The Age of Barbarians
How can we forget the cult British series from the 60s, The Prisoner, where a terrifying bubble relentlessly pursued the hero played by the charismatic Patrick McGoohan?
Our world finds itself in a similar situation because we are now all hostages to bubbles. From the bubble that isolates the rulers, to the bubble of the stock markets setting historical records of increase in a morbid forward flight, passing through the real estate bubble, to the bubble of egregious inequalities that today can only be resolved by war or revolution…
Just like the bubble that tirelessly pursued the hero of that brilliant television series, a similar curse infects our contemporary universe because, in fact, the implosion of one bubble mechanically shifts the fever to another field, not without wreaking havoc on the most vulnerable, as usual. In the end, we have gradually lost control because an individual’s life depends hardly more (to paraphrase Stiglitz) on their salary or the education given by their parents in a context where the ruined political sphere can practically do nothing more, stripped of its levers.
The great Minsky, who passed away in 1996, theorized that stability is deceptive, that it is actually destabilizing, that hyper-fragility is often lurking behind periods of calm and prosperity. He would be compelled to thoroughly revise his thesis because shocks of all kinds – financial, inflationary, geopolitical… – have punctuated our lives for many years in a world that doesn’t even bother to hide its danger and moderate its capacity for harm anymore. Instability is now the rule, not the exception.
Physicist Max Planck noted that science only advances “one funeral at a time.” Will the hecatombs we are facing be sources of progress?
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