Civilisation Is Failing Because Failure Is Profitable
Technocratically mediated civilisation increasingly conducts political discussion through institutions, platforms, professional expertise and commercial systems that determine which problems can be recognised, how they can be described, and which responses are considered legitimate. Political disagreement is permitted, encouraged and profitably amplified, provided it remains intelligible within the arrangements already in place. Dissent that challenges those arrangements is routinely translated into familiar ideological disputes, administrative problems or market opportunities. The result is a political culture remarkably proficient at reproducing disagreement and remarkably incompetent at addressing its underlying causes. Social instability becomes commercially productive, institutional failure generates demand for further intervention, and political conflict sustains the dark satanic machinery that profits from it. We have developed an extraordinary capacity to discuss everything except the conditions that make our discussions so reliably futile.
The deeper problem is that the system’s continuity depends upon its inability to describe itself adequately. Its institutions, technologies, commercial incentives and political languages are mutually dependent, reproducing the distinctions through which they recognise problems and legitimise solutions. Consequential dissent becomes unintelligible because it challenges not merely particular decisions but the relationships that determine what counts as reasonable, possible or even meaningful. The failure of description is thus productive: it preserves the conditions under which existing power, profit and authority continue to circulate. Civilisation becomes increasingly unable to confront its existential problems because doing so would require transforming the very arrangements through which it maintains itself. We have constructed a civilisation in which recognising the problem threatens the business model, while perpetuating the problem keeps everyone gainfully employed. Unfortunately, the biosphere has no obligation to respect our revenue projections.
