The progression of most good things in life is a matter of patience, determination and conservatism towards one’s own resources. Inordinate risk yields at correct times wondrous profits, but most successful people manage risk methodically until they reach a level of prosperity sufficient to mitigate future surprises.
And yet, when it comes to public finance, public benefits and corporate debt, we have practiced none of these principles. The principle of the day has instead been that everybody gets lunch, everybody gets a freebie, everybody gets something to take home. This is the attitude of the last 70-80 years, “why not me, don’t I deserve something good too?”.
He who produces handsome sums must also know how to dispense with them at the appropriate time. Carnegie had universities, Rockefeller research institutes, Gates vaccine labs. Whether they are truly of public benefit or not is of no interest to the patron - he only cares that they are ambitious - and in their ambition, benefit may come in their promulgation or in the fight against them.
This is precisely where technocracy fails: it leads to the death of ambition. It pokes, it prods, it waits, it makes one sit on ones hands, and when it has finally killed the golden goose, it is left with nothing to proffer for the common man. So if technocracy is soon to die, what comes next?
The Capricious Social Welfare State
The social welfare states that have come about since World War II were initially predicated on an exceedingly positive dependency ratio, but also on a premise of broad-based economic growth for the long term. What initially seemed fruitful and beneficent proves today to be a great dis-equalizer of wealth, with pensioners now being the beneficiaries of a system skewed to them in so many aspects while the young and working age population effectively serve them as chattel.
In the prelude to World War II, social welfare was often seen as a voluntary effort by the rich to stifle the ills of society, or executed on a local level through cities, states or councils that took ownership of the well-being of their local denizens. In a post-modern, interconnected world, this sort of magnanimous paternalism not only appears to the broader public as performative and grandiose, but also gathers no interest for the wealthy as the population will rarely act with a sense of reciprocity - once their hand is empty, they will simply stick it out again.
The welfare state will hence proceed in much the manner it has since the Anglo-American market reforms of the 1980s, mainly drawn tighter and into a smaller circle, where access to benefits is more often driven by personal bias, sympathy and the willingness of agents of the state to support them with whatever they have at their disposal, rather than a fair, justly distributed system of benefits.
While this system is permitted to decay or exercise a living death, the size of benefits and the scope of their distribution will ultimately fall short of social expectations, until they can be eliminated entirely, and people will be “on their own” again.
The Distributed Military
Large infrastructures of power projection are expensive, difficult to sustain, and require social and psychological cohesion which no longer exists in an institutionally disconnected age. The weapons systems currently utilized by the US military and its NATO partners were built for a 1980s level of educational attainment in maths, science and reading ability, not a 2020s level of educational attainment in “emotional arts” and “not hurting other peoples’ feelings”.
In this context, they may be impossible to use as time goes on, and the centralized interdependency of force doctrines that came through “combined arms” and the schools that followed thereafter may be totally impractical in an era where militaries are populated by migrants, vagabonds and nutjobs.
The more likely outcome is the mass production of thinly veiled munitions delivery systems, promoting accessibility but lacking in sophistication or dependency on tools like GPS. In environments where overwatch is denied, local expertise is more suitable, hence the return of civil defense and local militias will likely lead to an increased loyalty to local authorities - certainly at one level leading to conflict with federal states, but also perhaps making each individual compartment of national governates more difficult to conquer, similar to the German city-states of old.
Scientific-Industrial Mania
In an environment where power and control are distributed, science and industry can flourish, but will often lead to the centralization of power and control thereafter. This could be witnessed in the 19th century across multiple nation-states as industrialization led to more central state control, and the reconditioning of populations (through health, education and the military) to be more suitable to and productive within the industrial age.
As industrial centers became more commonplace, their subsidy of scientific research (in the interest of expanding their business opportunities) became more aggressive, as was the case with Edison’s labs or German research in the chemical industry, for instance.
While the intervening period in which public subsidy for the sciences collapses will be disruptive, the ultimate return of this function to the private sector will eventually yield the kinds of advances not seen since the first and second industrial revolutions, which are far more transformative than incremental as is the case in recent variations.
The Arts and the Common Man
Clearly, the 19th century offered a flourishing in the arts beyond measure. With new classes of bourgeois, new leisure time available, the celebration of rugged individualism and the entrepreneurial spirit, and the willingness of all castes of society to try new things, art in such a time truly flourishes - while men may suffer, their souls will rise.
And in this coming period also, men will discover new abilities to broadcast and communicate their ideas. As these attitudes are recreated in the aggregate, the energy and aggression of society will rise to meet them. While this culminated historically in World War I, what will the new age prelude next?