The Wizards of Ozymandias

It is the business of the future to be dangerous. . . . The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

—Alfred North Whitehead

The study of chaos informs us that outcomes of complex systems are unpredictable, due to the inconstant and interconnected variables that underlie our behavior. Historians offer glimpses of the factors that have contributed to the lives and deaths of past civilizations, views always attended by the caveat of uncertainty that inheres in complexity. The tendencies that are found in causal relationships often lead us to conclusions regarding outcomes that do not materialize. Smoking three packs of cigarettes per day greatly increases the likelihood of a person developing lung cancer or emphysema, but such results are not inevitable. So, too, is the historian’s effort to retrace Ariadne’s cord often hindered by unexpected or unidentified influences.

So cautioned, it is nonetheless evident that Western Civilization in general—including the American version in particular—is in a very turbulent—and, perhaps, terminal condition. The dynamic forces at work on both the structures and processes of this once-vibrant culture go beyond the economic dislocations, the disruptions of social movements, political upheavals, wars, and other major fluctuations long associated with the history of any culture. The tumultuous and entropic state of our modern world has eroded the very core of what it means to be civilized.

To focus on Western Civilization—or any of its national subcategories—runs the risk of overlooking the global consequences of either the collapse or major transformation of this culture. Our world is dominated by highly-structured, interconnected political and corporate-state institutions, whose coercive powers extend far beyond American and European boundaries. The institutional order depends upon the existence of social conflict. At the very least, this division consists of the subordination of individual interests to collective systemic purposes. It also finds expression in the clash of institutional undertakings. In either case, it is evident that any significant changes in organizational thinking or behavior will affect all of mankind, including so-called “third world” countries.

As I have emphasized throughout this book, civilizations are created by individuals and are destroyed by collectives. As historians have shown, the collective means of destruction begin with the institutionalization of the systems that have created and sustained the culture. The organizational forms that were employed to generate the values that made the civilization productive and life-enhancing, become their own raison d’etre, superseding the processes that brought the forms into being. The liberty of individuals to act upon the world—which, in turn, depend upon such values as private ownership of property, respect for contracts, and the idea that societies exist for the enhancement of individual well-being—came into conflict with the structured systems that insisted upon their primacy over the affairs of mankind. The state, corporations, churches, universities, communications systems, and other organizations combined to condition and reinforce the minds of individuals to accept the formalized direction of their lives.

A complete assessment of organizational systems must include an analysis of all costs and benefits of such practices, not just those upon which institutional interests focus. Collective undertakings grounded in coercion tend to dismiss certain costs and presume non-existent benefits. The utilitarian doctrine is premised upon this thinking, with the preferences of the “greatest number” prevailing at the expense of others. Political systems, by their nature, impose externalities upon some in order to benefit those who enjoy the use of force. By contrast, in a marketplace system—premised upon the inviolability of property boundaries and contracts—costs and benefits are incurred/enjoyed by persons willing to invest their own resources. The presumption that a given political program provides a “social benefit” smuggles into the equation what is often not true, namely, that most people value such ends and, because of “free-rider” tendencies, are unwilling to pay for them. One sees this in so-called “public goods” arguments. While the free-rider motive can exist—particularly where large numbers of persons are involved—it is too often assumed that the non-participant is trying to enjoy a benefit at the expense of others. What if a neighbor refuses to pay for a street-light on the corner because he doesn’t want the light shining into his bedroom? What is often implicit in the free-rider question is that a “public good” has some objective value to it—rather than it being the subjective value of the more numerous. What is further ignored—in presuming the rightful authority of the state to force some to pay for another’s preferences—is the psychic cost associated with violating one’s will (a topic to be explored in the following pages).

If our culture is to be transformed rather than destroyed, we need to examine our assumptions about how social systems are to be organized. In the course of human history, complex societies—particularly institutions—are a very late invention.1 In our search for systems that sustain life, we should find encouragement in our history. Our ancestors lived without institutional masters, while more recent histories inform us of the destructiveness of our failure to do so. Wars, genocides, depressions, torture, and the general dehumanization of life have been occasioned by our thinking. Self-serving abstractions (e.g., e pluribus unum)—which become ends in themselves—ultimately bring down the civilizations that spawned them. This is where we now stand, living in a hierarchically-structured world in which institutional interests have become so dominant that the state can give to its corporate partners hundreds of billions of dollars with no greater justification than that they are “too big to fail”; that wars can be conducted against any peoples personally selected by an imperial president and for no stated purposes; that torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, widespread surveillance, groping people’s bodies, domestic SWAT teams, and other forms of police brutality can be carried out to reinforce the subservience of the individual to the state; that the creative, life-sustaining energies of the marketplace that have maximized our material well-being can be depressed or destroyed whenever it suits institutional interests to do so; that alternative systems not subject to institutional control (e.g., the Internet) must be regulated, or subjected to a “kill switch” in the hands of the president; and that those who insist upon informing the public of governmental action the state prefers to keep secret will be prosecuted for high-crimes, reveal a civilization nearing its end.

The organizational design of our world is moving from the vertical to the horizontal. Whether our social systems will continue to be dominated by the top-down, externally-directed thinking that serves institutional interests, or by lateral networks of cooperation through which human beings pursue their varied purposes, is the question unfolding before us. The established order frantically and desperately works to reinforce the crumbling foundations of its pyramidal power-structure with increasingly draconian measures. The current “war on terror”—or what I prefer to label the “war to preserve the institutional order”—treats any challenge to the status quo as a “terrorist threat” to be forcibly resisted. In so doing, it has only hastened the collapse of the civilization upon which it has long been a parasite.

The “instrument of expansion” that defines our industrialized culture has been the marketplace, not that corruption going by the name of the “corporate-state.” Perhaps a rational response to the bankruptcy of our present civilization can be found by looking at how the marketplace deals with bankrupt business firms. Instead of government bailouts, the market alternative is to allow the failed firm to collapse, and reinvest its resources in more productive, efficient undertakings. Might we find a parallel alternative for dealing with the collapse of our dysfunctional civilization? Might we search the substance of our culture to rediscover its creative, peaceful, life-enhancing qualities, and reinvest those values in fundamentally transformed social systems?

Is it possible to reverse the collectivizing practices that dehumanize people and destroy civilizations? To regard institutions as ends in themselves necessitates treating the liberty of others to generate destabilizing influences as a threat to be forcibly restrained. For established interests to be insulated from the vicissitudes of change, requires the centralization of authority through the vertical structuring of society. Such a condition, in turn, depends upon men and women adopting collective, mass-minded forms of thinking.

Carl Jung has probably done the best job of analyzing patterns of collective thought and action, and suggesting the means by which individuals may liberate themselves from such destructive influences. In the process he calls “individuation,” people can discover how to withdraw their energies from the collective mindset. As the bulk of our collective inclinations arise from the mobilization of the “dark side” forces common to us all, Jung warns of the dangers of projecting such traits onto others, as well as suppressing them within. Only in acknowledging our own “dark side,” can we separate ourselves from the mass-mindedness that is destroying us.2

The weakening of the institutional order is providing not only the opportunity, but the necessity, for fundamentally transforming our social thinking and practices. If mankind is to avoid destroying itself, we must learn how to decentralize the systems by which we organize ourselves. We must dismantle the engines of violence that reside in collective identities. In the process of doing so, we may be able to generate a new civilization premised on enhancing the lives of people rather than institutions. If we are able to liberate our minds from the chains of collective group-think, we will continue to discover the benefits of decentralized decision-making authority. Organizations that are grounded in cooperation, rather than conflict and coercion; in which voluntarism replaces violence; and in which the values of individual liberty and private ownership of property prevail, are principles that we need to inform our thinking and behavior. The fact that our world is presently experiencing the processes of centrifugation in the form of alternative social systems, provides encouragement.

Rethinking such matters might begin with our redefining the nature of a creative and peaceful society of free people living in liberty. Perhaps the words “civilization” and “civilize” should be replaced by “humanization” and “humanize.” “Civilization” has too much of the political and other formal institutional connotations.

To better understand the nature of this social transformation, we might return to Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of the “process of Creative Destruction.” Contrary to the status quo purposes that define the institutional order’s insistence upon being an “end in itself,” creative change depends upon the transformation of existing systems and practices. The vibrancy that characterizes and sustains life is incompatible with an institutional need to keep the world in a steady state, immune from the vicissitudes of uncertainty and variation. The metaphor of the cutting-and-filling function of a river system is recalled.

The new renaissance that seems to be emerging is fostered, in large part, by exponential increases in our capacities for communicating information to one another. Indeed, “information” may prove to be the “instrument of expansion” that will underlie a new culture. Because of the lies, deceptions, and contradictions upon which the institutional order has depended for maintaining its dominance over the rest of humanity, secrecy—along with the twisting of explanations of events—has long been inseparable from establishment policy-making. The final scenes, in both The Wizard of Oz and Animal Farm, in which the victims of systematic bamboozlement finally become aware of the games played at their expense, attest to the liberating powers of information decentralized into the hands of individuals.

We must recall how so much of the substance and the epochs of Western Civilization arose in the years following Gutenberg’s contribution to the expansion of information: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. With even greater modern technological capacities for marshaling, analyzing, and communicating information, how prolific a culture might our children and grandchildren enjoy? They might also discover how to live in ways in which the material values for human well-being become fully integrated with the spiritual, emotional, and passionate dimensions that provide a deeper sense of meaning to life than an institutionally-dominant world can provide.

3Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, p. 198.

4C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. by R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX, 2nd ed., 1968), pp. 275–354.

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 4If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”