The main surprise of the last three years has been the amazing helplessness of the state

Reading about the consequences of the earthquake in Turkey (one , two , three ) - and here's what I think. The main surprise of the last three years has been the amazing helplessness of the state.

Take the Russian Federation, which for many years tried to cosplay the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union simultaneously with "only two allies - the army and navy." And then the army had to be tested in action, and it turned out ... well, what happened. As a result, the conduct of the war was outsourced to an organization that seemed to have descended from the pages of a gloomy version of "The Dunno on the Moon".

But here is Turkey, which for many years also depicted at the same time almost a new Ottoman Empire, designed to unite the lands that were once under the rule of the Brilliant Port, and at the same time - the center of the entire Turkic world, stretching to the Altai itself. But an earthquake occurs - and hundreds of houses built by Erdogan's friends collapse, no one sorts out the rubble for days, and a fire rages for days in the port of Iskenderun , which there really is no one to extinguish.

Okay, but here's the United States. An epidemic begins. It would seem that the fight against epidemics is one of the basic, most ancient functions of the state, along with waging wars and punishing murderers, robbers and thieves. And how is the state responding to the epidemic? Different states are ready to almost declare war on each other because of the masks. The governor of the main state - New York - makes a brilliant decision to settle the sick in nursing homes next to the elderly, who are dying like flies from the new virus. The President, meanwhile, is seriously discussing on Twitter whether sick people should eat pills to remove worms from horses. The country's chief virologist contradicts himself in every speech. A complete mess, chaos, the economy is collapsing, inflation begins, while hundreds of thousands of people die.

But here's China. Here, in response to the epidemic, insanely cruel quarantines are introduced for three years. And when it becomes clear that you can’t live with quarantines indefinitely, they are simply ... quietly canceled, without doing anything to prepare for the cancellation. The Chinese, who have been fooled for three years about a monstrously deadly virus, because of which workers have to sleep in factories, and the sick have to weld doors to apartments, at the first sneeze they run to hospitals in a panic. Not old people without obesity, diabetes, lung and heart disease, that is, people for whom the probability of dying from the current corona strain tends to zero, instead of sitting at home and drinking hot tea, they are stuffed into the emergency rooms like herring in a barrel, and sit there for days (!). Doctors do not have time for those who really need help, and the departments themselves turn into biolaboratories where sneezing people manage to infect each other with everything in the world.

Or England. An economic crisis came to England. Energy prices have risen sharply - this time. Money from Russian oligarchs and Qatari sheikhs stopped flowing into the country in a wide river - these are two. Inflation has forced central banks around the world to raise rates, because of this, the prices of financial assets have fallen, and London, which shares the first place with New York in the list of world financial centers, is in a fever - that's three. The break in trade ties with Europe after leaving the European Union - four.

There is nothing unique about a crisis. The first classic economic crisis occurred in England two centuries ago, and since then the country has experienced a dozen of these crises (see Kindleberger's book). What to do to fight the crisis - in general, it is known. And then the new prime minister Liz Truss comes and offers a brilliant plan: let's save expenses, but sharply reduce taxes, because of this, business will immediately reach our country and soon we will become the Singapore of Europe! In response to the ingenious plan, Treasury bond prices spike, falling at a rate that until recently seemed impossible for British government bonds.

In the first half of the 20th century, everything was exactly the opposite. Then the gigantic potential of the state became a surprise. Before the First World War, it was believed that the war could last no longer than a year - then the warring countries would finally run out of money. Even in 1916, Keynes himself wrote panicky reports that Britain had only a few months' worth of war left. Before the war, French generals believed that the regular peacetime army (600,000) would conduct the main combat operations, while the mobilized ones would be used for secondary tasks. As a result, the war went on for four years and three months, and France and Germany mobilized almost a fifth of their population - almost seven and more than thirteen million, respectively.

In World War II, the USSR and Germany were able to increase the output of military products at a frantic pace - despite the fact that the Union lost the lion's share of its industrial potential in the very first months of the war, and Germany, cut off from foreign markets, was mercilessly bombed. Finally, the nuclear and space races that followed after the war finally convinced everyone of the almost unlimited possibilities of states.

And now the impression from reading the news is that states have generally ceased to cope with at least some unexpected tasks and challenges. Of course, each specific case can be explained, you can tell why you can’t mix everything together and all that. But I'm talking about the impression: helplessness, inability to make plans and follow them, chaos and chaos. Don't you have that feeling?

Two explanations have been offered.

Here's the first one. All the leaders listed in the post above operate within the narrative, for them the scenery is more important than the content of the play. Erdogan revives the Ottoman Empire along with the Seljuk Empire. Putin seems to dream of building a kind of new Soviet Union, only with super-privileges for the elite. Liz Truss, not only in rhetoric, but even in clothes and gestures, tried to copy Thatcher. Trump plays on the feelings of American old people who dream of returning to good old America, ideally in the semi-mythical times of the early Eisenhower, when the power of the United States seemed limitless, the future was cloudless, and even the Europeans envied the prosperity of the American family, and no Chinese took away our work. What Xi Jinping wants is more difficult to say, but it seems that he wants a country of ideal bureaucracy, like from ancient treatises - such a gigantic Singapore, in which there is even more state and even less freedom.

But Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hirohito and others did not want anything like that. They weren't going to do anything great again. They fought for dominance - in the world, or at least in a large part of it. Decorations were important to the extent that they could increase the actual efficiency of the system.

The second explanation is directly opposite to the first, and it comes from - yes, don't make a face - from Naseem Taleb. He coined the swirling term "transparent orwellization".

The abundance of data, information signals and all sorts of bigdata make many of the shortcomings of systems transparent, forcing us not to see the systems themselves and how they work.

This is what is called “not seeing the forest for the trees”. Data is collected everywhere and everywhere, thousands and thousands of bloggers take the place of several national newspapers, and economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians are like uncut dogs, and they, these dogs, publish studies and build theories that all contradict one another.

However, two seemingly contradictory hypotheses can be combined. When there is so much information that the overall picture is no longer visible behind its abundance, it becomes simply impossible to try to increase the overall efficiency of the system. And then a simple and understandable narrative takes the place of efficiency - to return everything back. “Necessary” infa is selected and driven into this narrative, “unnecessary” is eliminated.

In general, the topic is interesting. Everything is readable. Think.

Vasily Topolev 2023-02-08