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About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:
Piketty was referring to "primogeniture," the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.
Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's "great powers" stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a "great house."
After a couple generations' worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn't get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.
For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world's chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they'd claimed as their property in order to carry on the "eternal" tradition of every son starting his own fortune.
It's a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century's defining events. That's why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.
Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:
Perhaps the reason Piketty's primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that "all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is":
In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams
This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago:
Indeed, this happened so fast that many people (including many Europeans) haven't even noticed that it happened. Back in December, when I was at CCC in Hamburg, I talked to a bunch of European activists, close watchers of the Commission and the Parliament, who were completely convinced that Europe would never spurn the fossil fuel sector – despite the fact that it had already happened.
Indeed, it may be that intimate familiarity with European politics is a liability when things change. Spend enough time observing up close how supine European politicians and their Eurocrats are and you may find yourself so reflexively conditioned to view them as spineless corporate lackeys and thus unable to notice when they finally dig up a vertebra or two.
Smart financiers are familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Change happens. Eternal verities might be fifteen minutes older than you. Pink used to be the color of ferocious masculinity, whereas blue was so girly as to be practically titular:
Real talk: I have serious, debilitating chronic pain. One of the reasons I'm so prolific is that the only time I stop noticing how much I hurt is when I'm lost in work (compartmentalization is a hell of a drug, and while it's not always healthy, it has its upsides). Ask anyone with chronic pain and they'll tell you that treating pain eventually becomes your hobby, a bottomless well of esoteric dives into various "modalities" of pain treatment.
Thus it is that I've found myself on one or two psychologists' couches, learning about different mental approaches to living with constant pain. One of the most useful pieces of advice I've gotten was to attend closely to how my pain changes – how it ebbs and flows. The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether. And even if it doesn't, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while.
Things change.
Our current crop of cowardly, weak appeasers – in Congress, in Parliament, in the European Parliament – have, at various times (and very recently), found their spines. The factions within them that militated for the kind of bold action that might meet this moment have, from time to time, won the day. We have lived through total transformations in our politics before, and that means we might live through them again:
Sure, it's easy and tempting to assume that our leaders will always suck as hard as they suck now. But latent in that assumption is that the leaders who presided over big, incredible transformations were exceptional people. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but I'm here to tell you, ten minutes' worth of research into the biographies of the "heroes" of our history will reveal them to have been every bit as capable of monstrousness, cowardice, cruelty and pig-ignorant bigotry as any of today's rotating cast of fascist goons:
The question isn't merely "How do we elect better leaders?" It's "How do we make our leaders follow us?" Today's Democrats are unserious quislings who keep bringing a squirt-gun to a mass-casualty assault-rifle spree-shooting. How do we terrorize these cowards into rising to the moment? If we want Congressional Democrats to form a Nuremburg Caucus and start holding hearings on who they're going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we're going to have to drive them to it.
And we can! The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren't braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today – they were more afraid of their base.
Things change.
Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:
They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be "just don't buy any of it."
But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:
And of course, there's some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to "which car should I buy?" was "don't buy a car, they're all unsafe at any speed."
Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:
Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn't an eternal verity. It didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's about ten seconds old:
Our eternals are all ephemerals. The idea that we should tax capital gains at half the rate of wages? It was practically invented yesterday. You know who thought we should tax all income at the same rate? That noted Bolshevik, Ronald fuckin' Reagan:
It's so easy to slip into the habit of thinking that nothing will change, that our politicians will never fear us more than they love the money and power they get from catering to the Epstein class. I'm not denying that this is how they view the world today, but there was a time in living memory when it wasn't true. If it changed before, it can change again:
Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023.
Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed.
Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either.
The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!”
Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you.
He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”
-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023
Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023.
Thus: Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no alternative,” a polite way of saying “Resistance is futile,” or, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
This is inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change. It’s the opposite of science fiction. As a science fiction writer, my job is to imagine alternatives. “There is no alternative” is a demand pretending to be an observation: “stop trying to think of an alternative.”
At its best, science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s an important exercise, maybe the important exercise.
It’s the method by which we seize the means of computation for the betterment of the human race, not the immortal, rapacious colony organisms we call “limited liability companies,” to whom we represent inconvenient gut-flora, and which are rendering the only planet in the universe capable of sustaining human life unfit for human habitation.
-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023
Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023.
The human condition is…not good. We’re in the polycrisis, a widening gyre of climate emergency, inequality, infrastructure neglect, rising authoritarianism and zoonotic plagues.
But that’s not the bad part. Stuff breaks. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not up for debate. Things fall apart. Assuming nothing will break doesn’t make you an optimist — it makes you a danger to yourself and others. “Nothing will go wrong” is how we get “let’s not put any lifeboats on the Titanic.”
Let me say, “to hell with optimism and pessimism.” Optimism and pessimism are just fatalism in respectable suits.
Optimism is the belief that things will get better, no matter what we do.
Pessimism is the belief that things will get worse, no matter what we do.
Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things.
The belief that nothing will change — that nothing can change — is the wrecker’s most powerful weapon. After all, if you can convince people that nothing can be done, they won’t try to do anything.
-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023
Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023.
Science fiction doesn’t predict. No one can predict. If we could predict the future, then what we did wouldn’t matter, because the future was coming no matter what.
In the Inferno, Dante sentenced the fortune-tellers to a pit where their heads were twisted around 180', so they forever looked behind them as they trudged naked through waist-deep molten feces, goaded on by demons’ whips.
Dante let the fortune-tellers off easy.
Science fiction writers are not fortune-tellers.
Science fiction does not predict.
Science fiction does the opposite of predicting.
Science fiction contests.
Science fiction demands we always seek out alternatives, where we find something far better than fatalistic optimism: we find hope.
Hope is the belief that if we make a change that betters our circumstances, that from our new vantage point we will espy a previously obscured next step that will bring us closer to a better future.
Hope is how we’ll get through the polycrisis.
-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023
