Downfall Lessons For Our Final Century

DOWNFALL
Lessons for Our Final Century

DOWNFALL
Lessons for Our Final Century
Ilhan Niaz
Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research
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Service Road North, E-11/2, Islamabad - 46000
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Copyright © 2022 Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research (CSCR).
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. The facts mentioned herein are as reported by the author and have
been corroborated to the extent possible. Further, the opinions and ideas expressed are of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CSCR, its staff, or its advisors.
Preferred Citation:
Niaz, Ilhan. Downfall: Lessons for Our Final Century. Islamabad: Centre for Strategic and
Contemporary Research, 2022.
ISBN 978-969-7828-05-0
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
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Published by
Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to Ejaz Haider and Riaz M. Khan for providing feedback
on earlier versions of some of the essays in this volume. I am profoundly
grateful to my parents, Kamran and Nuzhat Niaz, and my wife, Uzma,
for reading these essays as they were being written. I am also indebted
to Ailiya Naqvi and the wonderful team at CSCR, which includes Talha
Ibrahim, Fareha Iqtidar, Hassan Zaheer and Aurangzaib Khan, for
helping bring these essays into publication. I alone am responsible for
any errors and omissions.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: The Anatomy of Downfall 4
I. Lessons for Our Final Century from Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, 11

Mill, and Darwin
II. Growing to Oblivion: The Crisis of Economic Thought and 23

Our Final Century
III. Solon and Croesus: Why Humans are Terrible at Making Wise 38
Decisions
IV. The Pangloss Effect: Why Optimism is Lethal 53
V. The Geopolitics of Climate Apocalypse 63
VI. The Transience of High-Level Equilibrium and the 72

Inevitability of Downfall
VII. Orders of Darkness: Government and Post-Government 83

Amidst the Ruins
Conclusion: Is There a Way Out? 95

Bibliography
Index
Preface
The following essays were written in 2018 and 2019, preceding the
COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing global health emergency, while
terrifying, significantly tested human ingenuity, compassion, and resilience.
The relatively successful way in which countries with minimal resources,
like Vietnam, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, have coped with the crisis
contrasts sharply with the heavy fatalities incurred by the European and
American populations that enjoy a wealth advantage of 30 or 40 to 1 over
countries in the Global South. At the same time, East Asian societies,
irrespective of political dispensations, have generally fared better than
others due to effective state response and greater social discipline. Owing
to the rapidly evolving nature of the virus and the challenges that remain
in terms of vaccination and treatment, it is fair to say that COVID-19
is going to be a part of our collective life for decades to come. The virus
is a warning from nature that humanity needs to heed. Our destruction
of the world’s natural habitat, our insatiable demand for access to exotic
species with which we should not have contact, and our dependence on
fragile globalised supply chains, are the factors that have brought us to
this dreadful ordeal. There is now an irrefutable case for moving towards
an ecologically regenerative economy built around the minimal exchange
of goods and strictly necessary travel over long distances.
Sadly, even amidst this crisis, governments, corporations, and

plutocrats are keen to get back to business as usual. Some are hoarding
vaccines, and others are accumulating great fortunes on the backs of
soaring demand for digital services. Society is confronted with a flood
of disinformation motivating vaccine hesitancy and a sheer denial of
the existence of COVID-19. The virus and the pandemic are a cruel
Darwinian test of our fragmented sense of reality, be it derived from
modernism, post-modernism or traditionalism. The virus does not care
what anyone’s regime of truth is - it will decimate any society that refuses
to make necessary adaptations. The greatest weapon that the virus wields
is that it turns our human need to be with other people and our propensity
to think ourselves immune to disaster against us.
Indeed, humans are generally not good at contemplating the end. It is

an unpleasant exercise in relation to oneself or loved ones. Our minds rebel
1
against such efforts, and society strongly discourages such melancholic
endeavours. Never losing hope is a cardinal principle of religious faiths,
modern ideologies, and the vacuous self-help industry. Capitalism
legitimises itself by propagating rags-to-riches stories, millions opt into
lotteries, and in almost every major cultural entertainment product, good
guys win in the end. Soldiers are trained to never say die, sportspersons
are conditioned to keep playing till the last minute, doctors are mandated
to do everything possible to prolong human life, the young are taught
to feel invincible, and the old are encouraged to feel and look young.
Therefore, it is not surprising that states and societies have a hard time
thinking rationally about the future, and they behave as if they will last
forever.
It is perhaps for this reason that students of history often find

themselves at odds with the wilful denial, self-deception, or sincere
delusion that characterises the behaviour of most individuals and
collectives. History teaches us that all things have a culmination point, that
no state is permanent, and that individuals are transient and expendable.
It trains us to see the world, historically, in terms that reveal a dead past of
structures and mentalities that continue to live and an evanescent present
that continuously dies. The humbling fact is that the ultimate test is that
of time, and time always wins.
The essays that follow have been written with a very heavy heart that
is weighed down by the mounting evidence that life on Earth has been
plunged into mortal danger by modern human civilisation, particularly
the neoliberal variant of capitalism that has raged and dominated globally
over the past 40 years. The damage already done is so great that a crisis
of habitability is inevitable. And our heedlessness is so entrenched that
humans, especially the top 10 per cent, will continue to plunder and waste
until the Earth become unfit for all life. This downfall is, in historical
terms, underway with early-onset disasters starting to assert themselves.
The Global North, with its wealth and technology, might survive a little
longer. The Global South will probably collapse somewhat sooner. But
however one cuts it, the end of modern civilisation as it is presently
understood is likely to unfold between 2030 and 2100.
If humanity, in general, and the Global South, in particular, is to

have any chance of surviving the great churning headed in its direction,
2
everyone needs to greatly add to the presently limited reserves of wisdom.
The seven essays that comprise this anthology are an effort to draw lessons
from history and philosophy and relate them to the present crisis. Though
voices from the Global South are generally not taken seriously on any
matter, and global issues are reserved for the commentary of metropolitan
elites, it is hoped that this small effort to provide some perspective
from Pakistan, a country that has done very little to contribute to the
impending disaster but is nonetheless going to bear the brunt of it, might
prove useful to policy makers, environmentalists, and the general public.
It is also my hope that every prediction made in the pages that follow
is proven wrong and that the scenarios envisaged do not come to pass.
Ilhan Niaz
Summer 2022
Islamabad
3
DOWNFALL: LESSONS FOR OUR FINAL CENTURY
Introduction: The Anatomy of Downfall

When historians approach an event or a period, they have to choose,
sometimes from a range of options, a beginning, a middle and an end. For
instance, if we were to write about Europe’s Dark Ages, we could begin
the story at AD 476 (the end of the Roman Empire in the West) or AD
312-320 (the transfer of the capital to Constantinople and the conversion
of the emperor to Christianity), or AD 180 (the death of Marcus Aurelius
and the end of the Pax Romana). The point where one chooses to start a
story will affect the structure of its main body and its eventual conclusion.
Civilisations and empires emerge from obscurity, rise to glory through
a series of trials and tribulations, achieve their zenith, and then decline
and fall. They leave behind knowledge, beliefs, and cultures picked up by
others who march on for a while before they too are replaced. For as long
as history and philosophy have existed, thinkers have wondered if there
is any grand design to the historical process or any meaningful outcome
that will emerge from the sum of all human exertions. The philosophy of
history is, in particular, concerned with attempting to detect and explain
patterns and, in some cases, speculate as to the ultimate results. From
a contemporary perspective, it does seem as if an answer to these great
questions can be given. Sadly, the answer is that the present grand design
will reach a culmination, and human civilisation will literally destroy the
planet by 2100. Its story will come to a terrible end and be accompanied
by the ruination of the Earth’s ecosystem so absolute that no comparable
civilisation will be able to arise for thousands of years. This was not the
final result that Vico, Hegel, Comte, or Marx expected, nor is it what
the neoliberal globalists thought would happen when they proclaimed
history to be over with the fall of the Soviet Union and saw the future as
a triumphal march of free markets and democracy muddied only by self-
inflicted instability arising from boredom. The far darker perspectives of
Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, Mill, Spengler, and Toynbee, appear
to have come closer to explaining reality. But even they did not see the
possibility of an uninhabitable world emerging due to human activity.
Since the early 1990s, the globalist promise that all people could get
rich and free with limitless growth for all has maintained the hegemony
of heedless optimism. Today, it is as if more and more people, even in
the West, are waking up from a long slumber, finally jolted by a level of
4
ecological destruction that is impossible to ignore. The anger at globalist
elites is palpable. They sold the world on the lie that infinite material
growth was possible on a finite planet. They managed the lie so poorly
that even in rich countries, inequality spiked, and the welfare state
shrank, creating a backlash within the metropolitan core of globalism.
And, having exhausted many of the world’s resources and destabilised
the vital chemical, biological, and thermal processes upon which all
life on Earth depends, the level of poverty, in relative terms, has defied
meaningful reduction for much of the world’s population with over
40 per cent of humanity still unable to afford adequate nutrition.1 So,
under the influence of growth cultists, advocates of globalisation, and the
enforcers of corporate capitalism, a great unravelling of the rich tapestry
of life on Earth in the form of the human-caused Sixth Mass Extinction
is entering a mature and irreversible phase. In view of the totality of the
collapse that the world faces, it is incumbent upon those engaged in the
study of history to explain why humanity has failed so dreadfully when it
comes to heeding the scientific advice on environmental issues for nearly
50 years. Staring into the abyss that lies ahead is necessary since it is the
product of human actions and failures. The only way to avoid actually
falling into it is to rationally comprehend how it came to exist in the first
place.
Gaining a better understanding of what is happening and where

the world is headed is even more important for people from the Global
South, for whom the cruelty and injustice of environmental collapse
are particularly severe. This severity is due to the fact that the people of
the Global South had to foot most of the bill for the rise of capitalism,
globalisation, and the modern world. From the Atlantic slave trade and
the genocide and expropriation of indigenous peoples in the Americas,
Africa, and Australia, to the systematic draining of resources from
dominions of conquest (like India) and the unfair trade practices imposed
on others, the wealth of the West is largely stolen from the rest.
Without the tremendous subsidy reaped by Western economies from

plunder and extermination of these indigenous communities through its
colonial projects, the gap between the Global North and South would
be a lot narrower. Even at present, with an arguably rules-based trading
system, the Global North extracts an annual surplus of nearly 2.3 trillion
5
dollars from the South.2 It is no surprise, therefore, that the wealth gap
between rich and poor has grown - within and between societies. Due
to industrialisation, the bulk of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions
since 1800 have also been produced by states in the Global North.3
The scale and intensity of industrialisation were themselves functions
of draining resources and capturing markets from indigenous peoples
and Asian and African lands. Precisely because the Global North has
hoarded and multiplied its ill-gotten wealth, it is better placed to mitigate
the effects of the ecocide that its consumption has unleashed. For the
Global South, mitigation is not as feasible because many of its countries
are already warm, most of its people are too poor to afford expensive
coping strategies, governments are too disorganised and unstable, and
local globalist elites have more to gain in the short-term by facilitating the
plunder and unequal global exchange that is promoted by neoliberalism.
Even with the onset of climate apartheid and the highly uneven
losses that the ecological disintegration is likely to generate (at least for
another 30-40 years),4 environmental awareness in the Global North has
risen dramatically since 2000.5 Campaigners such as the United States
former Vice President Al Gore; movements like the Extinction Rebellion;
bureaucracies such as the United Nations (UN); and Non-Governmental
Organisations (NGOs) such as Green Peace have helped shift the public
discourse in favour of environmentalism in the developed world. The basic
message that these, and many other entities, have hammered home is that
the simultaneous disruption of many of the Earth’s natural processes due
to human activity is going to land everyone in an inescapable mess. What
is not surprising about these movements is that the white middle and
upper-middle classes of the developed world dominate them. Few people
of colour and fewer voices from the Global South are actually getting
through.6
Having created a problem on account of the historical accumulation of

crimes against other peoples and the natural world and having aggravated
that problem through sheer greed since the 1970s; the younger generation
in rich countries is beginning to recognise the brutality of the colonial
enterprises of their ancestors and the historical guilt associated with
the legacy they inherited from them. Consequently, woke white people,
alongside metropolitan people of colour, have found a new great cause
6
– saving the world “from themselves, for themselves”. A new chapter in
white guilt is being written, which in consonance with previous chapters,
emerges after the fact only, does nothing actually to compensate victims
in any substantive sense, and does not prevent the commission of further
crimes.
What such pangs of guilt do lead to is tokenism and rebranding.

If a government feels under pressure from ecological extremists, it can
declare a climate emergency. If politicians think that young people
in rich countries are anxious about maintaining or improving their
living standards in a future of ecological ruin, they can announce a
Green New Deal. If local governments feel they must do something
about environmental pollution, they can ban single-use plastic bags. If
international organisations feel that popular resistance to their ill-advised
cut-and-paste solutions is about to boil over, they can start talking about
“inclusive” growth.
Even conservative governments, like the one in the United Kingdom,

can try to co-opt the Extinction Rebellion rhetoric by announcing net-
zero targets for 2050 while threatening protesters with legal and police
action for daring to disrupt business-as-usual.7 Individuals can make
carbon pledges, forswear the use of materials that are not biodegradable,
and reduce their air travel. These measures are nonsensical from the
perspective of the Global South, which is running out of time to address the
consequences of climate change and ecocide. They are but a psychological
coping mechanism to help the principal collective perpetrators of ecocide
(the Global North) feel better about themselves so that when poor
countries start to implode under the pressure of environmental collapse,
the benevolent white folk and their resident diversity representatives can
feel that at least they tried to make things better.
Western leaders know this full well that the climate models in
use significantly underestimate the rate of global warming and do
not adequately account for the feedback loops that are already being
generated. Hence the recent alarm at observing that the Arctic ice melt
has reached levels in 2019 not expected till 2090 or that biodiversity loss
in the form of mass extinctions of insects is proceeding far more rapidly
than anticipated threatening the continuity of the processes upon which
the agricultural cycle depends.8 It is naı̈ve to think that the Global North
7
will execute an ecological revolution within the next nine years that will
save the Earth. The best that can happen is that rich countries will set in
place climate mitigation measures and attempt to ride out the storm as
its worst effects consume the Global South.
Pakistan, which contributes less than one per cent of global GHG
emissions and has a per capita consumption of resources so low that at its
standard of living, it would take a global population of 16 billion to exceed
the Earth’s carrying capacity, is a case in point. Due to its geographic
location, generally arid environment, and demographic distribution, it is
one of the 10 most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change.
Likely to run out of water by 2040 and burdened by a rapidly growing
population, Pakistan spends barely 0.3 per cent of its Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) on research and struggles to achieve universal primary
school enrolment.9 An important cause of Pakistan’s dire demographic
profile is that since 1947 it has been locked in conflict with its giant
neighbour, India. In spite of impressive GDP growth rates since the
neoliberal economic reforms in 1991, India, like Pakistan, is also among
the worst ecologically affected countries.10 While India and Pakistan
literally fight over melting glaciers, the energy they deploy against the
real enemy, i.e. regional environmental collapse, which does not care
about national borders, is minimal. Indians will not be able to drink
their foreign exchange reserves, just as Pakistanis will not be able to eat
their nuclear weapons, once regional habitability evaporates, along with
most of the water, in another 10-20 years. If India and Pakistan have any
plans to still be around in 2100, they need to put aside their “strategic”
confrontation and devote all efforts to a survival plan rooted in regional
cooperation.
As options narrow and time runs out, many are becoming desperate
for solutions, falling into despair, or channelling their energies into
activism. Before a realistic solution can be arrived at, it is necessary to
understand the causes of the problem. Central to the challenge that
lies ahead is that human technical and scientific progress have so far
outpaced social, psychological, and biological evolution.11 Humans are
very smart, but they are hardly ever wise enough to think in the long
term. Easily distracted by shiny objects, modern humans have collectively
deluded themselves into thinking that indefinite and infinite material
8
growth is possible on a finite Earth. Our entrepreneurs, corporations,
bureaucracies, and manufacturers are adept at calculating the prices of
goods and services without factoring in the real environmental costs of
producing more and more GDP.
Therefore, this anthology is an effort to generate a discourse on

the continual failure of human society to think about its survival in the
future amidst the impending climate catastrophe. It is intended to make
us rethink our contemporary approaches toward confronting significant
climate challenges. This anthology, grounded in history and philosophy,
comprises seven essays that distinctly frame contemporary ecological
crises with respect to different dimensions of the problem and tries to
offer a different vision for how the world could collectively deal with it.
The first essay explores the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, John
Stuart Mill, and Darwin in determining what the future holds and
what modern society ought to draw from the past. The rationale behind
making it the first essay is to dissuade the readers from the popular and
historically inaccurate rhetoric that present crises are unpredictable.
The second essay addresses the modern obsession with economic

growth and how it has contributed to the ecological crisis. The difficulty
the world’s leaders and economists have in envisioning a world without
GDP growth indicates that a profound dearth of ideas besets mainstream
politics and economics. Most economists and development practitioners
do not have the faintest clue as to how wrong the central assumptions
of their disciplines are or the massive contradictions that lie beneath the
surface of the ocean of economic sophistry in which policy makers and
leaders have been drowning for decades. Liberation from the irrational
tutelage of growth cultists is essential to humanity’s survival.
Ensuring survival will also require humans to make much better

decisions oriented towards long-term outcomes. The third essay uses
Herodotus and his Histories to probe why humans are terrible at making
wise decisions. The ability to distinguish between wise and unwise is vital
if humanity is to avoid making bad decisions in panic or simply trying to
continue as before out of hubris.
One of the most powerful factors that fuel hubris is optimism, and
9
this is the subject of the fourth essay. Taking the arch-optimist Professor
Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide as the exemplar of positive thinking,
the weaknesses of this approach are dissected. The luxury of time allowed
humans to indulge their optimistic tendencies in the past. At present,
time is rapidly running out, and it is imperative that rational and practical
thinking unencumbered by wishful weak-mindedness guides the future
course of policy. This clarity is necessary if states are going to endure
through the apocalyptic ecocide induced geopolitics that awaits the
world in 20 – 50 years’ time.
The fifth essay explains the implications of the climate apocalypse

for international relations. As the world heats up in temperature, it is also
going to heat up in terms of inter-state conflict. The winners and losers of
the looming struggle will not be like the victors and vanquished of many
past conflicts. This time, the losers will cease to exist.
Those alive today are living through the last days of a global
civilisation in a high-level equilibrium phase. This makes it difficult for
them to grasp the excruciating reality of the transience and fragility of
their opulent lifestyles and the imminent danger of downfall. As the
sixth essay argues, the downfall is the inevitable result of an intensive and
unequal developmental model highly reliant upon rapaciously extractive
economics. The trouble is that this time the global reach of extraction has
undermined the ability of the Earth to support complex life. The globalist
high civilisation is going to end in global collapse with all major cultures
at risk of extinction along with most of nature.
The final essay examines what types of political orders might emerge
during and after the collapse of the Earth’s habitability. In the medium
term, the most likely outcome is a new wave of fascism, while the
most benevolent outcome is a wave of relatively mild environmentalist
dictatorships. In the long run, tribalism, survivalist movements, and
small-scale isolated communities in especially favoured locations are
likely to be all that is left of human societies by 2100.
Let us then proceed to the first stop on this journey to learn some
lessons for what is shaping up to be our final century.
10
I
Lessons for Our Final Century from Ibn Khaldun,
Malthus, Mill, and Darwin
History is a discipline widely cultivated among nations
and races. It is eagerly sought after. The men in the street,
the ordinary people, aspire to know it. Kings and leaders
vie for it. Both the learned and the ignorant are able to
understand it. For on the surface, history is no more
than information about political events, dynasties, and
occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and
spiced up with proverbs…The inner meaning of history, on
the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get
at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of
existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why
of events. History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy.
It deserves to be accounted a branch of it.12
– Ibn Khaldun (Arab Philosopher, Historian, and
Sociologist, b. 1332, d. 1406)
Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides wrote the first critical and
explanatory histories, the subject of the rise and fall of civilisations has
fascinated historians and philosophers. The imperial or civilisational
breakdowns of the past were almost invariably local and regional, with
a few notable exceptions, such as the Mongol eruption of AD 1200 –
1400, which was global in consequence. It was only about 500 years ago
that a genuinely global human civilisation could be said to have emerged.
Primarily driven till 1945 by the agency of Western imperialism, this
process is now transitioning to a period of Eurasian globalisation centred
on China and India.
The age of globalisation has produced improvement in the quality and

quantity of human life. On average, the human lifespan has doubled over
the past 150 years, with much of the gain in the last 70. Even societies
like those in South Asia or Africa, considered poor or underdeveloped,
are vastly wealthier and more productive than 100 or 200 years ago.
The contemporary material aspiration for practically all societies is to
11
achieve a standard of living comparable to the old, industrialised states

of the Western civilisation. And in pursuit of this goal, economists have
perpetuated a cult of economic growth eagerly echoed by political leaders
who, whether elected or not, understand their primary role as improving
economic conditions for their people. The path to this desirable outcome,
economists assure us, is through increasing the size of our economies,
taxing enough to pay for essential services and infrastructure, and
providing incentives for growth. Confronted by increasingly inescapable
environmental limits to their preference for growth, some have taken to
mouthing glittering phrases like “sustainable development”, “grassroots
empowerment”, “green growth”, “inclusiveness”, and “knowledge-based
economy”. Like Professor Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide (more on
him in the fourth essay), they remain convinced, in spite of all experience
to the contrary, that we are living in the best of all possible worlds and
that somehow technical innovation and more disciplined enforcement
of environmental rules will allow us to advance along an infinite growth
trajectory.
The sustainable development paradigm is a hoax. Its advocates are

either sincerely mistaken or charlatans, profiting from selling placebos
to help with a dread disease. Many of them are genuinely unable to draw
logically consistent conclusions from the irrefutable evidence that our
planet is dying and that it is our insatiable greed that is killing it. On a
more extreme level of delusions, some fantasists advocate becoming an
interplanetary species or hold out hope that science and innovation will
find a way out of the mess – that the rise in environmental awareness will,
in the near future, turn us all into good ecologists. Far from enduring long
enough to colonise other worlds and harvest their resources or terraform
them to habitability, human civilisation is almost certain to self-terminate
by making its home planet uninhabitable by the end of this century.
Awareness will not help either. Consider recycling – in spite of broad

awareness in the industrialised world, we only recycle about a tenth of
plastics and dump the rest into our oceans or in landfills.13 The result is
that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in our waters. Further,
consider childcare products.14 People claim to love their children, and
they do at an emotional level. But, knowing that disposable items are
destroying the planet and making a decisive contribution to the onset of
12
humanity’s extinction event, which is likely to unfold in their children’s
lifetime, will not convince many parents to stop using disposable diapers
or plastic bottles or baby formula without viable alternatives.15
Contemplating how and why things end is not easy, but four key
thinkers can help us understand probable futures. The first of them is
the 14th century Arab philosopher of history, sociologist, and political
economist, Ibn Khaldun and his intriguing perspective on how regimes
fail to maintain rationality in decision-making. The second is an 18th
century English economist and demographer, Thomas Malthus, who
posited his idea on the problem of population growth in relation to the
planet’s natural carrying capacity. The third is a 19th century English
philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who theorised on what would happen
to our world if the growth stage of economic development continued
indefinitely and the resulting desirability of an eventual stationary state.
And the fourth thinker is a 19th century English biologist, Charles
Darwin, whose classical work in evolutionary biology propounded on the
exposition of the natural forces that lead to the evolution of life and how
the basic mechanisms that drive this process are likely to lead humans to
commit fatal errors.
Ibn Khaldun’s views on the origins of life and speciation

foreshadowed Darwin, and his understanding of human nature and
mentality approximated or exceeded Enlightenment and even modern
analyses. Ibn Khaldun was particularly concerned with the problem of
political order. History indicated to Ibn Khaldun that empires rose and
fell in cycles accompanied by changes in the rationality and enterprise of
ruling elites. Concerned primarily with dynastic states and the historical
experience of West Asia and North Africa, Ibn Khaldun offered an
explanation for this cycle of growth and decay. The basic mechanism
that enabled state formation was a sense of group feeling (asabiya).
Group feeling was strong when a community was faced with challenges
and threats that imperilled its immediate survival. Dire circumstances
necessitated that individual interests be subordinated to the collective
good. Consequently, heightened group feeling was strong amongst tribal,
nomadic, or semi-nomadic peoples that lived on marginal terrain and in
harsh environments. The trouble was that this primordial group feeling,
while it made for tight-knit clans or kinship groups willing to die for each
13
other if needed, also made large-scale cooperation between such groups

difficult. It was only through religion or ideology that such a society could
temporarily transcend internal rivalries and unify. When that happened,
such peoples could overrun agrarian heartlands and become the rulers of
sedentary societies.
Insofar as sedentary societies were concerned, the experience of

group feeling was different and, in critical respects, weaker than that of
nomadic societies. For starters, sedentary societies were too numerous
for everybody to know everybody else. Then, greater material comfort
and insulation from the kind of hardship endured by nomadic cultures
enabled the members of sedentary societies to pursue a self-centred
lifestyle and selfish ambitions. With a state to protect them, houses to
shelter them, trade and markets to enrich them, and refined culture to
distract and entertain them, sedentary societies possessed much more
of what was materially desirable. But, their relative ease of existence
made such people less hardy and more attuned to individual interests.
The problem, from the perspective of political order, was that running
a high-quality state required courage, determination, pragmatism, and
ruthlessness in furthering the common good. When a state elite became
infected by excessive self-aggrandisement and material decadence, it
started to decline. And in that context, nomadic groups temporarily
united by religious ideology could conquer sedentary civilisations,
become a new ruling elite, and, for a couple of generations, govern in
a relatively effective manner. As the decades passed, however, the rulers
would acquire the mentality of sedentary peoples and become decadent,
selfish, and incapable of providing leadership – thus restarting the cycle
all over again.
Ibn Khaldun explained the effects of power and wealth on rationality

and the tendency of ruling elites to degenerate into corrupt and self-
serving oligarchies or autocracies. Viewed in the context of long-term
survival, it was not in the interest of any ruling group to acquire qualities
that would lead to its downfall and the collapse of its host society.
The trouble was those very wealthy and powerful people were almost
invariably carried away by the trappings of their success and came to
view themselves as innately better than others. This sense of entitlement,
explained by Ibn Khaldun as the misguided belief in nobility as an
14
inherited rather than acquired attribute, destroyed the rationality of
ruling elites and led them to make decisions that might make them richer
or more powerful for a while but ensured destruction a few decades down
the road. While modern polities are, at least in the West and parts of East
Asia, no longer overtly dynastic or tribal in the way that they were in
AD 1400, the effects of power on mentality have remained fascinatingly
unchanged. We see this in the consolidation of plutocracies and secretive
corporations aware of the long-term effects of mining the environment
but driven by the more immediate need to ensure the next quarter’s profit.
They use their immense wealth to warp political processes to suit their
immediate economic interests. It is no surprise, therefore, that just 100
companies have, since 1850, accounted for over half of GHG emissions
and put some 1.1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
(since 1988).16 And they are not going to stop because a Swedish teenager
made a stirring speech at a climate change conference in Poland. It is
evident that globalisation has produced a global service and corporate
oligarchy that is incapable of reform.17 Instead, since the 1980s, it has
doled out half-baked compromises and promises of “sustainable”
development for propaganda purposes. As for the members of the public,
we are all culpable because few of us are prepared to accept restrictions
on our consumption patterns or standard of living for the sake of the
environment. Most of us want to save our planet, provided that it does
not entail personal inconvenience or sacrifices. The sheer absurdity of
delegations travelling by carbon-intensive methods, like aircraft, to attend
conferences on climate change (or other environment/eco-babble fests) is
lost on those engaged in such enterprises.
Ibn Khaldun realised that humans, as a species, are fundamentally

unjust and want to behave selfishly; while deluding themselves that
this does not make them bad actors. While our desire to believe in our
uprightness even as we pursue what suits us to the detriment of others
and the survival of the planet lies at the root of our cognitive dissonance,
providence and nature require logical consistency and cognitive integrity
for long-term survival. Elites that make decisions that destroy the very
planet they live on, and citizens that buy into the belief that growth can be
sustained indefinitely on a planet with dwindling resources, represent the
kind of behavioural pattern associated with a civilisation on the verge of
collapse. This kind of behaviour falls within Philip Zimbardo’s definition
15
of evil as knowing better while doing worse.
Thomas Malthus’s 1798 foray into future studies, An Essay on the

Principle of Population,18 aimed at challenging notions that humanity could
somehow remove all material difficulties in the way of achieving utopian
conditions. The idea of progress, common to many Enlightenment
thinkers, did not apparently have a cap. Though some, like Adam Smith,
even argued that the fruits of the pursuit of selfish interest were somehow
redistributed by an invisible hand. Malthus argued that while he hoped the
optimists were right, there was a fundamental constraint on our material
wellbeing, and that was the carrying capacity of our planet. He bifurcated
his idea into two rates – geometric and arithmetic, respectively. He
wrote that the human population, under favourable conditions, grew at a
geometric rate, while our ability to extract more from our environment, to
grow more food, etc., grew at an arithmetical rate. What this meant was
that every breakthrough that allowed us to feed or support more people
led to population increases that soon outstripped improved productivity.
This, in turn, forced us to find ways to further increase output. We

could bring more land under the plough, colonise new territories, intensify
the exploitation of existing resources, etc., but the more efficiently we did
this, the faster our population would grow, leaving us gasping eternally
for breath to escape the effects of our own ingenuity. Malthus framed two
basic hypotheses from this insight. One was that improved production
would, due to escalating population pressure, leave the vast majority of
people in relative or absolute misery at a bare subsistence level. The other
was that our ability to grow more to feed ourselves would ultimately run
into hard natural constraints and fail. Malthus’s insights, for nearly 200
years, appeared to be confounded by innovation. The world that Malthus
lived in had perhaps one billion inhabitants. Today, the world has nearly
eight billion people, likely to rise to nine billion by 2050. Much of this
increase has occurred since 1945 and can be attributed to a reduction in
the death rate owing to advances in medicine, increased commerce and
global trade, and rising incomes in developing countries. Life expectancy
has practically doubled over the past century, meaning that people
consume resources for a lot longer than they used to. Increasing per capita
consumption19 also means that people consume resources at a greater
rate. And there is hope that breakthroughs in growing food in labs and
16
other biotechnological advances may well allow us to feed more people
and keep them alive for even longer. However, the downside of all these
technological innovations is that the energy required to grow food and
the resources required to sustain modern civilisation will keep increasing.
As Jason Hickel has noted, the total carrying capacity of the Earth in
terms of resources renewed by natural processes is about 50 billion tons
a year. At present, human civilisation consumes 70 billion tons a year.20
If we have a global Green New Deal, as the leaders of the Extinction

Rebellion want, then, by 2050, humans will be consuming 95 billion tons
of resources a year. If we continue with the current growth model, then
by 2050, humans will consume 180 billion tons of resources a year. Even
the Green New Deal advocates, all well-meaning people, ironically want
to grow the economy sustainably, so entrenched in the public mind is
the ideology of growth preached by generations of economists. Even if
human civilisation goes green, it will still destroy the planet – after all,
those rare earths needed for solar panels and other smart technologies21
are not going to be mined or shipped by themselves. No matter how
we plan our next moves, our planet’s ecosphere is headed to collapse,
driven by plummeting biodiversity and climate change under any
extractive economic model compounded by increasing consumption
and rising numbers of people. Malthus’s bleak view of the future is all
set to reassert itself with a vengeance. Bluntly put, there are simply too
many humans living too long and consuming too much for the Earth
to sustain for very much longer. A Malthusian correction of apocalyptic
dimensions is a probable and increasingly proximate outcome of the
damage humans have inflicted on the Earth’s life-support systems. An
important cause of our impending Malthusian correction is our inability
to think about modern political economy in terms other than growth – a
significant absence of an alternative idea of a political economy. Political
leaders continue to promise growth and feel that their legitimacy is tied
to increases in Gross National Product (GNP). Economists assure us
that growth is good and that we are all better off as a consequence of
it. Yes, there are debates about equity, relative inequality, sustainability,
terms of trade, and inclusivity, but the underlying assumption is that
growth must continue, even if it leads to the collapse of our planet. It also
needs to be pointed out that today, according to the World Bank, Gross
World Product (GWP) per capita is about 17,000 dollars (in terms of
17
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), and were it to be distributed fairly, then

without any further addition to Global GNP, we could provide every
human being with a decent living.22 But that is not going to happen
because well off people in the Global North (with per capita incomes in
the range of 30,000 – 50,000 dollars) are not going to give up 40-60 per
cent of their incomes so that South Asian peasants, who live on a 1,000
dollars a year if they are lucky, can be bumped up to decent middle-
income status.23 And the few hundred billionaires who account for half of
the global wealth are not going to fork over their plunder unless subjected
to confiscatory policies by states – states whose political elites have been
bought and paid for by the very plutocrats driving our planet towards
collapse.24 John Stuart Mill’s monumental Principles of Political Economy
contains a concise but profound reflection on the eventual outcome of
economic growth. Written half a century after Malthus, by which time the
industrial revolution was in full swing in Western Europe, Mill wondered
about the “ultimate point” of industrialisation. Mill hypothesised that
in order to save the planet from exhaustion, the growth-oriented stage
would have to be replaced by a “stationary state”. This condition could
arise once humans had accumulated enough wealth to enable everyone to
live moderately well. By imposing restrictions on inheritances, regulating
wages, and redistribution of wealth, broad equality of economic outcomes
could be ensured within which variations in individual prosperity would
arise from enterprise, not inherited privilege or property.25
The purpose of economic growth, Mill felt, should never be the mere
accumulation of materialistic longings. Rather, the purpose ought to be
to enable people to live well enough so that they have enough leisure to
pursue the things that they want to. Once society was wealthy enough
to achieve this outcome, it no longer needed to keep adding to its GNP.
Instead, it could continue to make things better through innovation and
the accumulation of knowledge divorced from any specific profit motive.
Such a society, Mill reasoned, would be sustainable in the long run. Mill
warned that the alternative to the termination of economic growth in
a stationary state was a “world with nothing left to the spontaneous
activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation,
which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste
or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not
domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every
18
hedgerow or a superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where
a wild shrub or flower could grow.”26 A century and a half after Mill’s dire
warning, humanity is close to achieving this lonely, desolate, outcome. In
confusing “more” with “better”, humanity is all set on being left without
an ecosphere worth the name by the end of this century.
The Darwinian paradigm helps explain what had happened in

the past when species had to adapt to macro changes in the objective
conditions around them. Darwin’s primary framework, as articulated in
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)27 and The
Descent of Man (1872)28, has been greatly expanded in the past 150 years.
Advances in palaeontology and genetics enable us to understand the
processes of evolution far better than Darwin could have ever hoped for.
At the same time, popular science fiction movies, such as the Jurassic Park
franchise, have explored in wondrous cinematic detail the possibility of
directly controlling evolution and bringing back extinct life. This being
said, we are far more likely to go extinct ourselves before we bring the
Tyrannosaurus Rex back to life. And the reason for this is textbook
Darwin – nearly all life that has ever existed has gone extinct. Nature
has, over time, killed off 99 per cent of life on Earth.29 All the creatures
that existed at the dawn of hunter-gatherer human societies represent a
hundredth of all life to have existed on the Earth. Darwin’s framework
identified five critical ways in which this struggle for survival played
out. First, life seeks to replicate itself and requires the consumption of
energy from the environment around it. Organisms, in other words, have
to eat. Second, life adapts to highly specialised niches, which enables it
to secure a steady supply of energy and minimises competition for that
resource. Once equilibrium is found, life likes to stay put for as long
as possible. Third, once in a stable niche, those traits that enable more
efficient extraction of resources become desirable and advantageous
attributes that are more likely to be passed on to the next generation.
Successful adaptations are sexy, and those who manifest them are likely
to produce more offspring. Evolution then rewards those adaptations by
giving them more energy allocation. Fourth, depending on the specifics
of environmental circumstances, a single species can evolve into many
different ones, and many species can converge. Fifth, any sudden change
in objective conditions will leave most creatures in the lurch, unable to
adapt, and vulnerable to extinction.
19
Attributes that are a big advantage in one set of circumstances can

become severe disadvantages under another. That is how mammals, who
were small rodent-like creatures for 100 million years (160 million – 65
million BC), were better placed than the dinosaurs when that meteor
struck Earth. Large reptiles that needed lots of food could not survive
the post-apocalyptic conditions after the meteor hit. On the other
hand, small, warm-blooded, nocturnal, semi-troglodyte mammals were
able to survive. And once the dust settled and the dinosaurs were no
more, mammals exploded into the vacuum, adapting to new niches and
conquering the world. At present, human activity has destabilised the
world’s ecology and is causing mass extinctions of animals, plants, and, as
is becoming evident, insect life, all of which are vital to the maintenance
of the ecosystem that we depend on. Human beings are really smart.
Our brains have been the key to successful adaptation to a wide variety
of environments. The more our ancestors used their brains to manipulate
the environment, the more numerous they became and the further they
spread. And once, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture began enabling
sedentary cultures, and by 4000 BC, civilisations emerged, and the
human presence on the planet exploded, as did its ingenuity. In a mere
6000 years, humanity went from the Stone Age to the Space Age. And
while this was good, in the sense that people lived better, longer, and more
sophisticated lives, it also meant our demand for the planet’s resources
soared. The energy-intensive civilisations of the past six millennia were,
and are, phenomenally expensive to maintain. In order to keep going,
they mined the environment, spread in territorial extent, waged wars,
enslaved less materially advanced cultures, eradicated other large animals
and human populations, and figured out ways to increase productivity
through trade and technology.
The past 250 years have seen the intensification of this mining
process to a point where it has made the Earth very ill. One symptom
of that illness is climate change – particularly global warming. Like a
body fighting an infection, the Earth’s temperature is increasing. As the
Earth heats up, humans’ entire chain of energy extraction becomes more
costly to maintain and vulnerable to disruption. However, human beings
are so blinded by a hubristic reverence for their own ingenuity that we
are prepared to do everything except reduce our total consumption to the
point consistent with the Earth’s carrying capacity. Our intelligence is no
20
longer a survival advantage. It is, in fact, a disadvantage. If we were a lot
less intelligent and had never advanced beyond hunter-gatherer bands,
we would be living nasty, brutish, and short lives. But our species and
our planet’s ecosphere would survive for millions, perhaps hundreds of
millions, more years. Instead, like Adolf Hitler in his command bunker
during the last year of the Second World War, we remain convinced that
a miracle device or other fortuitous development will see us through to
victory over the dark future. As humanity becomes more desperate to
survive amidst the ruins of its planet, it is likely to employ intelligence
to do unimaginably stupid things. One such thing would be messing
around with our genetic code in order to genetically engineer ourselves
into surviving on planet Mad Max. Another would be to invest massive
amounts of resources from our dying world into trying to become an
interplanetary species. Yet another would be for countries armed with
weapons of mass destruction to unleash those assets on less powerful
states in a bid to secure control over remaining resources. A remote
possibility could be some sort of geoengineering solution whereby we
start tossing chemicals to cool our atmosphere from above to allow us
to keep pumping more carbon dioxide into it from below. Or, better yet,
let us introduce mechanical life animated by Artificial Intelligence (AI)
into our collapsing ecosphere and see how that works out – such life
would be ideally adapted to surviving long after the Earth has become
unfit for organic life. Essentially, our future is likely to be extinction or a
post-human dystopia that will make nightmarish works of science fiction
appear almost benign.
Let us recap the lessons we can learn about our present and future
from Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, Mill, and Darwin. In terms of politics and
administrative order, human civilisation is in the grip of plutocratic
control, regardless of the formal political system. The decadent and self-
aggrandising behaviour of the global elite, which seeks to keep in place
the system that is the source of its wealth and privilege, has left human
civilisation in an advanced stage of selfishness, decadence, and senility. We
simply do not have the political will to make the harsh decisions needed
to save our species and planet. In terms of demographics, the human
population is going to continue to grow and ravage natural resources until
they run out. Our extractive ability will continue to improve until there
is literally nothing left to take. Malthusian constraints might be delayed,
21
but they will not be denied and bite all the harder when they set in. On
the economic front, in the absence of a stationary state emerging soon,
growth will continue to be the priority. No matter how one cuts it, growth
driven by consumption, trade, and manufacturing will cause the collapse
of the ecosphere. Going green will buy us time, but it will not secure
salvation for us. It does not appear remotely possible to eradicate the
ideological cult of economic growth. And then, there are the evolutionary
implications of what we are doing. Our large brains cannot accept that
it is our very intelligence that is undermining our chances for survival
to the next century. Human activity is destabilising the ecosphere, and
the fantastical solutions being dreamed up by optimists are more likely
to accelerate humanity’s terminal crisis than offer a real solution. Blaise
Pascal got it right when he said, “We run carelessly to the precipice, after
we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.”30 At this stage,
even if we manage to see things clearly, it may well be too late for course
correction.
22
II
Growing to Oblivion:
The Crisis of Economic Thought and Our Final
Century
The Earth is a living planet and the source of all known
life. Arguably, there is no task more urgent and more
sacred than to care and preserve this crucible and home of
life. We are also witness to the ravages done to the planet
by humans who alone have the capacity to reverse the
damage which has been caused by unbridled consumerism
spurred by avarice and unrelenting manufacturing on the
wheels of industrialisation and expanding technological
capacities. Today, human activity in the production and
manufacturing sector employs capacities far exceeding
global needs. The service sector which is also as old as
human economic activity provides efficient distribution of
goods and enhances quality of living conditions. But today
this sector is increasingly locked into the productive sector
to accelerate and expand their mutual capacities. Instead
of balanced and justifiable growth, the two sectors often
create superfluous needs for each other’s profit. Human
energies ought to be channeled in an arena which provides
useful employment for enhancing the quality of life in
rhythm with nature and without expanding productive
activity and placing stress on the natural environment and
global resources. [sic]31
– Riaz Muhammad Khan (Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary,
2005-8)
Economists and their political acolytes believe in growth. Whether one

examines Adam Smith or Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes or Milton
Friedman, or Steve Keen, self-serving plutocrats and globalist hacks or
wide-eyed champions of a Green New Deal, or the perspective of global
institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
or the UN, the all-consuming obsession is with growth. Of course,
23
within economics, there are outliers like Thomas Malthus or John Stuart
Mill, and there are a number of non-economists, like Jared Diamond32,
Yuval Hariri33, and Peter Turchin34, who realise, or had realised, that our
planet’s carrying capacity imposes ultimately hard limits on growth and
that it is not a good idea to push beyond those limits. But few political
leaders, finance ministries, and corporate elites take what these critics
of growth have to say seriously. There is the usual handwringing about
increasing inequality, tragic memes on social media about creatures going
extinct, and a broad encouragement of environmental awareness. Still, the
discipline that feeds bad ideas to leaders and decision-makers remains
remarkably impervious to any adjustment to reality. Indeed, economists
seem to think it is the job of reality to conform to their fantasies cleverly
masked, as they are, by esoteric language, signs, and numbers.
Adam Smith, legitimately regarded as the founder of modern

economics, provided the basic blueprint for the idea of growth. To Smith,
growth entailed an increase in the wealth of individuals. The combined
increase in the wealth of individuals would lead to the enrichment of
the national (or imperial) polities they lived in. The wealthier individuals
became, the better it was for everyone as, through the pursuit of personal
gain, society would become more efficient at producing wealth. This
wealth would lift all boats and, through the invisible hand, ensure the
distribution of rewards in a manner proportionate to productivity and
enterprise. Conversely, those who failed in this competition would do so
on account of insufficient productivity or innovation and thus deserve to
fail. This failure would also enhance efficiency, and in time the operation
of the market would generate increasing wealth for everybody. In the
context of this perspective, the role of the state was to provide an enabling
environment so that people could, through the rational pursuit of their
self-interest, make themselves richer. Thus, the state ought to regulate
property rights, maintain law and order, and even provide some education,
but its interventions had to be limited in scope.35 Even today, the growth
cultists adhere to these basic tenets and believe in the inherent rationality
of selfishness, the basic correctness of market mechanisms for allocating
resources, and moral acceptance of inequality as being the legitimate
outcome of free and fair competition.
One political economist and philosopher of history by the name of
24
Karl Marx, had a serious problem with the inequality that the market
economy produced. He was outraged by the misery of the proletariat, the
obscene display of wealth by the robber barons, the obvious unfairness of
the state in rigging the game against the poor and in favour of property
and privilege, and the psychological toll of mechanised alienation from
life itself.36
His central insight was that the existence of a system of property

ownership is the root of all this evil and that history is merely the narrative
account of a profound structural tension between the few who own
property and the many who do not. The solution lay in redistributing the
fruits of growth evenly, and this could only be achieved by the collective
ownership of property or communism. Communism would allow growth
and prosperity to flourish as never before, and then everyone would have
a stake in the wealth of the society they lived in. Though Marx envisaged
communism as being the result of industrialisation, the societies where
his ideas first inspired successful revolutions (like Russia and China) were
agrarian and backward. They thus formulated a communist path to rapid
economic growth (centralised economic planning) accompanied by a
relatively even distribution of wealth that managed to appear competitive
for a few decades before sputtering to a halt, having inflicted terrible loss
of human life on the unfortunate inhabitants of these socialist utopias.
The leading capitalist powers were sufficiently terrified by the

apparent success of the Soviet model during its first 50 years that they
introduced welfare reforms aimed at keeping their working and middle
classes loyal and advocated central planning of economies in developing
countries. But the fact is that the communist variant of growth was every
bit as ecologically ruinous and unsustainable as the capitalist variant and
these two otherwise antithetical frameworks were in a competition to
show the world how to grow faster, bigger and better.
The great synthesiser of capitalism and communism and, arguably, the

saviour of the former was John Maynard Keynes.37 Having lived through
the First World War and its socioeconomic aftermath, Keynes sought
to save capitalism from itself. Prior to Keynes, the classical thinking in
economics was that governments ought to cut their expenditures to avoid
going deeper into debt as their tax receipts declined in the event of an
economic contraction. In other words, in times of economic distress,
25
governments ought to pursue austerity. Keynes blew this idea out of the
water and demonstrated that it was precisely when the economy went
into a recession that public spending ought to be increased. By producing
liquidity and spending it on goods and services, the government would
help raise the level of effective demand. This would limit the downward
part of the cycle and return an economy to the path of growth quicker
than cutting government spending and waiting for the market to correct
itself. In theory, increased government spending could keep an economy
operating at near full employment, which would cause wages to rise,
demand for goods and services to increase, and GDP to keep growing.
But the magic started to wear off in the late-1960s as the generation born
after 1945 came of age. This generation had benefited greatly from the
relatively equitable growth between the years 1945-1968. Unlike their
parents, who had lived through two world wars and the global economic
depression, this generation came to believe that its extraordinary good
fortune was the product of some innate qualities rather than favourable
circumstances – a typical human conceit that cannot be quantified for
the purposes of economic analyses. This generation also came to think
that it deserved to keep getting richer. But, there was a problem. In order
to maintain the level of social mobility seen between 1945 and 1968,
high taxes were needed. The various restrictions and state interventions
in the market over the preceding generation were deemed stifling.
During the wars of Containment, the slowing of growth and political
scandals discredited the established political and economic leadership.
And the stage was set for a generation that had benefited more than any
in human history from public interventions in the economy to become
addicted to the myth of its rugged individualism and a neoclassical or
neoliberal economic ideology that justified kicking aside the ladder
and trampling upon what was left of the ecosphere in the pursuit of
private profits. In the 1940s, as the Age of Keynes headed towards its
greatest accomplishments, a reactionary movement aimed at returning
to a purer free-market interpretation of economics took hold at the
University of Chicago. Considering themselves anti-Keynesian, Milton
Friedman and his apostles of free-market fundamentalism would take
the world by storm in the 1980s. Their ideas still constitute the bedrock
of contemporary neoliberal economic thought. The core scripture of this
movement is Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.38
26
The essential argument (made in a way that can be understood
non-mathematically) is that the market, if allowed to perform without
impediment, will achieve optimum efficiency in the allocation of resources.
Conversely, the more a market is rationed, controlled, taxed, regulated, or
otherwise subjected to non-economic factors, the worse it performs. Thus,
for instance, high taxes on the wealthy, from this perspective, discourage
investments and entrepreneurship, undermining the growth potential of
a society. Welfare payments or subsidies for education, health, or housing,
entail state interference in the market and thus reduce economic efficiency.
State ownership of assets, especially productive ones, is the ultimate
crime against the prosperity of society. Restrictions on trade such as
protectionist regulations, high tariffs, or subsidies for local industries also
constitute a threat to prosperity and need to be minimised or phased out.
Wealth would naturally trickle down if promarket policies were pursued
while the economy would expand. The elegance of this hypothesis is that
it is supremely value-rational. To anyone who has been conditioned into
believing that the market is inherently more efficient than other ways of
distributing resources and generating wealth (or calculating wellbeing),
any historical or empirical inefficiency in economic functioning can be
explained as arising from the interference of non-economic or non-
market forces in economic decision-making. This hypothesis also had
an obvious appeal to elites in the capitalist world. They could justify the
dismantling of the social, legal, and political restraints on the unabashed
pursuit of personal financial gain in the name of the greater good and for
the cause of restoring economies to competitiveness.
With the threat of communism receding in the late-1980s, this

perspective became dominant. Global trade, easing of capital controls,
the hyper-dominance of the financial and speculative sectors, the
auctioning off of public wealth worth tens of trillions of dollars from
one end of the globe to the other, the return of private debt-bondage in
advanced economies, the reversal of the 1945-1968 trend towards greater
socioeconomic equality, and the growing insecurity of employment, have
come to characterise the neoliberal dystopia.
Imagine a world where countries are encouraged to pursue the

ecologically ruinous practice of free trade in preference to local production.
Imagine a world where levels of relative inequality have returned to what
27
they were on the eve of the First World War. Imagine a world where a
few dozen of the richest have as much wealth as nearly four billion poorer
people. Imagine a world where people are working longer and harder for
relatively less. Imagine a world where 100 large corporations account for
70 per cent of GHG emissions while governments and environmentalists
encourage their citizens not to use plastic straws. And now imagine that
those responsible for this outrage congregate every year at Davos to bask
in self-reflective radiance while expressing token concern about the ruin
of the planet of which they are the principal instigators and beneficiaries.
Arguably, our world and civilisation are already in a pre-apocalyptic
dystopian condition. Unless human civilisation shakes itself out of its
present daze, it will have entered a post-apocalyptic dystopian condition
by the end of this century.
The trouble is that the basic idea of growth that animates the present
order also infects the critics of that order. The critics of the almost
libertarian spirit that drives contemporary capitalism and economic
globalism fall into several camps. The first are right-wing nationalists
who resent the social and cultural pain produced by the rapid movement
of capital and labour enabled by the present variant of globalisation. For
these elements, especially in the West, the rise of the civilisation-states
of China and India are deeply problematic.39 After all, in free and fair
competition, the West was supposed to win and firmly retain control of the
terms of engagement. Changing racial and cultural composition through
migration has exposed the limits to which “foreigners” can integrate into
White Caucasian cultures steeped in centuries of privilege grounded in
the casual de-humanisation of everyone else.40 In non-Western countries,
strongmen and aspiring autocrats or elected demagogues, sensing the
seismic shift, want to gain greater control over globalisation and direct
it towards the enrichment of their nations. Both seek a greater share
of growth for themselves and use identity politics to deflect from the
unsustainability and irrationality of the pursuit of GDP increases as a
panacea. The Brexiteers, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi,
Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and
Vladimir Putin are the most high-profile examples of this phenomenon.
They all want to make their countries great again and provide growth
on their terms. The second includes left-wing and centrist critics of
mainstream economics. No one paid much heed to them in the late
28
1990s and early 2000s, but when the Great Recession of 2008 hit, their
analyses gained wider popular currency. Some of these thinkers, such as
Steve Keen, Anne Pettifor, Raghuram Rajan, and others, had accurately
predicted the global financial crisis of 2008.41 Others like Yani Varoufakis
had experienced firsthand the Greek meltdown – how imperious and
unrepentant the priests of economic orthodoxy were even in the face of
the disaster they had clearly been responsible for.42 In many respects, these
thinkers idealised the Keynesian approach toward stagnation and low
wages and were critical of the inequalities that had been heightened by the
pursuit of free-market policies and austerity regimes. Their disagreement
was not concerned with the desirability of growth but with its equity and
with the excessive dominance of financial interests in decision-making to
the neglect of the real economy, of people, places, things, and ideas. The
third group of critics can broadly be identified as the sustainability crowd.
They include many outfits devoted to promoting sustainable economic
development, reconciling growth with environmental protection, and
lobbying for increased regulation. The very governments and forces
that advanced neoliberal prescriptions around the world patronise the
most successful of these organisations, which, in turn, act as a friendly
opposition to the dominant orthodoxy. Others are hardcore activists and
community-based initiatives operating at the local level. Most recently,
growing alarm at the rapidly approaching tipping points identified by
scientists beyond which limiting climate change and averting ecological
collapse will become impossible43 has led to the Extinction Rebellion44
and the open advocacy of a Green New Deal.
Countries like China and Germany are pouring resources into shifting
from carbon-intensive sources of energy, while others are banning plastic
bags, examining biofuels, and advocating “green growth”. But here is the
rub. Even if human civilisation as a whole move to renewable sources of
energy, our total consumption of resources will, by 2050, be twice what
the Earth can replenish in a year.45 Furthermore, the speed with which
the complex systems that sustain life on Earth are unravelling makes it
highly unlikely that converting to renewable energy will save the planet.
It is also unfortunate that even as the share of renewable energy in total
output rises, the total consumption of fossil fuels will continue to increase
well into the future. This is partly driven by increased global trade. The
carbon footprint of freight was about 2.1 billion tons in 2010 and is
29
projected to rise to 8.1 billion tons by 2050.46 At present, about a 10th of

global carbon emissions are due to international trade in commodities
and transport.47 The more we trade and travel, the faster our planet will
die. The iron grip of the idea of growth ensures that even as human
civilisation presides over the liquidation of its planet, those involved in
economics from varied perspectives debate the best way to ensure growth,
oblivious to the fact that any and all economic frameworks that require
the extraction, movement, and expenditure of resources on the present
scale will lead to planetary collapse.
There are theoretical alternatives to growing our way to oblivion. But

these alternatives will remain on the drawing board because they run
counter to far too many aspects of human understanding and behaviour.
The most important of these is the human understanding and

experience of time. For most of us, it is hard to think far into the future
as humans innately are a creature of the immediate. In fact, what we
consider “far” is not that far in historical terms and minuscule when we
relate it to evolutionary, environmental, or geological timescales. Even
the wisest person will have difficulty in seriously thinking, in any detail,
about what lies more than five or ten years ahead. Some individuals
may be concerned with their legacy or with the next generation, but
when it comes down to the brass tacks, we are creatures of the moment.
The elites who dominate us are also obsessed with the short-term.
Corporations pursue their quarterly results. In democracies, leaders face
frequent election cycles that average between two and six years. In the
media, the daily car crash gets most of the coverage, not the approaching
apocalypse. Universities and think tanks, often working off corporate
or donor-sponsored agendas and funds, rarely encourage serious long-
term reflection and certainly offer few, if any, incentives to facilitate such
exertion. Even the most enlightened autocracy or harmonious society
(China as the contemporary exemplar of the former and Japan and
Denmark as instances of the latter) will have a hard time thinking more
than 50 or 100 years ahead.
Our individual and collective inability to see ourselves in historical

time leads to constraints on what we perceive to be threats. The
challenge facing the world in terms of environmental breakdown is
an inter-generational one that has been building for at least a century.
30
It has accelerated after the year 2000, the year that saw total human
consumption of resources exceed, for the first time, the ability of the
Earth to replenish itself.48 But even this acceleration is slow compared
to situations that would actually get perceived as dangerous and lead to
an appropriate life-saving reaction. Comparisons are sometimes made
between the scale of the mobilisation needed to avert the collapse of
civilisation due to climate change and the threat of the Axis powers in
the 1930s and 1940s. What is often forgotten is that until the very last
moment possible, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and
the United States avoided taking steps to halt the rise of the Axis. It
was only after Germany and Japan imposed immediate military danger
upon the Allies that they were shaken into taking the steps necessary to
ensure their own survival. And here, we are addressing a specific military-
ideological threat that came to pose a direct risk to the survival of the
Second World War Allies.
This behaviour has not changed, nor will it until it is too late. Since
2001, the United States has spent six trillion dollars fighting the War
on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the spectre of terrorist
attacks on the American homeland continues to be employed to rally
people behind a “security-centred” agenda.49 The trouble is that terrorism
cannot destroy the United States. Climate change can. But the apparent
immediacy and lethality of the threat of terrorism is so great and fits in
so well with the fear-mongering that politics and the military-corporate
convergence feed off that. The state response is skewed towards dealing
with a bad headache while the planet is headed towards a cardiac arrest.
So the same United States government that has six trillion dollars
to spend on fighting wars to stop terrorism (and has given five trillion
dollars in tax cuts to its richest people since 2001), according to the
climate change sceptic, Kenneth Haapala, has spent about 40 billion
dollars on scientific research into this phenomenon between 1993 and
2014, plus about 105 billion dollars on programs to fight the menace.50
Sceptics, like Haapala, feel this is far too much money and subscribe
to the crackpot notion that scientific researchers are perpetrating a great
hoax and have a vested interest in keeping the climate science dollars
rolling in (from this perspective, cancer researchers would be helping
spread cancer to keep their research funding levels growing!). But it just
31
goes to show that the United States and most other developed countries
have not taken the threat of climate change seriously (as they would an
imminent military or security threat). So, our warning sensors are not
getting triggered because of the remoteness and lack of specificity in the
threat posed by impending ecological collapse.
Another source of numbness to long-term and large-scale danger

is that those profiting the most from the status quo have sold the wider
public on three myths that make it almost impossible for governments
to act decisively. The first is the decentralisation myth that holds that
growing awareness and righteous individual and local action can avert
disaster. The second is the innovation myth that if we wait just a little
longer, we will get the gadgetry to make our unsustainable modern
civilisation sustainable. And the third is the win-win myth, which holds
that there is no inherent trade-off between environmental sustainability
and rising living standards. All three are palpably false, but they reinforce
the fundamental human conceit that people are inherently good and that
getting materially richer is non-negotiable.
Regarding the decentralisation myth, the sheer scale of the crises of

carbon emissions, habitat loss, and diminishing biodiversity facing the
world cannot be addressed even if everyone stops using plastic bags and
starts eating only free-range chicken and organically grown broccoli while
driving around in a Tesla. Imagine how absurd Franklin Roosevelt would
have sounded had he, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, urged all Americans
to build tanks, destroyers, machine guns, and submarines through their
local communities while raising self-supporting local militias that would
be shipped overseas to fight the professional armies of the Axis. But this
is precisely the kind of absurdity that the decentralisation myth advances
and that a great many well-meaning people earnestly subscribe to. “If
everyone just does their bit, we will be all right,” is a fine attitude in the
face of an upsurge in a local street crime or raising money to keep the
neighbourhood soup kitchen open. But it does not work when dealing
with existential planetary-scale threats, be they the Axis powers or the
increasingly proximate collapse of our natural environment.
The innovation myth preys upon the almost universal human desire
to solve problems without making any real effort or sacrifice. We are
told that new digital avenues will reduce inequality without radical
32
taxation measures or a crackdown on the billionaire class, even though
that very class has positioned itself to take maximum advantage of new
developments by harvesting our personal data. The brutal increase in
relative inequality has been driven in part by new technology that breaks
down older and more stable forms of employment. Today’s young people
work in a “gig” economy, with rising personal debt, unaffordable housing,
and tremendous distraction and pressure to “appear” happy and successful
via social media. Young people are exhausted by the combination of
instability and dopamine-induced narcissism, while the innovations
that are alleged to be “disruptive” of the status quo merely reinforce it by
manufacturing a context of self-deluding imagery. The innovation myth
also conveniently ignores the fact that improvements in the efficiency
with which resources can be extracted from the environment inevitably
lead to more resources in total being consumed. The problem our planet
faces is that the total consumption of resources is far beyond the threshold
for sustainability. We will go extinct even if we become far more efficient
unless efficiency gains are accompanied by a reduction of at least 50 per
cent in humanity’s resource consumption.51 And even such a reduction,
which could only be imposed coercively by governments, may not save
us because of the amount of damage already done to the Earth’s life-
support system, the complexities involved being extremely difficult to
comprehend in a linear fashion.
The win-win myth is a potent force in politics because it constitutes

the dominant element of how public opinion has been shaped to hold
self-contradictory positions on the environment. The story goes that
every country can be like one of the Group of Seven (G-7) states or
Scandinavian. The trick is getting there. In order to get there, you
need lots of economic growth. GDP and per capita incomes must rise.
Consumption of goods and services must increase. More stuff needs to
be produced. And more trade needs to occur. The wealthier a society
becomes, the better it is. The job of political leadership is to ensure
growth. The costs of this growth, in terms of depletion of resources, are
dismissed as unimportant as no one should remain poor. Once a country
has caught up in terms of its GDP and per capita, then it can better
manage the environmental side of the equation, especially in terms of
dealing with local pollution. In rich countries, leaders are afraid to do
anything that might reduce standards of living or impose restrictions on
33
consumption. In poorer or middle-income countries, leaders insist that

they should not be encumbered by excessive restrictions on how they
pursue growth until they can get to the rich category.
What no one is prepared to say is that with a global per capita

income in the range of 17,000 dollars (11,000 dollars nominal), we have
had enough growth to not need more of it to provide everyone on Earth
with a decent standard of living. One can also make the case that in 2000
when nominal GWP per capita (in 2010 constant prices estimate) was
approximately 8,500 dollars, and the total consumption of resources had
just reached the level that the Earth can renew, had the world economy
stopped growing; it could have, with the proper redistribution, sustained
advanced civilisation indefinitely and allowed people everywhere to live
fairly well. In fact, for the vast majority of the world’s people, 8,500
dollars a year is a very good income level. However, rather than taking the
environmentally sound but politically difficult decision to even out global
wealth, rich countries, in their drive to get richer and reluctance to impose
restrictions on their citizens’ consumption, simply urged poorer countries
to grow their GDP regardless of the stress on the Earth’s resources.
Since these myths operate in a mutually reinforcing manner, it is

impossible to get the critical mass needed to move states and societies
to take necessary actions. These actions would necessarily kill economic
growth (whether green or purple) before economic growth kills the
planet. The trouble is that hardly anybody is willing to accept that
“growth is the problem”. Carbon emissions, rising toxicity, habitat loss,
plummeting biodiversity, desertification, etc., are the consequences of our
reckless pursuit of more GDP.
Instead of more GDP, we need a reimagining of economics in which

growth no longer holds any importance once enough wealth has been
generated to allow people to live in a fair degree of material comfort.
Ideally, this reimagining ought to come from within economics, and,
to be fair, John Stuart Mill did envisage a stationary state in which
economic growth would cease, and further improvements to life would
arise from more leisure and knowledge rather than more work and output.
But economic thought is too invested in the magic of growth. It is not
going to reject centuries’ worth of its own canon just because a handful
of biologists, historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists have
34
woken up to the fundamental problem of the Earth’s carrying capacity.
The easiest thing in academia is to shrug off criticism from other fields
as arising from a lack of subject knowledge on the part of the critics.
All sorts of marginal critiques of the mainstream thinking within the
discipline can be put forward to tell the critical outsider that they just
do not know how diverse the internal debate is. While dismissing critics
might make economists feel better, it will eventually leave everyone,
including the economists, extinct.
For most of history, economic growth was marginal, linear and

subject to reversal. More land could be cultivated. More people could
be made serfs or enslaved to farm that land. Precious metals and jewels
could be mined and hoarded by states and elites. A militarily weaker
neighbour could be plundered or forced to pay tribute. Gift exchange for
luxury items might add to the wealth of nobles and wealthy commoners.
However, a plague, crop failure, invasion, or rebellion, could wipe out
gains made over years or even decades of good fortune. A catastrophe
might overtake an entire civilisation sending it into a dark age or wiping
it off the face of the Earth altogether.
Recovery, in the former case, would take centuries. Thus, Europe

probably did not return to prosperity and social development levels
comparable to the Roman Empire in AD 200 until AD 1500. History,
therefore, offers us the clearest insight into what a post-growth world
might look like if corrective measures are not undertaken and natural
corrections arising from planetary resource depletion, ecological collapse,
and warfare over dwindling resources take hold. Human beings would,
in that condition, move from their modern trajectory of exponential
growth to a premodern state of contraction and material decline. The
consequences for billions of people should such a scenario play out would
be dire.
But even if the leaders of the world’s nations were to realise that going
from a rapid economic expansion that is dependent upon extraction and
consumption to global decline caused by the onset of ecological disasters
was not in their interest and that popular economic frameworks have
sold them on the false promise of limitless growth. What, if anything,
could be done?
35
The first step is perhaps the hardest. It entails tuning out any
economist or economic model advancing the notion that increases in
consumption or production that require utilisation of resources are still
feasible or desirable. Since all variations of economic growth currently
being advocated will lead to ecological collapse within the next 50 years,
there is a collective need to start thinking in post-growth terms. The
world has more than enough GDP to go around.
The second step is limiting global trade. This can be achieved in two
mutually reinforcing ways. One is to shift away from the current trading
system based on the United States dollar to a balanced trading system
rooted in regional currency blocks that would discourage both excessive
imports and exports. The other is to establish a Global Economic
Planning Agency that would encourage economic diversification and
local production and discourage specialisation and heavy reliance on
trade.
The third step would be to impose resource consumption quotas

based on per capita income levels. Countries with per capita incomes
above 8,500 dollars would be restricted in what they can import by way
of energy or what they might themselves produce from fossil fuels. This
would compel rich countries to shift to renewable energy. Conversely,
poor and middle-income countries would cap their growth once they
reached 8,500 dollars per capita GDP.
The fourth step would be to grow through redistribution of wealth

and through the promotion of sectors that are not resource-intensive. The
redistribution aspect of such a global policy would require both income
transfers within all countries from rich to the poor and cancellation of
debts, both public and private, domestically and internationally. The
growth aspect of this policy would recognise that fields that are not
resource-intensive or require minimal material inputs are the most
valuable sources of wealth and employment.
The fifth step is to pour resources and effort into the reclamation and
restoration of the natural habitat. An initiative, if you will, to terraform
the Earth back to health and clean up the mess humans have made.
Moving towards the regeneration of nature would also have a positive
effect by generating lots of jobs with a negative carbon footprint.
36
The problem with taking these steps is not that they are not obviously
necessary, that there is not sufficient evidence to support the need for
drastic action, or even that the logic of avoiding inflicting massive damage
on complex systems that might suddenly destabilise once thresholds are
crossed is open to question. The problem lies in the realm of politics
and administration and the insatiable appetite these have for bad ideas,
faulty logic, and selfish decision-making. The relation between intentions
and effects represents the governance dimension of our predicament.
No matter how wise or benevolent the policy, outcomes depend on the
quality of governance and the ability of leaders and states to make wise
decisions.
37
III
Solon and Croesus: Why Humans are Terrible at
Making Wise Decisions
For, to judge aright, one should esteem men because
they are generous, not because they have the power to be
generous; and, in like manner, should admire those who
know how to govern a kingdom, not those who, without
knowing how, actually govern one.52
– Machiavelli (Florentine diplomat, writer, and political
philosopher, b. 1469, d. 1527)
Persuading a ruler to adopt the right course is a fatiguing
business, but flattery of any emperor is accomplished
without the need for real affection.53
– Tacitus (Roman Historian, b. AD 56, d. AD 120)
But, nowadays, princes and ministers of a disorderly world
each on a small scale, appropriates the profits of his own
state, and each exercises the burden of his own office, for
his private benefit. This is why the states are in a perilous
position. For the relation between public and private
interests is what determines existence or ruin.54
– Lord Shang (Statesman of the Qin State, c. 390 – 338
BCE)
As the present century unfolds under the intellectual patronage of

growth-oriented economists, technological optimists, and corporate
apologists, the window of opportunity to save human civilisation from the
consequences of ecological collapse is closing. History is often preoccupied
with understanding the failures of the past, while philosophers of the
subject have built an impressive array of frameworks to help guide those
seeking answers. In the year 2200, by which time the present age will
probably have ended, post-apocalyptic dystopias would have taken hold
of those societies to have survived the onset of Malthusian and Darwinian
corrections; a single question will likely consume the historians of that
unfortunate time. They would wonder why their ancestors, equipped with
modern science and the technical means to save the planet, failed to do
38
so. In their search for answers, they would discover the triumph of hubris,
and its companion, nemesis, writ large over the entire course of history
and evident in the collapse of earlier civilisations. This being said, pre-
modern civilisations were often struck by challenges that were simply
beyond their material and organisational capacity to counter. Plagues,
famines, barbarian invasions, and natural calamities could strike suddenly
and with catastrophic intensity. In the case of modern civilisation, short
of an undetected large meteorite striking the Earth, the crises leading to
its unravelling have been convincingly predicted for generations.
Herodotus, some 2,500 years ago, as the first critical historian, tried
to get to the heart of the human inability to retain rationality in decision-
making. The Histories written by Herodotus can be read in several equally
legitimate ways.55 The most common way is as a non-linear narrative
account of states, cultures, and leaders culminating in the wars between the
Persian Empire and the Greek city-states. Another is to take the Histories
as an authentic, if not always an accurate, account of the civilisation of
West Asia, North Africa, and parts of Europe. And then, the Histories
can be read as a philosophical commentary on the irrationality of power,
the heedlessness of the powerful, and innate defects in human nature.
This third path through the Histories is the most relevant to the present
discussion.
Herodotus introduces us to his central insight through the story of

Solon of Athens and Croesus of Lydia. Solon, the Athenian statesman,
credited with Athens’ first constitution, and Croesus, the wealthy ruler
of Lydia (now in Turkey), met during the former’s travels around 560
BC. Croesus knew about Solon’s reputation for learning and wisdom
and wanted validation. So, Croesus gave Solon the royal treatment and,
after days of generous hospitality, had the Athenian admitted to a royal
audience. At this audience, Croesus wanted Solon to tell him who, of all
men, was the happiest. Croesus expected that Solon would tell him that
he was the happiest of all men. Solon, however, disappointed Croesus by
naming Tellus of Athens. In Solon’s estimation, Tellus was the happiest
of all men as he lived to be 70 in comfort and served his country and was
honoured at this death with a public funeral. No man, felt Solon, could
aspire to a happier life than one of public service, modest wealth, and
popular appreciation.
39
Croesus was unhappy at this response but was still eager to get
Solon’s stamp of approval, thus asking Solon to name the second happiest
of all men. Upon being disappointed for the second time by Solon’s
answer, Croesus was livid and demanded to know why the ordinary lives
of ordinary men were being described as happier than his own? Solon’s
response was that until life had ended, it was impossible to render a
verdict on it, while such was the cruelty of Providence that it often gave
us a taste of joy or success only to take it away. Croesus, blinded by hubris,
dismissed Solon. Lydia was soon embroiled in a war with the rising power
of Persia, which ended in Persian victory.
Although Herodotus’ account of the encounter between Solon and

Croesus stretches the timelines of the two lives and is probably apocryphal,
it remains useful by providing the Histories with a theme. Herodotus
uses the mechanism of the voice of reason, giving sound advice whose
correctness is proven by the subsequent course of events to demonstrate
the toxic effects of power and wealth upon rational decision-making. For
Herodotus, human nature is programmed to seek glory and success, but
once attained, these acts inhibit rationality and magnify conceit in one’s
innate superiority. From this hubris flow unwise decisions that lead to
frustration, defeat, and, in some cases, collapse. In the Histories, everyone
succumbs to hubris and invites nemesis making for an exciting story with
terrible consequences for the states and societies involved.
From Herodotus, we learn that the greatest public virtue is doing

what works to the collective advantage, and the greatest vice is acting out
of conceit and ego. At times it is necessary for some to sacrifice themselves
for the greater good. Thus, Leonidas leading his 300 Spartans to certain
doom at Thermopylae is both heroic and pragmatic as this sacrifice buys
time, demoralises the Persians, and helps unite many Greek city-states
against the Persian invasion. What makes Leonidas significant is not that
his actions are brave but that they are wise, underpinned by logos – a
logical comprehension of causes and effects. State and decision-making
tend to have a directly proportional relationship – the more a state tends
towards logos in its decision-making, the more likely it is to make wise
decisions, and conversely, the lower the level of logos, the greater the
chances of disaster.
Many of the greatest historians and political thinkers have focused
40
on the vexing contradictions at the heart of all attempts to exercise power
with wisdom and effectiveness. The corrupting effects of power deplete
the rational and moral faculties needed for its successful exercise. But
those who consciously seek power rarely do so out of philosophical
foresight or a desire to serve the greater good, assuming they can even
comprehend what that is.
The motivation to seek power arises from greed, personal insecurity,

social competition, family tradition, identity, ideology, or some
combination of these factors. These material, egoistic, or identity-based
factors are precisely those associated with hubris. Consequently, those
who consciously compete for power are almost invariably intellectually
and temperamentally unqualified to wield it wisely. And those who have
the temperament and intellect like Solon do not seek it and, should
it somehow come their way, wield it for as little time as possible. So,
those who cannot exercise power wisely are the most eager to have it,
while those who can exercise it wisely do not want to acquire it. This
fundamental paradox, rooted in human nature, has operated with equal
force across all historical civilisations. It is, therefore, no surprise that all
civilisations have wrestled with what Abu’l Fazl, advisor to the Mughal
Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), called the problem of the “selfish” ruler.
Abu’l Fazl, in the Ain-i-Akbari, divided rulers into two broad

categories, i.e. the selfish ruler and the true monarch.56 The vast majority
of rulers fell into the selfish category. Their reigns were characterised by
the reckless pursuit of personal gain and pleasure. These rulers confused
the trappings of power with the substance needed to govern fairly, wisely,
and efficiently. Selfish rulers attracted vicious and incompetent courtiers,
for they were incapable of taking good advice. In this manner, the decline
of the state became inevitable, along with the ruin of the country. A
minority of rulers, who fell into the “true” category, were characterised by
their ability to comprehend that statesmanship and governance were the
mainsprings of greatness. Decisions by such rulers reflected the overall
interests of the state. The less selfishly a ruler behaved, the better would be
the quality of administration, the more prosperous society would become,
and the longevity of the regime would be ensured.
The Chinese engaged with the problem of the “bad emperor”, the
Persians wrote “mirrors for princes”, the Ottomans crafted a Platonic
41
military-bureaucratic slave elite – the janissaries – to run their empire

and advise them, and Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab philosopher of history,
wrote profoundly about the structural processes that underpinned the rise
and fall of states. The basic blueprint of the great empires forged by the
Arabs, Turks, Persians, Mughals, and the Chinese was a monarchical ruler
exercising power through hierarchies of civil servants, soldiers, priests, and
notables. Despite all the emphasis on enlightened self-interest, princely
education, selection of capable servants, and cultivation of a drive to leave
an enduring constructive legacy, these continental bureaucratic empires
could not resolve the problem of the selfish ruler or ensure the orderly
succession of wise monarchs.
While most of the world’s successful civilisations were organised as

enlightened autocracies, the Western world, with its classical republics,
feudal aristocracies, and modern liberal or constitutionalist experiments,
took a different route in addressing the paradox identified by Herodotus.
While the dominant Eurasian tradition tried to ensure a high quality of
autocratic rule mediated through imperial servants, the Western tradition
sought to limit the power of any single actor while rendering all actors
vulnerable to the law or the collective will.
Athenian democracy, Spartan oligarchy, the Roman Republic, the

feudal diffusion of power, the Magna Carta, modern constitutionalism
inspired by Montesquieu and the separation of powers, and the pursuit
of democracy represent some historically important manifestations of the
effort to moderate the effects of power on its wielders. These approaches
share a common understanding of the power paradox. First, they all accept
that the concentration of too much power in one person or institution is
more likely to produce abuses. Second, they regard competition between
elites as a good thing that imposes mutual restraint while encouraging
better performance so long as the rules of the game are accepted as
legitimate. Third, they emphasise institutional continuity through a
predictable method of succession. Fourth, the shared expectation is that if
the first three points are followed, then the decisions of government will
have greater legitimacy within the elite and, where applicable, in society
at large. And finally, from this legitimacy will flow a less coercive state
wherein authority, being exercised with the consent of powerful sections
of society, will be carried into effect more completely.
42
In practice, societies organised on the republican, aristocratic,
corporate, or liberal-constitutionalist pattern extant in the West are
plutocracies. A small and incredibly wealthy elite secures political and
administrative power through direct and indirect means and ensures that
the state serves the selfish interests of the top 0.1 per cent. Historically,
such plutocracies have proven far more brittle than autocracies with
territorial expansion or great power status, often leading to the rapid
erosion of the elite consensus sustaining these state configurations. It is
not surprising, therefore, that much of the political thought emerging
from the Western experience of relative diffusion of power fixates on
the problem of institutional decay arising from the selfish and unwise
conduct of elites in such systems. From Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, to
Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, to present-day democratic theorists,
the search for a stable and responsive moderate regime continues with
only illusive successes due to the inherent limitations of this approach.
The first limitation is that more competition between elites does not
produce rulers better able to govern but only rulers better at winning
the competition to occupy a limited number of authority positions.
Indeed, as Peter Turchin has observed, the over-production of elites can
have a destabilising effect on public institutions leading to unhealthy
competition and the emergence of counter-elites alienated from the
system.57 The more vicious and intense the competition, the less likely
ethical candidates are to compete, and their chances of success would be
even lower.
The second constraint on the quality of candidates is the financial

cost of political competition. Even in a developed democracy, like the
United States, there are few restrictions on candidates taking vast sums
of money to run their campaigns from lobbies funding Political Action
Committees and then, if they win, helping write legislation for the
interests that bankrolled their electoral success.58 The greater the size of
the electorate, the more it will cost in terms of outreach, mobilisation,
and media content to get the message out. In more aristocratic or feudal
settings, it is still expensive to buy a constituency through the exercise of
patronage. And in those cases, frequently found in the developing world,
where overt religious or social affiliation causes a constituency to vote for
a candidate because of their lineage or spiritual value, monopoly leads
43
to incompetence and self-aggrandisement.59 Perhaps the most poignant

recent instance of the power of money in politics was Senator Marco
Rubio of Florida, refusing to rule out taking any more money from the
National Rifle Association when asked to do so point-blank by children
from his constituency who had survived a school shooting.60 Rubio is not
the exception but the rule. To keep the money rolling, most politicians,
even in the West, are literally prepared to allow their constituents and
their children to die.61 Whether that death comes quickly, in the form of
a mass shooting, or slowly, in the form of climate change, is a matter of
detail.
The third faultline emanates from limited durations in tenures.

Such limits are intrinsic to democracy and other constitutional forms of
government. After every few years, leaders need to refresh their mandate.
Elections can be coordinated so that they all happen at once or staggered,
as is the case in the United States, or a mixture of the two, as in India
or Pakistan. In theory, periodic elections should make governments
more responsive. In actuality, they lead the political class to operate in a
permanent campaign mode that consumes most of its energy. To stay in
power becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end or a way to
serve the public interest. Depending on how the election cycles play out,
divided governments, shaky majorities, or weak coalitions may emerge, all
of which reinforce the primacy of survival in politics.
The fourth constraint stems from the vested interests and inertia
of the administrative instruments under the command of the political
leadership. Such instruments include the personalised power networks
associated with the expansion of the Roman Republic, the service
nobilities and scribal bureaucracies of pre-modern empires, and modern
bureaucratic organisations. The BBC’s classic comedy series, Yes Minister,
and its successor, Yes Prime Minister, capture the eternal battle between the
“political will” and “administrative wont”, painting a remarkably authentic
portrait of government as a “loose confederation of warring tribes”.62
While the characters and situations are fictional, the basic message is
solidly based on the historical reality of administrative institutions. That
is, the instruments of administration are far from being neutral, and they
can effectively frustrate even the most popular government in the pursuit
of the most sensible policies. Even the most highly regarded bureaucracies,
44
like the Japanese elite track or French Grand Corps, seek to limit the
scope of political action to what they deem to be practical. The opposite
approach is for political leaders to have a spoils system (as happens in the
United States) and appoint thousands of people presumably loyal to their
political vision to key positions. This approach creates fissures within the
apparatus and undermines its ability to move at all by privileging loyalty
over competence. It also exacerbates the danger of vested interests that
bankroll campaigns infiltrating the bureaucracies that exist to regulate
them, such as appointing coal lobbyists and climate change deniers to
the United States Environmental Protection Agency.63 The choice then
is between a highly autonomous and professional administrative elite
basically impervious to political pressure, a compromised bureaucracy
staffed through a spoils system or bureaucracies like those of India and
Pakistan that manage to combine being formally closed with being
substantively politicised and incompetent.
From a broader perspective, autocracies, oligarchies, republics, and

democracies contain the seeds of their own destruction. An autocracy
depends on the quality of the ruler and the service elite but has no iron clad
means to resist a “selfish” ruler. In oligarchies, the interests of the privileged
few get conflated with the interests of the state, while competition within
the elite can plunge society into chaos. In constitutional republics and
democracies, the risk of tyranny through demagoguery or capture of the
institutions supposed to represent the public and regulate the powerful
by interests averse to both propositions is all too common. In all cases,
the barriers that ordinary citizens or subjects need to cross to become
decision-makers are immense not only in time and effort but also in
terms of finances. Power, as Ibn Khaldun so clearly understood, is tribal,
even as the definition of who belongs to our tribe might change.
Another set of critical constraints on our ability to make wise

decisions stems from the limitations of our cerebral equipment. People
in authority suffer from the same problem of perspective, whereby short-
term threats and contemporaneous events grab most of the attention of
the general population. Long-term or amorphous threats naturally get
shunted to the back of the line. Machiavelli’s observation that problems
are hard to detect when manageable and easy to detect once they become
unmanageable gets to the heart of our inability to act in time to stop
45
great disasters. The other side of this is the amount of distraction that
people in authority have to put up with. It helps to think of a state and
a society as a series of relationships. The more relationships converge on
a single point, the more powerful the occupier of that point turns. So, in
manorial feudalism, the lord of the manor occupies the most important
point because the serfs, freeholders, and his vassals need the manor to
do everything from deciding their disputes to selling their grain and
organising civic life.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in The Old Regime and the Revolution,

the French Revolution became possible not because feudalism was strong
in France but because between 1600 and 1789, an increasingly absolutist
state instrumented through a royal bureaucracy and the army had created
parallel and, ultimately, more powerful networks, dependent upon key
officials (especially the intendants).64 These royal servants were eventually
replaced by a modern bureaucracy headed at the local level by prefects
– a system that is still contemporaneous in France. The dilemma is that
without the concentration of power, effective governance is impossible.
But that same concentration means that key officials, ministers, and top
executives are overwhelmed by information and distractions. They are also
subjected to pressure by lobbies and vested interests, some of which were
or are critical to their coming into power or staying there. Even if the
political leadership wants to do the right thing and is fully seized of the
importance of a particular policy, the resistance it will face is considerable.
Should the leadership somehow tune out the noise and manage external
pressures and bureaucratic inertia, it might still fail to act wisely because
of the power of identity. All power is social and requires motivating people
to follow the leader or motivating some people to coerce others to follow
the leader. In premodern times a combination of kinship and religious
belief provided the glue that held regimes together. In modern times,
notions of ethnicity, nationhood, or utopian ideologies - civil religions,
as Michael Burleigh calls them - produce the same effect.65 How a state
or community identifies itself places limits on what is politically possible.
Some cultures, like those of the United States, are so enamoured with the
idea of free enterprise and individualism associated with capitalism that
they just cannot accept that a stationary state or equilibrium is necessary
or possible.66 Similarly, Japan’s elite mandarins and their political allies
are so emotionally invested in the idea of Japan as a homogenous and
46
harmonious society that they can only, with great difficulty, wrap their
heads around the need to open their society to immigration to offset
demographic trends such as greying of the population and insufficient
numbers in the workforce.67 In Europe, national identities that were
supposed to have been rendered redundant by the European project and
the shared European values that are embodied by the European Union
(EU) are reasserting themselves in spite of the tragic history of the
1900s.68
In a contest between our imagined identities and real-world, long-

term interests, the former frequently trump the latter. The history of
governance furnishes little basis for optimism. Human nature is almost
invariably tribal, selfish, and prone to collective delusions that have,
with agonising regularity, caused us to deny the humanity of others. For
all the political wisdom and administrative experience of the imperial
civilisations and bureaucratic states of Eurasia, the problem of the selfish
ruler remains intractable. For all the redemptive potential and inspiring
rhetoric of its classical and modern political philosophies, Western
societies are constitutional plutocracies where the capture of institutional
power by an assortment of vested interests that do not have the public
good at heart is the norm. Between our inherent weakness and the
damage accumulated over time, there appears to be no satisfactory answer
to the problem of sustaining the wise and efficient exercise of power.
These deficiencies might have been tolerable had human social and
political development proceeded at about the same pace as technological
advancement and economic growth. For the past 500 years, however, the
pace of material change has far exceeded the evolution of cultures of power,
group mentality, and our ability to understand in a relatable manner the
behaviour of the complex systems that sustain the Earth. With resources
running low and consumption and population continuing to rise rapidly,
the time to take countermeasures to save the planet has practically run
out. As the global environmental emergency asserts itself and becomes
obvious, the costs of doing anything about it escalate dramatically. Having
not taken action when the problem was manageable, the costs of taking
effective action today have become prohibitive. Critical tipping points to
avert a planetary crisis, be they related to biodiversity loss, habitat loss,
toxicity, or global warming, have either been crossed or are so close that
limiting the damage is all we can reasonably hope to do. Many of our
47
thinkers and practically all of our leaders have, like Croesus, refused to
listen to Solon’s admonishment. Modern civilisation may well become
that brief glimpse of happiness that is cruelly overshadowed by nemesis
rooted in our hubris.
In 1972, a report titled The Limits to Growth was published as part of

the Club of Rome’s project on the future of the world.69 The authors were
researchers in their mid-20s. The report was meant to serve as a timely
warning to the world’s leaders that exponential material growth was
unsustainable on a planet with finite resources. Even the most optimistic
projection indicated that the Earth’s resources would run out within 100
years. By 2100, or perhaps sooner, the Earth would be a wasteland unable
to support energy-intensive human civilisation and horrific Malthusian
and natural corrections would start ravaging humanity by 2050. The
basic message that the authors wanted to convey was that the world’s
governments, businesses and thinkers needed to work in concert to bring
the global economy into equilibrium with the Earth’s carrying capacity.
Such equilibrium would not end economic growth but decouple it from
gross increases in material consumption and production.
The case made by The Limits to Growth was solid and has been
strengthened by the passage of time as its concerns are now widely shared
by environmentalists and governments. The report made a huge splash
in the public domain and was widely reviewed and commented upon. It
angered economists, heartened environmentalists, and engaged political
leaders. However, the policy impact of the report was negligible. In theory,
public officials, when they encounter a superior argument about policy,
should change their minds. This should be all the more so in instances
where national, and collective survival is at stake. There were five major
causes for the triumph of Croesus’s hubris over Solon’s logos in this specific
instance. The first reason why the argument advanced by The Limits to
Growth proved unviable was that it ran counter to the dominant themes
of modern political and economic discourse, which made the attainment
of material prosperity and a high standard of living the fundamental
goal of governance. The report warned that global industrialisation to
Western levels was ecologically ruinous and would destroy the planet.
For the political leaderships of developing countries, many of whom were
ravaged by centuries of brutal colonial exploitation by Western powers,
48
the idea that they cannot catch up to the West because that will destroy
the planet is deeply hurtful and unacceptable. The leaders of India or
China cannot tell their people, “Sorry, but in order to save the Earth, we
will have to cap our economic growth and consumption at a level of 10-
20 per cent of the West, which is, incidentally, partly responsible for our
poverty through its colonial exploitation”.
For the leaders of rich countries, The Limits to Growth hypothesis,

if accepted, would require imposing restrictions on further increases
in consumption and following a redistributive agenda that would hurt
the politically significant top one per cent of their societies. In fact, the
Western world embraced the neoclassical or neoliberal mantra of free
markets and the celebration of the resulting inequality in the late-1970s
and early-1980s. They entrenched neoliberal ideas in institutions like
the IMF and the World Bank. It makes little difference to the average
American household if Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos earn extra billions (that
get added to GDP and overall growth). The three richest Americans have
more wealth than the bottom 60 per cent of American households.70
Besides, if every country had the per capita consumption of China, then
the Earth could sustain seven billion people. But at the United States'
levels of consumption, three or four planet earths would be needed.71 The
Chinese, however, are determined to rise to developed country status, while
no American government could seriously cut per capita consumption by
80 per cent. The political will to achieve ecological equilibrium is just not
there and cannot be there, as democracies cannot deliberately make their
people poorer, while enlightened autocracies derive their legitimacy from
economic growth. Even today, the IMF considers the world economy to
be in recession if it grows less than three per cent a year, which is to say
that the IMF believes that unless global GDP doubles every 24 years,
there is insufficient growth.72
The second impediment to the acceptance of The Limits to Growth

hypothesis was and still is administrative. Let us say that the world’s
leaders accept that taking effective action to achieve equilibrium is
necessary. Implementation will fall to the civil service elites and the
bureaucracies under their command. The targets of such policies will be
everybody, from large corporations to individual citizens. Many of the
close relationships that bureaucracies have with important segments of
49
society will be disrupted. The interests of commerce and industry will, in

particular, be adversely affected by policies stringent enough to actually
save the planet in the time we have left. Consequently, there will be fierce
pushback.
In democracies, civil society will protest and resist the intrusion of

the state. Corporations and their lobbyists will kick up a storm. The
resistance will assume legal and popular forms. Delays will be inevitable
and widespread, rewards will appear remote, and costs will be immediate.
Enlightened autocracies would, in principle, have an advantage in that
legal opposition would not be an issue, nor would civil society. The problem
would arise from the risk of popular rebellion driven by restrictions on
standards of living. Implementation of a strict environmentalist agenda
would also disrupt relationships within the state apparatus and between
the regime and its wealthiest subjects. In democracies and autocracies
with effective administrations, there is a chance that steps taken to achieve
equilibrium will be enforced. But the vast majority of states, whether
democratic or autocratic, do not have the ability to establish effective
environmental administrations. Countries like India and Pakistan cannot
manage garbage collection or basic sanitation in their capitals. To expect
that they can pursue a complicated set of policies aimed at achieving
environmental and socioeconomic equilibrium is not realistic.
The third impediment arises from the structure of globalisation and

the market economy. Shifting to greener local production and limiting
world trade will disrupt existing supply and demand chains. Those
who profit from globalised trade in commodities, especially export-
oriented economies like Germany and China, will find the adjustment
painful. Germany, the poster child for an environmentally responsible
industrialised state, is a case in point. Since the mid-1990s, Germany has
spent nearly 600 billion dollars on converting its economy to renewable
sources of energy. In absolute terms, Germany has achieved cuts in carbon
emissions but missed nearly all of its 2020 targets by a wide margin.73 The
reductions that have been achieved were more than offset by increasing
emissions in other countries. The tremendous growth in the fortunes of
the top 0.1 per cent since 1975 means that Davos men and women are
better funded than ever before and might well now constitute a global
imperial elite that will resist any serious effort to impose the restrictions
50
needed to de-globalise trade in commodities, tax the very rich, and pay
for a rapid transition to greener economies.
Saving the Earth will necessitate dealing with the billionaires in a

Bolshevik manner because they are the ultimate enemies of the planet
and the billions of underprivileged that inhabit it. The interface, however,
between governments, plutocrats, and administrations is so strong that
breaking it up through the normal processes of politics is no longer
possible within the remaining time. Even mild proposals like increasing
marginal tax rates on the highest incomes, cracking down on offshore
accounts, or imposing carbon taxes meet with furious and effective
opposition from the privileged few who stand to lose from them.74
The fourth impediment arises from the lag between implementation

and effect. No one can be entirely sure how quickly the Earth’s ecology
will recover even if maximal pro-equilibrium proposals are set in place
in the 2020s. It may not be possible to reverse the damage within a
timeframe relevant to civilisation. Even in the most environmentally
conscious country, the lags are immense and outcomes difficult to predict.
Turning around 200 countries, even if they are all committed, will take
time, and progress will be uneven. The uncertainty of success in achieving
equilibrium in time encourages state elites to pay lip service to the needs
of the environment while positioning themselves to acquire the best
possible control over the Earth’s remaining resources. This cynical social
Darwinism explains China’s drive to acquire control over African mineral
wealth75, key shipping lanes76, and its One Belt One Road initiative.77 The
deaths of millions of less wealthy Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans,
from the effects of a four degrees Celsius temperature increase by the end
of this century, while tragic, are inevitable from a realpolitik perspective.
The fifth impediment arises from the slow pace of philosophical

change. Academia and the broader intelligentsia are the products of
structures that have been at the leading edge of globalisation and sustained
pro-growth economic theories and technological optimism. Things are
changing, but the pace of innovation and the opening up of new avenues
of consumption means that most of our thinkers are not engaged with
the mortal threat posed by the collapse of the Earth’s ecology. One of
the major contributors to The Limits to Growth, Dennis L. Meadows, was
constrained to admit in 2012 that while he was pleased that the questions
51
posed by that study were being seriously considered 40 years after its
release, he no longer felt we could stop the economic doomsday machine
in time.78 The leisurely pace at which new ideas are circulated and tested
and accepted or rejected by academia and the press mean that even the
best ideas take an awfully long time to gain traction. Since universities
provide the human resource for businesses, corporations, state services,
and political parties, generations can be blinded by unsound ideas such as
limitless economic growth and pursue policies based on what they have
learned.
Notwithstanding our admiration for wise statesmen like Solon, it is

unwise, like Croesus, that have exercised power for most of our history.
Herodotus teaches us that nemesis awaits those who have succumbed
to hubris leading to the rise and fall of empires and states. The basic
constraints on wise decision-making, being rooted in human nature, cut
across history. The tragedy that is presently unfolding is that if the spirit
of Croesus prevails again, then the story of modern human civilisation
will end within a few generations.
52
IV
The Pangloss Effect: Why Optimism is Lethal
Men from shortsightedness frequently seek their own advantage
in what is harmful to them: how much the more must they err in
regard to others.79
– Akbar the Great (Mughal Emperor, r. 1556-1605)
Never has an expedition against them been more certain of
success…80
– Napoleon Bonaparte (French Emperor, r. 1804-1815, on the
prospect of war with the Russian Empire)
Optimism – or the idea that our inherent ability to overcome problems is

greater than the chance our problems overcome us – is perhaps the most
prevalent and indefatigable of all imaginative viruses to infect humans.
It lies at the root of the greatest disasters in history and has seriously
compromised humanity’s response to the global ecological catastrophe.
Optimists are generally willing to give human beings the benefit of
the doubt or simply invent the doubt necessary to continue giving
themselves and others like them a pass. The most diehard of this lot,
no matter how bad things get, will remain true to the notion advanced
by Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide that we live “in the best of
all possible worlds”. What makes Pangloss remarkable is his ability to
explain away all the terrible things that happen to Candide (the hero) as
being somehow for the best. The more disasters befall Candide; the more
elaborate Pangloss becomes in his rationalisations.81
The sources of our optimism are many, but three, in particular, merit
mention. The first of these is rooted in biology and the well-attested
inability of our animal brains to react to difficulties unless they are
immediate. Over millions of years, humans evolved to excel at responding
to immediate dangers with a range of xenophobic and cooperative
responses hardwired into them. Just think of how your mind focuses on
any strange sound or how tribal we are in our social life with multiple
layers of in-groups and out-groups requiring “us” to work together against
“them”. At the same time, absent an immediate threat, humans focus on
what is convenient or pleasing and ignore all else.
53
The second is rooted in our imagination and its effects on our ability
to understand the causes of phenomena around us. As the exercise of
reason requires effort and often produces unpleasant effects, human
beings are vulnerable to any assertion of certainty. Historically, the easiest
way to be sure about things is to imagine an explanation or attribute
causes to supernatural forces and repeat it endlessly. According to the
18th century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the exercise of this
imaginative faculty was an important binding force in early civilisations.
The xenophobic and cooperative tendencies rooted in our biology found
expression in what Vico called “poetic wisdom”,82 whereby cooperation on
a large scale to placate or fight against the supernatural forces responsible
for natural processes that often harmed humans emerged. It also meant
that humans who believed in a different set of deities could be identified
as outsiders. But the greatest asset of poetic wisdom was its infinite
elasticity in explaining human suffering and the many calamities that
afflicted people at the individual and collective levels. Religion, ideology,
popular superstitions, dharma, karma, modern wellness tropes, and a
variety of other ideas brilliantly dissected by Francis Wheen in How
Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World help people stay hopeful.83 Statements
that celebrate as a “miracle” the survival of one person out of scores or
hundreds in an accident or rags-to-riches stories are classical instances
of such thinking.
The third source of optimism is self-centeredness. Over the past three

hundred years, as traditional ideas have become less appealing, materialism
and consumerism have provided secular means of helping us stay hopeful.
Global elites are particularly fierce advocates of material optimism, while
those who have succeeded enough in terms of conventional bourgeois
standards also strongly identify with this type of thinking. For the
globalised classes, their privileges and prosperity encourage them to
rationalise it as being a desirable outcome for all with the promise held
out that everyone could have a Swiss standard of living.84 So, while the
world’s richest 75 million people contribute as much to global warming
as the poorest 3.75 billion, 85 the metropolitan optimist remains supremely
confident in the ability of humans to turn the tables on the impending
global catastrophe. In this way, without having to change our ravenous
behaviour, we will find a miraculous solution to our predicament, and
this will remain, now and forever, the best of all possible worlds. Our
54
optimism is built on the solid foundations of biology, ideology, and self-
absorption.
It is no surprise that optimistic thinking has produced disastrous

consequences throughout history. One does not have to go very far back
to find instances of optimism leading to catastrophic miscalculations. The
20th century began with the drift to the First World War – a conflict
that claimed 20 million lives directly86 and at least an additional 20-30
million lives indirectly.87 Amongst the most critical causes of the conflict
was the idea that war would be won swiftly and cheaply, enabling an
advantageous reset of the global pecking order. Every great power that
entered the war was convinced that victory was one campaign away. Had
the rulers of Europe been pessimists and sceptics, they would have been
less likely to fall prey to militarist and nationalist fantasies. In spite of the
enormous trauma endured by the participants in the First World War,
most retained a resolutely optimistic outlook on the future.
This optimism was the result of revolutions in Russia, Italy, and

Germany which brought to power left-wing and right-wing utopians.88
In United States, the return of the country to isolationism represented
the triumph of the hope that the world would sort itself out and that even
if it did not, the great oceans would protect the American homeland.89 In
Britain and France, the nominal victors of the First World War, a pacifist
fantasy took hold of public discourse – one that led to the appeasement
of fascism while it was militarily weak. This pacifism also led to the
demoralising concessions once it became apparent that Germany had
rearmed and was ready for a rematch. In Japan, the decline of European
colonial empires and the return of the United States to isolation led to
the articulation of an imperial vision for Asia, in which China would
become Japan’s India, and the rest of the continent would thrive under
Japanese tutelage. The bill for these various shades of optimistic thinking
came due in the form of a global conflict that dwarfed the First World
War and raged in China from 1931 to 1945 and in the rest of the world
from 1939 to 1945, killing 60-70 million,90 and injuring or displacing
many times that number. The trouble is that until the Japanese bombs
fell on Pearl Harbor, most Americans genuinely believed that they could
wait out the World War. The appeasement governments of 1930s France
and Britain did what their people thought was best. In spite of credible
55
evidence pouring in that Hitler had zero interest in peace and was not
a rational actor, the French and British (and later the Soviets) chose a
policy of hope over reality. Hitler and many in his circle were convinced
that they stood at the threshold of a Thousand Year Reich to establish
the German master race as the dominant world power. Lenin and his
successors were equally firm in their belief that the communist utopia
they were building in the Soviet Union would carry the world with it and
that history was on their side. The Japanese, debilitated by overdoses of
nationalism and imperial ambition, also believed that they were destined
to hold the future of half of humanity in their hands. While optimism
fueled by ideological or popular conviction led to the greatest disasters of
the first half of the 20th century, the relative peace that descended on the
world post-1945 led to the emergence of an even more lethal variant of
optimism.
After 1945, elites and peoples of all ideologies and at all developmental
levels embraced materialistic optimism. This is the idea that human life
can only get better through the application of technology and economic
growth. Soviet oligarchs, Maoist tyrants, social democrats, Keynesian
economists, Third World nationalists, medieval fossil fuel monarchies,
and neoliberal shock therapists shared the unshakeable belief that
getting rich was, and is, glorious. Their disagreement was on the best way
to organise a society to achieve that end. Should societies be forced to
undergo a Maoist “Great Leap Forward”, or is it better to maintain a high
investment-to-GDP ratio for a few decades, or is state ownership the key,
or should the decisions be left to the “free” market, were the debates that
raged within and between groups of growth cultists. But what was never
really questioned was the logic of infinite growth. The result was that since
1945 all of the nations stopped waging the kind of total wars that had
characterised the first half of the 20th century. Alternatively, they decided
to wage total war upon our planet in pursuit of the elixir of infinite growth
and prosperity. With extraordinary and increasing intensity, all other
life on Earth was subjected to an industrialised massacre. Ecology and
climate-altering amounts of chemicals and compounds were poured into
the land, sea, and air to make way for a better life for more humans. As
evidence mounted in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that the war on nature
would lead to the collapse of the environmental and biological systems
humans needed for their survival, our optimistic minds either refused
56
to contemplate that dreadful probability or pinned hopes on technology
delivering a solution.91 Like the millions of people who thought the Nazis
ought to be appeased, successive generations after 1945 thought that we
would somehow muddle through and the worst-case scenarios would not
materialise. Even when the awareness was there, the willingness to move
quickly enough to avert catastrophe was insufficient.
At present, as we head into the third decade of what may be the

final century for humans, the collapse of biodiversity is threatening to
disrupt the agricultural cycle, global warming is rendering much of the
current inhabited zone uninhabitable, and for every extinction rebellion
activist, there are far more people swayed by populism, greed, and identity
politics. One important factor that works to enhance the Pangloss effect
is that since the 1970s, life has gotten better for the top 1-10 per cent of
nearly every country’s population. What this means is that those people
with the greatest agency and best opportunities have experienced a world
that is getting better for them. Naturally, they do not want this trend
reversed even when they understand, at an intellectual level, the terrible
costs it has imposed on the 80 per cent of the world’s population that
has gotten relatively poorer since 197592 or the 60 per cent that does not
earn enough (about seven to eight dollars a day) to feed and clothe itself
adequately, or around 93 per cent that do not have a college or university
degree.93 The improvements that have taken place in reducing infant
and maternal mortality or improving access to healthcare or education
have almost nothing to do with the operation of the global economy and
nearly everything to do with the ability of individual states to provide
services and subsidise their citizens – both activities being constantly
threatened by the austerity axe wielded by neoliberals and their apologists
ensconced in international financial institutions and world markets. In
spite of having achieved sufficient world GDP per capita in 2000 (8,500
dollars) to provide every person with a dignified life without exceeding
the natural carrying capacity of the world, the top 1-10 per cent have
insisted on enriching themselves and outsourcing the costs of their
plunder.94 For instance, a country like Pakistan, which contributes a mere
0.8 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions, is nonetheless ranked as the
eighth most vulnerable to the effects of global warming.95 Or we can take
India that barely has 22 cars per 1,000 people compared to over 800 per
1,000 in the United States,96 which is facing prolonged heat waves and
57
disruption of its agricultural cycle due, in part, to climate change.97
This brings us to the darker, hubristic side of the Pangloss effect as it

relates to the global elites. For many in the West, the sense is that even
if a few billion peasants and slum dwellers in the Global South perish
as a result of environmental collapse, the global metropolis will be able
to employ its accumulated wealth and technology to continue to thrive
behind hard borders. They are prepared to make concessions to the public
conscience, such as declaring environmental emergencies or promising
to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050,98 or, as the Shell CEO
recently advised, encouraging people to eat seasonally.99 But while these
apparent victories are handed out to the environmental lobby, the United
Kingdom, for instance, has cut subsidies for solar power100 while British
Petroleum continues to send out rigs to drill for oil and gas.101 Within
developing countries, the spike in global inequality has benefited elites
tremendously, and there is widespread contempt for the poor reinforced
by a variety of caste, communal, and tribal identities. The “Globish” elite
of the developing world feels closer to its metropolitan counterparts
when it comes to seeing the great mass of the Asian, African, and Latin
American poor as surplus humans and the remaining resources of their
homelands as means to get even richer often in cahoots with international
capital. Third world globalists might actually live better than their first
world equivalents, with the former living in air-conditioned comfort in
gated communities with a large underclass to provide them with lots of
domestic help. Consequently, they are just as vulnerable to the delusion
that when environmental collapse strikes, it will not affect them or
think that if things get really bad, they can flee to the West. Unwilling
to change their behaviour or even limit their enrichment, metropolitan
and peripheral globalist elites have great faith in the human ability to
find a technical solution to the multifaceted environmental crisis. Perhaps
there will soon be plastic-eating microbes that will clean up our land and
oceans; a massive cloning program to restore global biodiversity; carbon-
capture technology to reverse global warming; a new global breadbasket
will emerge in Siberia and the Arctic to keep humanity fed; AI will save
the day by making everything more efficient; humans will become an
interplanetary species. Of course, even a little logical thinking about any
of these will reveal that they are untenable. Releasing vast quantities of
plastic-eating microbes into our environment might well help contain
58
waste, but the evolutionary trajectory of these organisms will be rapid and
unpredictable. More importantly, the plastic industry is closely tied to the
fossil fuel industry, and without ending mass consumption of plastics, the
problem will likely get worse. As for cloning, yes, it would make sense to
save species this way, but for one basic biological problem. Clones would
lack genetic diversity and be highly vulnerable to being wiped out by
disease. Also, the rate at which plant and animal life are going extinct is
so rapid that we have already lost hundreds of thousands of species. It
is not clear whether enough could be saved to restore the ecosystem to
health.
Carbon capture is a pipe dream because the number of resources

and energy it would take to reduce GHGs in the atmosphere and have
negative emissions large enough to reverse global warming trends would
be self-defeating. It is also probably too late as vital tipping points
have been crossed. For instance, the extent of Arctic summer ice melt
is expected to reach by 2035, levels not anticipated till 2090.102 The
thawing of Siberia and the Arctic/Antarctic might well produce a new
breadbasket, but if the same intensive farming techniques are applied, the
soil will degrade within a few decades. There are also bacteria and viruses
lurking in the melt against which humans have no immunity.103 Sending
large numbers of people to settle in these regions is probably not the best
idea,104 while the scramble for Arctic territory is likely to produce great
power conflict.105 For all our space cadets, there is the unfortunate fact
that the Earth is now surrounded by debris and that the carbon cost of
spaceflight is so great that sending large numbers to other worlds is not
feasible. Even if large numbers could be sent, what exactly would they do
on the Moon or on Mars (the two likeliest destinations) that might help
save humanity back on Earth? Terraforming is possible (over centuries),
at least in the case of Mars, but it would require massive investment from
a dying Earth. And would it not make more sense to do what was needed
to save the one planet in our solar system where the air is breathable than
squandering resources on trying to make another place more like Earth?
But the Pangloss effect is so powerful that nothing can deter the
optimist from believing that the future is only going to be better.
Optimists cannot seriously contemplate any reality in which their lives
and convenience are no longer sustainable, nor can they accept that
59
defeat is inevitable unless we put aside our Pangloss lenses. Optimists,

in practice, would rather condemn their children and the planet to an
agonising demise while retaining the cheerful disposition made possible
by their inability to study the abyss that lies before us. Being unable
to comprehend reality, optimists are less likely to actually do what is
needed to survive. Modern optimists are in such complete thrall to the
delusion of human power that they have almost universally succumbed
to the power of human delusion. To save the planet and, incidentally,
ourselves, humans, especially the rich and clever ones, need to stop being
optimistic and embrace realism, scepticism, and pessimism. Pessimism
and its cousins - realism and scepticism - are often wrongly understood
as negativism or cynicism. Many people who would consider themselves
optimists, like economists who adhere to Nordhaus’s absurd analysis of
the GDP impact of climate change, are in functional terms negative and
cynical.106 This is so because they sell people a placebo and set everybody
up for catastrophic failure. In contrast, a pessimist would argue that we
ought to comprehend our trajectory logically. If that analysis leads us to
conclude that the trajectory is terminal, then realistically, we have two
options. The first is to try to avert the outcome, and the other is to find
a way to survive it if it is unavoidable. Let’s illustrate this approach with
some examples from history.
During the 1930s, fascism was ascendant, and after the advent of
Nazi rule in Germany, it appeared that a new and irresistible force in
world affairs was emerging. The overwhelming majority of the British and
French people wanted peace, and their political leaders shared this pious
hope. Hitler, as communicated by the French and British ambassadors to
Berlin, was not interested in peace. He wanted war and was fanatically
committed to Nazi ideology. In pursuit of ideological objectives, Hitler
was prepared to show tactical flexibility, but the outcomes he sought were
predetermined. While governments in the United Kingdom and France
tried to do business with Hitler, Winston Churchill, an out of favour old-
timer, repeatedly warned that the Nazis were dead serious about their
insane ideology and that they were not seeking accommodation but an
advantageous strategic position from which to annihilate all opposition
to their millennial utopian vision.107 From Churchill’s perspective, every
concession to Nazi Germany merely delayed an inevitable conflict to a
point in the future where the Allies would be relatively weaker.
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Churchill was being pessimistic. He desperately wanted to save his
country from a calamitous war with Nazi Germany and felt that this
required reacting harshly to Hitler’s foreign policy while the Allies still
held the military advantage. For nearly six years, Churchill opposed
public opinion, defied his party’s leadership, and incurred the wrath of
the great and the good. By the time the rest of his country had woken
up to the reality of a Nazi Empire, the war had begun on less favourable
terms. Elevated in the midst of this crisis to the premiership, Churchill
proved to be a ruthless warlord utterly committed to the destruction of
Nazi Germany. Churchill’s essential strategic insight was that Hitler
was ideologically driven and would be propelled by his worldview to
relentlessly expand the conflict to hasten the achievement of the Nazi
millennium. To his people, Churchill’s message was stark. Even if the
United Kingdom fell to the Nazis, the war would continue because a
world dominated by Nazism was not one worth living in. In other words,
by the end of May 1940, Churchill resolved to risk the destruction of his
homeland (even though the Nazis were prepared to cut a deal) in order
to defeat a threat that, if allowed to prevail, would have turned the world
into a nightmarish racial dystopia. It is to this heroic pessimism, more
than anything else, that Churchill owes his place in history.
Two older instances of pessimism inducing rational thinking are of

Metternich and Bismarck. The former wrestled with the old problem of
Central Europe (i.e. Germany being either too weak or too strong for
the peace of Europe) and devised the German Confederation – a union
of Germanic principalities strong enough to deter attack but sufficiently
decentralised to avoid being tempted into aggression.108 After the rise
of German nationalism proved too much for the loose structure of the
Confederation to bear, Prussia, under Bismarck, ejected Austria from the
organisation and united the rest of Germany into a single state.
Once this unification was achieved, Bismarck changed tack and

declared that Germany was content with the new map of Europe. He
proceeded to reconcile Austria, befriend Russia, keep Britain neutral, and
ensure France had no major allies with which to encircle the new Central
European giant. For Bismarck, an overly aggressive foreign policy would
lead to the rapid encirclement of Germany and risk plunging it into a
war on multiple fronts. After Bismarck’s exit in 1890, a new generation
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of optimistic German leaders who were supremely confident in their

nation’s newfound success abandoned the policy of restraint and gradual
accumulation of strength through development and embarked upon a
global policy aimed at securing their country’s place amongst the three
global empires (Britain, France, and Russia).
The result was as Bismarck feared. By 1894, France and Russia

became allies, followed a decade later by France and Britain, and by 1907,
Germany had succeeded in driving all three empires into an anti-German
alliance. In some respects, the world is confronting a situation similar
to a century ago, with China as the emerging superpower. Under Deng
Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, China focused on its internal
development and became a development success story by rejecting
neoliberal ideas and focusing on using its state-regulated economy to
gain a competitive advantage over Western rivals while investing heavily
in improving the lives of its people through governance and welfare
spending and eschewing foreign entanglements. Since 2013, however,
China has been headed in a more assertive direction and threatening the
United States’ hegemony in East Asia. This is in part a consequence of
greater optimism and confidence arising from unprecedented material
prosperity and rising nationalistic sentiment. China’s current premier, Xi
Jinping, is breaking with Deng Xiaoping’s institutional legacy by doing
away with term limits, building a cult of personality, and elevating his
thought as part of the constitution.
What these and many other instances, such as Napoleon’s invasion of

Russia, can teach us is that wise leaders try to grasp reality while unwise
ones disregard it, often with catastrophic consequences. The trouble is that
optimistic rulers, who are normally incapable of wise decision-making,
resonate better with people who, in turn, are basically guided by regard
for their own convenience. It was perhaps for this reason that Voltaire,
a great advocate of the Enlightenment and a leader of the forces of the
empire of reason against traditionalism and conventional mindlessness,
felt deeply pessimistic in concluding his universal history: “As nature has
placed in the heart of man interest, pride, and all the passions, it is no
wonder that during a period of about six centuries, we meet with almost
a continual succession of crimes and disasters. If we go back to earlier
ages, we shall find them no better. Custom has ordered it so that evil has
62
everywhere operated in a different manner.”109 In other words, Pangloss
nearly always wins, and the real interests of humanity nearly always lose.
This is worth bearing in mind as we examine the geopolitics of a post-
apocalyptic world in the next essay.
63
V
The Geopolitics of Climate Apocalypse
Power is of three kinds; so is the success resulting
from its use. Intellectual strength provides the
power of [good] counsel; a prosperous treasury and
a strong army provide physical power and valour
is the basis for [morale and] energetic action. The
success resulting from each one is, correspondingly,
intellectual, physical, and [psychological].110
– Kautilya (Philosopher, premier of the Mauryan
Empire, c. 300 BC)
Historians often emphasise the role of geography and the environment

in shaping human societies. It is no accident that civilisation first
arose on the banks of large rivers that existed in close proximity to
grassy plains, shrubland, and grazing animals. It is also no surprise that
Eurasia and North Africa, with a dominant East-West axis, allowed
for swifter diffusion of knowledge than the Americas or Sub-Saharan
Africa with their dominant North-South axis. It is possible to stay for
longer in the same climatic zone, moving from east to west, while going
north or south, environmental conditions change more rapidly. There
is also little doubt that bigger and more geographically concentrated
populations allowed for more specialists, complex organisations, and
elite capture of resources that were only made possible by favourable
starting conditions. The ability to better modify the environment to
suit humans is also a product of relatively stable geography and ecology
susceptible to manipulation. From Ibn Khaldun to Montesquieu111
and from Fernand Braudel112 to Jared Diamond,113 the philosophers
of history have maintained with considerable persuasiveness that
geographic and environmental factors constituted objective conditions
against which societies had to struggle for survival and mastery. To
Braudel, the longue durée,114 or time in relation to deep structures, like
geography and environment, moved so slowly that it was typically
unnoticeable.
Generally, social scientific models subscribed to the idea that
64
geography and environment were stable factors. With honourable
exceptions, economists generally assumed that nature would continue
to supply the resources needed for growth. Historians and political
scientists often observed that ignoring geography and environment
proved to be a recipe for military and foreign policy disasters, as
evidenced, most recently, by United States military interventions in
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.115 Anthropologists and sociologists,
through field research, meticulously examined the adaptations made by
individuals and groups to their environments.116 While leaders, soldiers,
and diplomats, schooled on these ideas, almost invariably assumed that
nature, while open to being exploited and manipulated, constituted
the grand chessboard upon which human agency and competition
would play out indefinitely. Unfortunately for all remaining life on the
planet, human ingenuity, enterprise, and demographic overreach have
altered the ecology of the planet to such an extent that those presently
alive are, in all probability, the last people to live amidst conditions
of environmental stability.117 The warming of the planet is ushering
in a new phase of Anthropocene geopolitics that will require leaders to
rethink the fundamentals of how they comprehend the world.118 The
climate apocalypse will have enormous consequences for international
relations and alter the ways in which states interact.
For most of history, the only way for a society to increase its
resources was through horizontal expansion. This was achieved through
inland conquest, migration, and establishing colonies overseas.119 This
all-embracing but straightforward fact of history meant that from 4000
BC to AD 1950, a not-so-inconsiderable period, the most successful
type of state was the empire. Imperial states were simply asymmetrical
power relations in which one group of people dominated or co-opted
many other groups of people, with the former drawing resources and
labour from the latter to build military might and acquire more land.
This expansion and exploitation process would continue until one

empire bumped into another empire (balance of power), ran into an
insurmountable natural obstacle (like the Himalayas), lost its internal
balance and collapsed into anarchy (political and administrative
decline), or faced an overwhelming natural calamity (desiccation,
plague, prolonged change in rainfall patterns, etc.).120 There were
65
alternatives to empire, such as city-states, chiefdoms, or decentralised

feudal arrangements (such as those that emerged in Europe after the
Roman collapse).121 But such entities were perennially at risk of being
absorbed by empires, while those that became successful and thrived
evolved into imperial states. Whatever their provenance, empires
produced a metropolitan effect whereby resources, skills, and workers
were concentrated in an imperial centre and the hands of a numerically
small ruling elite.
After having endured unapologetically for nearly 6,000 years, the

imperial model of political order apparently stood discredited. The
overseas colonial empires of Europe became nominally independent
nation-states. The German, Italian, and Japanese fascist imperial
projects lay in ruins. Following the Second World War, the United
States and the Soviet Union agreed that henceforth international
relations would be conducted under the diplomatic pretence of
sovereign equality. Empires would have to be informal and outwardly
respectful of the sentiments of the less equal peoples under American
or Soviet tutelage. More importantly, the old horizontal model of
imperial resource expansion was deemed passé in light of the boundless
potential for growth and development made possible by technology,
trade, and investment in human resources. After 1990, with the Soviet
model falling apart, it seemed as if the American version of pro-growth,
free-market capitalism would prevail, and everyone would get rich.
That, of course, did not happen. What happened was that in pursuit of
more economic growth, the Earth’s habitability has been compromised,
natural resources are depleted, and biodiversity is collapsing.122 As these
constraints assert themselves with growing vigour in the decades ahead,
the horizontal expansion will reemerge as the principal means for one
society to gain a greater share, or just maintain its existing share, of
dwindling resources.
In a neo-Malthusian world, classical imperialism, severe identity

polarisation, hard borders, and violent great power competition will
return with a vengeance, while the fragile edifice of humanitarianism,
internationalism and the veneer of sovereign equality-based diplomacy
in all likelihood evaporate.123 As nations fight each other for resources,
especially water and arable land, any increase in resources for one party
66
will have to come from diminishing the resources available to others.
Barbarically enforced autarchy on the economic front, militarism on the
external front, and autocracy at the political level represent the likely
contours of human civilisation amidst climate apocalypse. The return
of colonial empires, the extermination of “lesser” peoples, and extreme
patriarchy, reinforced by dystopian levels of internal inequality, are not,
however, scenarios that global institutions and mainstream thinkers are
contemplating. Indeed, the IMF is still pushing for three per cent a
year global GDP growth, business as usual dominates the politics and
decision-making of all major powers, and most of the developing world
is sleepwalking towards the abyss. If history is any guide, the stress on
global systems and ecology will accumulate till critical tipping points
are crossed. Once enough thresholds have been crossed, the speed of
climate change will accelerate to revolutionary levels.
The crisis of resource depletion is severe, but innovation and

recycling, as well as forced cuts to consumption, might well be able
to mitigate its effects – at least in countries with reasonably effective
governance. What will prove fatal for many countries will be the crisis
of habitability caused by global warming.124 In the past, even minor
fluctuations in the planet’s climate triggered mass migrations and
conflicts. For instance, the Indus Valley Civilisation probably declined
and fell due to rising aridity over several centuries.125 Climatically-
driven changes to grazing patterns often forced Central Asian tribes
to migrate and triggered a domino effect, and more powerful groups
displaced weaker ones.126 The Little Ice Age (1350-1800 AD) weakened
populations already reeling from the Bubonic Plague and plunged
Europe into wars and famines127 that could well have killed off 40 per
cent of the Central European population.128 It also stands to reason that
regions that are already cold will suffer more from additional cooling,
while those that are already warm will suffer more from temperature
rises.129 In a like manner, rising sea levels will affect countries with large,
densely populated coastlines. At present, out of the world’s 7.6 billion
people, four billion live in East, South, and West Asia.130 Much of this
population is concentrated in fertile but warm flood plains or hot (and
often humid) coastal areas. While some of the countries in the region
like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are part of the Global
North, and others, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Saudi
67
Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, are rich fossil-fuelled monarchies, nearly

90 per cent of the region is poor or middle-income. Economic growth
in countries like India has added to GDP, but inequalities are steep,131
governance is weak, and corrupt elite capture of decision-making is
rife with little hope of corrective impulse arising from the societies in
question.
Now imagine a four degrees Celsius increase to average global

temperature by 2100, with about half of this warming by 2050. Most
of the densely populated areas in India and Pakistan would become
uninhabitable for months at a time132 133 Water would dry up completely,134
and the resulting impact on agriculture135 would be devastating. The top
10 per cent could sit at home with the air-conditioners on, but what
would the rest do? And how long could a society facing agricultural
collapse be able to pay for its power sector to keep on generating
electricity? Not very long, one suspects. Rising sea levels pose another
danger. Rich cities, like Boston or London, might well be able to
engineer their way out of immediate danger. But South Asian or East
Asian cities, reeling from rising temperatures and water shortages, are
likely to be sunk, in the literal sense of the term. People will have no
choice but to move in search of cooler weather, water and food.
What kind of chaos would be unleashed if, over the next 50 years,
half of the world’s population finds it impossible to continue living
in its existing locations? Will states like China, Brazil, Mexico, India,
Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia,
and Indonesia obliterate each other in a desperate quest for living
space? Will such states simply collapse under the strain of the climate
apocalypse leading to billions of deaths and hundreds of millions of
refugees fleeing northwards to Siberia and Europe or southwards to
Australia and New Zealand? What will happen to the nuclear arsenals
of China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel amidst all this
chaos? Will the Canadians, Russians, Europeans, and Australians open
their hearts and diminishing resources to these refugees? Or will they
bomb, torpedo, incarcerate, torture, and humiliate refugees and try to
secure themselves behind hard borders? As things stand, Australia136
and the United States137 already have concentration camps for refugees,
while the mood in Europe is shifting in favour of hard borders and
68
not letting people of undesirable origins (i.e., not White) in.138 These
are but a handful of the many unpleasant questions that the crisis of
habitability will generate as the intensifying effects of global warming
and ecological collapse ravage the world’s population.
Real estate, it is popularly said, is all about location. While most

of the world stands to horribly lose from environmental disintegration,
the warming of the planet will produce, for a few decades at least, new
opportunities for exploiting nature in the Arctic, Siberia and Antarctica.
The elimination of permafrost at these locations will make these icy
wastes habitable, navigable and arable.139 The geopolitical fulcrum of the
world will move to the extreme north and south as the old heartland of
human habitation turns into a dead zone. For countries like Russia and
Canada, this is a historic opportunity to gain ascendancy. While for
Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States,
new spheres of influence and competition are about to emerge, and
if this grouping can stay united, it will have definite advantages over
Russia.
By shifting population and agricultural production as needed, while

deploying military strength and location advantages, these countries
could well survive the climate apocalypse. If they do, then the Asian,
African, and Latin American dead zones could be left to recover along
with any primitive societies that somehow manage to survive in the
Global South. This great inversion of the habitable zone would mean
that the Global North – having industrialised and modernised by
consuming the resources of the Global South140 – could shield itself to
an extent from the effects of the catastrophe that its economic wealth
will produce. Certainly, the Americans, Europeans, and Russians have
considerable expertise in applying genocidal policies and have profited
greatly from them in the past.141
There is, however, one major power that has the potential to
challenge and upend the Global North’s de facto final solution to the
problem of the Global South. That power is China, situated adjacent
to the demographic vacuum of Russia’s Siberia. It is in a position
to overrun this post-apocalyptic breadbasket by the sheer weight of
numbers. Though far poorer than the United States or Canada, China
has a ruthless, efficient, and disciplined state imbued with a Darwinian
69
outlook and no illusions about the struggle for survival that lies ahead.142
At present, China is using its economic strength to secure the world’s
remaining resources, open communications, and build the infrastructure
needed to project power.143 Building communications into Central Asia
and Russia makes sense. Nearly 60 per cent of China’s population lives
near the coast, and a major redistribution of the population might
become necessary as coastal ecology collapses and temperatures and
sea levels rise.144 As climate breakdown intensifies, the Sino-West
competition is likely to heat up. Whether this leads to open warfare, a
cold war, or some other realignment, China is determined to use all the
means at its disposal to ensure national survival.
The shifting of the world’s arable zone to the north and the
liquidation of most Asian, African, and Latin American populations
due to climate apocalypse will lead to a new era of geopolitics for the
survivors. Policies aimed at securing national or regional autarchy in the
Global North and managing the demise of badly afflicted states in the
Global South will define the future even as those societies that manage
to endure longer struggle to maintain standards of living and their
democratic political dispensations. There are possible countermeasures
that states in the developing world can take, but, with the exception
of China, none seem to have the vision and internal organisation to
manage the emerging crisis.
The first step along what promises to be an incredibly painful path

is for the leaders of developing countries to comprehend the totality
of the horror that is headed their way. There is, at this stage, no escape
from disaster. The planet is dying, and the present-day warm/temperate
zones are going to die first. A few more per cent of annual GDP
growth between now and 2030 or 2040 will be meaningless in view of
the ecological collapse that will have matured in a generation. It is the
height of foolishness for developing countries to place any stock in the
promises of the rich countries. The fact is that if the developed world
had been serious about saving the environment, it would have acted
in the 1980s and 1990s. True to form, the wealthy countries are still
primarily interested in finding a way to continue business as usual while
making token concessions to movements like the Extinction Rebellion.
The second step is to recast all national policies from the
70
perspective of saving the environment and finding ways to offset or
manage the effects of climate disasters. This means putting an end to
the extraction of local resources for global trade, limiting commercial
farming, investing in hardened water resource infrastructure, clamping
down on population growth, and moving national economies towards
self-sufficiency, dispensing, in the process, with what cannot be
locally or regionally produced. All of these steps need to be taken on
a total war footing and may necessitate the suspension of such civil
and human rights as exist in developing countries. Dictatorships that
embrace environmentalism, as Tokugawa Japan did when faced with
the collapse of the country’s forest cover in the 1700s, might well have
a better chance of survival under emerging circumstances.
The third step is to provide maximum logistical and diplomatic

support to enlightened opinion in the developed world and help it break
through the policy logjam. While it is correct that rich countries with
relatively smaller populations and vastly more advanced technical and
scientific abilities will be able to manage climate change and possibly
survive longer, there is no guarantee of this outcome. Moreover, with
greying populations, coping with the economic dislocations caused by
climate change will not be easy, even for the wealthiest countries. The
greater the success of movements, like the Extinction Rebellion, in rich
countries, the better the chances that at least some of the developing
world might survive.
The fourth step is to invest in nuclear weapons. These are great

equalisers. The experiences of India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea
testify to the immense strategic value of such weapons. In order to have
real strategic bargaining chips, countries like Egypt, Iran, Indonesia,
and Turkey need to follow the Indian and Pakistani examples. At
the very least, such weapons will deter preemptive strikes by Western
powers145 and build leverage to allow more people from these countries
to migrate northwards. There is a chance that if nuclear-armed
environmentalist and survivalist regimes emerge in enough of the
developing world, the Global North might be compelled to modify its
behaviour or at least help save a greater percentage of Asians, Africans,
and Latin Americans, from the effects of climate apocalypse.
The world is headed to a new dark age, one that will be unprecedented
71
in its global reach. To survive, let alone thrive, in the geopolitics of a post-
apocalyptic world will require clarity and resolve. The challenge is that
when a culture is in its high civilisation phase, it is unable to contemplate
the dynamics of its downfall rationally. At present, globalisation has
produced a high civilisation that is extractive and energy-intensive beyond
anything previously experienced. Understanding the links between high
civilisation and the downfall that almost invariably follows is critical if
humanity is to survive.
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VI
The Transience of High-Level Equilibrium and
the Inevitability of Downfall
In the second century of the Christian Era, the
empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the
Earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The
frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by
ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but
powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually
cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful
inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of
wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution
was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman
senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority,
and devolved on the emperors all the executive
powers of government. During a happy period of
more than fourscore years, the public administration
was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva,
Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the
design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters,
to describe the prosperous condition of their empire;
and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus,
to deduce the most important circumstances of
its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be
remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the
earth.146
- Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, first published in 1776)
From the earliest historical times to the present day, states and civilisations
have risen and fallen. Philosophers, historians, political scientists, and
even economists have attempted to explain this phenomenon. While a
diverse array of thinkers and perspectives can all agree that rise and fall
are ubiquitous features of the human experience, attempts to explain why
this pattern exists in the first place have generated a fierce debate that led
to the emergence of explanatory models. To Herodotus, the oscillation
73
in human fortune is rooted in the universal human propensity towards

hubris, which, once it clouds our ability to make rational decisions, invites
nemesis.147 For Ibn Khaldun, the strengthening or weakening of elite
group feeling led to the rise and fall of empires. To Edward Gibbon,
diminishing rationality and internal discord drove civilisations to
collapse. For more economy-minded thinkers like Paul Kennedy, powers
rose when their underlying material and human resources were greater
than their political and military commitments, and the decline was
the result of these commitments outstripping resources for prolonged
periods.148 These and many other ideas are of immense value to anyone
trying to understand the past and present better. In general, analyses
of civilisations or empires rising and falling employ the concept of the
Golden Age – a period of extraordinary strength, ascendance, harmony,
resilience, progress, wealth, and happiness. One can also think of this as
a high-level equilibrium that serves as the transitional period between
growth and atrophy.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to identify a Golden Age in

the histories of fallen empires. An important problem that international
relations have attempted to address is the emergence of new powers and
whether or not they will overtake established ones.149 These days China
is the subject of much intense speculation in this regard.150 At the same
time, one must consider that for those who lived through the Golden
Age, it may not be clear to them that their civilisation or state has peaked.
The expectation would rather be to consider the high-level equilibrium
as natural and self-perpetuating and therefore normal. Only when
calamity strikes that decline in relation to what has gone before allows
the distinction to be drawn between periods of greatness and decline.
The onset of a Golden Age may also occur without conscious design
or awareness of what is going on. So, when Julius Caesar, struggling
for personal survival, reshaped the Roman Republic into a monarchy,151
neither he nor his detractors believed that they were living through the
beginning of Rome’s Golden Age. This high-level equilibrium set in as a
result of deep structural forces that were pushing and pulling individual
actors in different directions. Centuries later, the Arab Empire, in its
Umayyad and Abbasid incarnations (AD 660-1258), rose to rule half the
known world – from the Indus and Oxus to the Atlantic Ocean.
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Today, it seems obvious that these centuries represented the Golden
Age of Islam, especially in view of the Mongol cataclysm that engulfed
much of the Muslim world between AD 1217 and 1400.152 Whether this
period was actually felt to be a Golden Age of any kind by those living
through it – with all its intrigue and massacres – is open to question.
In China, the unification of its core territories under the Legalist

Qin dynasty - which persecuted Confucianism in 221 BC, is a historical
outcome central to the idea of the country as an ancient civilisation-state.
However, the first emperor of the Qin is reviled as an unnecessarily cruel
and impious ruler. While the Han dynasty, which seized power in 206
BC, inherited a unified administrative state and kept most of the Qin
governance structures in place. It is regarded as China’s First Golden
Age.153 In modern times, nostalgia for the age of relative peace before the
First World War led to the casting of the late-1800s as Europe’s Golden
Age. Though given the series of disasters that unfolded between 1914
-1945, one can forgive the Europeans of that period for looking at the
generations before as the good old days.
Much as Solon admonished Croesus by trying to explain to him that

the happiness of a life can only be fairly judged once it has ended, history
teaches us that it is difficult to judge a period of high-level equilibrium
while one is still going through it, given the limitations inherent in our
perspective. Unfortunately, the totality of the ruin confronting humanity
today on account of the operation of a globalised high-level equilibrium
is such that we no longer have the luxury of waiting for outcomes before
trying to assess what the future holds. Here, history can help us by
providing examples of earlier high-level equilibrium civilisations phases
and the downfalls in which they ended.
When high-level equilibrium phases are examined, it needs to be

understood that we are referring to periods characterised by a relative
or absolute intensity in terms of enterprise, material success, and the
accumulation of power. Societies that become more powerful than others
almost invariably fall into the trap of attributing their good fortune to
innate qualities and consequently enjoy moralising. Still, there is little
evidence to suggest that greater power is either caused by or otherwise
correlated with such conceits. Societies with wildly divergent ethics
– from the Aztec Empire built on a theological-political economy of
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warfare and sacrifice of captives intended to keep the Sun burning,154 to

Muslim empires organised around the institution of the military and
administrative slavery,155 to European Christian empires built on the backs
of plantation slaves, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and serfdom156
established extremely successful polities. It is, therefore, impossible to
take claims of moral superiority espoused by the most successful regimes
seriously. Some were undeniably worse to their victims, but all were just
as surely flawed.
What does need to be taken seriously is the ability of societies

entering a high-level equilibrium phase to concentrate power in the
hands of their ruling hierarchies. This hierarchical power, whether
rooted in religion, bureaucracy, caste, economic wealth, military power,
or some combination thereof, as Blair Fix has observed,157 is the key to
understanding the violent and self-aggrandising tendencies of those at
the top. Take the pyramids of Egypt as an example. These monuments
to the pharaohs demonstrate the ability of the ancient Egyptian state to
marshal resources, labour, and organisational ability on a vast scale and
then deploy them for long periods of time for the purpose of building
very large tombs. Contemporary Egypt’s tourism sector relies on the
pyramids for much of its pull and would not be the same without these
monuments.158 Herodotus, however, tells us that the systematic coercion
needed to build the pyramids left deep psychological wounds on the
Egyptian people and that even thousands of years after pyramid building
had ceased, the memory of Cheops, the greatest of the builder-pharaohs,
was reviled by the common folk.159 In a like manner, the Great Wall of
China160 was a vast consumer of convict labour, 161 and being sent to the
wall could amount to a death sentence for ordinary Chinese. Other
empires built fortifications, roads, aqueducts, and irrigation networks and
expended resources on military power and conspicuous consumption,
leaving in their wake symbolic as well as substantive relics.
When tourists gawk at the pyramids, are inspired by the Taj Mahal,
marvel at the precision of Roman infrastructure, or seek to transplant the
British industrial revolution to their own countries, it is easy to forget
the callousness of the Mughals towards their subjects,162 the extensive
use of slaves by imperial Rome,163 or the fact that most of the capital
used to finance Britain’s industrialisation came either from the African
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slave trade164 or was looted from dominions of conquest like India.165
Over 50 years since the NASA moon landing, it remains a remarkable
feat of engineering and astrophysics. The objective greatness of this feat
cannot be understated. However, one must also keep in mind that over
a thousand Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians were
brought over to the United States and granted amnesty after the Second
World War.166 The person who designed the heavy rocket that took the
Apollo landing craft to the moon was Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi
Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and rocket scientist responsible for designing the
Vengeance weapons (V1 and V2), which were the first modern missiles.
Von Braun was quite possibly responsible for the deaths of over 20,000
inmates at forced labour camps connected to the Nazi missile program.
In other words, all civilisations are extractive, and civilisations in a high-
level equilibrium condition are exceptionally extractive. Everything from
skilled labour to resources to ideas is drawn into the artifice at the heart
of civilisation in such a phase.
Throughout history, civilisations have peaked and, in doing so,

drawn upon a greater share of local and regional resources, causing
inequality within them to spike and resulting in the concentration of
greater power within their ruling hierarchies. For most of history, the
horizontal nature of this extractive process placed limits on how large an
advanced civilisation could get. Like Rome, Persia, the Arabs, Ottomans,
Mughals, and Chinese, empires could get very large and complex through
horizontal expansion, but even at their biggest, these empires were, at
best, multi-regional powers.
Trade across long distances was possible and did occur fairly
regularly, at least for items destined for elite consumption, but economies
remained firmly rooted in domestic commerce and agriculture. Under
these circumstances, even the most advanced pre-modern empires had
to manage practically all of their expenses from the people and territory
under their direct physical control. Ensuring this control was itself
hugely expensive and required constant vigilance over bureaucracies
and local notables employed by imperial centres. The Roman Empire
came to be organised around a road network that enabled its 180,000167
strong standing armies to move across the Mediterranean world with
astonishing speed.168
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Mughal India spent some 80 per cent of its revenues on its military
and the rest on maintaining the lifestyle of its service nobility and ruling
house.169 Sometimes the armies and infrastructure backfired, such as
when a weak emperor came to power, and the Roman military intervened
in politics, or when, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a devastating
plague killed a fifth of the population, thanks in no small measure, to the
excellent road network that allowed the disease to spread widely through
the movement of Roman armies being redeployed from the frontier with
Parthia (now Iran). The great empires of the past existed in a precarious
Malthusian and Darwinian balance that often swung against them with
devastating results.
This balance eventually collapsed under the weight of internal and

external pressures. In the case of the Roman Empire, the concurrent
operation of four major upheavals sapped its strength and led to its
downfall. First, pressure from tribal peoples on the Roman frontiers
intensified after AD 150 due to demographic changes and migrations
over which the Romans had no control. Second, the Antonine Plague
(referred to above) may have killed some 20 per cent of the population
(10-14 million people out of 50-70 million), destabilising the empire from
within.170 Third, after AD 180, a prolonged political crisis set in that saw
dozens of emperors raised to the imperial purple only to be killed by the
military or rival court factions. And fourth, amidst the onslaught on the
borders, the plague, and the endless power struggle in Rome, Christianity
spread throughout the empire, promising salvation to the downtrodden.
The hollowing out of Roman military power, population, political

order, and ideological appeal combined to generate a dreadful cycle of
decline punctuated by briefly successful attempts to stabilise under the
occasional strong ruler that still managed to emerge amidst the decline
and chaos. In other cases, overpopulation and exhaustion of local
resources drove the process of collapse; climate change appears to have
played a central role in bringing down the Indus Valley Civilisation, while
the waves of Mongol expansion almost annihilated the Muslim and
Chinese civilisations.171 Some who faced the Mongols (like the Ottoman
Sultanate) managed to rise again, while others, like the mercurial Tughluq
Sultanate of Delhi172 and the brilliant Song Empire in China (that came
tantalisingly close to an industrial revolution), were exterminated.173
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When a civilisation or empire goes into decline, the consequences for
its people are tragic and shattering. In the European context, Ian Morris
estimates that Europe did not return to its development level of AD 200
(the end of the Pax Romana) till AD 1500 (the beginning of the modern
age).174 Cities like Rome, which had a population of one million in AD 0,
had perhaps 40,000-50,000 people by AD 600. In South Asia, the decline
and fall of the Mughal Empire led to wars, famines, and dislocations that
might have claimed the lives of one-fifth of the region’s population. The
terrible destruction and suffering unleashed by past collapses may well
have appeared to be apocalyptic to those living (and dying) through them.
For all the horror collapse entailed, the story of civilisation managed
to continue, revive, and thrive. This was because the destruction was often
incomplete and typically operated at the local, regional, or inter-regional
level. The decline of one empire or civilisation did not necessarily entail
the fall of others. In fact, the decline of the Roman and Persian Empires
helped the rise of the Arabs175 while the decline of Islam’s classical
civilisation facilitated the rise of the West. This would not be of much
comfort to those on the downswing, but it did mean that in a world
of basically autarchic regional empires and civilisations dependent upon
local resources, downfalls were contained, and revival was, in some cases,
a distinct possibility.
The historical pattern of alternating or sequential rise and fall

started to change around AD 1500 in ways that were unprecedented.
This shift was brought about by five interlocking factors that produced
the world’s first global civilisation, i.e., the modern West. The first
element in this transition was the emergence of classical humanism in
the Italian peninsula in the 1300s. The humanist movement reintroduced
Christendom to the world of Greco-Roman thought and created a
secular space autonomous of the Church wherein scepticism about the
world and the human condition could start to take root.176
The second ingredient was the rise of seafaring city-states and

kingdoms locked in a deadly confrontation with the mighty Ottoman
Sultanate. For much of the 1400s and 1500s, the Ottomans enjoyed the
upper hand in this conflict. The losses suffered by the Europeans led states
like Portugal and Spain to start navigating westwards and southwards in
the hope that they might circumvent the Ottomans. These efforts yielded
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the “discovery” of the Americas, laid the foundations for the Atlantic
economy built on the African slave trade, and succeeded in finding
alternate routes to Asia. The European age of colonial empire had begun
by AD 1509 when Magellan circumnavigated the world.177
The third factor was the eruption of the Protestant Reformation

(AD 1517). As humanism spread in Northern Europe, it interfaced
with Christianity and led to Christian reformism that sought to return
the Church to its original message. This was not something the Church
hierarchy was interested in, but the stymieing of reform efforts led to a
doctrinal schism within western Christianity. This broke the power of
traditional religion in much of Europe and helped ensure that humanism
and its offshoot, the Scientific Revolution, survived the Roman Catholic
Church’s furious efforts to stamp out challenges to its authority.178
The fourth critical change was the Scientific Revolution which

started to take off in the mid-1500s and has not stopped ever since. This
revolution upended traditional epistemology and produced an intellectual
revolution in Europe that propelled it to first place in terms of science,
knowledge, and technology, generating an exponential power deviation in
Europe’s favour over time.179
The fifth major change was that by the mid-1600s, a vast Atlantic
economy had emerged, and as European states ruthlessly colonised and
exploited the Americas, they gained strategic reserves of resources with
which to fund their overseas empires, develop capitalism, and extract the
surplus needed to finance a global commercial revolution.180 It was during
this time that the Europeans began their conquest of Asia and Africa
as tiny European states like the Netherlands, Portugal, England, and
France spread their tentacles all over the world. The rest of the planet was
steadily absorbed into a subordinate-periphery type of relationship with
the European metropolitan-core countries. As the Europeans imposed
favourable terms of trade (soft robbery), openly enslaved and expropriated
populations, and perpetrated genocides, they riveted the chains of global
civilisation upon everyone else. The continuous operation of this dynamic
between 1450 and 1750 produced the critical mass needed to begin
Europe’s industrial transformation. This was the dawn of the Carbon Age
built around using stored energy in the form of fossil fuels to produce
controlled combustion, with the residue thrown up into the atmosphere.
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It was through European imperialism that a global civilisation
emerged. In this civilisation, a relatively small number of winners in
the core countries prospered at the expense of everybody else while
proclaiming the universality of Western values and approaches. Other
cultures and civilisations were placed in a terrible dilemma. They could
either read the writing on the wall and embrace modernisation and try to
catch up to the West, or they could make piecemeal adjustments trying
to preserve their traditions while copying European military techniques,
or they could just ignore what was going on. All three alternatives were
fraught with danger, though a few countries, like Japan, could make
the leap. Other, less fortunate lands fell under the sway of European
colonialism, which stimulated organised resistance and the beginnings
of nationalism in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.181 As the European
core collapsed in prolonged warfare and economic crisis between 1914
and 1945, the periphery started to gain independence. Many of the elites
of the developing world (as it became politely known) were determined
to catch up to the West by emulating one of their models of economic
growth. This meant increasing GDP and consumption on the Western
pattern and ensured that since 1945 more and more of the world would
be churned up to either farm, mine, or manufacture, leading to a rapid
acceleration of the globalisation process alongside an explosion in the
world’s population and energy consumption.
The growth of global trade, in particular, encouraged countries

to offset local resource shortages and import more stuff, while travel,
especially by air and cars for people, and large cargo ships for goods,
boomed. Just one person taking a round-trip by air from London to New
York produces enough GHGs to melt three square meters of Arctic ice
(on average, each American melts 50 square meters of Arctic ice per
year).182 In 2014 there were approximately 100,000 flights per day (nearly
37 million that year), while by 2018, the figure had risen to 45 million
flights for the year. Given that 80 per cent of people have never flown183
(something that airlines want to change), it means that the four to five
billion passengers travelling by air every year represent184 just 20 per cent
of the world’s population. Mass tourism, one of the greatest achievements
of contemporary globalisation, is thus a mass killer of biodiversity and a
major driver of global warming.
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What makes contemporary globalisation particularly pernicious is
that the wealth gap between the richest and poorest nations has grown
since 1960.185 More trade, the opening of financial markets, and rolling
back restrictions on the movement of tourists, goods, and services have
not altered the balance between the Global North and South in an
equitable manner. What it has done is to create a caste of third world
globalists whose own fortunes are intimately connected to the power and
prosperity of the developed world and fundamentally disconnected from
the fortunes of their own people and countries. For these third world
globalists, free trade, free movement, and access to the metropolitan
centre are the keys to driving their own wealth upwards even as most
of their compatriots continue to languish in almost medieval levels of
poverty. Post-1990, together with their patrons in the West, “sustainable”
growth was pushed by such groups within developing countries, which
effectively derailed efforts to protect the environment.186 With the opening
up of China and India in the 1980s and 1990s, the global growth engine
received access to new frontiers to explore and exploit and by 2000,
human consumption began to push beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity.
That limit being breached was only a question of when the combination
of global warming, biodiversity loss, rising toxicity from waste, and soil
degradation would produce a global catastrophe.
The advent of globalisation will, assuming there is anyone left to write

history in a century’s time, probably be identified as the point of origin
for the apocalypse of environmental breakdown that awaits humanity
in the next few decades. The early phase of this phenomenon made
possible: (the often forced) population exchange, the global networks
of trade and created the Atlantic economy. The mature phase saw the
emergence of dominant European colonial empires. The modern phase
began with the collapse of those empires in the mid-1900s and the
advent of developmental paradigms that promised salvation to formerly
subjugated peoples. And the contemporary phase, which might well be
the last, began with the global triumph of the neoliberal variant of the
phenomenon and the intensification of trade, investment, and travel
to current unsustainable levels. The globalisation-induced collapse of
the Earth’s habitability is a catastrophe so comprehensive in its scope
that civilisation’s story is likely coming to an end. In the past, local,
regional, and inter-regional collapses were devastating but remained
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compartmentalised due to distances and geography. The exhaustion of
local resources also typically occurred over many generations, while more
sudden upheavals, like invasions and plagues, could lead to migrations
into other habitable zones. But global civilisation is extremely vulnerable
to disruption due to its interdependence, complexity and intensity. And
if the Earth becomes uninhabitable, then there is nowhere else to go. Of
course, the great powers will fight it out for pieces of the Arctic or the
Antarctic, but even if they manage to move some of their people into the
dwindling areas that are habitable, their present national existences will
be over. The people in the lower decks of “SS Globalisation” (the Global
South) will drown first, and those in the upper decks (the Global North)
may last a little longer, but if the whole ship sinks, then everyone meets
the same end. A few million or even tens of millions of humans might
still survive amidst the ruins of their planet in increasingly dystopian
or primitive and isolated conditions. But then again, civilisation, as we
understand it, will be over, everywhere, more or less simultaneously. This
brings us to an interesting problem – that of Dark Age governance during
and after climate breakdown.
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VII
Orders of Darkness: Government & Post-
Government Amidst the Ruins
Last night I passed by the ruins of Tus;
And saw that an owl had taken the place of the peacock.
I asked, ‘What news from these ruins?
It answered, ‘The news is – alas, alas!’187
– Shahid Balkhi (Persian poet and thinker, d. AD 935)
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where
Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahram, that great
Hunter – the Wild Ass
Stomps over his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.188
– Omar Khayyam (Persian polymath, b. 1048, d. 1131)
From Mad Max and Blade Runner to numerous zombie horror franchises,
fictional portraits of the kinds of outcomes that can emerge after collapse
have terrified and entertained audiences for decades. While the futures
projected by fiction are often horrifying, they are not nearly as awful as the
history of actual collapses and their aftermaths. What makes historical
collapses so dreadful is that they were real and that millions, or hundreds
of millions of people, endured their effects, with many failing to survive
the experience.
The dark ages of the past could last centuries, and recovery, if at all
possible, was halting and uncertain. These tragedies of the past provide
valuable clues as to how societies and states are likely to respond to the
comprehensive downfall soon to be realised on account of the breakdown
of the Earth’s habitability. The kind of orders that will emerge in a world
of climate catastrophe, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss are likely
to be far harsher and stranger than the darkest dystopias of the past.
Arguably the most successful post-apocalyptic dystopia to have

existed was the medieval theocracy of the Roman Catholic Church
(AD 600-1500). It lasted nearly a thousand years, retarded the recovery
of European culture and civilisation, and ultimately collapsed in large
parts of Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. In its glory
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days, the Roman Church held about one-third of Europe’s farmland as
fiefs, employed its police and armed forces, maintained a monopoly on
learning, and operated the West’s only centralised continent-spanning
bureaucratic hierarchy. This hierarchy was so powerful that for a thousand
years, kings, nobles, and commoners lived in awe of the ecclesiastical
power189 whose authority trumped all others in the gangster’s paradise
that was the Medieval West.
The Church emerged as Europe’s most powerful agency in the wake

of the Roman Empire’s descent into chaos. For some part of that decline,
Christians were viewed as enemies of the state (which they were in
the epistemological, if not the political sense) and subject to sporadic
persecution. From the classical Roman perspective, the problem was
that the decline of the empire’s secular fortune was being propelled by
demographic trends, military over-extension, and political chaos, all of
which enhanced the appeal of Christianity.190 With Europe experiencing
massive population decline, de-urbanisation, and barbarian invasions, the
Church, by converting both locals and invaders to its doctrines, was able
to extend Christendom as the old Roman world fell apart.
Medieval Christendom had five characteristics that are relevant to

understanding the kind of responses future collapse might entail. First,
the Church promoted and benefited from a mindset that saw the secular
world as inherently unworthy of human endeavour. Instead, the pious
ideal was a life of seclusion from worldly affairs that would allow good
Christians to dedicate their time to the pursuit of personal salvation. In
this manner, moral and psychological escapism became central to the ethos
of Christian Europe. Second, the Church obliterated or marginalised
any source of intellectual authority or knowledge that did not have its
approval. This included the physical destruction of Greco-Roman places
or learning, persecution of non-conformists, and propaganda.191 This
epistemological totalitarianism allowed the Church to control what
people thought and render them unwilling or unable to contemplate any
approach towards “reality” not based on religious doctrines.
Third, the Church was willing to legitimise barbarian warlords and

Roman aristocrats in exchange for their acceptance of its intellectual and
moral authority. This enabled the Church to establish a field presence
that was used to shape the religious worldview of the masses without,
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however, providing them with direct access to the sources of Christian

doctrine. Fourth, the Church, based on the first three points, was able
to extract taxes, lands, military service, donations, etc., for itself while
absolving itself of any real responsibility for the material wellbeing of
its human flock. And fifth, the Church integrated itself into the feudal
caste system as the first estate. Members of the theocratic caste enjoyed
immunity to local courts and operated as autonomous agents of the
Papacy. The administrative enervation, intellectual regression, and political
fragmentation of post-Roman Europe eminently suited the Church.
The combination of these five elements enabled the Church to preside

over the ruins of the post-Roman world for nearly a millennium. In that
post-apocalyptic set-up, feudal lords endlessly fought each other; wars,
plagues, and famines ravaged Europe. Attempts to question the Church
led to ferocious persecution. The inquisitor, the censor, and the crusader
were the razor’s edge of this benighted order. One example of this, which
provides one of the first historical accounts of planned and systematic
genocide, is the Albigensian Crusade of the 1200s. The Albigensians were
a Christian sub-sect that rejected the material extravagance of the Church
hierarchy. After bureaucratic methods failed to secure their obedience,
the Papacy declared them heretics and launched a Crusade against
them. Crusaders were absolved of any sins committed in furtherance of
the divine commands of the Church and could help themselves to the
property of the slaughtered. Some 200,000 Albigensians were killed,192
while their leadership was burned alive. This drove the sect underground,
where it eventually petered out.
Interestingly, the Church got the French king to foot the bill for
the military aspect of this persecution. This was not an isolated incident
but a recurrent pattern in medieval Christendom arising from the
single-minded determination of the Church leadership to preserve its
hegemony in Europe’s Dark Ages dystopia.193 The Spanish Inquisition,
the Counter-Reformation, the alliance with slavers and the legitimisation
of genocidal policies in the Americas (barring the occasional pangs of
conscience) helped make the Church Europe’s most formidable actor
until the French Revolution.194 At the same time, medieval Christendom
did possess an underlying logic. Born into a world of secular failure and
contraction, the Church sold the promise of a better afterlife for all who
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accepted its authority in exchange for a large share of Europe’s dwindling
resources, which enabled the ecclesiastical hierarchy to live better than
others in this world. To the traumatised, miserable, and oppressed, the
Church offered hope – not in this life, but the next – and a means of
rationalising suffering.
The implications of this historical example for the future are profound.
As humanity moves towards a world of environmental collapse, states and
societies are going to experience secular failure on a scale far greater than
the fall of the Roman Empire. As people are progressively traumatised
by the deaths of loved ones, the loss of their homes, the infertility of
their farmlands, the increasing heat, water shortages, hunger, and the
return of the uncontrolled disease, they will struggle to cope with and
make sense of their suffering. The totality of the secular collapse, likely
to arise from the Earth becoming largely uninhabitable for humans, will
eliminate any scope for secular means of redemption for the vast majority
of the people. Amidst such conditions of extreme stress, the revival of
traditional religions or the emergence of new death cults like Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are inevitable.195 Societies that are already
religious might lapse into theocracy and fundamentalism. More secular
societies are vulnerable to ideologies like fascism and might relapse into
overt racism. Such worldviews would thrive in a period of economic
contraction, social decay, and intensifying conflict.
While the return of theocracy is one outcome that is likely in societies

experiencing collapse, another possibility is the return of totalitarianism
rooted in non-religious ideologies. In the West and the materially
developed societies of East Asia, an updated version of fascism could be
the way of the future. This assessment is not without precedent in world
history. Fascism, after all, did emerge as a major political force in the years
after the First World War and the disillusionment, poverty, chaos, and
brutalisation unleashed by that conflict created festering conditions for
radicalism to thrive. Left-wing totalitarianism found expression in the
birth of the Soviet Union, while the right-wing variety emerged in the
form of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Hirohito’s Japan. Even
countries that remained democratic, like Britain and the United States,
saw a surge in racist right-wing politics. In the United States, the Jim
Crow South was, in fact, a white supremacist and practically authoritarian
87
entity within the larger body politic. As is generally the case, the rise of
fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan was driven by powerful stirrings
of nationalism, disappointment with the previous generation of leaders,
and a desire to assert state power on the international stage. Ultra-right-
wing nationalists tapped into these sentiments to propel their countries
towards a Social Darwinist and predatory outlook that enabled crimes
against their own and other peoples.196
The basic mechanics of the fascist outlook revolved around insensitivity

to the suffering they inflicted on others. The first ingredient required to
nurture this outlook was a sense of racial, ethnic, or ideological superiority
that made others less human. The easiest source of this kind of thinking
for fascists in the 1900s was racial nationalism, though religion could
also serve a similar purpose. The second ingredient was the belief that the
world had conspired to deny them their rightful place in the sun. The third
component was to define that rightful place in terms of internal purity
and external power, linking the two in a causal relationship. This would
have the effect of excluding large groups within the domestic population,
deeming them inferior and disloyal and thereby justifying persecution
and confiscation of their wealth. The fourth building block saw the world
as too small for accommodation or peaceful exchange and coexistence.
Instead, only the fascist powers could be allowed to win, and their destiny
was to enjoy a monopoly on the fruits of success. The success of any
other polity was an affront to fascist greatness. The resulting militarism,
permanent war hysteria, and intense jealousy of others strengthened the
xenophobic tendencies that fascism fed off of. And last, though by no
means least, was the idea that the only way to save society from decay and
collapse was to reassert masculinity, reclaim unapologetically traditional
patriarchal norms that treated women as chattel, and subordinate the
family to the state by making its primary objective the production of
more (male) fascists.
At present, neo-fascist and crypto-fascist movements are sweeping

the world. Trump, Modi, Xi, Putin, al-Sisi, MBS, Erdogan, Bolsonaro,
Le Pen, Orban, Brexit, the Thai military junta, Bangladesh’s Awami
League, and Burma are just some of the more prominent instances of the
return of xenophobic right-wing identity politics. Each in its own way
represents the reassertion of national chauvinism, the rejection of common
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humanity, and a growing insensitivity to the plight of the environment.
That such movements are thriving is no surprise. Growing socioeconomic
inequality within societies, wrought by neoliberal globalisation, facilitates
identity politics as elites use their control of the media to divert public
anger and frustration towards religious, ethnic, or racial sentiments. Such
movements promise to restore national greatness and purity and help
corporate plunder and elite capture by making cooperation within and
between societies harder to sustain. In doing so, they help ensure that the
kind of global response needed to combat global warming and ecological
decay will not be able to materialise. And since any effective response
to the environmental crisis will necessitate a crackdown on corporate
plunder and plutocratic capture of decision-making, it suits the top one
per cent that profit from the status quo.
This being said, today’s right-wing authoritarians are still operating on

a habitable planet. The deterioration in the Earth’s habitability is expected
to start asserting itself on a scale sufficient to disrupt human societies by
the end of the 2020s and intensify every subsequent year until most of
the present habitable zone is rendered dead by the 2070s. As this process
unfolds, resource constraints become severe, and economic contraction
sets in, authoritarian tendencies are likely to become totalitarian, as
harsher and harsher measures are needed to keep elite extraction going.
The ability of a new wave of fascist regimes to compete in the kind of
chaos that is going to result from environmental breakdown will depend
in part on new technology. In the early 20th century, suppressing and
brainwashing populations took a lot of physical effort. Tracking what
people were doing, saying, and thinking required layers of informers,
bureaucracies, and lots of resources. It was also highly imperfect, given that
targets of surveillance could modify their behaviour, and those engaged in
snooping around could let selfish motives influence what they reported.
Moreover, the mere fact that the state enjoyed a monopoly of information
made people wary of official narratives – as evidenced by the refreshingly
irrepressible brand of Russian jokes about Soviet communism. Powerful
states like the Soviet Union or Maoist China could compel conformity
through violence and terror and more subtle forms of administrative
control, but only at a high price in terms of economic cost, public morale,
and expanding the heavy foot of the government.
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Today, things are very different, thanks to the Internet, AI, big
data mining, and the mobile phone revolution. Anyone who is on the
Internet, or has a mobile phone, can be hacked and tracked at all times.
Our behaviour generates mass quantities of data. In the “free” world,
citizens surrender this data voluntarily to big corporations197 in exchange
for services. In the un-free world, such as China, all data is state property,
and there is no operational concept of privacy. In most other countries,
intelligence services have the resources to locate and hack any person of
interest even if they cannot manage the Chinese level of control.
As computing power inexorably increases, keeping tabs on people

will become easier, sometimes with comical results, such as when a young
computer enthusiast revealed the location of American military bases by
accessing the data from a popular fitness app.198 The false news epidemic,
in the meanwhile, is debilitating and polarising public discourse even in
the most advanced countries. Since there is no centralised source of false
news, unlike in the old days of state monopolies on broadcast and print,
millions of people are duped each day into sharing such stories. Even the
most vigilant social media user is susceptible to spreading false news if
what they see conforms to their existing opinions.199
Organised actors like political parties, corporations, advertisers, and

governments have learned to take advantage of this. Troll armies can
inflict tremendous psychological pain on dissidents without any need
for physical intimidation. Rapidly re-sharing posts, regardless of their
authenticity, can cause the message to go viral. Using the data mined
from people can help campaigns and states shape public opinion.
Minimal selective targeting of people in real life can have a dramatically
greater effect because if the target shares their experience, it will inhibit
countless others, and if they start censoring themselves, then the desired
outcome from the oppressor’s perspective has been achieved. Any kind of
outrageous, ignorant, or anti-social behaviour or advocacy can spread far
and wide before it is shut down, while bots and people running dummy
accounts can do a lot of the leg work of disinformation campaigns.200
The Rolls Royce of Dark Age information dystopia is the ingenious

social credit system pioneered by China. Through this system, the
government can rate its citizens for loyalty and reliability and mete out
rewards and punishments in terms of access to services.201 This system
90
would be very helpful in allocating dwindling resources to loyal citizens
in a future of environmental collapse. Far from empowering people,
Information Technology (IT) and AI have placed the ultimate weapons
in the hands of governments and corporations that can be employed
to influence what people think and maintain social control.202 The day
may not be far off when babies are implanted with microchips that
communicate vital information to remote servers. What makes this
process so hard to resist is the sheer convenience of being connected.
Everything from being able to pay your bills from home, network with
thousands of people, enjoy free telephone calls, and order groceries can
be managed from home.203
Amidst conditions of global heating, it may well become inadvisable

for people in large parts of the world to step outside for months at a time,
making these IT tools essential to human survival. Imagine a world where
the government operated robots/drones roam otherwise deserted streets
delivering rations to people confined to their homes due to the extreme
heat and toxicity of the outdoors and/or unforeseen deadly diseases. Such
people would be completely at the mercy of their state. Totalitarianism in
the past was a clumsy and heavy-handed exercise, but automated social
credit systems, combined with complete monitoring of human behaviour,
would allow for the total dismantlement of the private sphere. A fascist
dystopia of the mid-2000s would be able to exercise greater control with
a lighter footprint while providing convenience and protection against
the effects of environmental deterioration to its loyal citizens. Allowing
various iterations of Amazon’s Alexa to take over our lives is not just
about shopping from the convenience of one’s couch. It is about giving
corporations and governments the ability to read our minds while cutting
us off from other people. This is a power that the police state apparatus of
the KGB and Gestapo would have envied.
What are governments and corporations doing with the enormous

unregulated power of being able to read our minds? For the former, the
desired result is control of the narrative, while for the latter, it is making
more money, diminishing the human component of their organisation,
and inhibiting collective response to the ecological ruin neoliberal
capitalism is bringing about.204 It does not take much to imagine a
fascistic world in which states ration resources and services based on
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loyalty while corporations continue to reap profits by catering to the

top 10 per cent while everyone else struggles to survive amidst climate
apartheid. In many ways, this craven new world of bot and troll powered
narratives, and convenience-driven elite consumption is already here. The
intensification of the Earth’s crisis of habitability in the coming decades
will destroy the veneer of civility and humane pretensions which most
states and companies still publicly espouse.
An essential component of navigating a world of ecological instability

will be controlling the majority of the population – the ones who will
suffer horrendously – so as not to disturb the rich and the powerful.
Internal systems of concentration camps, the incitement of mass violence
against minorities and dissidents, warfare against weaker states, genetic
tampering, reverting to pre-industrial patriarchy, the return of slavery, the
institutionalisation of discrimination based on race, caste, and creed, and
the end of human rights as a practice and a legitimate concept, are just some
of the instruments of control that will have to be employed. A variation
on the theme of a statist fascist dystopia is a corporate dystopia in which,
as the world’s habitability tanks, plutocrats seize control of territory and
resources and develop their own armies and police forces to maintain
control.205 In conditions of extreme scarcity, even if billions perish, such
corporate enterprises could still make money while destroying the world’s
remaining resources. Given the historic closeness between big business
and fascism and the corporations’ need for a government to maintain a
semblance of order, the more likely scenario is that the fascist state and
corporate interests work together.206
While many states are well on the way to becoming IT-powered

fascist dystopias, others could evolve into relatively more benign and
rational environmentalist dictatorships. Smaller and highly advanced
states like New Zealand or the Scandinavian countries are already in
the process of subordinating national policymaking to scientific advice.
As the ecological crisis worsens and piecemeal adaptations fail to cut it,
more and more authority might end up being transferred to scientific
advisory bodies that would dictate measures to contain the damage. This
kind of scientific technocracy would effectively subordinate the authority
of parliaments and cabinets to its advice.
Like fascist regimes, environmentalist authoritarians motivated by the
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sense that they must do whatever it takes to save the planet will impose
restrictions on what people can do. Assigning everyone a carbon budget,
heavy carbon taxes, limiting trade and travel, a massive public works
program aimed at transitioning to carbon-neutrality on a war footing,
universal basic income, massive public borrowing and confiscatory
taxation on the wealthy are some measures that will be deemed necessary.
Environmental crimes would merit harsher punishments, while global
trade and investment would collapse as economies reorient themselves
towards local production and consumption. The management of this
transition will necessitate a much stronger, more authoritarian, and
intrusive state with a lot more bureaucracy. Paying for this in conditions
of de-globalisation of trade, shrinking economies, and flight of capital
will not be easy and could accelerate economic collapse and lead to worse
shortages and more extreme rationing. There is every chance that the only
way to deal with rightwing opposition will be to declare emergencies,
suspend civil rights, and allow mobs of enraged environmentalists to
mete out “climate justice” to “climate criminals”.
This could also escalate into inter-generational warfare as those

presently under the age of 40, justifiably enraged by the selfishness and
heedlessness of baby boomers, start to liquidate older people. Since
the rightwing in countries like Britain and the United States is better
armed than the centre and left, countries with complex and divided
demographics could well break up into liberal and conservative states.
Scotland could secede from the United Kingdom, while liberal coastal
states might find it impossible to stay within the Unites States dominated
by a racist anti-environmentalist white minority entrenched in power
through gerrymandering and control of the Supreme Court.
Thus far, the options discussed have presumed that a semblance of

state order will survive in a future dominated by environmental collapse.
This might hold true in the West, East Asia, and a few other states.
However, climate catastrophe will lead to state failure for much of the
planet. Already weaker, poorer, less legitimate, and less organised states in
the developing world are facing dire consequences on account of ecocide.
Failing to respond effectively to the contemporary effects of global
warming, local resource depletion, and runaway population growth, many
states in South Asia, West Asia, Africa, and Latin America will not live
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to see 2100.
As state capacity plummets in relative and then absolute terms, such

societies are likely to revert to caste, kinship, and tribal affiliations to
survive. Those people who do not have strong primordial networks will
perish during the initial stages of collapse. Those who have access to such
networks will be forced back into a strictly hierarchical relationship with
their kinship group or tribal leaders. Whatever little gain the developing
world has experienced regarding women’s rights and children’s rights will
evaporate as temperatures rise and states and economies fall. Slavery, child
marriage, and the open treatment of women and children as property of
tribal males will return without the pretence of public order to restrain
such violations.
Given how much worse climate change will affect women, it is

mortifying to see coal mining operations in Pakistan being praised
for employing female truck drivers. In these conditions, it will not be
possible to immunise children, send them to school, or provide basic
healthcare. The gains in control of communicable diseases, sanitation, and
population welfare made possible by state intervention will be reversed
within a generation. Life expectancy will revert to medieval levels as
disease, starvation, and violence destroy populations. Some states which
have significant military power, such as India and Pakistan, or smaller,
more developed populations such as Bhutan and Sri Lanka, might
manage to preserve some kind of state order in their metropolitan areas
for a few more decades. By 2100, as temperatures soar by four degrees,
water resources disappear, and the population collapses, it is not likely
that any “state” worth the name will be left standing in the Global South.
The implications for governance arising from ecocide are stark. It

is highly unlikely that any kind of liberal political order and economic
system as these terms are understood today will survive more than
two generations into the future. Right-wing fascist, theocratic regimes,
left-wing green dictatorships, or reversion to tribalism are the types of
political and social orders likely to survive during the coming ecological
crunch. Isolated communities of survivalists could endure for long periods
of time in highly favourable locations though it is not clear that they
would do so for long enough to allow the Earth to return to some sort of
pre-industrial stability. Even more radical outcomes such as genetically
94
engineered humans or sentient AI taking control cannot be ruled out.
The latter, in particular, would be largely immune to the effects of global
warming. This new Dark Age would last at least 1,000 years, which is
how long it would take the Earth to naturally revert to pre-industrial
revolution levels of atmospheric carbon if all emissions ceased today. Of
course, emissions are not going to cease anytime soon, and with the polar
ice caps melting 70 years ahead of what was predicted, the release of
even more GHGs could lead to a situation where it would take tens of
thousands of years for concentrations to return to pre-industrial levels.
95
Conclusion: Is There a Way Out?

All life on Earth, including humans, stands at the brink of downfall
on account of deficiencies in human nature that have been magnified
by the oscillations of historical experiences. Human intelligence does
not so much appear to be an evolutionary advantage but an aberration
responsible for the presently unfolding mass extinction. The human
appetite for convenience, longevity and more material stuff has mined
the environment to exhaustion. The human propensity towards optimism
ensured that decades of warnings from scientists and philosophers that
the world was hurtling towards ecological disintegration were dismissed.
In order to manage the effects of industrialisation and globalisation,
humanity sorely needed the wisdom and sense of proportion of Solon.
Regrettably, an assortment of hubristic Croesus-like leaders aided and
abetted by growth cultists operating in the tradition of Pangloss held
sway and continue to rule nearly everywhere. History teaches us that the
inaneness of the Homo Sapiens is such that the capacity for insight is a
very limited one and that the chances of getting those with the requisite
understanding into positions of authority are slim to none.
A predictable question that arises after the doom and gloom of the
preceding pages is to ask if there is any way out of humanity’s self-inflicted
predicament. The incorrigible optimists like Pangloss would have people
believe that this is still the best of all possible worlds and that science
and technology have an ace up their sleeves that will dispel the adverse
effects of human activity on the environment. Other, more conservative
types might still genuinely believe, in the face of all evidence, that all
these fluctuations are natural and will sort themselves. Sadly, for both
optimists and conservatives, the tipping points already crossed due to
human activities are so disastrous that no technical solution can by itself
rescue life on Earth.
Each fantastic solution, like carbon capture, or a Green New Deal,

will consume resources and energy that the Earth can no longer tolerate.
And even if the funding and resources were not an issue, the technology
was perfect, and all that was needed was to give the order, the 9 to 12 year
timeframe left to make the changes is insufficient to move entire societies
towards genuine ecological regeneration. What is needed to change the
96
way states and societies think about environmental issues and make them
realise that only hard choices lie ahead and that this will entail many
sacrifices.
To survive beyond 2100, we need to abandon all hope and all

pretence that things can continue as they have thus far. A new approach
is needed – one fundamentally at odds with what passes for normalcy
today. And this shift needs to be brought about in 3,000 days, or the
darkest scenarios articulated by scientists will certainly come to pass. So
here are seven lessons for our final century that, if learned and applied,
might just allow life on Earth and, incidentally, human civilisation to
continue for millennia to come.
The first lesson is that it is time to start seeing ourselves not as

individuals operating in a present-minded vacuum but as tiny pieces of a
continuum of a great story that stretches far back into time. In other words,
to survive, humans must learn to think in historical time, see themselves
in historical terms, and act as if the future of civilisation deserves to last
at least as long as its history. The temporal frame of reference for policies
and actions needs to be centuries, not days, months, and years. The mental
discipline it takes to think in such structural terms is immense. With the
exception of China, no major power has a tradition of secular thought
that engages with reality in historical terms, and even in the Chinese
example, the application of this approach has been sketchy at best. In
the past, cultures had the option of muddling through if for no other
reason than their impact on the environment was not as catastrophic as
it is today. Modern civilisation desperately needs to acquire a heightened
historical consciousness. There are modern thinkers like Fernand Braudel,
Jared Diamond, Peter Turchin, Roman Krznaric, and Ian Morris whose
perspectives manifest the approach that political leaders and mainstream
pundits need to adopt.
If we start to really think historically about our problems, then the

second lesson, the need to abandon our absurd fascination with economic
growth, becomes self-evident. Growing an economy by converting natural
assets into material ones at a rate faster than the former can regenerate
is ultimately suicidal. Our mainstream economists remain confident
that pollution, biodiversity loss, and global warming, while bad news, is
not as important as more GDP. The world has also been sold on the
97
desirability of global trade and travel. And even though the dominant
growth framework followed for the past 40 years has disproportionately
benefited the top one per cent, the prescription for all ills remains yet
more growth.
If human civilisation is going to survive, there is no choice but to

move towards a stationary state or some version of managed de-growth.
Instead of growth, the objective of economic planning will have to change
to well-being and from “sustainable growth” (which is a fantasy) to the
regeneration of nature. This shift might actually be easier for countries
in the Global South that have been badly let down by the dominant
economic model. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
and Burma could actually follow the example of small states like Bhutan
and New Zealand by shifting the emphasis to well-being and helping
nature recover. These and most other states in the Global South have
literally nothing to lose by stepping off the collective suicide train that is
contemporary capitalism.
If any country decides to abandon economic growth as an objective,

the challenge it will face will be to manage a holistic transition to an
ecologically regenerative and well-being oriented system. Here, the
historical tendency to make bad decisions in the face of opposition by
vested interests may well derail the noblest policy initiatives. In both
democratic and autocratic states, as well as hybrid models like Pakistan,
pushing through the reforms needed requires sustained leadership
commitment, a critical mass of popular support, and solid administration.
The pressure needed to push for change will have to endure for at least 20
years, and, on top of it, enough large countries will have to sign on for it to
have a much-needed global impact. Brazil, for instance, can derail efforts
at containing global warming through reforestation and restoration of
meadows by allowing more of the Amazon to be cleared for farming
and mining - something that its present fascistic government is intent
on doing.
The experience of wartime mobilisation in the first half of the 20th

century indicates that both democracies and autocracies are capable of
the required level of mass mobilisation to combat threats like climate
change. The difficulty lies in convincing governments to go to that level of
mobilisation in order to save the planet rather than for killing each other.
98
Here, major developing countries like China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Burma, Thailand, Mexico and
Brazil could get things started by declaring environmental emergencies
and start implementing policies aimed at securing nature within their
national boundaries.
Admittedly, the administrative effectiveness of regenerative policies

will be a concern, but, as Pakistan’s reforestation effort shows, even a poor
country with a tottering bureaucracy can, if the political will is there,
tackle major environmental problems head-on. The lesson to be learned
here is that all other issues that states currently think are problems are
nothing compared to the effects of ecocide. For India and Pakistan to
keep squabbling over Kashmir, trade, terrorism, and who has the best
mangoes, they need to be physically around. Neither is likely to survive the
crisis of habitability wrought by climate change and local environmental
depletion.
If enough states understand that dominant models of economic

growth are senseless and that moving towards regenerative and well-
being-centred policies is the key to survival, they will be ready to learn
the fourth lesson. This is to take a page out of Churchill’s book and
tell their people how bad things are and how much worse they will
get before they might start to get better. Technological optimism and
wishful thinking need to be banished from policy discourse and public
pronouncements on the ecological crisis. People need to be told the truth
by their governments. The Earth is dying, human activity is killing it,
and powerful corporate vested interests that want to make more money
before everything collapses have delayed effective action until it is almost
too late.
What lies ahead is a struggle for survival like no other in history.

And like Churchill, the world’s leaders need to tell their people that for
the next 20 years, they will have nothing to offer but sacrifice and that
without a victory in this struggle, there will be no survival. They must also
tell their people that there is a good chance that these efforts will fail but
that the only real hope lies in making the sacrifices necessary to break
with business as usual because an environmentally ruined world will not
only be unlivable for billions, it will not be worth living in for those
who survive. As Zhou Enlai explained to his colleagues at the beginning
99
of China’s communist revolution ( July 1927): “If we do not fight, we

surely die. If we fight, we may die, but we may win.”207 To save human
civilisation, what is needed is not false hope but heroic realism in the
pattern of Churchill, Zhou Enlai, or Leonidas.
The fifth lesson that the world needs to learn is that as resource
crunches and climate change hits, as they must, even in the most
optimistic scenarios, scarcity will spike, and the intuitive response of
each major power or bloc will be to pull inwards and consolidate control
over its own sphere of influence. Growing insularity and xenophobia are
very human responses to danger and shortages. But if states give in to
these impulses, they will plunge the world into apocalyptic geopolitics.
Any major military conflict or a new cold war at this critical juncture
will dramatically add to GHG emissions and ecological destruction and
divert energies away from regenerative policies.
While cutting back on global trade and travel and moving

towards localisation of manufacturing and services will end economic
globalisation, greater political, scientific, environmental, humanitarian,
and administrative cooperation across national and regional boundaries
will be needed. Falling into a new cold war, stumbling into a hot war, or
otherwise reducing international cooperation will hasten the process of
downfall. There is a tremendous responsibility on the shoulders of the
current generation of political and military leaders to understand that the
real enemy is ecocide, not each other, and only intense global cooperation
will be able to pull humanity out of a tailspin.
The sixth lesson is that civilisation is passing through the end of the
high-level equilibrium phase of globalisation and capitalism. History
teaches that such phases do not last forever, however much the elites
benefiting from them would like them to, and that there is a natural
tendency towards decline and fall. In the past, civilisations lacked
awareness that they were going through such periods or thought that
high-level equilibrium was normal and went into shock when the decline
began.
This time, however, civilisation can manage the decline of its present
high-level equilibrium in an orderly fashion and deliberately transition
towards regenerative frameworks. The top one per cent will look back
100
upon the period from 1975-2025 as the golden age of capital, from
which they derived disproportionate and inequitable benefit at the cost of
future generations and billions of working people all over the world. But
now it is time to start paying the bill for the party that neoliberal baby
boomers and their apologists threw themselves. Perhaps, over the next
several hundred years, the pursuit of regenerative policies will enable the
Earth to recover, more equitable prosperity to descend on a much smaller
human population while continuing to expand scientific knowledge
at an exponential rate, and a far better and more enduring high-level
equilibrium in the form of an advance eco-utopia might emerge. The
next 80 years will require the dismantling of neoliberal globalisation and,
if necessary, forcible de-carbonization of society and economy to realise
this possibility and create a future truly worth having.
The final lesson, at least for the purpose of this collection of

essays, is that in the years and decades to come, political orders and
governance structures will be severely tested. Many states will fail due to
environmental collapse, while others might evolve into dark dystopian
versions of themselves. Dystopias that deny the humanity of others and
seek to employ racial or religious identities as weapons while promising
“solutions” based on repression and hatred are a real possibility. These
cannot be ruled out even in advanced liberal democracies. But there is an
alternative that might actually work. It is the Platonic concept, from The
Republic, of the rule of the qualified, as opposed to rule by the popular,
rich or powerful. In view of the crisis of habitability facing the Earth, the
most qualified people to make decisions are scientists, philosophers, and
technical experts. The trouble is that people with expertise are generally
not listened to on broader policy questions. That might be fine under
normal conditions, but the severity of the ecological crisis is such that all
governments need to constitute advisory bodies of experts to meet the
environmental challenge and treat the advice given as binding.
Taken together, and they ought to be considered a package deal,

these seven lessons, if learned and acted upon, might well help humanity
and life on Earth survive long past 2100. There is still time to mend our
wicked ways and make better and wiser decisions and meet the challenge
of the environmental crisis. It is also important to bear in mind that if
humans cannot learn from history even now, then by 2100, there probably
101
will not be anyone left to repeat it.
102
Endnotes
1
“Our analysis found that a significant proportion of the world’s population–over 40 per cent,
primarily located in Africa and South Asia–simply do not have 3.75 dollars to spend on food every
day. This amount is far above the international poverty line of 1.90 dollars.” Anna Herforth, “Three
Billion People cannot afford Healthy Diets. What does this mean for the next Green Revolution?,”
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Commentary, September 23, 2020, https://www.
csis.org/analysis/three-billion-people-cannot-afford-healthy-diets-what-does-mean-next-green-
revolution (Accessed: May 7, 2022).
2
“The findings in the report indicate that as of 2011, 2.6 trillion dollars of developing countries’
private wealth is held in tax havens, over half of the 4.4 trillion dollars of total developing country
assets in these same jurisdictions. Sub-Saharan Africa’s assets held in tax havens grew at an
annualized rate of over 20 per cent from 2005 to 2011, a faster rate than that of any other region
either developed or developing.” See the Global Financial Integrity findings at http://gfintegrity.
org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecorded-capital-flight-finds-developing-countries-are-net-
creditors-to-the-rest-of-the-world/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
3
Developed countries are responsible for 79 per cent of cumulative Greenhouse Gas Emissions
since 1850. See the Center for Global Development’s findings at https://www.cgdev.org/media/
who-caused-climate-change-historically (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
4
As per the United Nations, the world faces Climate Aparthied in the short-term and medium-term,
threatening to wipe out improvements to living standards achieved by developing countries since
1945. See https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1041261 (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
5
Pew conducted a survey (2020-2021) that revealed a generational divide in terms of environmental
awareness, with younger generations more concerned about climate change: “when asked about
engaging with climate change content online, those in Gen Z are particularly likely to express
anxiety about the future. Among social media users, nearly seven-in-ten Gen Zers (69%) say they
felt anxious about the future the most recent time they saw content about addressing climate
change. A smaller majority (59%) of Millennial social media users report feeling this way the last
time they saw climate change content; fewer than half of Gen X (46%) and Baby Boomer and older
(41%) social media users say the same.” See: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/05/26/
gen-z-millennials-stand-out-for-climate-change-activism-social-media-engagement-with-issue/
(Accessed: May 6, 2022).
6
For an analysis of the Whiteness (and classism) of climate change activism, see Sarah Jacquette
Ray, “Climate Anxiety is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon,” in the Scientific American,
online, March 21, 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-
of-climate-anxiety/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
7
For details on the UK government’s strategy with reference to Net Zero by 2050, see its official
policy paper: “Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener,” released in 2021, https://assets.publishing.
service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1033990/net-zero-
strategy-beis.pdf (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
8
In 2012, scientists estimated that Arctic ice could disappear by 2090. But in 2020, the speed of
the ice melt and temperature rise in the Arctic led scientists to revise their projections to 2035.
As the world heats up, the climate system is reacting unpredictably. Alejandra Borunda, “Arctic
summer sea ice could disappear as early as 2035,” in The National Geographic, online, August
103
13, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/arctic-summer-sea-ice-could-be-
gone-by-2035 (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
9
“Pakistan, although only contributing 0.9% to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is one of the
most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change. These impacts are primarily in the form
of intense flooding, drastic change in rainfall patterns, melting Himalayan glaciers, increasing cases
of vector-borne diseases such as dengue, and an overall increase in the frequency and intensity of
climate-induced natural disasters. Climate Change imposes numerous challenges, and is becoming
an existential threat globally. Pakistan’s experience through Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in
addressing the global challenges serves as a solution provider. Pakistan has surpassed mitigation
contributions, and has taken climate change ‘beyond Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs),
and took initiatives which contributed to reduction of 8.7% emissions between 2016-2018.”
Updated Nationally Determined Contributions, 2021 (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 2021),
12.
10
For details see Abinash Mohanty and Shreya Wadhawan, Mapping India’s Climate Vulnerability: A
District Level Assessment (New Delhi: Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2021).
11
This problem has been recently been taken up at length in Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A
Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking (New York: The Experiment, 2020).
12
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History), trans.Franz Rosenthal, ed., N. J.
Dawood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978): 5.
13
According to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), as of 2018, only 8.7% of plastics are
recycled in the United States. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-
recycling/plastics-material-specific-data (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
14
This projection has been accepted by the United Nations as of 2019. https://www.un.org/
pga/73/2019/06/05/op-ed-we-must-save-our-world-from-drowning-in-plastic/ (Accessed: May 6,
2022).
15
This said, “Two-thirds of Americans are willing to pay more for everyday items made out of
environmentally sustainable materials instead of single-use plastic, according to a survey from PBS
NewsHour and Marist Poll.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/most-americans-would-pay-
more-to-avoid-using-plastic-poll-says (Accessed May 6, 2022). The problem is that the market is not
willing to provide the alternatives as it knows that people will not sacrifice short-term convenience.
16
Paul Griffin, The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017, (London: CDP, 2017),
6.
17
Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World (Glasgow: William Collins,
2020).
18
Thomas Robert Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” History of Economic Thought
Books, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, no. malthus1798 (1798),
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/malthus/popu.txt (Accessed: February 21, 2022).
19
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the first two decades of the 21st century saw continued increase
in average lifespan: “Globally, life expectancy has increased by more than 6 years between 2000
and 2019 – from 66.8 years in 2000 to 73.4 years in 2019. While healthy life expectancy (HALE) has
also increased by 8% from 58.3 in 2000 to 63.7, in 2019, this was due to declining mortality rather
than reduced years lived with disability.” https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-
and-global-health-estimates/ghe-life-expectancy-and-healthy-life-expectancy (Accessed: May 6,
104
2022). See, for instance, Levels and Trends of Mortality since 1950: A Joint Study by the United
Nations and World Health Organisation (New York: United Nations, 1982) for the gains between
1950 and 1980.
20
Jason Hickel, “Why Growth Can’t be Green,” Jason Hickel, Blog, last modified September 14, 2018,
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/9/14/why-growth-cant-be-green (Accessed February 21,
2022).
21
D. Giurco, E. Dominish, N. Florin, T. Watari and B. McLellan, “Requirements for Minerals and
Metals for 100% Renewable Scenarios,” In Teske S. (eds) Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement
Goals (Springer, Cham, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05843-2_11 (Accessed February
21, 2022).
22
“GDP per capita, PPP (current international $),” World Bank Group, https://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
23
The average for OECD member states is about 45,000 dollars (per capita income). https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=OE (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
24
For a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon and the fake change peddled by the very
wealthy see Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
(London: Penguin, 2019).
25
John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy: With some of their applications to Social
Philosophy, Vol. II (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, West Strand, 1871).
26
Ibid., 325.
27
Charles Darwin and Leonard Kebler, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or, The
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, (London: J. Murray, 1859) https://www.loc.
gov/item/06017473/ (Accessed: February 21, 2022).
28
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1871).
29
Ashley Hammer, “99 percent of the Earth’s Species are Extinct – But That’s not the Worst of It,”
Discovery August 1, 2019, https://www.discovery.com/nature/99-Percent-Of-The-Earths-Species-
Are-Extinct (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
30
Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1958): 51.
31
Riaz Muhammad Khan, Environment Service Sector: Climate Perspective (Islamabad: Civil Society
Coalition for Climate Change), 1.
32
Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, (New York: Viking, 2005).
33
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, (New York :Harper, 2017).
34
Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on
Earth (Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books, 2016).
35
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin A.
Seligman (London: J. M. Dent, 1901).
36
Karl Marx, 1818-1883, The Communist Manifesto, (London; Chicago, Ill.: Pluto Press, 1996).
37
John M Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, (London: Macmillan & Co., Limited,
1919).
38
M. Friedman and P. N. Snowden, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002).
39
Reference the rise of China see Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the
105
Western World and the Rise of a new Global Order (London: Penguin, 2012).
40
For a deeply researched account on race relations in the United States see Elliot G. Jaspin, Buried
in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Perseus Book
Company, 2007).
41
Cameron Cooper, “6 Economists who Predicted the global financial crisis,” In The Black, July 7,
2015, https://intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au/economy/6-economists-who-predicted-the-global-
financial-crisis-and-why-we-should-listen-to-them-from-now-on (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
42
Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment, (London : The
Bodley Head, 2017).
43
Renee Choo, “How Close Are We to Climate Tipping Points?,” Columbia Climate School, last
modified November 11, 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/11/11/how-close-are-we-
to-climate-tipping-points/ (Accessed: February 21, 2022).
44
“Act Now,” Extinction Rebellion, https://extinctionrebellion.uk/act-now/ (Accessed: February 24,
2022).
45
Jason Hickel, “Why Growth Can’t be Green,” Foreign Policy, online, September 12, 2018, https://
foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
46
The Carbon Footprint of Global Trade: Tackling Emissions from International Freight Transport
(Paris: International Transport Forum, 2015), 3.
47
Ibid.
48
The day on which humanity’s consumption of resources exceeds what the Earth can naturally
replenish is now known as “Earth Overshoot Day”. In 2021, that day arrived on 19 July. Since 2000,
the the number of days after which we are mining the environment unsustainably has continued
to grow. For more see https://www.overshootday.org/about-earth-overshoot-day/ (Accessed: May
6, 2022).
49
Amanda Macias, “America has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a
new study says,” CNBC, last modified November 20, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-
spent-6point4-trillion-on-middle-east-wars-since-2001-study.html (Accessed: February 24, 2022).
50
Kenneth Haapla, “US Government Funding of Climate Change,” Climate Dollars https://www.
climatedollars.org/full-study/us-govt-funding-of-climate-change/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
51
At present, we need 1.75 Earths to sustain our present level of consumption. If everyone were
to live like an American, that shoots up to 5.1 Earths. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-
earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
52
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, ed., Bernard Crick (London: Penguin
2003), 94.
53
Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Kenneth Wellesley, ed. Rhiannon Ash (London: Penguin, 2009), 13.
54
Shang Yang, The Book of Lord Shang, trans. J. J. L. Duyvendak (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1998),
200.
55
Herodotus, Herodotus : the Histories, (London, Eng.; New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
56
Abul-Fazl ‘Allami, The ‘Ain-i-Akbari, (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Pvt Ltd,
2021); Abū al-Faz̤l ibn Mubārak, Henry Blochmann, H. S. Jarrett, and Jadunath Sarkar, The A’in-i
Akbari by Abu’l-Fazl ‘Allami, trans. H. Blochmann, (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927).
57
Peter Turchin, “Blame rich, overeducated elites as our society frays,” Bloomberg, November 20,
2013, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-11-20/blame-rich-overeducated-elites-
106
as-our-society-frays (Accessed: March 2, 2022).
58
Some 14 billion dollars were spent by candidates in the 2020 US election cycle. William C. R.
Horncastle, “The 2020 election was the most expensive in history, but campaign spending does
not always lead to success”, London School of Economics, Phelan US Centre, November 27, 2020,
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2020/11/27/the-2020-election-was-the-most-expensive-in-
history-but-campaign-spending-does-not-always-lead-to-success/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
59
In Pakistan, the phenomenon of “electables”, i.e. candidates with dynastic political influence in
a locality that can swing that constituency towards whever party they associate with, remains a
powerful factor in government formation.
60
Eli Watkins, “Rubio stands by accepting NRA contributions: ‘People buy into my agenda’,” CNN,
February 22, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/21/politics/rubio-nra-money-cameron-
kasky/index.html (Accessed: March 4, 2022).
61
In the United States, for instance, “moderate” Democrats have delayed legislation intended to
integrate climate change response into COVID19 recovery. Anthony Zurcher, “Joe Manchin and
Kirsten Sinema Blocking Biden’s Climate Agenda”, BBC online, October 28, 2021, https://www.bbc.
com/news/world-us-canada-59060739 (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
62
Louise Rhind-Tutt, “Yes, Prime Minister proves how little changes in British politics,” INews,
June 14, 2017, https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/yes-prime-minister-little-changes-in-british-
politics-72493 (Accessed: March 4, 2022).
63
Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead
E.P.A.,” NYTimes, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/scott-
pruitt-epa-trump.html (Accessed: March 4, 2022).
64
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998).
65
Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the
War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
66
For a powerful corrective to this view see Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot
Guide to Changing Capitalism (London: AllenLane, 2021). Mazzucato explains how most of the
critical innovations that define modern capitalism came from the government acting as a strategic
investor, not from the creativity or competition of the free market and the entrepreneur. See also
Piergiussepe Fortunato, “The Long Shadow of Market Fundamentalism”, Social Europe, online, May
5, 2022, https://socialeurope.eu/the-long-shadow-of-market-fundamentalism (Accessed: May 6,
2022).
67
Jake Strumer and Yumi Asada, “Japan forced to confront resistance to immigration amid
desperate labour shortage”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, online, December 20, 2018,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-20/japan-foreign-immigration-amid-desperate-labour-
shortage/10632288 (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
68
Kartik Raj, “How Nativist Populism is going Mainstream in Europe”, in Human Rights Watch,
online, February 21, 2020. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/21/how-nativist-populism-going-
mainstream-europe (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
69
Donella H Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens, The Limits to
growth; a report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind (New York: Universe
Books, 1972).
107
70
Noah Kirsch, “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country, Study
Finds,” Forbes, November 8, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-
richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/?sh=3514bdda3cf8
(Accessed: March 4, 2022).
71
“What is your Ecological Footprint?,” Global Footprint Network, June 6, 2022, https://www.
footprintcalculator.org/home/en.
72
“Few concepts have implications as far reaching for economic policy as long-term growth.
Growth– namely, the increase in an economy’s potential to produce goods and services–is of
central importance not only for improving living standards, but also for addressing inequality, debt
sustainability, and the cost of climate change mitigation.” World Economic Outlook: Recovery during
a Pandemic (Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund, Oct. 2021), 65.
73
Kate Abnett, “Germany would have missed 2020 climate goal without COVID-19 emissions
drop,” Reuters, August 9, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-climate-change-eu-germany-
idUKKCN25F27F (Accessed: March 4, 2022).
74
“A year ago, Open Lux uncovered the secrets of tax havens existing in Europe. Eight months
later, the bombshell of the Pandora Papers made headlines around the world for blowing the lid
on how the super-rich use tax havens to escape their tax bills. This week, a historic leak of Swiss
banking records revealed how criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians used the secretive Swiss
banking system to stash over $8 billion in assets. Yet, none of this made a dent in EU rules on
tax havens. The updated list does not challenge the persistent weaknesses of the process which
exempts EU tax havens, and leaves secrecy jurisdictions, like Switzerland and the US, and zero tax
rate countries, like the Cayman Islands, off the hook. Meanwhile, poorer countries, like Tunisia
and Vietnam, are at risk of being blacklisted for not complying with top-down designed standards.
Greylisting the Bahamas, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands means some
real tax havens will be put under the magnifying glass. However, as long as the
criteria are not reviewed, these countries can continue to operate as tax havens
without any repercussions and can easily be completely delisted in the next review.
How many more tax scandals must happen before the EU commits to a real reform? The current
process is full of holes, lacks credibility and fails to put an end to tax avoidance. It is time for the EU
to automatically blacklist zero and low tax rate countries, and to hold EU countries up to the same
level of scrutiny as non-EU countries. The EU should also not use the blacklist in the future to force
poorer countries, like Nigeria and Kenya, to sign up to the unfair OECD tax deal,” Chiara Putatoro,
Oxfam ,Press Release, February 24, 2022, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/eu-countries-
fall-short-their-promises-stop-tax-havens (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
75
M. Ericsson, O. Löf and A. Löf, “Chinese control over African and global mining–past, present and
future,” Miner Econ 33 (2020): 153–181, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13563-020-00233-4 (Accessed:
March 4, 2022).
76
Matthew Rochat, “China’s Growing Dominance in Maritime Shipping,” The Diplomat, December
18, 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/12/chinas-growing-dominance-in-maritime-shipping/
77
Junhua Zhang, “What’s driving China’s One Belt, One Road initiative?,” East Asia Forum,
September 2, 2016, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/09/02/whats-driving-chinas-one-
belt-one-road-initiative/ (Accessed: March 4, 2022).
108
78
Christiane Grefe, “Interview with Dennis Meadows on “Limits to Growth”,” Volkswagen
Foundation, March 10, 2014, Youtube video, 23:21, https://youtu.be/uYNlhjOZ7DU?t=1401
79
Abu’l-Fazl Allami, The A’in- I Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann, ed. D.C. Phillott (Lahore:Sang-e-Meel,
2004), 1146.
80
Adam Zamoyski, Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 130-
131.
81
Voltaire, Candide (New York: Boni & Liveright, Inc, 1918).
82
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed. trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948).
83
Francis Wheen, How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
84
A broad cultural term for English becoming the global Internet lingua franca, used here to refer to
Anglicised or globalized elites the world over who can talk to each other more easily than to their
own countrymen.
85
Laura Paddison, “How the Rich are Driving Climate Change,” BBC Online, October 28, 2021,
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-make-the-rich-pay-for-their-
carbon-emissions (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
86
Nadège Mougel, “World War I casualties,” Reperes, 2011, http://www.centre-robert-schuman.
org/userfiles/files/REPERES%20%E2%80%93%20module%201-1-1%20-%20explanatory%20
notes%20%E2%80%93%20World%20War%20I%20casualties%20%E2%80%93%20EN.pdf
87
The Influenza Pandemic of 1919-1921 was a direct result of the First World War and claimed 50
million additional lives by American Center for Disease Control estimates. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/
pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/1918-pandemic-history.htm (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
88
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Revolutions of 1830,” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 20,
2021, https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1830 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
89
Office of the Historian, “American Isolationism in the 1930s,” US Department of State, https://
history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/american-isolationism (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
90
“5 bloodiest wars in world history,” India Today, April 17, 2015, https://www.
indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/5-worst-wars-in-history-of-the-
world-249029-2015-04-17 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
91
Shannon Hall, “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 Years ago,” The Scientific American,
online, October 26, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-
change-almost-40-years-ago/ (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
92
“The $1.90-a-day line is “obscenely low,” and “earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re
somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty.” A minimum of $7.40 per day, at least, is necessary
for “basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy. Using the percentage of people in poverty
is misleading, and we should instead focus on the absolute number of people in poverty, which
according to Hickel’s preferred $7.40-a-day line has increased since 1981.” Jason Hickel, cited in
Dylan Matthews, “Bill Gates Tweeted out a chart and sparked a huge debate about global poverty,”
Vox, February 12, 2019, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/12/18215534/bill-gates-
global-poverty-chart (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
93
“6.7% Of World Has College Degree,” Huffington Post, May 19, 2010, https://www.huffpost.com/
109
entry/percent-of-world-with-col_n_581807 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
94
Using constant 2017 USD, the global per capita income was about 11,000 in 2000. https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.KD (Accessed: May 6, 2022).
95
“Pak-INDC,” UNFCCC, November 4, 2016, https://www4.unfccc.int/sites/ndcstaging/
PublishedDocuments/Pakistan%20First/Pak-INDC.pdf; David Eckstein, Vera Künzel, Laura Schäfer
and Maik Winges, Global Climate Risk Index 2020, (Bonn: GermanWatch, 2019): 9, https://www.
germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/20-2-01e%20Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%20
2020_14.pdf (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
96
Muntazir Abbas, “India has 22 cars per 1,000 individuals: Amitabh Kant,” Auto: Economic Times,
December 12, 2018, https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/passenger-vehicle/cars/
india-has-22-cars-per-1000-individuals-amitabh-kant/67059021 (Accessed: March 7, 2022); David
Banister, Transport Planning: In the UK, USA and Europe (London; New York: E & FN Spon, 1994),
193.
97
D. K. Panda, A. AghaKouchak, and S. K. Ambast, “Increasing heat waves and warm spells in India,
observed from a multiaspect framework,” J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., no. 122 (2017): 3837–3858,
doi:10.1002/2016JD026292 (Accessed March 7, 2022); Murali Krishnan, “Climate change: IPCC
warns India of extreme heat waves, droughts,” DW, August 10, 2018, https://www.dw.com/en/
india-climate-change-ipcc/a-58822174 (Accessed March 7, 2022).
98
“What is net zero and why is it important?,” UN News, December 02, 2020, https://news.un.org/
en/story/2020/12/1078612 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
99
Emily Gosden, “Eat seasonally and recycle more to cut emissions, says Shell,” The Times, June
11, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shell-asks-businesses-to-work-together-in-cutting-
emissions-0pwkk2qnm (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
100
Tom Bawden, “Solar panel installations by homeowners and power companies plummet after
subsidy cuts,” iNews, November 04, 2020, https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/solar-panel-
installations-homeowners-power-companies-plummet-749069 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
101
Archana Rani,“Aker BP signs $1bn agreement with Maersk Drilling for two jack-up rigs,” Offshore
Technology, December 20, 2021, https://www.offshore-technology.com/news/aker-bp-maersk-
drilling-rigs/ (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
102
Michelle R. McCrystall, Julienne Stroeve, Mark Serreze, Bruce C. Forbes and James A. Screen,
“New climate models reveal faster and larger increases in Arctic precipitation than previously
projected,” Nature Communications 12, 6765 (2021): 3-10, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-
27031-y (Accessed March 7, 2022).
103
Brian Resnick, “Melting permafrost in the Arctic is unlocking diseases and warping the
landscape,” Vox, November 15, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/16062174/permafrost-
melting (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
104
Justin Jin, “The workers searching for gas in the icy Russian Arctic – a photo essay,” The Guardian,
February 28, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/28/wild-north-
pioneers-on-energy-politics-coldest-battle-front-a-photo-essay-gazprom-arctic-siberia (Accessed:
March 7, 2022).
105
Ryan Burke, “Great-Power Competition in the “Snow of Far-Off Northern Lands”: Why We Need
a New Approach to Arctic Security,” Modern War Institute, August 04, 2020, https://mwi.usma.
edu/great-power-competition-snow-far-off-northern-lands-need-new-approach-arctic-security/
110
106
William Nordhaus, “Projections and Uncertainties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal
Climate Policies,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 10, no. 3 (August 2008); Steve Keen,
Nobel prize-winning economics of climate change is misleading and dangerous – here’s why,” The
Conversation, September 9, 2020, https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-
of-climate-change-is-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why-145567 (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
107
“Churchill and the Great Republic,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/
wc-hour.html. (Accessed: March 7, 2022).
108
Roy A. Austensen, “Metternich, Austria, and the German Question, 1848-1851,” The International
History Review 13, no. 1 (Feb., 1991): 21-37.
109
Voltaire, An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations: From the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis Xiv. - Primary Source Edition (Sacramento: Creative Media Partners,
LLC, 2014).
110
Kautilya, The Arthashastra, trans., L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), 559.
111
Aytekin Demircioglu, “A Comparison of the Views of Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu in Terms of
the Effect of Climatic Conditions on Human Life,” The Anthropologist 17: no. 3 (2014): 725-733,
https://doi.org/10.1080/09720073.2014.11891486 (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
112
James R. Hudson, “Braudel’s Ecological Perspective,” Sociological Forum 2, no. 1 ( 1987): 146-
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113
Jared Diamond, “Ecological Collapses of Past Civilizations,”Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 38, no. 3 (363-370), https://www.jstor.org/stable/986741 (Accessed: March
9, 2022).
114
Stephen W. Sawyer, “Time after Time: Narratives of the Longue Durée in the Anthropocene,”
TransAtlantica, no. 1 (2005), https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.7344 (Accessed: March 9,
2022).
115
James H. Lebovic, Planning to Fail: The US Wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2019).
116
Guillaume Simonet and Eric Duchemin, “The concept of adaptation : interdisciplinary scope
and involvement in climate change,” Sapiens 3, no. 1 (2010), https://journals.openedition.org/
sapiens/997 (Accessed: March 9, 2022); T.F. Thornton, R.K. Puri, S. Bhagwat and Patricia Howard,
“Human adaptation to biodiversity change: An adaptation process approach applied to a case study
from southern India,” Ambio 48, (2019): 1431–1446, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01225-7
117
Natalie Novella, “How Humans Will End The World: A Cautionary History of Environmental and
Civilizational Instability,” Inquiries Journal 13, no. 09 (2021), http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/
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118
Simon Dalby, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustain.ability (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2020).
119
Krishan Kumar, “Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 02 (2021): 280–309, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0010417521000050. See also Daniel Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments,
and Western Imperialism, 1400 to Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
120
Eugene Berger, George L. Israel, Charlotte Miller, Brian Parkinson, Andrew Reeves and Nadejda
111
Williams, World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 (Dahlonega: University of North
Georgia Press, 2016).
121
Kenneth Jupp, “European Feudalism from its Emergence through its Decline,” The American
Journal of Economics and Sociology 59, no. 05 (2000): 27-45.
122
John Asafu-Adjaye, “Biodiversity Loss and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis,” (paper
presented at Western Economic Association International, Vancouver, B.C., 2000), 1-7.
123
Stefano Guzzini (ed.), The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy
Identity Crises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28.
124
Shirley Cardenas, “How climate change could make some areas of Earth uninhabitable by 2500,”
World Economic Forum, October 21, 2021, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/climate-
change-could-make-some-areas-of-earth-uninhabitable-by-2500/ (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
125
“Climate change likely led to fall of Indus Valley Civilisation, says Study,” The Hindu, September
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to-fall-of-indus-valley-civilisation-says-study/article32521221.ece (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
126
Carol Kerven, Sarah Robinson and Roy Behnke, “Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands:
From Clans to Workers to Ranchers,” Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 4, no. 590401 (2021), https://doi.
org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.590401 (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
127
Brian Handwerk, “Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars,” National Geographic,
October 05, 2011, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/111003-science-climate-
change-little-ice-age (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
128
“The Black Death: The Plague, 1331-1770,” University of Iowa, Accessed March 09, 2022, http://
hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/histmed/plague/index.html (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
129
Helle Abelvik-Lawson, “Cold weather and climate change explained,” Green Peace, March
22, 2021, https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/cold-weather-and-climate-change-explained/
(Accessed: March 9, 2022); “Global warming makes heat waves hotter, longer, and more common,”
National Academies, August 23, 2021, https://www.nationalacademies.org/based-on-science/
global-warming-makes-heat-waves-hotter-longer-and-more-common (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
130
“Factsheet: Population trends in Asia and the Pacific,” UNSCAP, November 2013, https://www.
unescap.org/sites/default/files/SPPS-Factsheet-Population-Trends-v3.pdf (Accessed: March 9,
2022).
131
In India, the top 1 per cent is presently assessed as owning nearly 60% of the country’s wealth.
132
Arguably, many communities are already in this condition.
133
Usman Kabir, “Heat waves in Pakistan, India could render urban areas unlivable: report,” Geo
News, January 17, 2020, https://www.geo.tv/latest/267822-heat-waves-in-pakistan-india-could-
render-urban-areas-unlivable-contends-report (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
134
Already most population centres do not have a regular water supply.
135
The top consumer of water.
136
Guo Chushan, “Why human rights violations in Australia’s offshore detention centers are
appalling,” Global Times, August 03, 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1230395.
shtml (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
137
Shereen Marisol Meraji and Adrian Florido, Interview with Karen Ishizuka, Code Switch Podcast,
NPR, July 03. 2019, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/738247414 (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
138
Marta Welander, “The Politics of Exhaustion and the Externalization of British Border Control. An
112
Articulation of a Strategy Designed to Deter, Control and Exclude,” International Migration 59, no.
03 (2021): 29-46, https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12778 (Accessed: March 9, 2022).
139
Tim Hornyak, “Climate Change could make Siberia an attractive place to Live,” Eos, online, July
12, 2017, https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-could-make-siberia-an-attractive-place-to-live
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140
Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, “Rich countries drained $152tn from the
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141
Emily Prey, “The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides,” Foreign Policy, October
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Jilin Xu, “Social Darwinism in modern China,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 6, no. 02 (2002):
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143
David o. Shullman, “Protect the Party: China’s growing influence in the developing world,”
Brookings, January 22, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/protect-the-party-chinas-
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biggest building project aims to make China great again,” The Guardian, May 12, 2017, https://
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144
Don Hinrichsen, “The Coastal Population Explosion,” in Trends and Future Challenges for U.S.
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Nancy Foster (Delaware: Center for the Study of Marine Policy, 1999), 27-29.
145
Kenneth Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better,” Adelphi Papers, no. 171
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146
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged, Frank C. Bourne (New York:
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“Herodotus Part 1 (Selection from Scroll 1),” trans. Lynn Sawlivich, Gregory Nagy, Claudia Filos,
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Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).
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Douglas Lemke, “The Continuation of History: Power Transition Theory and the End of the Cold
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151
Laying the foundation of the Pax Romana that followed his nephew’s victory in the civil wars that
erupted after his assassination.
152
See, for instance, Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the ‘Abbasid Empire
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
153
See Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (London: The Bodley Head, 2016).
113
154
Barry L. Isaac, “Aztec Warfare: Goals and Battlefield Comportment,” Ethnology 22, no. 2 (Apr.,
1983): 121-131, https://doi.org/10.2307/3773575 (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
155
Ira M. Lapidus, “The Evolution of Muslim Urban Society,” Comparative Studies in Society and
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156
Robin Blackburn, “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” The William and
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11, 2022).
157
“UTES - Energy and Economic Development: Understanding the Role of Hierarchy - Blair Fix,”
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158
“Pyramids of Giza are central to Egypt’s tourism recovery,” Travel Guard, July 01, 2014, https://
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Alan B. Lloyd, “Herodotus’ Account of Pharaonic History,” Historia: Journal of Ancient History 37,
no. 01 (1988): 22-53, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436037 (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
160
Actually a series of walls begun by the Qin dynasty.
161
Fernão Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
221-222.
162
“Past present: Decadence of the Mughal nobility,” DAWN, October 18, 2009, https://www.dawn.
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163
John Madden, “Slavery in the Roman Empire Numbers and Origins,” Classics Ireland 3 (1996):
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164
“Britain and the Caribbean.” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zjyqtfr/revision/6
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166
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to
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167
Stephen Dando-Collins, “Legions of Rome: Where It All Began,” The History Reader, September
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168
Evan Andrews, “8 Ways Roads Helped Rome Rule the Ancient World,” History, Updated April 15,
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169
For detailed examination of South Asian political economy see Taypan Raychaudhary and
Irfan Habib, eds., The Camrbidge Economic History of History, Vol. 1, c. 1200 to 1750 (Cambridge:
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170
“Perhaps 10 percent of 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. ‘Like some
beast,’ a contemporary wrote, the sickness ‘destroyed not just a few people but rampaged across
whole cities and destroyed them.’” Edward Watts, “What Rome Learnt from the Deadly Antonine
Plague,” Smithsonian Magazine, online, April 28, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/
114
what-rome-learned-deadly-antonine-plague-165-d-180974758/ (Accessed: May 7, 2022).
171
They would never be the same again after the trauma they endured between 1200-1400.
172
P. Jackson, “The Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate in the Reign of Muḥammad Tughluq (1325–
1351),” Central Asiatic Journal 19, no. 1/2 (1975): 118-157, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41927097
173
Jean Johnson, “The Mongol Dynasty: When Kublai Khan Ruled China,” Asian Society, Accessed
March 11, 2022, https://asiasociety.org/education/mongol-dynasty (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
174
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal About
the Future (Profile Books: London, 2010).
175
Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster and Harold A. Dunkelberger, “1. The Heirs of the Roman Empire:
Byzantium, Islam, and Medieval Europe. Pt. II: Medieval, Political, and Economic Development:
Feudalism and Manorialism, “ In Ideas and Institutions of Western Man (Gettysburg: Gettysburg
College, 1958), 1-6.
176
See, for instance, A. C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the
Modern Mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), which examines the eventual, though not inevitable,
triumph of the humanist legacy.
177
For a classic history of the Spanish overseas empire see C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in
America (New York: Harbinger Books, 1963).
178
S. O. Becker, S. Pfaff and J. Rubin, “Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation,” ESI
Working Paper 16-13 (2016): 1-44, http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/178
179
David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York:
Harper Collins, 2015).
180
For a now classic but still relevant analysis of the economic basis for slavery in the Atlanic world
and its inextricable relationship with the rise of modern capitalism see Eric Williams, Capitalism &
Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945): esp., 3-29,
181
John Breuilly, (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 832.
182
Amina Khan, “How much Arctic sea ice are you melting? Scientists have an answer,” Los Angeles
Times, November 03, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-co2-sea-ice-
20161103-story.html (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
183
Lizzy Gurdus, “Boeing CEO: Over 80% of the world has never taken a flight. We’re leveraging
that for growth,” CNBC, December 07, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-
percent-of-people-never-flown-for-us-that-means-growth.html (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
184
“Facts & Figures,” ATAG, https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html (Accessed: March 11, 2022).
185
“Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities. The poorest
half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In
contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth. On average, the poorest
half of the population owns PPP €2,900 per adult, i.e. USD4,100 and the top 10% own €550,900
(or USD771,300) on average,” World Inequality Report (2022), online, https://wir2022.wid.world/
executive-summary/ (Accessed: May 7, 2022).
186
“During this same 20-year period of increased reporting and sustainable investing, carbon
emissions have continued to rise, and environmental damage has accelerated. Social inequity, too,
115
is increasing. For example, in the United States the gap between median CEO compensation and
median worker pay has widened, even though public companies are now required to disclose that
ratio.” Kenneth P. Pucker, “Overselling Sustainability Reporting,” Harvard Business Review, online,
May/June 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/05/overselling-sustainability-reporting (Accessed: May 7,
2022).
187
Quoted by Michael Axworthy in Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran (London: Hurst & Company,
2007).
188
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: Collins, 1947), 104.
189
John Rapley, “The New Middle Ages: Gangsters’ Paradise,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2006-05-01/new-middle-ages (Accessed: March 14,
2022); Kristin Baird Rattini, “Who was Constantine?,” National Geography, February 25, 2019,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/constantine (Accessed: March 14, 2022).
190
Collin Rickets, “The Growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire,” History Hit, August 9, 2018,
https://www.historyhit.com/the-growth-of-christianity-in-the-roman-empire/ (Accessed: March
14, 2022).
191
Saint Augustine, City of God, edited by G. R. Evans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin
Books, 2003).
192
Sean McGlynn, Kill Them All: Cathars and Carnage in the Albigensian Crusade (Stroud: The
History Press, 2015).
193
John Van Engen, “The Future of Medieval Church History,” Church History 71, no. 3 (Sep., 2002):
492-522, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4146417 (Accessed: March 14, 2022).
194
Gemma Betros, “The French Revolution and the Catholic Church,” History Review, no. 68
(December 2010) https://www.historytoday.com/archive/french-revolution-and-catholic-church
(Accessed: March 14, 2022); Alexa Weight, “God and Revolution: Religion and Power from Pre-
Revolutionary France to the Napoleonic Empire” Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History) 64
(2017): 1-51, https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/his/64 (Accessed: March 14, 2022).
195
See, for instance, John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Religion (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
196
For a classic work on how this process works see Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
(Lahore: Gautam 1995; FP New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946).
197
Such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
198
“Fitness app Strava lights up staff at military bases,” BBC, January 29, 2008, https://www.bbc.
com/news/technology-42853072 (Accessed: March 14, 2022).
199
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer, “Biases Make People Vulnerable to Misinformation
Spread by Social Media,” Scientific American, June 21, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/
article/biases-make-people-vulnerable-to-misinformation-spread-by-social-media/ (Accessed:
March 15, 2022).
200
See, for instance, Gary Machado Alexandre Alaphillippe, Roman Adamczyk, and Antoine
Grégorie, Indian Chronicles: Deep Dive into a 15-Year Operation Targeting the EU and UN to Serve
Indian Interests (EU Disinfor Lab, 2020).
201
Meg Jing Zeng, “China’s Social Credit System puts its people under pressure to be model
citizens,” The Conversation, January 23, 2018, https://theconversation.com/chinas-social-credit-
system-puts-its-people-under-pressure-to-be-model-citizens-89963 (Accessed: March 15, 2022).
116
202
Christopher Soelistyo, “Artificial Intelligence: The Technology of Social Control?,” Science
Innovation Union, January 6, 2021, http://science-union.org/articlelist/2021/1/6/artificial-
intelligence-the-technology-of-social-control (Accessed: March 15, 2022).
203
Jen Clark, “What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?,” IBM, November 17, 2016, https://www.ibm.
com/blogs/internet-of-things/what-is-the-iot/ (Accessed: March 15, 2022).
204
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New
Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
205
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper Brothers, 1932); Suzanne Collins, The
Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008).
206
James Q. Whitman, “Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal,” The American Journal of
Comparative Law 39, no. 4 (Autumn, 1991): 747-778, https://doi.org/10.2307/840740 (Accessed:
March 15, 2022).
207
Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1878-1976 (London: Random
House, 1994), 90.
117
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INDEX
advocacy, 29, 90 Extinction, 96

Ain-i-Akbari, 41 Rebellion, 70, 71
apocalypse, 10, 30, 82 Sixth Mass, 5
climate, 10, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
70 fascism, 10, 55, 60, 87, 88
Artificial Intelligence, 21 Final Century, 10
autocracies, 14, 42,43, 45, 49, 50, 98 Crisis of Economic Thought and
Our, 23
biodiversity, 7, 17, 34, 47, 57, 58, 66 Lessons for Our, 11
biological, 5, 56, 59 fragility, 10
evolution, 8
borders, 8, 58, 66, 68, 78 GDP, 8, 9, 26, 28, 33, 34, 36, 49, 56, 57,
60, 67, 70
campaigns, 43, 45, 90 genetics, 19
Capitalism, 2, 5, 25 geoengineering, 21
catastrophe, 9, 35, 53, 54, 57, 69, 82, 84, geopolitics, 10, 63, 64, 70, 72, 100
93 GHG, 6, 8, 15, 28, 57, 58, 59, 81, 95, 100
Churchill, 60, 61, 99, 100 Global South, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 58, 69, 70,
civilisation, 2, 4, 10, 11, 20, 21, 28, 29, 30, 81, 94
34, 35, 38, 83, 97, 99 global warming, 7, 20, 47, 54, 57, 58, 59,
climate change, 7, 8, 15, 17, 20, 29, 31, 67, 81, 82, 89
32, 44, 45, 58, 60, 67, 71, 78, 94, globalist, 4, 5, 6, 10, 23, 58, 82
98, 99, 100 GNP, 17
collapse, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, global, 18
29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 51, Green New Deal, 7, 17, 23, 29, 96
56, 57, 58 group feeling, 13, 14, 74
communist, 25, 56, 100 growth, 13, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 33, 34, 38,
consumption, 6, 8, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 47
29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 47, 48, 49, cycle of, 13
51, 59 Limits to, 48, 51
corporations, 1, 9, 15, 28, 30, 49, 52, 90, sustainable, 98
91
COVID-19, 1 Herodotus, 4, 9, 11, 39, 40, 42
Histories by, 9, 39, 40
Dark Age, 4, 84 heroic, 40
decay, 13, 43, 87, 88 pessimism, 61
depletion, 33, 35, 67, 84, 93, 99 realism, 100
diseases, 91, 94 History, 5, 9, 11, 13, 25, 35, 38, 39, 42,
dissidents, 90, 92 47, 52
Downfall, 2 hoax, 12, 31
The Anatomy of, 4 hubris, 9, 39, 40, 41, 48, 52
Inevitability of, 73
dystopia, 21, 27, 38, 61, 67, 83, 84, 86, 90 Ibn Khaldun, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 42, 45, 74
infrastructure, 12, 70, 71
ecology, 20, 51, 56 Roman, 76
economics, 9, 10, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, innovation, 16, 18, 24, 32, 51
elites, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 18, 24, 27, 35, 42, and recycling, 67
43, 49, 51, 54, 56 myth, 32, 33
empires, 13, 42, 44, 52, 55, 62, 66, 67, 74, technical, 12
76 technological, 17
environment, 16, 19
equilibrium, 10 lifespan, 11
ecological, 49
high-level, 10, 73, 74 Malthus, 11, 13, 16
pro-equilibrium, 51 Malthusian balance, 78
evolutionary trajectory, 59 Malthusian correction, 17, 38, 48
125
Malthusian constraints, 21 threshold, 33, 56
neo-Malthusian, 66 Toynbee, 4
minorities, 92 transience, 10
of High-Level Equilibrium, 73
Natural Selection, 19
nemesis, 39, 40, 48, 52, 74 utopian, 16
neoliberal, 2 conditions, 16
baby boomers, 101 ideologies, 46
capitalism, 91 right-wing, 55
globalisation, 89, 101 vision, 60
shock therapists, 56
nuclear weapons, 8
invest in, 71 zombie, 84
Oblivion, 23
Growing to, 23, 30
oligarchies, 45
self-serving, 14
Orders of Darkness, 84
Pakistan, 44, 57
India and, 45, 50, 68, 71, 94, 99
palaeontology, 19
Pangloss, 63
Professor, 10, 12, 53,
Effect, 53, 57, 59
lenses, 60
patriarchy, 67
pre-industrial, 92
Pax Romana, 4
end of the, 79
Pearl Harbor, 32, 55
placebos, 12
plutocracies, 43
consolidation of, 15
constitutional, 47
quadrupeds, 18
Reformation, 80
Counter-, 86
Protestant, 80, 84
resource, 17, 47, 51
consumption quotas, 36
finite, 48
utilisation of, 36
scarcity, 92, 100

sedentary, 20
societies, 14
Solon, 96
and Croesus, 38, 39, 40
species, 1, 58, 59
interplanetary, 21, 58
Origin of, 19
Spengler, 4
126
127
About the Author
Ilhan Niaz is the author of The State During the British Raj: Imperial
Governance in South Asia, 1700-1947 (OUP, 2019), Old World Empires:
Cultures of Power and Governance in Eurasia (Routledge/OUP, 2014), The
Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008 (OUP 2010),
and An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent (Alhamra,
2006). He has been published in leading international academic journals,
including The Round Table, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Asian
Affairs (The Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs), Asian Profile,
The New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, and The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
He also occasionally contributes articles and reviews to leading national
news publications. The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan was
awarded the best non-fiction book of 2010 at the 2011 Karachi Literature
Festival and has also received the Higher Education Commission of
Pakistan award for best book in social sciences, arts and humanities for
2010. Old World Empires: Cultures of Power and Governance in Eurasia
received the HEC award for best book in social sciences for 2013/14. The
State During the British Raj received the 2021 HEC award for Best Book
publication. He is also the recipient of the Kodikara Award for 2013
(RCSS, Colombo) and has, in connection with that award, authored a
monograph on Understanding and Addressing the Administrative Aspect
of the Civil-Military Imbalance in Pakistan. He is presently Professor of
History at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research presents fresh and
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diverse set of public and civil society stakeholders.
We explore avenues of research, consultancy, and advocacy. The team at

the Centre helps targeted segments understand the policy choices facing
Pakistan and the rest of the world.
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DOWNFALL

Lessons for Our Final Century

Copyright © 2022 Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research (CSCR).

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

I. Lessons for Our Final Century from Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, 11

II. Growing to Oblivion: The Crisis of Economic Thought and 23

IV. The Pangloss Effect: Why Optimism is Lethal 53

V. The Geopolitics of Climate Apocalypse 63

VI. The Transience of High-Level Equilibrium and the 72

VII. Orders of Darkness: Government and Post-Government 83

Conclusion: Is There a Way Out? 95

Sadly, even amidst this crisis, governments, corporations, and

Indeed, humans are generally not good at contemplating the end. It is

It is perhaps for this reason that students of history often find

If humanity, in general, and the Global South, in particular, is to

Introduction: The Anatomy of Downfall

Gaining a better understanding of what is happening and where

Without the tremendous subsidy reaped by Western economies from

Having created a problem on account of the historical accumulation of

What such pangs of guilt do lead to is tokenism and rebranding.

Even conservative governments, like the one in the United Kingdom,

Therefore, this anthology is an effort to generate a discourse on

The second essay addresses the modern obsession with economic

Ensuring survival will also require humans to make much better

The fifth essay explains the implications of the climate apocalypse

The age of globalisation has produced improvement in the quality and

achieve a standard of living comparable to the old, industrialised states

The sustainable development paradigm is a hoax. Its advocates are

Awareness will not help either. Consider recycling – in spite of broad

Ibn Khaldun’s views on the origins of life and speciation

other if needed, also made large-scale cooperation between such groups

Insofar as sedentary societies were concerned, the experience of

Ibn Khaldun explained the effects of power and wealth on rationality

Ibn Khaldun realised that humans, as a species, are fundamentally

of evil as knowing better while doing worse.

Thomas Malthus’s 1798 foray into future studies, An Essay on the

This, in turn, forced us to find ways to further increase output. We

If we have a global Green New Deal, as the leaders of the Extinction

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), and were it to be distributed fairly, then

The Darwinian paradigm helps explain what had happened in

Attributes that are a big advantage in one set of circumstances can

Economists and their political acolytes believe in growth. Whether one

Adam Smith, legitimately regarded as the founder of modern

One political economist and philosopher of history by the name of

His central insight was that the existence of a system of property

The leading capitalist powers were sufficiently terrified by the

The great synthesiser of capitalism and communism and, arguably, the

With the threat of communism receding in the late-1980s, this

Imagine a world where countries are encouraged to pursue the

projected to rise to 8.1 billion tons by 2050.46 At present, about a 10th of

There are theoretical alternatives to growing our way to oblivion. But

The most important of these is the human understanding and

Our individual and collective inability to see ourselves in historical

Another source of numbness to long-term and large-scale danger

Regarding the decentralisation myth, the sheer scale of the crises of

The win-win myth is a potent force in politics because it constitutes

consumption. In poorer or middle-income countries, leaders insist that

What no one is prepared to say is that with a global per capita

Since these myths operate in a mutually reinforcing manner, it is