Captain Cynic and the existential crisis of the 2020s

Posted on by Matthew Wright

Welcome to 2024, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century. When I was a kid that was science fiction, but it’s a world very different from the one envisioned by many sci-fi writers of the twentieth century. I’m still waiting for my flying car.

But hey – we’ve social media, trolls, malware and online scammers. What’s to complain about?

All this is playing out to a backdrop of a world that is entering ‘interesting’ times. The neo-liberal version of capitalism is clearly in its end-game: there are limits to the extent to which the poor and middle-income earners can pass their money to a small group of elite rich. There are limits to the extent to which general populations will put up with the intrusive behaviours of ever-larger and more powerful corporates and their ‘surveillance capitalism’ business model. The increasing intrusion of advertising into everything, including computer operating systems, is symptomatic of the problem. Customers, these days, are merely a source of money to be exploited. And when corporates have monopoly or duopoly control over – for instance – food supply, which is the case in New Zealand, they can do what they want – they know people have to eat.

The issue is that this version of capitalism has become so embedded nobody questions it: efforts among the democracies to vote in governments that might find a different version have failed. Each new government merely perpetuates the neoliberal approach without addressing the fundamental problems it causes in the long term – including wealth distribution that is so iniquitous it risks cracking society. That has, in turn, eroded democracy. As one example, the bold experiment in democracy started in North America by Messrs Jefferson, Franklin etc some 250 years ago is clearly struggling to put the brakes on what threatens to be an existential crisis for that system.  And that’s without considering the general issues now faced by many nations across the globe, including the fact that war is already flaring in Europe and the Middle East.

Welcome to the future.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2024

15 thoughts on “Captain Cynic and the existential crisis of the 2020s”

    1. In the wider historical sense I suspect the 75-odd years of relative stability in the west since the end of the Second World War is an abberation, not the norm. If we go back to the early 19th century, for instance, we find a period of relentless and relatively frequent crises that emerged on the back of the industrial revolution, with its tremendous social change.

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    1. I’d like to be more cheerful but something tells me Pollyanna mode isn’t going to cut it just now. And history tells me that when things have become this stressed in the past, nothing ever ends well.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. For at least thirty years, I’ve watched Americans work longer hours, take fewer vacations, work more jobs, empty their savings, and pile-on debt. You’d think it was their patriotic duty to do more for corporations that give nothing back in return. Whenever I’ve commented, people become angry. It’s as if they’re convinced they’ll be included among the 1% any day now. To think that the downward spiral has accelerated since 2008 is baffling, yet impossible to miss. I guess it’s all okay when you can add another streaming service, watch another Hollywood remake, and fit in a few hours to sleep.

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    1. It’s not dissimilar here in New Zealand. The problem with the General Financial Crisis of 2008-10 was that the ‘stimulus’ packages kicked the spectre of economic collapse down the road, but the fundamentals of the system that had caused it weren’t changed. Fifteen years on, we ARE down the road, and the collapse looms. Add to that the ongoing shift of wealth from the poor to the rich, and it’s a recipe for disaster. And yet nobody is prepared to discuss it, something I regard as one of the greatest triumphs of the neo-liberal version of capitalism ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher 45-odd years ago: the way it has crushed all dissent. These days it’s not even recognised as a VERSION of capitalism – it “is” capitalism, and those who breathe a word of criticism risk being labelled “socialists”, even if they’re not. The first step to rescuing the situation is a proper discussion about other approaches that capitalism could take, but I can’t see that coming any time soon.

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  5. Happy 2024 to you too, Matthew. I’m scared of heights so I’ll leave the flying car to you, but the rest? It feels as if the inmates are running the insane asylum, but unlike United Artists, it’s not likely to end well. Trouble is, when things get this out of whack, it usually takes a very big, very painful event to trigger a reset.
    Are we there yet?

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    1. I had hoped to be a bit more cheerful this New Year, but the way things are heading it’s challenging. I agree – the inmates are running the asylum. Witness the last NZ election, for example, in which most Kiwis were determined to get rid of the government that had failed to reform things – but where the only options were parties that wanted to intensify the neo-liberal system while winding social principles back 70 years.

      Even that didn’t work: the vote was spread across the options to the point where now NZ has a three-way coalition government, cobbled together under command of a thumb-headed moron that used to run an airline, a right-wing imbecile who looks and behaves like Rimmer from Red Dwarf, and a wily old career politician whose sole focus is himself. Within nine days of the writs being issued they had street protests against the first thing they tried to do, which is unheard of for any new government in NZ. This one skipped the ‘honeymoon’ period, skipped the ‘growing disappointment’ period, and went straight to the ‘we want another government’ end-game… But of course NZ is run for practical purposes by corporates who have duopoly control over the food supply (and a monopsony over the wholesale market), other duopolies that control the telecom and insurance markets, and so on. Government has the sovereign power to regulate their behaviours, but it hasn’t – which explicitly means the power of control rests with corporates whose sole purpose is maximising the profits they can send overseas. This isn’t a “bad” thing of itself, but it risks destabilising society if it goes much further.

      I think what we’re seeing across many western neo-liberal economies is characteristic of any system that is struggling to maintain itself: those in charge won’t let go and begin behaving in ever more extreme ways to avert the collapse. All that does is make things worse, of course – but as you say, a reset inevitably becomes a big and painful event. I suspect it’s not far off now, in historical terms, ie: more than a few years but less than a generation.

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      1. ‘…more than a few years but less than a generation.’
        That literally gives me the chills. My parents lived through a world war and a bloody revolution. I really, really hoped that I’d get to live out my life, and the Offspring’s life, in a calm, sane world. Sucks.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. It definitely sucks. The period from the end of WW2 can be looked back on as something of a golden age – one where the world deliberately moved away from the chaos and violence of the prior 150 years or so (and the 150 years before that, etc). It became our normal, and it was the kind of normal that people of other eras yearned for. It’s a tragedy that it hasn’t lasted.

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  6. It is true that there seems to be a general siphoning of wealth from the lower classes (including the middle classes) to the upper 3% of the population. Productivity gains that come from new technology have been appropriated via financial sleight-of-hand to preexisting commercial giants, some of which are private. It’s a sad state of affairs.

    Come visit my blog, and leave some comments, if you like

    http://www.catxman.wordpress.com

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  7. The problem I find is most people seem to be in chronic denial about everything you’ve listed. Instead, the complaints are dumped on immigration and Marxism/socialism.

    It’s very odd. In the UK we’ve had 13 years of hard-right Conservative rule and the country is in a mess. For Tory voters that doesn’t seem to mean anything and, instead, the reason for this mess MUST be down to immigrants and THE WOKE.

    That right-wing media narrative from Murdoch has worked, sadly.

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