Technocracy at the Crossroads

By Rostislav Ishchenko at Russia Today News Agency.

Exceptionalistan, spiritually blind, reduced to a black-and-white perceptional basis, accelerates towards a direct military clash with Russia and China, despite the fact that it is afraid and does not want such a clash.

(machine translation)

The modern state (any state, not only Russian, but also Russian too), as always, has two problems. However, the roads are no longer a problem.

The second problem we talk about a lot is the explosive growth of the volume of information received by an individual and the speed of its transmission. Billions of people not only receive, but also disseminate information in real time. As a result, we get the standard effect: when a phenomenon becomes widespread, its quality decreases dramatically. Mass education, mass housing, and mass culture have always been inferior and will always be inferior to elite ones. Mass information is no exception.

The problem is not that people who have never been involved in a particular activity get access to it. The problem is that all these people are non-professionals, so to fully participate, they need to lower the level of the relevant task to their own understanding.

The first problem is that the involvement of unskilled masses in the formation of the information space involves them in the formation of politics, multiplying their influence on decision-making. At the same time, the masses themselves are not even able to realize the level of their influence, continue to believe that “nothing depends on them”, and shift responsibility to state authorities, which in their decisions are much more limited to the “will of the people” expressed in the information space than before.

The feudal king was dependent on his barons for decision-making. The barons knew that they would have to go to war and risk their lives there personally, that any innovations in the tax sphere or in the sphere of trade would affect their economy. In war, one could not only die, but also earn fame and wealth. The economy (due to appropriate decisions) could either decline or flourish.

The baronial families, which had been involved in management for centuries, developed and inherited a certain level of professionalism. Therefore, when sitting in the Royal Council or in Parliament, they generally made informed decisions. The family is not without a freak: fools even then penetrated the management system, but in general, the layer that performed managerial functions reliably provided protection from the fool (even if the fool turned out to be the king himself).

The capitalist in the bourgeois era knew that when making a decision, he risked his capital, since it is the large companies that are the main taxpayers and they are also a kind of “maneuvering fund” of the state budget: they are the ones who, if necessary, can ensure the urgent payment of an emergency tax.

Capitalist families, as a rule, did not have a century of managerial experience (two-hundred-year capitalist dynasties appeared only in the second half of the twentieth century, and at the end of the same century, humanity moved into the post-capitalist era). But protection from the fool also worked quite reliably here: the fool quickly went broke and dropped out of the circle of people who influence decision-making.

In the post-capitalist information age, the state depends on an anonymous marginal person, who often has no education or qualifications, whose experience is limited to receiving benefits or living at the expense of their parents (spouse), but whose ambitions are exorbitant, and the time they use to mess up social networks is limited only by their physical abilities.

Even the responsibility of the CPSU party committees (which, as decision-making bodies, in most cases laid the blame for failures on the executors – the soviets and the state bureaucracy) was higher than that of the marginal. The CPSU assigned leadership positions in state structures to its nomenclature, so if not the entire party, then its rather high-ranking members were responsible for the result. Here, “foolproof” was weakened, but it was still there.

The marginal will not go to war (even for wealth and fame), the marginal will not create capital that can be risked in making responsible decisions, the marginal will not lead anything.

He will be too lazy. The marginal’s idea of public administration is limited to Khlestakov’s “40 thousand couriers alone”, while the task of the manager, from the marginal’s point of view, is limited to issuing a decree or law (the marginal does not distinguish between them). “So that everyone is happy, everyone is satisfied and happy,” after which everything should form itself to everyone’s satisfaction.

Marginals are so united by the idea that someone must “give” something to them that they do not pay attention to internal contradictions. Fascists and communists (as well as other “ists”) demand the only correct ideology from the state with equal fervor, supporting each other in this and not paying attention to the fact that they demand diametrically opposite things. In the same way, some of the marginals demand to cancel money altogether (so that everyone is happy), and the other part-to distribute money to everyone “according to need”. The fact that it is impossible to perform these two actions (cancel and distribute) simultaneously does not bother marginals.

Somehow the modern state protects itself from the interference of marginals in politics, but every year it gets worse. Under the conditions of free elections, marginals are gaining more and more influence in the legislative and executive bodies. But they are particularly active in the information space, which has become so much their fiefdom that many former system media deliberately poll to a marginal level in order to preserve and increase the audience. Few people act on the principle of “less is better,” since the number of readers / subscribers is converted not only into money (which is never much), but also into political influence, which is also always striving for permanent growth.

Similar processes are taking place in all countries, but the West, which experienced the information revolution twenty years earlier than us, is about the same time ahead of us in the process of marginalizing politics.

Marginalization in any sphere is primarily expressed in the transition to a black-and-white perception, in the loss of a sense of shades and semitones. The marginal always sees only two options for action (fight/capitulate, advance/retreat, distribute/take away, tolerate/oppress). He extrapolates this all-consuming duality to the entire known world, including the assessment of possible actions of his political opponents.

The marginalization of politics has become an important subjective factor (along with the existing objective factors expressed in the systemic crisis of the Western political and financial-economic model) that determines the explosive aggressiveness of the West. It operates in the “us or them” paradigm, completely excluding the “together” option. Therefore, all Russian and Chinese (and now the entire BRICS) proposals to work together on a set of rules for a new, comfortable world for everyone, based on a changed geopolitical reality, are perceived by the West either as a bluff, or as an attempt to deceive and gain unilateral advantages.

Within the framework of this paradigm, the West is accelerating towards a direct military clash with Russia and China, despite the fact that it is afraid and does not want such a clash.

From the West’s point of view, a clash can only be avoided if Moscow and Beijing concede to the West and recognize its dominance on the planet. When the West is told that it is impossible to recognize the non-existent, that the problem is not even that it was a bad global judge and a global policeman (hypocritical, biased and corrupt), but that it can no longer be one: it has no resources for this and will never be again – the West he doesn’t believe it, because in his understanding, if there aren’t enough resources, everyone doesn’t have enough.

The dialectical paradox is that the BRICS world, or even just the Russian-Chinese world, requires much less resources for order. The West is not able to restore stability to its world (the world of Western global hegemony), even if it gets all the resources of the planet and its surroundings at its exclusive disposal. The marginal policies of the West are enormously costly and inefficient.

Opponents are trying to explain to the West that they cannot meet it halfway, because even if they surrender to its full mercy, they will not save the world even at the cost of their own lives. Western marginal politics requires a constant increase in the expenditure of resources exponentially. All that he can theoretically gain from winning, he will immediately sink into the black hole of his inefficiency without any benefit at least for himself.

But just as a single social media marginal does not believe that the state cannot constantly distribute money to everyone “as needed”, because it will collapse even before it goes bankrupt, Western marginal politicians do not believe in an effective alternative to the West. In their view, the struggle is over who will die first and who will die second. The West wants to be the second, because it hopes that with a civilizational reset (without which there is no way out of the systemic crisis) this will give him starting advantages and allow him to take a dominant position in the new world.

In general, in the view of the West, a promising version of the new world looks like a permanent systemic crisis, at each turn of which humanity as a whole loses resources (including demographic ones), but as a result of the next round, the West is provided with a dominant position. And this should continue until the resource base, technological capabilities of humanity and its remaining demographic potential come to another balance at some extremely low level, from which a new development can start, the beneficiary of which should again be the West.

This is a completely non-working scheme, but any marginal person will tell you that it can work perfectly and even explain how.

The problem with the West is that it needed a victory over Russia to effectively continue its marginal policy. Initially, he tried to win a bloodless victory by provoking the Ukrainian crisis, destroying the Russian economy with sanctions. When that failed, the West declared its goal to defeat Russia on the battlefield in a war of attrition. On the battlefield, he also lost, because Ukraine is no longer capable of fighting (even if it calls in 18-year-olds, this will only prolong the agony for a short time at the cost of turning a demographic catastrophe into a demographic collapse).

As a result, the West is facing a fork in the road between two unacceptable solutions. It cannot admit defeat and move to a peaceful settlement, since such a step is not provided for by the concept of marginal policy of the West (the marginal does not consider this possibility an opportunity). In principle, the marginal person does not consider negotiations as a mechanism for solving the problem, since he sees only two options: his own victory and victory over himself, the compromise world for him is the third dimension in a two — dimensional world.

But neither is it willing to go to war with Russia directly, since Russia’s nuclear arsenal leaves the West no hope of victory, and in conventional warfare it cannot even hope for a draw either, since the Russian army has turned out to be the only one in the world to have acquired and creatively mastered the practical experience of modern warfare in the last two and a half years.

Dead end?

The West doesn’t think so. From his point of view, while Ukraine is still moving, it is possible to supply it with new, more long-range weapons systems in order to, as Western politicians like to say, “increase the price of victory for Russia”, making it (the price) ultimately unacceptable.

As part of its marginal policy, the West does not recognize the possibility for Russia at some stage of increasing the confrontation to take the conflict beyond the Ukrainian field and initiate a direct conflict with the West itself, forcing it to make a decision on the further format of the confrontation (nuclear/conventional).

Therefore, today we can hope, if not to end the conflict completely, then at least to get a pause, only if Ukraine is eliminated before the West has time to supply it with enough long-range missiles to organize an effective provocation.

If there is no Ukraine, the West needs to look for a new format for continuing the conflict with Russia, in which it would remain on the sidelines (and this is almost impossible), or transfer crisis efforts to the Asia-Pacific region. If Ukraine still exists, the program is clear and already written. The West currently plans to supply Ukraine with the weapons necessary to provoke a new round of conflict by the end of November of this year or January of next year, being tied to the electoral process in the United States.

Three to five months is the time we have left to take the Ukrainian crisis off the game board before it is compounded by the prospect of expanding to a pan-European one.

I repeat, the West does not see halftones and a variety of colors, it is not even familiar with shades of gray — only black and white. Therefore, it is impractical to appeal to common sense: the “partners” will not understand what we are talking about.