There has been another very welcome upsurge in subscriptions, and I would like to welcome and thank all new subscribers, especially those who have thrown some money into the little bowl, or paid for coffees. I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually.

The last essay provoked a lot of comments (people had difficulty replying occasionally, for reasons I haven’t been able to fathom) but also a few acerbic exchanges. Vigorous disagreement (“I think that’s quite wrong”) is fine, but no personal remarks please. I’m glad to say that I have never had to delete any of the many thousands of comments on this site, and I hope I never have to.

A reminder that these essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here,. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. Yannick has completed another translation into French, which I intend to publish at the weekend. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. Now then:

****************************************

When you write regularly, ideas for future essays develop in the brain like dishes being prepared in a restaurant. At any one time I have three or four ideas circulating in my head, usually in the form of complete draft paragraphs or even pages, looking for a structure to bring them together. I do what my brain tells me, and it informs me that next week I’ll write about Ukraine once more, on the subject of victory conditions, but although some of the bits and pieces are ready they are not yet in any coherent shape. So this week, when I’m travelling and pressed for time. I’m going to try to bring together some other assorted bits and pieces on two related subjects that my brain was working on separately, but which it now wants to bring together. OK, you are the boss.

It all results from the fact that I have written unsparingly for several years now about the decline of institutions and political systems. I hope I haven’t been too doom-and gloom—after all, understanding the problem is the first priority—but by the same token I haven’t said a great deal about what might be done, beyond some thoughts about maximising the freedoms we have left. So I would like to bring some heterogeneous ideas and speculations together now, under two linked headings, in the hope that people might be inspired to look further into some of them. I disclaim, as usual, any pretensions to guruhood, or even special expertise. Nonetheless.

I’m going to address two subjects. One is the need I see to re-establish genuinely valuable and legitimate hierarchies, in a system which theoretically despises them, but which is actually riddled with hierarchies in semi-covert form. The other is about how individuals can develop the capacity to live and work in such hierarchies, and to make themselves, and thus their communities, more resilient. The links between the two will become obvious as we go.

I will start with the first subject, because little if anything has been written about it. The second, by contrast, consists largely of piles of junk cluttering up bookshelves, Youtube and the Internet in general, and is generally produced by people seeking your money.

“Hierarchy” is a word that is scarcely pronounced these days except in tones of scornful dismissal. Scarcely a week goes by that I do not start to read an angry piece by an Internet pundit, condemning one of their enemies for “trying to-re-establish traditional hierarchies” of X or Y, even while, for the most part, respecting and even enforcing hierarchies of which they themselves are part. The origin of the word is Greek, although its exact meaning is disputed: it seems to have been coined by that fascinating and mysterious figure Pseudo-Dionysius some time in the sixth century AD, and to have meant something like “the order of divine things.” So it was applied to the various orders of Angels in Heaven, and to the organisation of Church on Earth. Neither of which helps us very much.

Hierarchy is to do with precedence between two or more individuals or institutions. It may be formal and trivial. So Business Class travellers have an easier time at airports and board first. Heads of State have precedence over Heads of Government: something that always infuriated Mrs Thatcher. In many areas, people with qualifications are given deference over those without, and in certain societies (though less so than in the past) different groups have a different status. In Africa your tribal or clan status can be more important than your formal status in an organisation. In some Asian societies, age and experience automatically give you higher status than a younger person.

For most of human history, the idea that some people had an inherent hierarchical superiority to others was so obvious it went without saying. In societies where monarchs were believed to be appointed by gods, or even to be gods themselves, not only was their personal position at the top of the hierarchy, but all their blood relations or relations by marriage were near the top as well. In the Europe of the eighteenth century it was obvious to all except a few radicals that there were elite social classes and the common people, and that the difference between them was as much biological as social and financial. (Think about phrases like “high born,” or the significance of Anderson’s story of The Princess and the Pea.) Apologists for races and civilisations have placed their own group at the top of a hierarchical order throughout history. This has even taken place within societies: the mad scientists of apartheid actually divided the country into twenty-five racial groups, in a hierarchical chain of rights and privileges.

When we talk about a hierarchy, though, we usually talk about a formal or semi-formal structure in which, broadly, instructions come from above, and those above have more privileges. Hierarchies have come in for a great deal of criticism since the 1960s, especially by those outside or near the bottom of them, but in practice they seem indispensable to organisations working correctly, and to anything getting done. The necessary condition, of course, is that such hierarchies are effectively and fairly organised and managed, and I will come back to that point in a moment.

Hierarchies are the most effective means yet devised for running organisations and societies, and they have been adopted by every known civilisation: indeed, it is hard to imagine what an alternative could be. The essential characteristic of hierarchies, however, is not power or dominance, but rather specialisation. Hierarchy enables tasks to be allocated to the right level. A properly functioning hierarchy enables a great deal of business to be dealt with at lower or intermediate levels, in accordance with direction from above, so as to free up people at the top of the hierarchy for a few key issues. The fewer the levels of a hierarchy, the more that people at the top are likely to be drowned in work, since the human instinct is always to pass problems upwards when you can. (I met a reasonably senior person from the RAND corporation some years ago, who had fifty people directly reporting to him. He had, of course, no time for his own job.)

Left to themselves, most institutions and societies develop hierarchies of this pragmatic type, and so military forces and national governments all over the world have organised themselves in remarkably similar ways . The problem arises, as it arose in the West from the 1980s, when management theorists are let in to “reorganise,” and make the existing organisations “more efficient.” To take the example of the British Public Service, which I know best, there were originally extremely clear lines of control and responsibility, and considerable delegation to quite junior levels. In every major area, there were highly experienced people getting towards the end of their careers, to whom you would bring problems you couldn’t solve at your level. They would listen to you, think a little, and say “OK, I’ll talk to X,” or, “draft me something and I’ll write to the department of Y.” The point, of course, was the such people had done your job or one similar, in the past, as well as other jobs at higher level, their judgement was more developed than yours and they knew more than you did. This is what happens when people design pragmatic systems for themselves.

Like all good systems, this was one that had to be destroyed, and by the time I fled the British system it was effectively impossible to know who worked for whom or who was responsible for what. In particular (and this is a common problem internationally) people were brought in or promoted for wider political reasons, such that the person you notionally worked for knew less than you did, and had less experience and less useful judgement. This is the point at which hierarchies start to collapse and die, and nothing gets done. Now notice that I am not talking here about dynamic visionary leaders: if anything, we have had too many of those, or at least of people who fancied themselves in that role, and the results have not always been positive. I mean the calm, thoughtful, everyday type of leadership, the ability to bring order out of chaos, and then say “we’ll do this.”

And in reality, such undramatic hierarchies exist in every situation in life. You are with a group of people on a trip and one of you speaks the local language or knows the place well. Somebody knows how to fix a car, sort out a recalcitrant computer or find their way home when you are lost. You do what the cabin crew tell you on an aeroplane, you park where you are told to at a large event. Otherwise, things would not get done and life would be impossible. If we like, we can put on our post-modernist hat, and call these patterns of dominance and hierarchy. But the alternative is what, exactly?

Well, we can see what happens when hierarchies based on knowledge and experience are destroyed. Other hierarchies replace them, of which the most prevalent today are hierarchies of suffering and victimhood. These days, our position in the hierarchy often depends not on competence or experience but on weakness. Or rather, it depends on us belonging to a recognised victim group, led by individuals who can claim to represent us and our interests. Under certain circumstances this may give us access to preferential treatment, or to positions of power and influence. But for the mass of a victim groups, or a “marginalised minority,” this status brings no actual advantages. Rather, for the politics of “marginalised groups” to function, the groups have to remain marginalised, otherwise there is no money to be made, and no power gained, through intervening in their favour.

As a policy, it is therefore remarkably conservative, and does not so much benefit “marginalised” groups, as make them more effective raw material for identity entrepreneurs. It also shields their self-appointed leaders, and often their worst elements, from criticism. Thus, several members of M. Mélenchon’s political circus in France have instructed women from minority ethnic groups in the country not to report abuse or rape within their own communities, because that would lead to “stigmatisation” of these same communities, and “strengthen the extreme Right.” Well, Fatima, that’s your place in the hierarchy settled, then.

We are going through a period where what matters in organisations is not their effectiveness, but their politically aesthetic image. So long as you don’t care whether an organisation functions efficiently or not, then you can develop a hierarchy based on any criteria of identity that you like. And that hierarchy will naturally pursue its identity interests, because that is what human beings do. The problem arises when an organisation has to do something, and it turns out that there is no necessary correlation, or even connection, between a hierarchy based on identity and one based on competence: indeed, they exist to do different things.

The other characteristic of modern hierarchies is a massive increase in unofficial hierarchical contacts and relations. ( I say “increase” because it’s not a new problem, and unofficial personal linkages between individuals, based on education or social origins, do exist even in the most merit-based organisations.) Thus, the previous dominance of academic staff in institutions was not without its problems, but in recent years both administrators, often selected and self-reproducing on an identity basis, as well as students themselves, have started to dominate, and under certain circumstances, to tell academic staff what to do. This merely illustrates the point that hierarchy is a basic function of all societies, and that if you try to abolish formal hierarchies and traditional preference and deference, then others will simply take their place.

Under this heading, and before I attempt a summing up and a transition to the next part of the argument, let me mention one more hierarchical problem: that of ideas. The fashion since the 1960s has been to position oneself as “anti-system,” “independent,” or these days “challenging the accepted discourse.” Indeed, it’s quite hard to find a writer these days who would actually admit to expounding the “accepted discourse”, whatever we understand it to be. Writers compete to give their Internet sites the most combative and dissident names possible. (Well, OK, not me.) This is only really possible because of the extremely low barriers to entry for writing on the Internet. This means not only that it is easy to do physically—you can set up a Substack in an hour—but more importantly that nobody is inhibited from writing about a subject just because they are completely ignorant of it. I don’t mean that they hold minority opinions, which will always be the case, but rather that they are ignorant of basic facts.

Thus, what is starting to be called the “Google effect,” not only in universities, but also among the general population. The Internet has brought about a radical change in the hierarchy of information and judgement, from the best attested previously, to the most popular and controversial today. Anyone familiar with a given field of study knows that there will be a hierarchy of theories and interpretations, based essentially on what is collectively thought reasonable by experts on the subject. To take a well-known example, there isn’t and there cannot be, a consensus on the causes of the First World War, not least because it depends how you define “cause” and even “war.”’ But an interpretation such as that in Christopher Clarke’s magisterial work would probably be accepted by most experts in the field. By contrast, interpretations based on commercial rivalry (eg that between Britain and Germany) would be regarded as reflecting minority and rather old-fashioned views. And conspiracy theories involving the City of London or the Freemasons would be banished to the fringes of the discourse. Now note that in such a complicated field there are never going to be explanations that are entirely “true” or “false.” Dominant theories will be subject to debate and qualification, and the intellectual consensus will change over time, as it did, for example, after 1991, when Soviet documents about the Second World War became available for there first time. But anyone with a serious interest in an area of study knows this, and in principle can understand the hierarchical distance between a book on Egyptian history by a qualified individual who has worked with texts and excavated tombs, and a book claiming the Great Pyramid was a beacon for flying saucers.

The Internet abolishes this hierarchical distance, and ideas are marketed in competition with each other like soap-powder, and often with the same sort of techniques. Thus, Google may return an extreme fringe theory as its first result, and indeed with a little patience it can be made to disgorge an extreme fringe theory, but one that is emotionally satisfying, on virtually any topic. Yet curiously, it also imposes a conformity and a hierarchy of its own. Thus, almost all of those who claim to write “dissenting” or “independent” articles on Gaza or Ukraine ultimately write versions of the same thing, and in general they quote the same hierarchically superior “dissident” authorities, themselves also saying much the same thing. This is inevitable: if you know nothing about Gaza and have never been to the Middle East you will search for someone of higher status, who does show some familiarity with the issues, and copy what they say.

We can now, perhaps, suggest a few interim conclusions. Society depends to a large degree on the successful functioning of institutions and groups. Some form of hierarchy, whether of qualifications, expertise, experience, judgement or otherwise, has to operate effectively if this is to be the case. People have to respect and have confidence in those who are further up the hierarchy, and have to accept that they have earned their position there. Hierarchies based purely on power, or on birth or wealth, generally do not endure for very long when confronted with challenges, whereas hierarchies based on respect do. However, over the last couple of generations, hierarchies have become progressively less functional, through deliberate attempts to destroy them, through politicisation, and through the progressive institutionalisation of the adolescent desire not to take instructions from anyone. The result has not been the abolition of hierarchies (since that would be impossible), nor the abolition of organisations, but the creation of substitute hierarchies of identity, wealth and ideology, which may inspire fear, but cannot inspire respect.

This is the biggest single reason why institutions today are dysfunctional, and why paying their workers more or increasing their size and budget would not be enough to halt the decline. Too many institutions have now rotted from the inside, and they have forfeited respect, and are not taken seriously by those they are intended to serve, or even by those who work in them. If that argument is accepted, then the necessary conclusion is that institutional reform, for all that it might be desirable, simply will not be possible at scale. What will have to happen is the creation, or re-creation, of traditional pragmatic hierarchies of competence and character. Now it’s important to understand that such hierarchies would not be fixed and invariable. A group of people intending to grow food together would have a different hierarchy from the same group trying to set up their own generator, or to arrange education for their children when the state could no longer provide it.

The problem, of course, is that the cultural conditioning of the last few generations is entirely against this. We are all rebels, all individualists, all challenging the dominant narrative, all free to make up our minds about what we will do. And then our washing machine breaks down and we cannot repair it, because such skills are no longer generally distributed as they once were. For ideological reasons, children are no longer taught at school the life-skills they will need as adults, and so as adults they are lost. If you know people with children in their twenties, you’ve probably heard this already (“she called me to ask how to cook spaghetti!” said one mother to me not long ago.)

The first requirement, and it’s a massive one, is to put our own Egos aside for a moment, and to actually accept that some people know more about certain things than we do, and that we should therefore take their advice and follow their suggestions. This is problematic, because our entire culture is dedicated to the worship of the Ego, and to nurturing, protecting and strengthening it. We are taught that relations of any kind are examples of domination and hierarchy, which, logically, we can only escape by not having any. We are taught that we are always right and that any bad things that happen to us, or any unhappiness at all, is the fault of others. We are taught that our Egos are so delicate they must be protected from words and acts that could induce trauma. For example, I was recently in a University which had posters everywhere threatening those who told inappropriate jokes with disciplinary action because “words hurt people.” This is nonsense, of course, since words only have the meanings we give them. (If this were not true then insults in a language you didn’t speak would be as powerful as those in a language you did.)

Even in today’s world, this Ego-based approach can’t last. (“Sorry, dear, I don’t know how to mend the leaking tap. Can I have an accommodation?”) The statistics for unhappiness, psychiatric problems and suicide are clear about that. But the whole thrust of these essays, is that we are moving into a world which will be increasingly uncomfortable for all of us, not just the young, and we are going to have to adapt psychologically, just as much as practically. If humans are to survive they will have to re-learn how to organise themselves in groups, respect knowledge and expertise, and follow genuine leaders, not just the people who shout loudest. This is going to be extremely difficult, and at a large scale—which I’m not concerned with here—it will certainly risk the rise of demagogues and charlatans.

Nonetheless, as things begin to fall apart, the individual will have to be prepared to give way to the collective, the individualist will have to be prepared to collaborate with and follow others, if anything is to get done. This is difficult for a society in which we are taught that the individual is the centre of all things, and that any attempt to de-centre individuals can result in psychological damage. But just imagine, for a moment, that you live in a ten-story apartment block of forty apartments, and a freak storm, or simple power generation and distribution problems, mean that your area has no electrical power for lighting, heating or communication. The streets outside are jammed, you receive no news from elsewhere, you can’t even raise or lower the electric blinds. What do you do, Or to be more precise how would you begin to decide what to do? I have a horrible feeling that large numbers of people today will simply fall into a near-catatonic state, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. After all, our society may encourage individualism, but in a solipsistic fashion: I am the only person who matters, and everything is seen in terms of my wants and needs. Society actually discourages self-reliance today, and instead tells us that we are weak and have to engage others to do things on our behalf. So what would we actually do?

Well, it’s easy to fall into clichés about stiff upper lips and stoicism, development of character and willpower, and so forth. But even if that kind of mentality were desirable—and that can be debated—the kind of society that produced it no longer exists. The sort of challenges previous generations faced—war, occupation, hunger, forced movement of populations—would simply cause current societies to fall apart, and the structures and ideologies that sustained people in times of crisis generally no longer exist. Rather I want to discuss a few simpler, everyday initiatives, some of which seem to be under way already.

One of those ideologies that helped people to survive in the past was, of course, organised religion. (Note “organised” in this context.) There are signs here and there in the West of a return to organised religion, and it is obviously possible that this could help to bind societies together once more, and strengthen individuals and make them more resilient. But there is a basic question here, for all that it is seldom asked: do we treat religion as something objectively true, or as a combination of humanistic philosophy and lifestyle choice?

Hardly anybody today treats religion as though it might be objectively true, and that includes most churches. From the 1960s, Christian churches attempted to become “relevant” to a changing society, by adapting to the fashionable ideas of others, rather than by converting others to their own ideas. This is curious, really, since it amounts to eternity adapting itself to time, rather than time to eternity, which would be more logical. Thus, discussions about religion today neglect almost entirely the content and reality of religious doctrine, and focus on superficial and aesthetic issues. I’ve never actually heard anybody say “The Vatican failed to properly investigate child abuse by priests, therefore Jesus did not rise from the dead on the third day,” but that’s pretty much all that contemporary discussion about religion amounts to. Indeed, I would argue that the precipitate decline in religious observance since the 1960s has little to do with any supposed triumph of materialism and science (see below), and much more to do with our Ego-based society, which produces “independent” individuals who don’t want “to be told what to think.” The very idea of a supernatural power creating the world, infinitely wiser and more powerful and ineffable than we can ever understand, is just too much for our Egos to cope with, so we reject it.

The problem, of course, is that all we have to replace it (since political ideologies have disappeared too) is a joyless, pointless, mechanistic view of the universe, based on nineteenth-century materialism. Even discounting the body-blows that science has taken recently over Covid (which to be fair are primarily related to the institutional rot I described earlier) scientific materialism has been in a bad way for some time, and its citadels have been falling progressively. But whilst the experience of being a member of a Church and participating in its life does seem to be positive and helpful and lead to happiness and better health, it’s questionable whether conventional Christianity actually has the energy and the conviction left to give people an alternative, transcendent, framework for understanding the world. If you want to be told that immigration is good and you should be more tolerant of transexuals, well, you don’t need to go to church to hear that. And whilst cults and gurus will no doubt prosper, there is a lack of organisation among other more respectable spiritual tendencies, not to mention open war between many of them.

Which means we are increasingly thrown back on our own resources to stay sane. This is not necessarily disastrous, because there are things we can do, and more than that, our own sanity helps others as well. So let’s conclude with a few thoughts on what is possible.

I take as a point of departure that we need to be better equipped to handle the stresses of the world we live in now, since those stresses can only get worse in the future. Our society, especially mediated through the Internet and social media encourages just about every negative tendency imaginable, from destroying attention-spans to undermining concentration, to responding instantly to transient stimuli and deliberately seeking out those stimuli that give us quick emotional fixes. Now I’m not here to tell you to get off social media or declutter your digital life. Others have done that much better than I could. But if the beginning of wisdom is understanding the problem, then there are a couple of interesting experiments anyone can perform. One is simply to see how long you can sit without moving a muscle. It sounds easy, but experiments aimed at getting people to sit still for two minutes generally show that the average time is 10-20 seconds. And of course physical and mental restlessness feed off and reflect each other. A parallel experiment is to try to keep your mind on the same subject for more than a few seconds. In the modern world, hardly any of us can do it without training. Look at this cup, they say, concentrate on that. Ah yes, cup, coffee, didn’t have breakfast this morning, too late to bed last night, arguing with my spouse, wants me to leave this job but I told her we can’t afford it, what was the question again?

It’s not surprising, then, that people have asked what the value of all this mental activity is. What, after all, do we gain from being permanently aroused, permanently ready to take offence, permanently providing a running commentary in our heads about everything we see and hear? What difference does it even make? It makes us tired, it makes us angry, it makes us upset and even despairing, and of course it achieves nothing. Or rather, it gives us the illusion of achieving something, and thus comforts our Ego. Shouting and screaming at the television or an Internet feed, joining in some Internet pile-on against a popular hate-figure vicariously associates our Ego with the subject and the outcome, like football supporters cheering on their team. But in the end, it doesn’t make any difference. Indeed, it actually makes things worse, because the anger you feel cannot, almost by definition, be directed against those who deserve it: it is projected against your friends, family and colleagues instead.

Once we understand that we are not obliged to react angrily or emotionally to things we cannot control or even influence, life becomes easier, and we become an easier person for others to deal with. We have, of course, to deal with emotional blackmail of the kind that says “you aren”t screaming and shouting against Gaza so you obviously don’t care,” with a response like “and what difference would it make if I did scream and shout?” More widely, we begin to understand something that the Buddha taught, but is found elsewhere. You are not your thoughts, you are only that which observes your thoughts. This is self-evidently true, since otherwise, when you cease to think, or when you sleep, you would cease to exist. Ironically, psychologists are the first to confirm this, since we aren’t even conscious of what we think for the most part, and much of our life is controlled by forces we are not even conscious of. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to accept this, but in this, as in other cases, the Buddha seems to have been right.

Once we understand that we are not our thoughts, we can use various techniques to make ourselves calmer, more balanced, and better able to help ourselves and others. There are, of course, people who object to this. We should not, they say, use meditation or mindfulness or other techniques to reconcile ourselves to modern life, we should revolt against it. This seems to me to be quite misguided, not least because many of these techniques, which I’ll touch on briefly, are far more likely to open your eyes to reality than they are to drug you into insensibility. After all, if you have a difficult boss or a difficult interview, wouldn’t you want to be as calm and focused as possible? But if people want to argue that it’s better to be unhappy, to make others unhappy and to engage in pointless angry gestures against targets you cannot influence, well, help yourself.

We are talking here about disciplining and quieting the mind, improving concentration and ultimately recognising that a lot of what we call “me” has no objective existence, but is just a bunch of conditioned reflexes and accumulated habits. “I” cannot therefore hurt by things I hear and see, because there is no “I.” This doesn’t lead to passivity though: finding a space between the riot of thoughts and emotions that we confuse with a “self” actually liberates enormous amounts of energy for doing things. (The experience of asking “where is the ‘I,” can be transformative, if also disturbing for some.) The pragmatic value of meditation is that from time to time the mind quietens, and instead of squinting to see through the dark glass obscured by our thoughts and emotions, we see more clearly, and unlike Paul we don’t have to wait for the end of Time, either. Indeed, putting the seething ego aside for a moment, and its incessant regrets and resentment about the past and its fears about the future, enables us actually to see the present for a change, which must surely be a good thing.

Some go further, and follow mystics of different faiths into a sense of the unreality of the self, of that “self” as just a collection of thoughts and feelings that pass and disappear, which has no continuity or objective existence. Indeed, non-duality presupposes precisely that we don’t have an independent existence as such: everything is ultimately just vibrations in the universal consciousness, everything is “empty” in the sense that it has no inherent qualities at all. You may find such ideas either fascinating or frightening, but there is much pragmatic value in at least exploring them.

But I’ll leave the substantive discussion there: I can always go back to it if enough people are interested. But what is key, I think, is that the Age of Ego, the Age of Me, is ending anyway, because it is driving our civilisation mad, and it needs to end perhaps more quickly than it otherwise would if anything is to be salvaged. The Age of Me excludes by definition consideration of that which is Not Me, and indeed promotes hostility, suspicion and fear, as we come to see others as a threat to our own Ego. Western Individualism, as it has developed slowly over the last couple of centuries, and at breakneck pace over the last fifty to sixty years, is not going to enable us to survive the future that is coming, unless we have the courage to tell the whiny little Ego to get stuffed for once. Or as TS Eliot put it more decorously

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to sit still.