Looming reckonings

It's about to become a bumpy ride

Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price. The one who sang or danced the best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skilful or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences rose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other, and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.
Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755

Four legs good, two legs bad… Four legs good, two legs better.”
George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1945

Recent assaults on DEI from the right have caused people who care about a diverse, inclusive America to circle the wagons against attacks from people who, at best, want to pretend the country is already colorblind, and at worst, want a return to an era when White, Christian men presided unquestioned at the top of the status hierarchy. But proponents of diversity do need to alter these programs—not to please those who want to go backward, but to help America become the inclusive nation it needs to be moving forward.
Rachel Kleinfeld, Persuasion, 24/8/25

For the three glorious decades after 1945 we had a society where status was shared around in a relatively egalitarian manner.

Yes, status is always and everywhere a zero-sum game.

Yes, there were people of above-average or below-average status in the Keynesian-era West.

Nonetheless, Anglosphere societies, not least my own Lucky Country homeland, were routinely and accurately described as “middle-class societies”.

Much of the population could realistically aspire to a home-owning, spouse-having, suburban lifestyle. And even the poor, the non-homeowners and the unmarried could enjoy living in high-trust, non-atomised societies.

As Robert Putnam observed, you can have an ethnically homogenous society with high levels of social capital, such as Japan. Alternatively, you can have a vibrantly diverse society with low levels of social capital, as seen in Brazil.

But you only get to pick one.

You don’t hear Anglosphere societies referred to much as middle class nowadays.

Since the free-market turn of the 1980s, you often hear them referred to as ‘winner-take-all societies’ – ones with stark and readily apparent wealth, income and status differentials.

That is, of course, delightful for the ever-shrinking minority of winners but not so delightful for the ever-expanding majority of losers.

A majority that AI-driven mass automation is about to expand considerably.

Neoliberalism 101
Neoliberalism was effectively a de facto grand settlement between the Left and the Right.

The Right got the economic liberalism it lusted after – a reversal of the Keynesian-era approach of transferring wealth (and hence political influence) downwards, global-labour-arbitrage-enabling free trade, minimal and minimally enforced taxes on corporations and plutocrats, and the crushing of organised labour.

In return, the (by-then-gentrified) Left was given relatively free rein, especially within its own sense-making-institution strongholds, to promote a status-hierarchy-inverting cultural Marxism.

Following the Western working classes' recalcitrant refusal to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat earlier in the 20^th century, the New Left decided sacralised minorities would take the place of the now-despised proles.

Meanwhile, those guilty of enjoying ‘privilege’ – heterosexuals, men, (cultural) Christians, white people in general, the ‘white working class’ in particular, Sydney Sweeny-types leveraging their genetic blessings to sell eugenics-promoting trousers – were to be performatively excoriated at every available opportunity.

That much of this blame-whitey excoriation was carried out by (clout-chasing, PMC) Caucasians is just one of the many bemusing aspects of the now rapidly receding neoliberal era.

More on that momentarily.

But first, some thoughts on why the political realignment that’s been building steam since 2016 is only going to accelerate as the months roll by.

“The handover… should have started some time ago”
One day, when I can pause from my Noah-like labours warning of the looming AI flood, I’ll take a Chomskyean deep dive into this email thread between Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Nick Clegg.

To think, had the discussion gone a bit differently, the media would have been running stories about how Zuck was the Bob Dylan of Millennials for the last half decade.

People wanting to make a point about Millennials, positive or negative, would have been saying, “Well, look at Zuckerberg, he’s the very model of a Millennial and he…”

Everybody, including me, would have just accepted Zuckerberg’s identity as King Millennial was more noteworthy than his identity as, say, a gazillionaire tech bro.

And all because of an email thread between a handful of people a few days before Christmas in 2019.

From: Peter Thiel
Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: RE: Milennials

In a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past (my emphasis). And that's why it's especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them…

Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946… they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger... and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.

As Thiel notes, at some point soon the Boomers must (surely?) lose their half-century-long stranglehold over Anglosphere politics, allowing long-frustrated post-Boomer generations to belatedly set the agenda.

The only quibble I have with Thiel’s analysis is he doesn’t mention the ‘sudden and dramatic’ generational-handover inflection point is just one of a plethora of ‘sudden and dramatic’ watersheds about to transform Anglosphere societies.

To speed things along, let’s bust out the greater and lesser than signs.

As Thiel noted, since 1946, it has been Boomers > All Other Generations, but at some juncture, it will be All Other Generations > Boomers.

Now, let’s proceed.

From US > The Rest to US = China
Among all the other collapses, we’re witnessing the collapse of the post-World War II order.

That’s in no small part because Corporate America has showered China with capital and IP for over three decades.

The Middle Kingdom was always going to rise after its 1979 return to economic sanity.

But would it now be the world’s factory if America’s business class – with the enthusiastic backing of presidents from Reagan to Obama – wasn’t quite so keen on doing an end run around unions?

With the Ukrainian conflict apparently winding down, the next likely world-unravelling flashpoint is Taiwan.

Thankfully, Xi apparently has no plans to move until at least 2027. Given Trump’s re-election, I’m hoping he’ll push that date to at least January 20, 2029.

But Xi will surely be tempted take advantage of the US being distracted if any of the transitions explored below propel the US into chaos.

From Open Society > Strong Gods to Strong Gods > Open Society
After WWII, Western elites decided to banish the Strong Gods – tribalism, nationalism, ideological zeal – in favour of the seemingly unobjectionable weak tea of pluralism, openness, proceduralism and cosmopolitanism.

Only, as the English are now very much coming to realise, there’s a reason that humans across time and place have preferred to worship at the altar of the Strong Gods.

Rather than, say, embracing cosmopolitan globalism, then importing millions of people from very different tribes into their hitherto ethnically homogenous, or at least ethnically coherent, homeland.

It now seems the dwindling band of cautious managerialist technocrats is increasingly succumbing to the Strong God Berserkers. If I were a betting man, I’d even wager on Keir Starmer not making it through the next six months.

Which brings us neatly to the next status switcheroo.

From Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) > Unlettered, Uncivilised Masses (UUC) to UUC > PMC
There’s been a lot of attention paid to how the ‘one per cent’ have made out like bandits over the last 45 years.

Curiously, there has been rather less attention paid to how ‘the next 19 per cent’ have done for themselves.

In 1980, the top one per cent of Americans controlled about a fifth of their nation’s wealth. They now control a bit under a third of it.

That leaves two-thirds of the wealth pie still to be divvied up among the 99 per cent.

Here’s where things get interesting.

In 1980, the top 20 per cent of Americans owned a tad over 40 per cent of total US national wealth.

Figures vary, but the top 20 per cent of Americans now own 70-80 per cent of the wealth.

That means most of the wealth in the US is controlled by the top quintile, with the bottom four quintiles fighting for scraps.

If you want to understand why American politics became so polarised and bitter, especially since 2008, you should probably start with the fact the top quintile has long been shamelessly hoovering up wealth from the bottom four quintiles.

The figures aren’t quite as extreme in other Anglosphere nations, but they’ve also seen a similar dynamic thanks to four decades of top-quintile-enriching economic policies.

PMC academics, journalists and pundits are quick to point the finger at the Musks of the world for those wealth-inequality exacerbating policies, and the plutocrats certainly deserve their fair share of the blame.

But then again, so does the PMC.

It enthusiastically supported plutocrat-empowering policies, such as mass migration, that pushed down wages for those in the bottom four quintiles.

What’s more, not satisfied with enriching itself, the 19 per cent couldn’t help flattering itself, prosperity gospel-style, that its material success was evidence of moral superiority.

Not content to quietly grow rich, Millionaire Next Door-style, the 19 percenters were forever eager to educate those in the bottom four quintiles out of their regrettable racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and global-warming scepticism.

If you happen to be part of the 19 per cent, dear reader, I’ll ask you to imagine how you would feel towards a class that oversaw – and visibly benefitted from – your pauperisation while endlessly haranguing you about your retrograde value system.

On second thoughts, I won’t ask you to imagine it. I’ll quote another passage from Thiel’s email.

I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it (my emphasis).

Female > Male to Male = Female
As well as the sacralised minorities the contemporary Salonkommunist Left is so keen to uplift, there’s also one sacralised majority – women.

Not the white working-class ones, of course. They’re nearly as disreputable as their male counterparts.

But the university-educated, career-orientated, middle-to-high income ones were judged in need of endless celebration, given the immense patriarchal forces arrayed against them.

So, for as long as anyone can recall, it’s been received wisdom, at least in PMC-dominated spaces, that men are toxically masculine, women are morally superior, and The Future is Female.

Only now, both men and women are starting to notice the gender divide is perhaps not quite as Manichean as previously advertised.

As many lady intellectuals, not least my fellow Substacker Louise Perry, have noted, it has recently been discovered that the female of the species can also behave noxiously.

After all, what is cancel culture other than scaled-up reputation sabotage, of the kind women have long specialised in?

The Left, the university system and Anglosphere societies have all been comprehensively feminised over the last half-century.

Trump’s re-election would appear to be just the start of the pendulum swinging back toward masculine energy.

Now let’s throw AI into the mix
Now let’s run down the tipping points and consider how AI is likely to give each a little push along.

Non-Boomers > Boomers
There’s no shortage of Boomers still in powerful positions, not least in China and the US, but most of them are now retired or close to it.

The worst-case AI scenario that Boomers immediately face is having to retire earlier than planned.

Yet no Boomer is an island.

If AI puts lots of working-age non-Boomers out of work, the money to cover the UBI for the ever-swelling ranks of the jobless is going to have to come from somewhere.

One of those somewheres is likely to be the asset-rich – and, often, straightforwardly rich-rich – Boomers. Which I suspect is the reason there’s growing talk of inheritance, estate, wealth, vacancy and property taxes in Western nations.

China = America
Either China or the US will get to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) first.

Being the only nation with AGI is equivalent to being the only nation with nuclear weapons – you get to call the shots.

But that’s a whole other Musing. Here, I’ll just observe that Westerners shouldn’t simply assume that the US will get there first.

While the Anglosphere has been spending the last decade debating trans bathroom access, China has been turning itself into a technological and manufacturing superpower.

Strong Gods > Technocratic Managerialism
Forecasting how AI will impact the shift back towards a Strong Gods-worshipping society is difficult.

But those in the bottom four quintiles have already lost most of their trust in institutions and mainstream politicians.

I don’t imagine skyrocketing unemployment rates and the resulting political chaos are likely to convince the median voter to continue putting their faith in managerial technocrats.

UUC > PMC
AI is coming for knowledge workers first. Many individuals with somewhat prestigious and reasonably well-paid jobs are likely to find themselves on the scrapheap over the next year or two.

To rub salt in the wounds, while this is happening, many blue-collar workers will at least remain employed and, just possibly, see their incomes rise substantially.

After all, those data centres aren’t going to build themselves. Not until the tradie-droids start rolling off the production lines in big numbers, and that’s got to be at least five years away.

I suspect many PMCers will soon find themselves in much the same position as the Russian nobles who fled to Paris after the revolution. Those émigrés had to support themselves as working as mere taxi drivers and governesses and endure being spoken to as equals by mere commoners.

Male = Female
The PMC skews female. Women account for 60 per cent of university students. Most PMC professions are now at least 50 per cent female. Some, such as book publishing, are outright matriarchies.

Unfortunately for the fairer sex, it’s the jobs they’re most attracted to – in fields such as academia, communications, HR and marketing – that are most threatened by AI. An ILO report released a few months ago found women are three times more vulnerable than men to AI-driven job displacement.

We’re (almost) all going to be part of the 99.9 per cent soon
Mo Gawdat, a rather better-qualified and higher-profile AI doomer than I, recently appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast.

He made numerous worrying predictions about what would happen once AI started automating jobs in earnest.

The most concerning one, for me, was: “Unless you’re in the top 0.1 per cent, you’re a peasant. There is no middle class.”

Which brings me to one final turning of the tables.

Since the late 1960s, it’s been Gender, Sexuality and Race > Class with the Left.

At a minute to midnight, the more rational, prescient Leftists are trying to flip that back to Class > Gender, Sexuality and Race.

They'd better get a wriggle on.

Gawdat has predicted a 0.1 per cent > 99.9 per cent society could arrive within two years.