It’s always the same eternal questions that torment us when a bubble bursts and wreaks havoc on human, economic, and ecological fronts: How did we get here? What happened? Our world finds itself today in a critical situation with few historical precedents because we are now all hostages to multiple and repetitive bubbles.
There’s the bubble isolating the rulers, the overheating of stock markets shattering their historical records of increase day after day in a morbid rush forward, the real estate bubble, and the bubble of outrageous inequalities that only a war or a revolution would be likely to resolve… A curse infects our contemporary universe because, in reality, the implosion of one bubble mechanically shifts the fever to another field, having devastated both the middle class and the most vulnerable among our fellow citizens, as usual.
For the very first time in the long history of our presence on this planet, events occurring in one region or on one continent – war, financial crash, etc. – simultaneously affect all other parts of the world. When the Roman Empire and China had virtually no interaction, it is undeniable that our current living conditions are much more influenced and tossed by the vicissitudes occurring elsewhere, even far from us, than by our own national context, thereby accentuating our hyper-fragility.
Ultimately, we have progressively lost control because our existences hardly depend (to paraphrase Joseph Stiglitz) on our salary anymore, nor even on the education provided by our parents. Politics and politicians in ruins can practically do nothing as they have been meticulously stripped of their levers.
The great Hayman Minsky, who passed away in 1996, theorized that stability is deceptive, that it is actually destabilizing, that a hurricane is often lurking behind periods of calm and prosperity. He would be compelled to fundamentally revise his analysis because shocks of all kinds – financial, inflationary, geopolitical – have been punctuating our lives for many years in a world that doesn’t deign to mask its dangerousness anymore, nor moderate its capacity for harm. Instability is now the rule, not the exception. And Taleb may tear out what’s left of his hair because black swans are everywhere!
Physicist Max Planck noted that science progresses “one funeral at a time,” but there is no chance nowadays that the hecatombs we will soon face will be sources of progress. I can’t help but think almost every day of the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, hyper-fragilized by the Byzantine discussions of its elites in the Emperor’s Palace and having squandered precious time in sterile procrastinations, thereby greatly facilitating the task of the Turkish invaders.
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