centralisation that makes crises worse, more hostility to entrepreneurs and those who can build and create value. When the voters rebel, Insiders respond by telling themselves that the real problem is the voters — so the solution is not ‘we should listen more and adapt’ but ‘we mustn’t listen to these idiots, we must find new ways to defend the old power structures’. They’re also now trying to mobilise hatred for out-groups — particularly Russia and China — in ways that resemble how regimes worried about losing domestic power behaved pre-1914. They parrot slogans from decades ago — ‘the special relationship’, ‘the rules-based international order’ — but we can see the hollow reality behind the rhetoric. So can non-NATO regimes across the world which are rapidly distancing themselves from and hedging against our repeated vandalism (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, breaking our own global financial system etc).
This cannot work. Everybody outside the Insider social network holds our political regimes in contempt — the young revolutionaries and the young billionaires agree on one thing, politics is rotten and politicians seem deranged.
So I think (per my 2013 essay on politics and education) that we’ll hit events resembling 1848-71:
A. Waves of financial crises, revolutions, wars, and chaos.
B. Over the next 10-20 years a very different world will emerge and some of our regimes that seemed permanent, like the Soviets in 1980, will be replaced. Perhaps like the 1860s-70s new countries will be formed.
C. Regimes that survive will be transformed and the elites in charge will be transformed.
D. The political chaos will be downstream of the spiritual crisis described in Dostoyevsky: the crisis of ‘modernity’ itself and ‘rationality’.
See the bottom of this blog for a different way of framing the crisis sketched above.
A summary: Our political Insiders en masse are arguably even less able to see what’s happening than in the 1840s or 1910s or 1930. Political Insiders understand less about relevant technology than in the days of archers and cavalry. The speed of crises has grown: in 1815 it took ten days for news of an assassination to get from Paris to the most powerful person in the world; by 1848 the telegram beamed news from city to city in hours and we see in 1866 the first war affected by rapid communication; today we face nuclear crises that could escalate hundreds of times faster than July 1914. The complexity of interconnected forces and human memetics has increased. The quality of political Insiders and officials has collapsed as high talent has migrated (startups, hedge funds etc). And the institutions for crisis management are roughly the same as July 1914, as I wrote in 2019 and witnessed in 2020.
And if you want to explore the 1840s-70s in detail, how one man tried to surf this chaos and create a new world, read my chronology of Bismarck.
It’s a perfect moment to reconsider Dostoyevsky’s view on the struggle over western ‘values’ as we now call them, echoing Nietzsche who called Dostoyevsky ‘the only psychologist from whom I learned anything’. Our political crisis takes its most dramatic form in the war between the West and Russia that is a grotesque absurdist mix of 1914 trenches, AI-controlled drones, spiritual-clash-in-memes-on-social-media, and the lurking possibility our Idiocracy might stagger into nuclear Armageddon and a hundred Auschwitzs in an afternoon.
In 2022 I wrote about War and Peace. The more non-fiction I’ve read the more obvious it’s seemed that some aspects of politics and power are far better described by great artists than they are, and probably ever can be, by academics/scholars. Tolstoy’s description of how meetings really work at the apex of power in a crisis tells you far more than academic studies, which usually overrate the seriousness of the people involved and underrate the absurd, the vanity, the farce — and tell you far more than the absurd official inquiry by lawyers will tell you about what really happened. And you can’t understand a lot of history without understanding the artistic fashions of the times. You can’t understand the spiritual crisis of the West without reading Fathers and Sons, The Devils etc.
Many of these themes were also explored in my blog on Oakeshott and Rationalism.
I highly recommend Frank’s epic biography of Dostoyevsky from which much of the below is taken. END QUOTE
Cummings (and Goings)
Who (if anyone) is telling the truth?
