The perils of certainty in an uncertain world

 

“This is this. This is this!” Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter. But how helpful is Michael’s certainty? After all, even though a bullet is indeed a bullet, the USA lost the Vietnam war after firing far more bullets than their enemy.

Introduction

This article examines how decisions are investments in the future, and how consequent systemic inflexibility can lead to very ugly outcomes as we double- and triple-down on prior investments when refusing to read the writing on the wall. It posits wisdom, that unquantifiable, uncertain phenomenon, as the main ingredient needed for best navigating this inevitable pattern.

This is an article of two halves joined together by an examined thought. We begin with a look at the long-term challenges of industrial war, currently a hot topic for NATO and very relevant to US dreams of perpetuating its cherished unipolar power, and then proceed to revisit some issues surrounding money that I have begun to reconsider.

Bogged down in the world The West built

Power can paint you into a corner as surely as any lack of foresight can. Because of various complex realities pertaining to munitions manufacture, The West is now in a bind in its Ukrainian misadventure. Below in list form the considerable challenges of long-term shell manufacture as recently expounded by Dr Jack Watling in The Daily Telegraph (hat tip to Alexander Mercouris for discussing Dr Watling’s article):

1. Ukraine’s rate of shell consumption is many times higher than the West’s shell-manufacturing capacity: the West’s defence industries are thus in the spotlight
2. NATO has been hollowed out since end of Cold War
3. Shell manufacture consists of five separate processes, with explosives production being highly demanding: expensive, significant quality-control and regulatory restrictions; each shell must be close to perfect to be safe to use
4. Ukraine uses 17 different artillery types of both NATO and Soviet designs
5. Economics: Shells used in vast quantities during war, but hardly at all in times of peace. Must be produced at slim margins during war to keep cost to state low. Incentive to mass produce shells in peace time thus very low. A shelf life of approx 20 years makes stockpiling shells problematic. Excess capacity requires companies to keep factories idle for decades. It is a serious challenge to keep a skilled work force available in own population, and very demanding to keep machinery in good working order when kept mostly idle, etc.
6. The West’s focus economically is mostly services, having outsourced its manufacturing for the most part. For this and many other reasons, the West is in no position to quickly establish the correct economic conditions to even begin to meet Ukraine’s munitions demand.
7. Defence industry incentivised to manufacture high-profit munitions such as complex, high-tech missiles, fighter jets, etc. (see Mercouris quote immediately below). This over time governs what type of war the West is best at waging. In conjunction with other factors, this slowly evolving character becomes increasingly difficult to change, until it becomes effectively impossible, especially within the timeframe (a few months) required of the West by the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Western ideas of fighting wars with a limited number of highly trained troops operating ultra-sophisticated but extremely expensive weapons [has been] shown to be wrong. […] The West has disastrously over-invested in air power. – Alexander Mercouris (my emphasis). 

In other words, The West has a catastrophically inaccurate perception of Russia, one on which it has gambled its own prosperity and Ukraine’s viability as a nation. Its miscalculation flows directly from prior decisions, which themselves flowed directly from earlier decisions all flowing from the West’s foundational values and assumptions. My argument is that the West has failed to favour wisdom and quality over narrow intelligence and quantity-based ideas of value in a very particular way. It is this deep character trait that has led it to its current crisis.

Russia is fighting a war of attrition, not a war of rapid territorial gains The West prefers, a strategy aided and abetted by domination of the skies and the long-range naval projection of that dominance. Victory in wars of attrition are decided by who has artillery/missile dominance. As Stalin put it: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” This is not troop size or the myth of “human-wave tactics”, this is industrial prowess imposed militarily over an opponent.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is thus an industrial war as much as (or more than) it is a technological war; mass-production of munitions looks to be the decisive factor. It is thus a war that is exposing the West’s inability to keep up with Russia industrially, and therefore more so with China should China choose to engage. Furthermore, the likelihood that Russia deliberately and carefully opted for this strategy without having the industry to back it up must be vanishingly small; the stakes are too high, and Russia is too cautious and conservative a culture to fluff a decision of such existential importance. Ergo, The West has gravely miscalculated its way into a fight it cannot win. The bitter tragedy is that Ukraine is paying the price for The West’s hubristic arrogance. 

For me, then, the Russia-Ukraine war is a darkly brilliant example of how a civilisation’s foundational value system steadily percolates up to control almost everything, slowly setting everything in place in a particular constellation of institutional and business power structures. In the West’s case, value is determined almost entirely by money/price/markets, and is thus essentially associated with number, with quantity, but in the abstract rather than the physical sense. If a thing does not generate a sufficient quantity of money profits, that thing is not worth pursuing. The West’s sense of what it can and should do is therefore governed almost entirely by pure number-quantity considerations, where numbers can be increased to infinity (and beyond!). The West’s consequent hubris leads it wildly astray. The real world can only fail to disappoint The West’s heady ambitions.

Such folly is, I believe, less true of Russia and China, who are reflexively wary of market-based price-discovery, seeming to prefer top-down command processes to ameliorate what they likely think of as market instabilities and excess. How effective or wise this is, is not for me to say. Equally, Russia and China favour manufactured hardware, food production, functioning infrastructure etc. as engines of growth, over service and FIRE sectors and the quick, heady money-profits the latter can generate.

Blurring the boundary between quantity and quality

By now you should have noticed an apparent contradiction in my position, best captured perhaps by Stalin’s words: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” The point I’m trying to bring into relief is a subtle one: The West now has a crass relationship with quantity that has been stripped of any wisdom it might once have had. In obsessive pursuit of efficiency of value creation and throughput, The West has outsourced its wisdom to airy automated processes – i.e. The Market – via endlessly proliferating number measurements in the now reflexive certainty there is little more to value than number/money. 

Russia and China appear to me to have a more nuanced and wiser relationship with the complex interplays between quantity and quality, as Stalin’s famous quote implies, as the delicate avenues of Confucian thought suggest. By this I do not mean China and Russia are as wise as it is possible for a culture to be, merely that they appear to me wiser than The West on this point. I take my evidence from how they are better handling their respective relationships with the rest of the world, while acknowledging that another factor could be how historical timing favours their current roles as rising powers benefiting from The West’s decline.

(I’m well aware of the argument that The West is in fact statist and not a ‘purely’ capitalist enterprise – ignoring for the sake of brevity the many subtly different interpretations of ‘market economics’ applied by the West’s different nation states –, but this is not an argument I take especially seriously. I’m more persuaded by reasoning that casts money as a creature of the state, not some neutral, natural emergence from an Adam-Smith-like, trucking and bartering homo economicus. As such, I see the state-market dichotomy as at best misleading. Each entity interferes with the other; they are in my eyes two halves of a very complex symbiont, Siamese Twins eternally joined at the money system, each as concerned with power as the other. Money-as-power is for me the issue of concern, not how ‘purely’ capitalist or socialist or communist a state might be.)

Of course there are also all sorts of international-trade interdependencies adding their dizzying array of complexities – the West as China’s source of insatiable demand, for a simple example. These factors closely tie nations of differing socioeconomic preferences and prowess to broadly similar economic vectors, such that each enjoys and suffers the other’s trade turbulence to varying degrees, with the US still top dog in this regard. That said, a careful decoupling is now underway, as the non-Western world gently frees itself from the West. But as gently as they try, it is of course proving a turbulent process, as all epochal change is. 

But beneath these economic factors, nations can be in competition with one another in more fundamental, culturally reflexive ways, as we currently see between The West and Russia, and between the US and China. These sorts of tensions develop unpredictably in the fine detail, as determined by the character of whichever governments happen to be in charge, and by each permanent state’s geopolitical sensibilities and ideologies. This is extraordinarily complicated territory that is only partly determined by economic considerations. Here things like ideological fervour and personal psychological profiles are very significant factors. Add in the unavoidable rise and fall civilisations are subject to, which determines how venal a civilisation and its states are … well, we can see that wars bubble up from very murky pools, and are of uncertain outcome. There is much more to it than a bullet being a bullet.

How wars shape up and play out is, as we’ve just touched on, determined by a huge number of factors, but relative defence-industry prowess turns out to be, once again, one of them. When the US attacks countries of the industrial calibre of Iraq or Libya, the balance of power favours The West. When it comes to Russia and China as opponents, things are significantly different. With an increasingly senile president ‘in charge’ of the US, with the UK and EU struggling with their own difficult economic realities, with Russia facing significant growth potential domestically and in international trade, it’s clear why unbiased and well-informed observers are increasingly advising The West – with a capitalised “The” I mean essentially the neocon cohort’s influence on the West – to find an exit strategy as quickly as possible. Recent insinuations against the Ukrainian regime in a New York Times article that sets out, very vaguely, how six “pro-Ukrainian” people in a yacht blew up the Nord Stream pipelines constitute a very redolent and, for The West, profoundly embarrassing case in point. 

The panic levels must be at fever pitch among neocons; the story floated in the NYT and repeated only somewhat elsewhere is being treated with chill and biting skepticism in Germany, where the Seymour Hersh article setting out with more detail who more likely lies behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines is making serious waves. These waves are in turn piling pressure on Scholz, who is a weak leader of a fractious coalition government that has pledged fanatical support to what it bills “Ukraine: Europe’s Eastern Bastion of Freedom and Democracy”. If the German people is persuaded that the US was indeed behind the terroristic destruction of its prosperity, it will not bode well at all for NATO, nor for Germany’s decades-long and fervent atlanticism, regardless of how fervent their loyalty is. 

Events are overtaking them. The West’s deeply held certainties are turning soft in its increasingly anxious grip.

Certainly uncertain: the value of value

Let us return to our main theme; decisions are investments in the future, and cumulatively so. In many ways, money and compound interest reflect this fundamental truth. It is why I so repeatedly promote organic wisdom over intelligence, over automation and any other mechanical or computerised system. If we fail to regularly clear out the crap (malinvestments) earned from our less wise decisions – a process that requires wisdom, which itself requires humility –, we face an unmanageably large correction when events overtake us. I believe this is what is happening to The West. 

If we fail to value wisdom, which can be neither measured nor quantified, our chances of catastrophic corrections are far higher. Without wisdom, how can we recognise when best to self-correct? We are in effect leaving it up to fate, and fate can be a brutal task master.

This leads to a question I am increasingly asking myself: Can money as market-based price/value-discovery system indeed be the ‘automated’ or ‘organic’ cultural wisdom some seem to want it to be (“Hand, The Invisible” as Zarlenga wittily put it)? I’m beginning to waver on this point. Does my uncertainty here mean I favour Russian/Chinese over Western cultural reflexes on this issue? No; I favour anarchic solutions that systemically encourage wisdom both individually and thus, necessarily, culturally. On the whole, though, I try to describe what I see without then prescribing the best solutions.

Civilisations are built on certain operating assumptions that must be treated as sacrosanct for its vision of How Things Should Be to be realised. Building a civilisation is far from easy. As a civilisational vision beds down over decades and centuries, so systems become less and less adaptive, more and more institutionalised – in the absence of sufficient cultural wisdom, that is. With insufficient wisdom, what was once clearly the foundational reason for greatness slowly and invisibly becomes the cause of decay. As argued above, one of the West’s foundational assumptions is value as number as money. In seeming direct consequence of this, money now appears to be our god. I see this as one of the root causes of our impending demotion.

So what is money, then? Here is Alan Greenspan talking about the slippery difficulty of pinning it down:

This is not to say that money is not relevant to the economy. For a central bank to say money is irrelevant is the deepest form of sin that such an institution can commit. The problem is that we cannot extract from our statistical database what is true money conceptually, either in the transactions mode or the store-of-value mode. One of the reasons, obviously, is that the proliferation of products has been so extraordinary that the true underlying mix of money in our money and near-money data is continuously changing. – Alan Greenspan, FOMC Transcript, June 2000.

It might seem a small leap to think that holding up a dollar bill and shouting “This is this!” into the face of some good-for-nothing layabout tells us all we know about money. But, just as with bullets, money is more complex than such gestures can capture. We may well like simple certainties, but our preference does not make simple certainties helpfully accurate descriptors. Furthermore, holding up a gold ingot rather than paper money does not really improve the picture. In fact, it might well exacerbate our difficultly in penetrating a fog we refuse to acknowledge. So I believe Greenspan is voicing a generalised exasperation still prevalent among his peers that will in fact never be solved. Money will never be that certain thing our reflexes currently want it to be. 

In the tension between wilful expectation and reality, things are falling apart. Our power structures have become morally moribund and brutish, and thus wholly incapable of navigating the challenges before us with anything remotely approaching wise foresight. Our core value system has steadily selected for icy ambition and greed as required qualities for promotion, rather than wisdom and humility. I see this as a crass quality-versus-quantity issue.

To go over old ground, there can be no objective or falsifiable store of value. Value is relative. The proposition that we can have the objective unit “1 Value” is meaningless. More meaningless, in fact, than looking for discreet millimetres in an object by cutting it open. And while there are indeed institutes of units and measures that set standard specifications on what constitutes a meter, a gram, the speed of light, etc., these measurements become fuzzy at very fine granularity, so even here objectivity has its limits. Leaving that irreducible fuzziness to one side and to return to value, value cannot be specified like weights and measures can. To repeat, unlike meters, value is fundamentally relative; you don’t need to know what inches are to understand and use meters, nor do you need to understand wood and metal.

Were we to attempt to specify 1 Value, it must then equal some other thing, very differently to the standardised “from here to there” of distance. But what other thing should 1 Value equal? 1 Gram of Gold, perhaps? But what do we do with that gram of gold, what utility does it have, what is the purpose, the value of measuring value? 

Well, we would use gold as money to buy things. This means that “1 Value = 1 Gram of Gold” can only have value in a market. In other words, there must first be market-based trading – which includes dynamic price discovery (value discovery!!) – before an effort to fix value to a specific measurement (money) can have any use in the first place. What happens in markets? Truck and barter. Truck and barter cannot happen over metres and kilograms. Look at how gold prices and currency exchanges fluctuate over time. Ergo, neither gold nor any other money can be an ‘objective’ store or measure of value other than we reflexively, culturally believe it to be. And I don’t mean any of this disparagingly, nor that this is some new observation. My point is that Western cultural reflexes seem not to take it sufficiently into account. On the contrary, they lionise money with a stubbornness that blows my brains.

Nevertheless, Greenspan knew we do not understand money. He also knew we are culturally invested in it, and deeply so: “to say money is irrelevant is the deepest form of sin”. Money is a creature of culture, of power, of belief, of symbols. To my eyes, it is a societal magic. It is a part-designed, part-evolved system that guides societal action right across the planet, as if by magic (Hand, The Invisible moves in mysterious ways). It is thus existentially important that money ‘work’ (whatever ‘work’ means), and that it be at least somewhat controllable. With insufficient control, our ability to correct in the face of financial troubles before correction becomes unmanageable diminishes cumulatively. The FED and other central banks are thus, in essence, necessarily under-equipped guardians of the existentially important belief they have sufficient control, despite the fact that it can never really be so. (Hat tip to Jeff Snider for laying this out in such a clear way!)

But while I’m not convinced markets ‘know’ better, I do tend to feel they cope better when allowed to decentralise via innovation and general historical turbulence than any centralised state apparatus could; they deliver more immediate corrective feedback. This possibility applies no matter the origins of money, and no matter how inextricably intertwined the state-market symbiont is. Markets are a technology one way or the other, a technology that delivers benefits and risks as all technologies do. The same goes for statecraft. With a wise handling of both sides of this complex pairing one should enjoy the best of both. Balance in all things, as they say.

The eternal danger is how money equals power and how power corrupts. Knowing that there is no ‘perfect’ system – where “perfect” tends to mean “nobody need suffer ever again, and especially not me” –, knowing also that there is no “perfect competition” to prevent the emergence of monopolistic or oligarchical power in real-world markets, I do accept that idealistic sensitives like Yours Truly ought to be very wary of slipping into ideological certainties. What does seem clear, though, is that ideological certainty is one of the root causes of The West’s current predicament, and it has befallen power players of a very different character.

I continue to believe that additional fundamentals are being ground down by historical change, these more global in scope. They remain in my thinking as warnings advising me to stay loose in my loyalties to this or that ‘solution’. We’ll touch on those fundamentals in passing as we close out this tricky article.

Conclusion

When we have a mid-50% labour-participation rate in the US, flourishing obesity in many Western nations despite similar labour-participation rates, recalcitrant inflation, rapidly improving robotics and AI, computerised market trading, etc., it is easy to see that money itself should be in the spotlight, whether fiat, crypto, gold, vouchers, etc. Money is an issue because we are so heavily invested in it, and, far more importantly, in over our heads with our poor understanding and therefore poor relationship with it. We want to have a “This is this!” money, but I suspect we can never have it. 

We, the People should therefore insist on more suppleness and wisdom in our power infrastructure, as systematically as we are able to embed it there, and consequently allow, via decentralisation and localisation, the best mix of alternative monies to rise to the surface.

For the moment, it seems we simply do not want to know how uncertain and magical money really is. The exact same dynamic is at work regarding materialism and the nature of reality, I believe. This paradigmatic crucible is exactly what this blog fumbles to understand. 

We know full well that we pay an horrendous price when we lose control at the civilisational scale. My hope is that the core reason for current crises is our over-investment in an erroneous understanding of the nature of reality, an error that yokes us to control itself as a culturally reflexive imperative. This reflex blinds us to feedback from left, right and centre, bellowing at us to change course.

Dauntingly for us, it is somewhere in the process of letting go that wiser, more supple solutions will emerge – not before; only a Fool’s Leap can reveal such treasures. As Ukraine is ground down by forces it does not want to understand; as international trading systems groan once again under the multiple strains generated by lockdowns, bossy governments and hubristic organisations like the UN, WHO and WEF; as we suffer at the hands of fervent ideologues in power positions; and as our cultural addiction to certainty in a fundamentally uncertain world condemns us to inappropriate knee-jerk reactions to events, so the need for clear and bold out-of-the-box thinking mounts. I suspect for most this sort of thinking is still anathema. But I strongly sense that for a small and quickly growing minority, this need is becoming clearer and clearer. 

Though terrible storms lie just ahead, more distant signs of the times are improving solidly. The outlook just over the horizon looks brighter and brighter. Let’s not forget that when the storms land.