By Michael Every of Rabobank
Finite and Infinite Great Games
Spending time on social media is a great way to pollute one’s mind with ill-informed idiocy, bile, narcissism, and the most trivial of all trivia - which is why we all spend so much time doing it. However, it does also offer the occasional diamond in the rough as a platform for some genuinely interesting discussions.
Yesterday, I watched Bret Weinstein’s ‘Dark Horse’, where Jamie Wheal pronounced that --from an American perspective-- what we are currently experiencing is a “meaning recession”. To summarize his argument, for most of mankind’s history, the social order was fixed, with power centered on religious authorities: this offered “salvation” at the price of “inclusion”. Following the Enlightenment, Western society shifted to secular, rational, humanist foundations that offered a level playing field of “inclusion” --in theory-- at the price of *public* “salvation”. Yet Western belief in religion as the central organizing force of society, and in democracy, free speech, liberalism, and capitalism’s ability to provide a real ‘level playing field’ are now collapsing in tandem. As such, Wheal argues we don’t know what things mean at the most fundamental level anymore: and the answer is to grasp for the solidity of fundamentalism, of any form, or of nihilism. In short, this is an existential argument underneath the socio-economic/historic (as offered in ‘FX Wars’, ‘On Your Marx’, and ‘The Age of Rage’ over 2015-2019) to explain why we are seeing rapid, deep polarisation, and a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling Overton Window.
Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, added a further element: the physiological. He argued when humans live in a state of uncertainty and anxiety, it...