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It’s become less and less common to experience real and genuine differences these days. Some 50 years ago, an average person might have traveled just a short distance from the Soviet bloc to the West and been completely shocked. But nowadays, globalization means there is less and less left to truly surprise. Yet it’s exactly in those surprises that new ideas circulate, history really starts moving in unexpected ways, and people are permanently transformed.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the United States. Because not so long ago, this country held a different place in people’s imagination. Part of it was fantasy over opportunities and wealth, but there was also fear over what one would find.

What follows are profiles of three individuals whose first contact with America shocked them to the absolute extreme. The first was disgusted, the second saw the possible seeds of ruin, and the third was enamored by America’s abundance. Each would return to their home countries with historic repercussions for the whole world.

Sayyid Qutb’s America

Sayyid Qutb stayed almost two short years in America from 1948 to 1950. But his experiences provoked such visceral disgust in him that he would return to Egypt completely radicalized.

Qutb is known today for being a leading figure in Islamist thought. After his return from America, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and became its most famous writer and propagandist. His influence would later be foundational for Islamic fundamentalist groups like Al-Qaeda. He wrote about his experiences in the United States in an essay titled The America I Have Seen (1951).

Qutb’s observations largely center around his time in Greeley, Colorado. By today’s standards, this was a quaint conservative town where even alcohol was illegal.1 Little did this matter for Qutb, however, who saw loose immorality and ugly materialism everywhere.

He viewed Americans as living isolated lives, pruning their green lawns in front of their spiritually empty suburban homes.2 He writes:

During this long period of time and throughout this vast area of space I did not glimpse except in rare occasions a human face which expresses the meaning of man, or a human look from which the meanings of humanity are revealed… but I found the herd everywhere, the raging and wandering herd which knows no direction except pleasure and money.3

One word that often comes up in Qutb’s opinion of America is its “primitiveness.” And practically nothing is spared from this extreme judgment.

His list of damnable things about America is long and often reads like a parody. The United States is said to be regressive in its artistic taste, especially its love of jazz, which satisfies “primitive desires” with claps that could “deafen ears.”4 American films are “simplistic” and, again, “full of primitive emotions.”5 Athletics are full of deranged spectators who value only strength and have no regard for principles, values, and manners of personal life.6 American fashion is said to be made up of “screaming, loud colors and elaborate, large patterns.”7 Not even haircuts are spared — for there was not one instance where Qutb did not return home to “fix what the barber had ruined with his awful taste.”8

Qutb felt America was impressive in its productivity, but lacked any depth. One thread that follows practically all of his observations is his disgust at the relations between men and women. By all accounts, Qutb himself was a man tortured by his sexuality. He was a lifelong bachelor, pale with respiratory issues since birth, introverted, and socially alienated.9 He dedicates long paragraphs to criticizing the sexual decadence around him with its flirtatious girls—described in uncomfortable detail—and the American “dream boys” who pair up with them.

Yet, it was at church where Qutb saw what was, to him, the most lascivious display. Outraged, he wrote: “in America, the church is for everything but worship.”10 He recounts one night in Greeley at a dance which haunted him.

The passage is titled, “A Hot Night at the Church”:

The dance floor was lit with red and yellow blue lights, and with a few white lamps. And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.

Then the minister descended from his office, he looked intently around the place and at the people, and encouraged those men and women still sitting who had not yet participated in this circus to rise and take part.

[He then] chose a famous American song called “But Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

And the minister waited until he saw people stepping to the rhythm of this moving song, and he seemed satisfied and contented. He left the dance floor for his home, leaving the men and women to enjoy this night in all its pleasure and innocence!11

It could be said that Qutb was radicalized the moment the needle dropped for “But Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Qutb’s experience in America solidified his belief that there are only two kinds of societies: the moral Islamic civilization and the jahili (the “uncivilized”). As he writes in The America I Have Seen, this country had mastered productivity but “no ability remains to advance in the field of human values.”12

He openly asks the reader what is the end-point of this supposedly depraved country:

This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values? And what does it add to the moral account of humanity? And, by the journey’s end, what will its contribution be?

I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people. And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.13

Qutb’s observations are clearly steeped in personal projection, deep resentment, and perhaps even self-hatred. But regardless, he believed them wholeheartedly. He returned to Egypt a changed man who proselytized his newfound belief in Islamic superiority and violent jihad. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting to assassinate the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and later executed.

To Islamic fundamentalists and their apologists today, he remains widely read as a famous martyr who died fighting jahiliyyah or secular Western modernity.

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Wang Huning’s America

The last National Congress for the Chinese Communist Party in 2022 was full of intrigue and drama over what would happen. In the end, the expected happened. President Xi was granted an unprecedented third term.

But in the background was another figure reappointed to the elite seven-person central party leadership. Wang Huning, a close advisor to the past three Chinese party leaders, was once again chosen for the top position. Huning is credited with being the country’s chief ideologue and theorist. He is the leading mind behind what values China’s 1.4 billion people should follow, all passed down from the dictates of the party.

Huning himself was something of a prodigy. At age 29, he was the youngest associate professor of international politics in China. Although already widely cited by the time he visited America for a short six months in 1988, his experience solidified his belief in China’s unique authoritarian path and the need for single-party rule. He returned to his homeland with the view that all political power runs downstream from shared values, culture, and tradition.14

Huning saw these aspects disintegrating in America. He felt the United States was slowly breaking at the seams, unable to understand itself, but also admired what the country had accomplished in such a short amount of time. China and America are in an “eternal conversation,” both centers of the world that command respect.15 He compiled all his notes and observations in a 349-page book later published as America Against America (1991).

The title of the book is taken from the Chinese term yíhuò [疑惑] meaning “puzzle” or “doubt.”16 America had effectively turned itself into a yíhuò [疑惑] which has made Americans equally puzzled by their own system.

For Huning, America was trapped in a puzzle. It was in a battle against itself: the ideal America versus what it actually was. Through its great progress, it had also sowed the seeds of its own undoing.

American society itself, it has its affirmative and negative forces, and wherever affirmative forces can be found, negative forces can be found. This is the basic meaning of America Against America.17

This puzzle is all over Huning’s writing as he tries to understand what America really is.

The United States is a very developed society in many respects. Anyone who comes to the US will feel a sort of “future shock.”

One type of person will just think about how they can enjoy being in America; another type of person will ponder why there is an America.18

While Huning was shocked by America’s futuristic quality, he was equally shocked by its rampant homelessness. In fact, homelessness is mentioned in America Against America as one of the most pressing problems. He dedicates a whole chapter to it titled “Begger’s Kingdom.”

He recounts many stories with the homeless in his short travels.

December 1988, New York. When I went to a friend’s house and walked to the door of the building where he lived, I saw a man sitting on the steps, eating. He was disheveled and had a pile of tattered luggage next to him. I couldn’t help but be alert and hesitant to go in. It turned out that the person looked up first and turned out to be an old woman. She said, “Don’t hurt me, I’m homeless, I’m just sitting here to eat, I won’t do anything else.” Hearing her words, a great compassion flooded my heart.19

Huning struggles to understand how America could, despite its great wealth, also create the ugliest conditions for life.

On the night Bush was inaugurated as the 41st president, I saw homeless people sleeping in the doorways of the buildings lining Bush Street in San Francisco. Isn’t this America? Is this America? I’m afraid I can’t answer that with a single word.20

Credit has to be given to Huning for being perceptive in diagnosing cultural trends without any exaggeration or hysteria. The book touches on a surprisingly wide variety of themes: the commodification of life, hero worship, elite interest groups, family life, racism, the power of money, the Native American past, and the American work ethic, among others.

One of his observations in particular would be very influential for China’s new path forward: the power of technology. The use of electronic payments like the credit card shocked him, as did the emergence of computers. But he also understood that this technological process would eventually remake the very people it was supposed to serve.

Sometimes it is not the people who master technology, but the technology that masters the people. If you want to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.21

One can draw a line connecting Huning’s observations in America and China’s focus on engineering and technological dominance since the 1990s. The Chinese state has also used technological systems as a tool for discipline, like the “social credit system,” perhaps inspired by Huning’s writings and experience in America.

Yet, Huning does not just focus on systems and structures. America Against America is one of the earliest texts to discuss the country’s growing loneliness. He calls it “a disease derived from all developed societies.”22 He dedicates an entire section to this question titled “The Lonely Heart.”

Commenting on one story about a friendless but well-off woman with alcoholism, he pithily writes that “she was alone in society, and society was alone in her.”23 Huning understood loneliness as a deeply destabilizing force. It undoes the social contract, and he repeatedly questions whether Americans understand the long-term ramifications of it worsening.

Huning also argues that loneliness is “major burden on the political system.”24 American loneliness is described a byproduct of its decayed and self-interested social institutions, and that “it is difficult to find solutions as long as such social institutions remain intact.” 25 Now, some 28 years later, American loneliness is affecting all areas of life. With diminishing social bonds, politics has increasingly becoming a chaotic place to project exaggerated hatreds, resentment, nostalgia and an intense desire to be saved.26

Much like Qutb, Huning’s shock with America left him with a nagging question: what will become of this country and the greater world?

Today, America’s development, with its economic prosperity, political processes, lifestyle, and international status, has sown a lot of uncertainty in the world. People in developed countries have this fundamental concern: human science and technology and material life have developed up to this stage. Is this [stage] contrary to human nature? Will it cause the depletion of the earth’s resources? Will it ultimately lead to the destruction of mankind?27

Huning would take all his observations back to China with the main takeaway being that to copy America would be his own country’s undoing.

Today, he is chiefly responsible for the theory and strategy behind China’s culture and values, so that the one-party state can stably rule. For Huning, China must have common story it tells itself, so it not fall victim to same yíhuò [疑惑] that he saw eating away at America.

Boris Yeltsin’s America

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It’s said that when future Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited an American grocery store in 1989, “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him.”28 Although the detour lasted only 20 minutes, he was in such a state of shock that he was speechless on the plane ride back.

The United States was the first country Yeltsin ever visited outside the Soviet Union on his own. He had already been dined by wealthy Americans before, flown on their private jets, and socialized with the wealthy.29 His trip took him all over the country. But this impromptu visit to a grocery store off State Highway 3 in Webster, Texas surprised him at his core.

Yeltsin reportedly told aides after a long pause that, if Soviet citizens saw what he saw, “there would be a revolution.”30 In this store far away from any urban center, some 30,000 items were fully stocked and sold. Not even the Soviet Politburo had as many options available to them. Yeltsin was stunned: “Does this cornucopia exist every day for everyone? Incredible!”31

His own experience as a regional party secretary was him struggling to procure food supplies for Sverdlovsk, Russia. He had previously organized poultry farms. All of it seemed insignificant having seen this small, well-stocked shop. The experience left him “sick with despair” for his own people whose economy was on the verge of collapse.32

Upon returning back to the Soviet Union, he spoke to journalists about his experience. He spoke of the “madness of colors, boxes, packs, sausages, and cheeses.”33 He relayed to his aides that Americans spent just a tenth on food, with more variety, whereas Soviet citizens spent over half. Thereafter, he decided that his mission was to bring this American dream to the Russian people.34

By 1990, hundreds of other Soviet officials like Yeltsin experienced similar shock at American abundance. America thereafter became a standard by which to judge Russian development. It can be said that the grocery store visit was a turning point for Russia itself. In March 1991, Yeltsin met with a delegation of neoliberal economists from Stanford University. “I want you to help me as you helped Reagan,” he told them bluntly.35

Yeltsin himself knew virtually nothing about the neoliberal reforms he agreed to. Still, he found the American dream so persuasive that he supported them “lock, stock, and barrel.”36

Yeltsin’s hope was to speed run their own path to American-like capitalism. He was elected to the Russian Presidency in June, 1991 and quickly implemented “shock therapy” to privatize the country. The result was a new oligarchy, but it was initially rooted in recreating the American abundance Yeltsin himself witnessed.

Yeltsin may have privately lost all faith in Soviet communism in 1989, but he later declared it openly in a speech to the U.S. Congress in 1992—to thirteen standing ovations.

The idol of communism which spread everywhere social strife, animosity and unparalleled brutality which instilled fear in humanity has collapsed. It has collapsed never to rise again. I am here to assure you we shall not let it rise again in our land.37

As the 1990s came to an end, the relationship between the U.S. and Russia degenerated. However, President Bill Clinton and Yeltsin maintained a close bond. Nicknamed “Boris and Bill,” they met more times than all the Soviet leaders met U.S. Presidents combined.

Unlike Qutb and Huning, Yeltsin did not ask what future America had. Rather, he saw Russia’s future in America’s present. But the experiment ended catastrophically as Russia descended into gangster capitalism by the end of the 1990s. Yeltsin also started to be visibly drunk more and more in public outings.

Yeltsin shockingly resigned on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and appointed his successor, Vladimir Putin. In his address, he apologized outright to the people in a surreal moment and admitted the dream had failed.

I want to ask your forgiveness – for the dreams that have not come true, and for the things that seemed easy but turned out to be so excruciatingly difficult. I am asking your forgiveness for failing to justify the hopes of those who believed me when I said that we would leap from the grey, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous and civilized future. I believed in that dream, I believed that we would cover the distance in one leap.

We didn’t. I was too naive in some things, and the problems turned out to be bigger than expected in other things. We ploughed ahead through mistakes and failures. Many people were traumatized by that time of upheavals.

I want you to know – I have never said this before, and I want to say it now – that the pain of every one of you was my pain, the pain of my heart.38

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Between 1921 and 1932, a strange man became a familiar face in Greenwich Village, New York City. Howard Scott lectured all who would listen on his vision for an anti-democratic state led by technicians and engineers. Businesspeople and politicians would be replaced, and a new society of abundance would be possible through science. He spread a gospel that preached “technology was the revolutionary agent of our period.”1 Scott believed liberal capitalism would eventually collapse and give way to a new system that he called “technocracy.”

Scott would form a movement known as Technocracy Incorporated, which by 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, boasted hundreds of thousands of members. Its followers took an oddly fascist look. Dressed in gray and hailing with Roman salutes, they saw themselves as a revolutionary organization whose creed was efficiency. The movement wished to see the entire North American continent unified under a single, centralized state, which they called “The Technate.”2 It would be organized on a system of “energy accounting” to allocate resources, and each citizen would receive an “energy distribution card” for purchases.3 A new calendar was also proposed to allow for uninterrupted, 24-7 production. At the top would be an elite committee of technological experts, overseeing every facet of life.

Technocracy found many admirers in its heyday, particularly among futuristic writers. Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” published for the movement’s journal in 1933.4 Ray Bradbury similarly said that technocracy was “all the hopes and dreams of science fiction.”5 The public was introduced to this dream in Harold Loeb’s utopian novel Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (1933). Among scientists, prominent figures like Richard C. Tolman and M. King Hubbert were vocal supporters of the movement.

The case for technocracy was simple for Scott and his followers: “engineers and mechanics created this civilization, so they will eventually dominate it.”6

The technocracy movement reached its height in 1933 when Publishers Weekly called it the “most discussed topic in America.”7 As its popularity quickly rose, Scott began to sound more and more delusional in his belief that rule by technocracy was imminent. After a disaster of a radio appearance in New York City that year, the press began to criticize him for selling a cult-like fantasy. He was also exposed for lacking actual scientific credentials. The technocracy movement continued to persist throughout the 1940s with some minor influence, but nowhere close to its peak.

Technocracy Incorporated still exists as an organization, but it is insignificant and largely forgotten. It has been receiving some attention again recently since it became known that Elon Musk’s grandfather was a leading member of the Canadian technocracy movement.8 But what’s more interesting is how some of its core ideas have unconsciously found new life in the 21st century. Whereas Technocracy Incorporated tried to be a mass movement, today’s tech elite possess the capital and influence to pursue a similar philosophy through more covert means.

Predicting Social Life

One of the core tenets of the original technocracy movement was that social life could be measured and predicted. As a still from an educational video by Technocracy Incorporated reads:

According to the administrative model for The Technate, the board of engineers would have an entire department dedicated to “social relations.”9 In the movement’s 1937 manifesto, the organization stated that technocracy was essentially the science of “social engineering.”10 Every single facet of daily life would be reduced to inputs and outputs: quantified, processed, and then optimized for efficiency.

Technocracy Incorporated viewed the management of people as necessary for their program. Every citizen would have a report on their consumption habits, along with any other details.11 The issue was, there was not enough data in the 1930s to predict social outcomes with any certainty. Computers were not developed enough at the movement’s peak, so the plan would have inevitably failed. Today, however, the situation is much different. The algorithms parsing through endless data from users give tech companies the ability to surveil, predict, and even influence society’s outcomes and preferences.

The dream of technocracy has taken on new life with these tools. As I documented in my essay Living in a Time of Psychopolitics, philosopher Byung-Chul Han views this as a situation where “free will itself is at stake.”

It is possible that Big Data can even read desires we do not know we harbor… rendering the collective unconscious accessible... in the position to take control of mass behavior on a level that escapes detection. 12

For today’s technocrats, there is no limit to quantifying and measuring social relations. Every social interaction is a potential place for data mining and monetization. In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg said that the average person today has 3 friends, but they desire at least 15.13 Naturally, Meta hopes to fill the gap as it invests an unprecedented amount into AI that can function as friends, workers, and personal assistants. And this is just one example of today’s tech elite pursuing social engineering.

Even with all this data, the results of measuring and predicting social life are mixed at best. From polling to economics, the predictions are often wrong.14 The state still views everyday people with unease, since it knows that public anger can unravel things quickly and erratically.15 Yet, one can see how predicting social outcomes would be the endgame for both the state and Big Tech, for profit and for maintaining political power.

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Technology as a Revolutionary Agent

In a time when nationalism and the working class were the harbingers of revolution, Howard Scott insisted that these were red herrings. In his mind, technology was the only real revolutionary agent. This became a quasi-religious belief for his followers. Those who controlled and ran technological progress (i.e., “the technicians”) would be like priests at the top of the hierarchy.

Today, this is more or less a mainstream view of venture capitalists and leaders in tech—from Marc Andreessen to Balaji Srinivasan to Peter Thiel—who take a millenarian view of technology. Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society. This pitch has become standard in the tech world to procure record investment.16 Effectively, the goal is to push technological advancement to its limit, and sweeping social and political changes will come, consequences be damned. Andreessen has claimed that only jobs like his, as a venture capitalist, would be safe from the coming storm.17 At the same time, he somehow also views the chance of a catastrophic outcome from AI as 0%.18

For the technocrat, the public is secondary, and technological progress must persist unimpeded as if it were destiny. Google’s co-founder Larry Page has privately said he desired to someday see a “digital God” and considered our preference for humans as outdated.19 As tech elites promise the next Garden of Eden, technology is again being proselytized as the only path to revolutionary change.

However, the overall track record for technology being revolutionary on its own is poor. For the last 20-some-odd years, technological progress has been reduced to maximizing attention in the form of gimmicks, addiction, and apps nobody needs. It’s hardly the sci-fi future many once wrote about. One of the most common questions asked nowadays of technology, especially AI, is “Who is this for?” And the public is left to deal with the fallout without any consideration for its interests.

No Democracy Needed

In recent emails that surfaced from the early days of OpenAI, one of the fears that created the company was over who would run the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) dictatorship.20 The industry leader then was DeepMind, led by Demis Hassabis. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others expressed worry that Hassabis would have unlimited power if left uncontested. Now, each camp accuses the other of wanting to control the future dictatorship, as if winking to each other that they themselves want to helm it.21

The anti-democratic sentiment among today’s technocrats has been building for some time. As Peter Thiel wrote in a 2009 op-ed, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”22 He argues that technology is in a “deadly race” with politics.23 The public and its political demands are viewed as an obstacle to the supposed freedom provided by technology, especially the freedom of its owners. Balaji Srinivasan has more recently argued that tech elites should “exit democracy” and establish new sovereign territories of their own.24 Increasingly, actual people are in the way of the technocrats.

The original technocracy movement viewed democracy as a self-interested and inferior system that limited potential. As a statement read in 1933:

Technocracy stands ready with a plan to salvage American civilization, if and when democracy, as now functioning, can no longer cope with the inherent disruptive forces.25

Similar to today’s tech elite, the basis of their claim was elitism: those who would lead the technocracy were biologically predestined to do so. As one 1937 essay in Technocracy Digest put it, “upon biological fact, theories of democracy go to pieces.”26 The end-point of technocracy is a top crust of technician “geniuses” whose rule would be extremely centralized.

The Technique Behind Technocracy

The vision behind Technocracy Incorporated was practically impossible in the 1930s. Yet, since tech capital is now one of the most valued in the world, today’s technocrats have fewer limitations placed on them. They also have immense lobbying power. But it’s not even that technology itself is the issue with technocracy. The real blind spot for the technocrats is not understanding the technique by which they pursue their goals.

“Technique” is a term best explained by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society (1954). It is the method, procedure, and skill needed to advance technology. The guiding principle for the technique behind technocracy is efficiency. Ellul likens technique to opening a Pandora’s box: once technological progress accelerates, the technique cannot be stopped from reaching its endpoint, regardless of social, political, or economic consequences.

Ellul fatalistically concludes that, because techniques cannot be halted once set in motion, society eventually loses the ability to make any choices about technology. It then has to adapt to these changes against its will. The drive for efficiency also undermines other values where it does not apply. Technology is allowed to advance at the expense of everything else, and any damage is corrected with more of the same technique. If mental illness is on the rise, then the obvious solution is on-demand therapists through an app; if friendships are in decline, Meta will invent virtual friends for you.

For many of today’s technocrats, giving up our autonomy to machines is a gamble worth taking. This is despite the fact that many tech elites themselves place the possibility of a catastrophic outcome (“p-doom”) at very significant levels.27 But the technique demands efficiency and progress: if we don’t pursue this, someone else will, so it must keep advancing.

Technocracy Incorporated was a dream that saw itself as a social movement made up of actual people. Although they were elitist, they still understood the need to keep up appearances for public consent. Today’s technocrats do not need to make concessions to society or pretend to be a “movement.” But with no democratic mandate, tech elites have to face the skeptical public who have soured on the fantasy they are selling.28 It’s a major tension point that will keep defining politics in the years and decades ahead.

If you had to pick a period that most closely resembles how we experience life today, the start of the 20th century might not be the obvious answer. Life over a century ago seems like an altogether different world. But it was also the beginning of what we’d today recognize as modernity. A deep anxiety pervaded the social climate, especially in Western Europe, as every aspect of life was being upended.

This was a time of decadent wealth and competing empires. Technology and science were advancing at a rapid pace. Cities ballooned in population as more people joined the working and middle classes. Industrialization brought modern-day conveniences, and mass media emerged to satisfy the eager public. Labor unrest and mass politics became a fact of life. Many experimental art movements took shape, as the old ways to describe the world needed updating. It was accepted that accelerating change and exponential growth would be the new normal.1

Some rejected where this new world was headed, while others accepted it. But regardless of where one stood, the overarching feeling for the average Western European—and the one aspect we relate to the most today—was speed. Things were moving too fast, everything was up for grabs, and there was no telling what kind of society would emerge or who would ultimately wield power.

The years between 1900-1914 have appropriately been called by historian Philipp Blom as the “vertigo years.”2 To find your footing in this dizzying period so often meant jumping into the unknown or, as many did, sleepwalking through it and hoping things would sort themselves out.3 Technological innovation remade cities into bustling metropolises, and the rapid transformation caused many to question what they once took for granted. As possibilities opened up, some artists and writers even found the newfound freedom exhilarating. While few truly expected the breakout of World War I in 1914, the uneasy atmosphere made the unthinkable possible. As writer Robert Musil wrote after the war, “we were simply lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.”4 The vertigo years passed like a visceral dream.

You can’t help but read Blom’s The Vertigo Years (2008) with today in mind. Like then, our present is defined by its relentless pace. The states and people involved are clearly different, but that vertigo feeling has now expanded to include all of us, since for the first time roughly half of the world is part of the middle class and the vast majority is plugged in online.5 We are all arguably going through our own vertigo years, with similar anxious uncertainties about the future.

To read about the early 20th century is to look into a society that was struggling to keep up. Emotions ran high, tension was everywhere, and there was this nagging sense that the old rules no longer applied. “This new world was a merciless place,” Blom writes, “dividing humankind into those who coped and those who did not.”6

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Losing Your Sense of Self

During the 1890s, the famous Austrian physicist Ernst Mach split from his scientific colleagues. To try to understand individual psychology in hard scientific terms was foolish, he argued, because the self is not a coherent unit.7 Each person’s experience was just a temporary collection of sensations whose causes are beyond our comprehension. The self had no directional center or permanence. “The ego cannot be saved,” Mach wrote, because the ego is nothing more than “convenient fiction.”8

For many young artists and writers in Vienna, it was as if Mach was speaking directly to their feelings of displacement. Mach’s ideas would be brought to a wider audience by Austrian essayist Hermann Bahr in 1903. He also coined the term “modernism” to describe the new genre of literature it inspired. The psychological profile Bahr laid out captured the mood: the ego was temporary, we are now unable to feel continuously, and our internal lives are utterly disjointed.

Man no longer moves towards objects through an act of will, he no longer chooses or examines objects: the world has dissolved, the objects move incoherently past the incoherent man. He forgets everything, as he has no continuity.

All that he ever has is that which the moment throws into him. He lives from this, exists through it: nothing else is in him except that which has come to him from the moment.9

It was an idea that struck at the heart of Bahr’s home country, Austria-Hungary, with its age-old obsessions with ego, noble titles, strict decorum, and traditions. It also suited the fast-paced, moment-to-moment experience of living in a chaotic city. A circle of writers called Young Vienna took up Mach’s ideas passionately.

Hugo von Hofmannstahl, one of the most distinguished writers of the circle, was a common attendee of Mach’s lectures. Hofmannsthal was growing frustrated by what he felt was a wall between his experiences and how he could express them. He explored these ideas in a fictionalized letter to philosopher Francis Bacon called The Chandos Letter (1902).

In it, Lord Chandos writes to Bacon about a world he no longer recognizes.

For me, everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.

Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.10

While daily life gave him vertigo, Lord Chandos also writes that over-stimulation overwhelmed him to extremes and produced manic episodes. In those moments, he thought he was onto something, but the feeling never lingered and produced little coherent thought. “I could present in sensible words as little as I could say anything precise about the inner movements of my intestines or congestion of my blood,” he writes.11 The constant stimulation did not clarify his thoughts, it just paralyzed him further. “I have lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently.”12

Exhaustion and Starting Over

The vertigo years saw breakthroughs in psychology, and one of the most common diagnoses was neurasthenia or “nervous exhaustion.”13 It was thought that the body could not keep up with the demands of modern, industrial life. The illness was also known as “Americanitis” since it seemed to especially affect professional Americans with fast lifestyles.14 Other diagnoses, like anxiety, neurosis, and hysteria also filled the medical literature of the period.15 Lacking solutions, “rest cures” were commonly prescribed to sufferers. Neurasthenia as a diagnosis has since been abandoned but is very similar to burnout syndrome, which became a regular diagnosis after the 1970s.

Both neurasthenia and burnout are diseases of exhaustion, common to both the early 20th century and our current time. And the fractured self that Bahr, Hofmannstahl, and others described also relates to our current sensibility. We, too, live in a kind of extended present as scattered and fleeting selves. Feelings linger momentarily, our routine of life is constantly disrupted, and being rooted is increasingly difficult.

Yet, many artists and writers of the early 20th century leaned into this modern reality. If the self was fractured, maybe it was time to proudly separate oneself from the past. Tradition was thought to provide no answers. Many deliberately broke from the 19th century liberal culture their parents were raised in and sought entirely new definitions. Innovators emerged in all spheres of life: music, art, politics, philosophy, economics, architecture, psychology, and more.16 But all of these original ideas were linked to the more fundamental fact that one’s sense of self was fragmented, and everything therefore needed to begin anew.

The uneasiness, however, remained and there was this unconscious longing to be saved from the incessant pace of life. The tragedy was that many projected these feelings onto World War I when it broke out. For Hofmannsthal, he undoubtedly saw it as a blessing.17 Full of jubilation, he thought, finally there was moment for us all to be reborn. Maybe now, the whole of society could finally be united under a common experience and cause. Others writers like Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig also fell under this spell, but came to regret their naive enthusiasm as World War I dragged on.

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Information Overload

One of the dominant trends of our own time has been the parabolic rise of information. According to latest estimates, some 402 million terabytes of data are created online daily, and this number has continued to increase yearly for the past few decades.18 Since the 1970s, we have been living in the “Information Age” which has come with its own psychological problems: cognitive overload, decline of attention, desensitization, addiction, burnout, and a struggle to find meaning amid the avalanche.19

The vertigo years of the early 20th century was caused by its own avalanche of information, led by the explosion of print media. High-speed rotary presses and new typesetting machines made print media ultra-accessible and cheap. Increasing literacy also meant there was now a mass audience to read them. The demand was so high that some newspapers even had multiple daily installments. In just Germany alone, thousands of newspapers printed some 14 million copies per day by 1912.20 In England, The Daily Mail was the first publication to sell a million copies daily as early as 1896.21 It was also the first British paper to have a majority-women readership and catered mainly to the lower-middle classes. And in France, daily press circulation reached around 5 million per day by 1910.22

As print media boomed, no longer were news stories the sole focus. Magazines covered a wide variety of topics: gossip, crime, sports, entertainment, corruption, war, romance, celebrities, science, self-help, technology, travelogues, and serialized fiction. Virtually everyone could find their niche interest. Advertisements also reinvented themselves with bold styles to draw in readers. When it came to politics, magazines of liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, and other leanings all competed to capture the attention of the growing middle and working classes.

The chaotic rhythm of the vertigo years was created by print media, and the resulting information overload reshaped the public’s relationship to the world. Unsurprisingly, many publishers turned to sensationalism, scandal, and rumors, sometimes outright lying, to bring in readers. It was the “press barons,” British writer J.A. Hobson argued, who were pumping the public with “a continuous stream of false and distorted information.”23 For Austrian critic Karl Kraus, the press did not merely reflect modern anxieties, it manufactured and multiplied them. In 1922, he joked that, “in the beginning there was the press, and then the world appeared.”24 He called those responsible the “journaille” — fusing “journalism” with the French word “canaille” (scum) — to mock their shamelessness. As World World I broke out, he indicted them as responsible for essentially talking themselves into catastrophe.25

Because of the vast readership, mass media during this time openly exploited the emotional state of crowds. As British journalist Francis W. Hirst documented in The Six Panics (1913), calls for emergency and hysteria were a common tool to manufacture public consent. Today, these same strategies are supercharged from the bottom-up. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, the current media environment is like a “dictatorship of emotion” in its ability to torrentially stir up energy and then dissipate practically overnight.26

While the people of the vertigo years certainly weren’t doomscrolling, they were only a degree removed. The sudden avalanche of print media in the early 20th century is the closest parallel to the information overload we are all familiar with online. Its media critics might as well had written their scathing opinions today.

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Technological Wonders

The rise of mass media gave the vertigo years their rhythm, but life all around was being quickly transformed. As rural people moved to the growing cities, they were taken aback by the rapid pace of life. Technological advancement was so constant that one could easily convince oneself that society and its morals would someday “catch up.”27

Inventions like the radio, airplane, zeppelin, automobile, electricity, film, skyscrapers, x-rays, and mass transit were all steadily adopted during the early 20th century. Fads even emerged around technologies. X-rays, for example, became a sensation by 1900 with a cult public following.28 Electricity was viewed as magical, even thought to cure all ills. Electrical baths were prescribed to cure ailments from digestive problems to neurasthenia to menstrual cramps.29 Remarkably, virtually all of the futuristic tropes we know of today were already mentioned in fiction by 1914: “ray guns and microfilm, atom bombs, humanoid robots, airships, tape recorders, television, technological warfare, interstellar travel, alien invasions, surviving dinosaurs, faster-than-light travel, and human cloning.”30

The largest European cities had been remade by these technological breakthroughs by 1914. Although it was still early, life was assuming a new rhythm not unlike our own. Speed became the ultimate obsession. “Everywhere life is rushing insanely like a cavalry charge,” wrote French writer Octave Mirbeau, “everything around man jumps, dances, gallops in a movement out of phase with his own.”31 To be modern is to have your mind be “like a racetrack.”32

These paintings and illustrations are just a few examples of how the period’s innovations produced awe. The noise and light filled cities with an altogether different ambiance, inspiring both artists and the public.

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A Crisis of Masculinity

Recently, I came across a relevant quote by fellow Substacker . “The legacy of modernity is as broad as humanity,” he writes, “but recurrent among its outgrowths is the frequency with which men and women renegotiate their relationship to one another.”

I think this remains true today. Nowadays, the gender divide dominates the discourse online. Politically, men and women have never been more divided.33 Online communities have formed along gender lines, made possible by loneliness and psychological projection. Again, the relationship between men and women is being renegotiated.

Since there has been so much written on it already, I’d rather not talk about today’s prognosis here. The point being, the vertigo years were also a time obsessed with gender questions. The first-wave feminist movement had started to organize itself and would gain the right to vote in many Western countries by the 1920s. Yet, so much energy was spent provoking questions on masculinity. Machines were taking over from muscle work, and concerns arose over what male virtues would remain in a modern, industrialized society.34 The crisis of masculinity was so serious, some writers argued, that it could supposedly destroy nations if not resolved.

Panic Over Declining Birthrates

Today, worries over a demographic crisis are everywhere. Declining birthrates have become a global phenomenon. Elon Musk has become the most vocal on this question, and often repeats the claim that “civilizational collapse” is imminent if birthrates don’t improve.35 Governments have tried to financially entice couples to have children, setting up entire departments to address the problem. While the global scope of the problem is unique, the same conversation became an obsession in France in the early 20th century.

In 1911, French statistician Jacques Bertillon was preoccupied with a central question: “how can we stop France from disappearing?”36 “Next to this vital question,” he wrote, “all others vanish.”37 For many of its patriots, France was in the death throes of an identity crisis which could threaten its very existence. And with the neighboring German Empire rising in number and industrial power, anxiety pervaded the national conversation. There was a real fear that the French nation could disappear entirely. 1891 was officially the first year that the country registered more deaths than births.38 In 1896, novelist Émile Zola published Depopulation (1896) in which he blamed moral decay as the culprit for France’s demographic decline.

For right-wing French patriots, the demographic crisis was mathematical proof that the virility of the nation had declined. Everything was seemingly at a loss of energy as national confidence suffered. Appropriately, Sigmund Freud chose the Parisians to formulate his early theories on hysteria and neurosis. The environment weighed equally as heavily on sociologist Emile Durkhiem, who wrote Suicide (1897) as if speaking to the French nation itself. The demographic crisis was evidence that something deeper was amiss.

Novels in the years before World War I unpacked the supposed lack of masculinity among the latest generation of boys, told as eulogies of ruined families.39 Fingers were opportunistically pointed at whoever could be conveniently blamed: the decline of faith, social-climbing grifters, a decadent middle class, advertising, the weakened military caste, feminization, capitalism, American influence, Freemasons, Jews, Protestants, and the lot.40 The malaise created a confused, desperate environment that demanded scapegoats.

Cultural Decline (and War As a Solution)

One of the most common themes during the vertigo years was the fixation with “degeneracy.” The loss of masculine energy was obsessively theorized as being responsible for cultural degeneration. This would also become a core tenet of fascist movements in the succeeding decades.

According to these writers, weakness was infecting Europe, morals were dying, and the future would bring collapse if uncorrected. These were the conclusions of Jewish-Hungarian writer Max Nordau’s book Degeneration (1892), which was one of the first texts to describe neurosis. Nervousness, exhaustion, hysteria, egotism, and the inability to act were some of its many symptoms. City life and its decadence had corroded the mind, Nordau argued, and the whole of society needed to be treated like the sick patient it was. It was the decline of “masculine vigor” that had allowed traditions to weaken: men were being “feminized” and women were increasingly becoming “mannish.” This process if left on its own, he predicted, would lead to the “dusk of nations.”41

Nordau would go on to influence other thinkers in Europe, who linked cultural degeneration to the perceived loss of masculine energy. As German writer Otto Weininger argued in Sex and Character (1903), for example, femininity negated culture and was inherently “amoral.” But nowhere else did these ideas gain currency like in France. Having lost the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, French politicians and writers still wrote decades later of the blow to national prestige. Compared to the rest of Europe, anxieties over masculinity reached their most hysterical point in France. As Charles Maurras wrote in La Romantisme Féminin (1903), decadence and romanticism had “feminized the souls and minds of French people.”42 Novelist Maurice Barrès ridiculously speculated that each nation had a set amount of “virility.” Any gain in women’s power would dispossess men of their manhood and produce “half-males.”43

For many of these nationalist writers, the solution simply became glorifying war as a means of renewal. Filippo T. Marinetti, author of the The Futurist Manifesto (1909), famously called war the “world’s only hygiene.” Perhaps war, he thought, could reaffirm masculinity again. The Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi similarly believed manhood could only be reinvigorated through war. “War is a divine business,” he wrote in 1911, it was “an indispensable factor of civilization… a biological necessity of the first order.”44 Given that many only knew of war through magazine stories of bravery far away, the outbreak of World War I was initially viewed as a testing ground to redeem lost manhood.

The problem was, nobody truly expected World War I to be as violent, spirit-breaking, and industrial as it was. A decade before World War I broke out, feminist author Rosa Myarender wrote that “modern men are insensitive to the brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if it coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.”45 The traditional canon said that masculinity needed war — but in 1914, it became clear this was not the heroic war men imagined, but death in the trenches for no noble cause.

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The World Up for Grabs

In March 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow for talks. Upon bidding President Putin farewell, he told him, “Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving these changes together.”46 It was a nod to the plan to reshape the world away from American hegemony that had been dominant since World War II.

At the start of the 20th century, the leading superpower was the British Empire and its currency, the pound sterling, was the strongest in the world. It found itself in direct competition with a rising German Empire, whose growing industry was dominating Europe. The United States today finds itself in a similar position to the British Empire: a rising, industrialized China threatens the U.S. position as the sole superpower. Many have written on the similarities between China and the German Empire’s aspirations under Wilhelm II, even down to President Xi’s obsession with having a world-class navy.47

During the vertigo years, great power politics played as a backdrop to the upending experience of everyday life. For many average citizens, wars abroad were like epic dramas, read with the same intrigue like you would for any good fiction story. Reports on the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, for example, were eagerly read as serialized stories of bravery. However, the period also popularized reporting on social justice, particularly against colonialism. This led to some of the first public pressure campaigns against genocide.48 Diplomatic scandals naturally filled the papers as well, commonly reported like gossip. In one instance, Wilhelm II caused a firestorm in Britain in 1908 when he gaffed in the Daily Telegraph that most Germans hate them (although he clarified that he, in fact, did love British people).49

The whole world was being contested unlike ever before. This is because all the frontiers were now claimed by empires or smaller states. The entire Earth was a closed and integrated economic unit for the first time. Unsurprisingly, the field of geopolitics and global military strategy was invented during the vertigo years. World’s fairs famously emerged as a means to project imperial prestige and culture on this new international stage.50 While citizens then may not have viewed themselves as part of a globalized world, globalization was becoming a reality. The people of this era were the first generation to experience globalization proper, so they were closer to us than we may realize.

New Spheres of Influence

When President Xi made that comment to Putin, he was harkening back to this old form of great power competition when everything was in flux. The 2020s marks its return, and the war in Ukraine was the turning point. It came as a shock to many military analysts who believed a land war in Europe was too costly, strategically nonsensical, and downright impossible to imagine.51 The recent Israeli attack on Iran was equally surprising, only possible because the world map seems open to being redrawn. For today’s great powers, the goal is consolidating their spheres of influence, often along cultural lines. Russia has staked its claim, China has yet to stake its properly. Trump, likewise, has laid claim to Greenland and the Panama Canal, as well as jokingly to Canada, whose land he views as fitting “beautifully” on a map in a fully-realized North American union.

We are no longer living in a world situation resembling the Cold War. That was a battle between two ideologies that each claimed to want the entire world, either as liberal-capitalist or communist. Such dreams are long dead now. Trump’s transactional approach to politics and diplomacy is fitting for the new vertigo years. Journalist Edward Wong has speculated that Trump views an agreement between Russia, China, and the United States on their respective spheres of influence as the “ultimate deal.”52 Trump may not know it himself, but his approach is very much in line with thinking “we haven’t seen for 100 years.”

An Unsettled Feeling

Writer Lauren Berlant has argued that in times of social upheaval, people often find themselves desiring something that is actually an obstacle to their flourishing. She calls it a form of “cruel optimism.” In her 2011 book of the same name, she explains how politics can often take the form of cruel optimism. In times of great change, political desires happen at the affective, pre-reflexive level: anxieties are first formed, often without having an “explanation.” This causes individuals and crowds to irrationally desire some action, so they can finally transform that unease into something they can identify.

You are “optimistic” because you know the pace of change will continue — but it is “cruel” because it is incompatible with your own flourishing. There is a mismatch between desire and reality. The early 20th century was a period of cruel optimism, a time of deep emotion desperately looking for reasons. People’s various desires were often incompatible with the actual trends of modern life. This helps to explain why they talked themselves into a catastrophe.

The vertigo years feel so familiar because accelerating change provokes a strong emotional response. Today, we are also wrestling with a form of cruel optimism: too much emotional affect, but the speed of social change makes it difficult to make sense of it. That which we desire, like autonomy or community or security, are made impossible by the very technological systems we use everyday. By lacking the language to understand that which we experience, we feel a sense of vertigo. What’s left is a collective, unsettled feeling that lashes out as a false means of understanding. Technology may be improving, but it is “cruel” in the sense that it prevents understanding, until emotionality forces a response by chipping away at us until we finally break down.

To read about the vertigo years is to read of a period teetering on the edge. But despite its dark undercurrents, it was an unparalleled time of creativity that still reads fresh. I’m sure there are more similarities to our own time than the ones I’ve covered here. The vertigo years saw the birth of that modern feeling, which was described most beautifully by philosopher Marshall Berman: “to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”53 The new vertigo years today are motivated by this same tension.

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Superb Owl

Church of Reality: Ernst Mach on Mind, Matter, and the Illusion of Self

This post is part of a series on the philosophical and spiritual views of prominent scientists and mathematicians. Past subjects include Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, and Barbara McClintock. Future subjects will include Albert Einstein, David Bohm, and William Clifford…

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3 years ago · 16 likes · 9 comments · Max Goodbird

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In 1968, the general mood in Central Europe was deeply pessimistic. That year, the Soviet Union together with the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the reformists. Just twelve years earlier, Hungarian revolutionaries had also been subject to a bloody crackdown that claimed thousands of lives. The repression was so openly ruthless that it even disillusioned some communists.1 From the perspective of the Soviet leadership though, it was a relative success. Premier Leonid Brezhnev declared that the “triumph of the socialist system” in Czechoslovakia “can be regarded as final.”2 Still, if needed again, the “armed might of the socialist commonwealth” would ensure it remained so.3

The Brezhnev years (1964-1982) are today viewed as a time of widespread stagnation that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, it was hard to imagine such a possibility in 1968 and the two decades that followed. In 1984, Hungarian dissident writer György Konrád spoke tragically of his country as being trapped in an “imperialist bargain” between West and East.4 Little seemed to lie ahead except the present forever or war.5 And to the alarm of many dissidents, the people of Central Europe were starting to adjust, and even accept, the new normal. Konrád jokingly quotes the former Hungarian Communist party boss Matyas Rakosi, who allegedly asked his officials: “Comrades, have we sunk so low as to be taken in by our own propaganda?!”6

There was always the risk that Central Europe would accept its fate. The Soviet Union had devolved into a cult of power that ruled over its people like a leviathan, but still hid its motives behind ideology. Alternative horizons were closed off and difficult to imagine, and many resigned to silence. Because there was no independent public, dissidents were uniquely called upon to imagine a new one.

These writers would go on to be elevated to the status of moral heroes and national icons. Between 1968 and the end of the Soviet Union, the underground flourished. “In the middle of our tunneling,” Konrád wrote, “we heard voices on the other side.”7 When society finally arrived at the “other side” with the Soviet Union’s collapse, these same writers were then called upon to enter politics en masse. In a rare moment, an entire literary underground came out as victors. They were now tested to act out their stories and philosophies in reality as politicians, often with contradictory results.

A Politically Hopeless Situation

Let me preface this by first bringing it to the present day. A common observation nowadays has been the decline of institutional trust and public life, particularly in the United States and other Western democracies.8 To put it differently, there has been a decline in “civil society.” It’s an important term that broadly includes everything outside of the state and for-profit enterprise.9 When it’s strong, civil society is made up of many shared interests, groups, and independent institutions that can pressure the state toward real demands. It’s arguably what gives life to any free society.

I mention this to better illustrate Central Europe’s depressed position after 1968 by way of comparison. Unlike our current predicament, writers found themselves speaking to a public defeated and virtually nonexistent in independent terms. Dissidents openly admitted the political situation was hopeless. Civil society had not only declined but had been thoroughly crushed by the state. The cold bureaucracy instilled in people a doomed feeling this was permanent. As playwright and future Czech President Václav Havel wrote in 1987, “the bureaucratic regulation of the everyday details of people’s lives is another indirect instrument of nihilism.”10

It is here that public matters infiltrate private life in a way that is very “ordinary,” but extremely persistent.

The sheer number of small pressures that we are subjected to every day is more important than it may seem at first because it encloses the space in which we are condemned to breathe — and there is very little air in that space.11

Havel characterized the Soviet system of the 1970s and ‘80s as “post-totalitarian.” Its rule over Central Europe was not a classic military dictatorship by any means. Post-totalitarian systems derive their legitimacy, not from individual personalities, but from history. The Soviet Union claimed the popular workers’ movements of the past and inherited the moral legacy of the anti-fascist struggle.12 It also justified itself through a universalist ideology that sought global appeal. According to Havel, such systems are never improvised: they are comprehensive in their laws and regulations. Rather than enslave, they seek to make their subjects feel rational by providing them with an all-explaining worldview. The priorities and procedures are out in the open, and state officials carry out their tasks like automatons. “Individuals need not believe all [the government’s] mystification,” Havel writes, “but they must behave as though they did or tolerate them in silence.”13

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Giving Up on Politics

After the repression of 1968, it became clear things were unreformable. Because the state had such a grip on public life, many felt there was no emancipatory potential in politics. “What is to be done when nothing can be done?” rhetorically asked Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń.14 After 1968, the opposition gave up on attempting to democratize the state and instead asked how life should be lived and shared with others. If politics was hopeless, perhaps the focus should be on civil society and making it independent.

From this breakthrough emerged a counter-movement which György Konrád aptly called “antipolitics.” To use the language of Havel, engaging in politics trapped one in the suffocating web of post-totalitarianism which provided “very little air.” The solution simply could not be one where “people are organized, so they may then allegedly be liberated.”15 Captive minds would just end up recreating the same conditions. As Havel famously wrote in The Power of the Powerless (1979), hope lay instead in each individual pursuing an ethical life. These individuals could then presumably come together to form a new civil society that could breathe again. Havel coined its credo as “living in truth.”16 Polish journalist Konstanty Gebert imagined living in truth as setting up a “small, portable barricade between me and silence, submission, humiliation, shame…” 17 The idea was to make people’s inner core untouchable by the alienation creeping outside.

In his 1984 speech “Politics and Conscience,” Havel spoke directly on antipolitics and how he related it to inner truth.

I favor “antipolitical politics,” that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.

One such fundamental experience, that which I called ‘anti-political politics’, is possible and can be effective, even though by its very nature it cannot calculate its effect beforehand. That effect, to be sure, is of a wholly different nature from what the West considers political success. It is hidden, indirect, long term and hard to measure; often it exists only in the invisible realm of social consciousness…

Yes, “antipolitical politics” is possible. Politics from below. Politics of man, not of the apparatus. Politics growing from the heart, not from a thesis. It is not an accident that this hopeful experience has to be lived just here, on this grim battlement… We have to descend to the very bottom of a well before we can see the stars.18

According to the Central European dissidents, civil society was to be neither apolitical nor beyond politics, but anti-political.19 Society had been captured by the state. To make itself autonomous, it had to be against institutional politics, or else it risked being co-opted and exploited by post-totalitarian control. For these dissidents, antipolitics was not just some strategy to topple Soviet rule, but an entire worldview. And to Western outsiders, it forced questions about civil society that many today still take for granted.20

As a shared endeavor, antipolitics took on many surprising forms. The movement Solidarity, which would be chiefly responsible for toppling Soviet rule in Poland, always claimed its activities were social (podmiotowość), not political.21 In one notable clash in 1980, striking workers in Gdańsk collectively told the state committee that “politics is your business, not ours.”22 Despite strict martial law being introduced as a response in December of 1981, the ideas quickly spread. As Polish writer Adam Michnik wrote in Letters from Prison, “for the first time of communist rule in Poland… ‘civil society’ was being restored.”23 The Solidarity movement spoke of civil society as an exciting new place to be discovered. “We don’t need to define it. We see it and feel it,” said Solidarity’s parliamentary leader Bronislaw Geremek in 1989.24 It’s as if Geremek was echoing what Havel said — that the task of building civil society was “hidden, indirect, long term and hard to measure… it exists only in the invisible realm of social consciousness.”25 Dissidents genuinely did not know what they’d find.

These developments and their vague demands irritated party officials, who in one instance mockingly addressed the movement as “His Excellency, Civil Society.”26 In their frame of mind, they could not understand the desire for an autonomous public and viewed it as delusional hubris.

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Creating a “Second Culture”

In the words of Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous, one of the goals of the antipolitics movement was to create a “second culture.”27 Fellow Czech writer Václav Benda similarly called for building a “parallel polis” in his banned 1977 essay.28 Society had to organically develop from below, separate from the state. Both of these concepts would be deeply influential to Havel’s understanding of giving “power to the powerless.” The turn toward civil society, rather than politics, also greatly elevated those who created culture, namely writers and artists.

Through novels, films, poetry, music, and other mediums, dissidents explored the extreme conditions of life in “Other Europe.”29 The underground following was devout, and it was easy to completely absorb oneself in reading then. “The word was the most valuable thing”, recalled Jan Šicha, who spent all his factory pay on it.30 According to Czech writer Jáchym Topol, the 1970s and ‘80s were a time of “manic reading of books.”31 Many of the period’s canonical texts were distributed as clandestine literature (samizdat).

Novels of the samizdat period often dealt with life on the edge of dehumanization. One common theme concerned the terrifying that had become mundane. György Konrád’s The Case Worker (1969) follows the life of a social worker whose life has been made exceedingly difficult by the country’s suicide rate, allegedly then the highest in the world.32 The Guinea Pigs (1970) by Ludvík Vaculík tells the first-person story of a bank teller desperate to be “in control” of something for once, who adopts and experiments on guinea pigs for morally questionable reasons. In Ivan Klima’s Love and Garbage (1986), a dissident writer takes up the job of street sweeper and begins a relationship that forces some difficult choices.33 In fact, many dissidents did take such menial and low-pay jobs during the late Soviet era, as they were banned from better-paid professions.

Other novels focused on anti-utopian themes with brute realism. One particularly famous samizdat novel of the underground was Invalidní sourozenci (“The Invalid Siblings”, 1974) by Egon Bondy.34 Set in the year 2600, the dystopian sci-fi story follows those deemed useless to totalitarianism living in ghettos amid widespread ecological decline. Pungent garbage, accumulated over generations and generations, surrounds the living quarters of those deemed unfit as they converse and live their lives. The novel would become a bible of sorts for the Czech underground.

Still others explored themes of individuality, memory, and authenticity amid absurd conditions. There was often an element of the semi-autobiographical present, as a way of fighting back against the state’s single-minded narratives.35 Havel himself started as an absurdist playwright whose works satirized the bureaucracy.36 Milan Kundra’s The Joke (1967) is about a student’s politically charged prank that somehow completely derails his life. Kundra’s most famous work The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is a moving panorama of private lives in the aftermath of 1968.

And then there were those artists who just sought to inject some novelty into the sterility of their surroundings. The conditions were serious, but perhaps individuals didn’t need to be. Polish theater group Akademia Ruchu put on comical public performances where they would pretend to fall over invisible objects on the street.37 In other instances, they would queue in exceptionally long lines for seemingly no purpose at all. Avant-garde artist Endre Tót mailed zeroes to noteworthy recipients for “people who are nothing.”38

In a 1982 New York Times Review of Kundra’s The Joke, the general feeling of nothingness is plainly said:

A boyish prank? An innocent joke? Not on Ludvik's life. He is soon brought up on charges at his Party cell and slyly excoriated by a friend and comrade, Pavel. Party and university expel poor Ludvik, and he is shipped off, for ideological rectification, to work as a penal laborer in the mines. On his occasional leaves from the mines, Ludvik has a frustrated love affair with a frightened, almost speechless girl named Lucie.

It comes, like everything else in his life, to nothing.39

It was initially unclear whether any of this would ever amount to something. In the six-part series The Other Europe from 1987-1988, the interviewed dissidents show little indication they believed they would very soon be victorious and propelled into power.

According to Havel, the dissident has “no desire for office and does not gather votes. He offers nothing and promises nothing.”40 But once the unthinkable happened and the Iron Curtain fell, the public naturally turned to these dissidents for guidance. They were their moral heroes, and they wanted political promises. Votes were gathered and this literary underground, often to their own surprise, found their way into political power.

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The End of a Literary Golden Age

The collapse of Communism caused an existential crisis among dissident writers. Despite the historic victory and promises of a better life, coming out from the underground brought confusion over the purpose of literature. Dissidents had to step down from their exalted positions with no special role. “Writers, who once represented mythical entities, now represent just themselves,” remarked Polish novelist Adam Zagajewksi, who humorously added that this suited him better.41 Yet others found themselves in a more unsettled state. Konrád pithily asked in 1991, “what is left when there is no more devil?”42

The confusion we see now among intellectuals here was absolutely predictable. It is very ironic, a cruel central European joke. Those who historically were always the opposition, who did not want power, are now the leaders.43

Central European writers once dreamed of living in a “normal society” where they had the freedom to create whatever they wished. But the truth was that their literary golden age was partially made possible by indirect state subsidization. Very few “recognized the simple truth that communist regimes had in many ways created for them a writers’ utopia.”44 Under repression, they had lived in their own enclosed “mad worlds” and now they had to exit.45 In the decade that followed the end of Communism, market liberalization eroded the literary underground both of purpose and financial backing. The years 1989 to 2000 saw the collapse of many publishing houses as well as pay for writers plummeting despite incomes on average rising.46

Yet, it wasn’t just a matter of bad pay and ennui. During Soviet rule, Central European dissident writers went to great lengths to develop their own language which was no longer relevant. They often relied on the passive voice to avoid accusations and naming names, but one could always read between the lines. The end of Communism meant writers no longer knew who “we” addressed.

As Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy remarked:

Once when a poet said “we” we knew who “we” was. Now that community of interest has been broken: the basic relationship between writer and writer, writer and reader, reader and reader, and their relationship to politicians – who occupied an entirely different territory – have all been broken up. Now we are fragmented. We always knew what we were against, but not exactly what we were for. Now when a politician – or a writer, for many writers have become politicians – says “we” we don’t know to whom he is referring.

Now I must take each and every word into my hands as if for the first time, and I must study these words to see what they contain now and what they might contain in the future. I need to make a whole new dictionary.’47

Hungarian poet Sandor Csoori, whose writing often spoke to peasant rural life, characterized the situation as a collapse of spirit. By the mid-1990s, it had “sunk to zero point” in Hungary.48 Politics was exploiting the difference between rural and urban life to procure votes, he argued, without any regard for the preservation of cultural heritage.

And what are we doing to protect our rural writers, our peasant artists? Nothing at all. And yet they have such a purity about them in their style, their vocabulary, in the verse forms and themes. They are craftsmen. When you read them it is like watching someone work a design in wood. They are the essence of Hungarian-ness. Our peasants, they are pure. They are our only hope.49

Although holding much self-doubt himself, Csoori could not help but feel that the intelligentsia had "lost touch with its ‘orphaned’ people.”50

The Promise of Politics

After the collapse of Communism, the dissident writer was left without a clear mission. Many stopped writing to enter politics, believing that political office could presumably take on the ideas that their literature once described. The most noteworthy example is Václav Havel, who would be elected the first President of the Czech Republic. As one Hungarian magazine editor told a journalist in 1990/1991, “There is no good writing at the moment. Everyone is involved with politics, I think. I don’t know what writers are doing, but they are not writing. That is all I can say.” 51

The dissidents were “politicians in spite of themselves.”52 The anxiety was perhaps best captured by György Konrád. In Antipolitics (1984), he confessed that “my worst nightmare is to have to tell millions of people what to do next.”53 As a skeptic prone to tragedy, Konrád viewed power as a ruiner of otherwise good people. “The most gifted people should be seers, not government officials,” he argued, “power is not a stage but a prison.”54 Konrád himself was a founding member of the Hungarian Liberal Party (SZDSZ), but retreated during the 1990s despite some believing he should be the country’s president.55

Some even suspected that dissidents only became writers because the door of power was never open to them in the last regime. This was the assessment of Hungarian critic László Kéry in 1990/91:

The east-central European writers have lost their constituency to the politicians.

It is clear from the way that the democratic opposition has been led by writers, and by the speed with which the writing fraternity has transformed itself into an active political stratum, that without the advent of "socialism” this class would not necessarily have become writers at all.

Indeed, it seems probable that a great number of them would rather have become professional politicians.

In many ways, according to the poet Csoori, “the transition came so suddenly that no writer has been able to catch up with its impact.”56 The shock of the 1990s overloaded the culture with consumerist excesses, appealing to the most basal desires and pornographic kitsch, not to mention criminality. In the realm of ideas, everything was aired out in the open. There was an explosion of “reportage, editorials, letters to the editor, special documents and studies, and cultural and political attacks and counterattacks” that were not present under Communism.57

It is as if the whole of Hungary has been reduced to the role of a tourist who is just passing through, quickly snapping up trifles and rubbish, not knowing good from bad. We see this perhaps worst of all in our journalists, many of whom were responsible for telling us how to be good communists, and who now tell us how to be good democrats.58

New battlefields opened up in virtually every direction. This was in no small part due to the oppositional character of the dissidents themselves. “I belonged to the opposition for many years – perhaps nearly 30 years,” Csoori said, “and now, even though my party is in power, I cannot rid myself of this habit.”59

At the moment journalists say that the ruling party has three sections: the populist, the nationalist, and the Christian conservative. What can I say that isn’t true? These three groupings — I feel I have all these things in me, but I still feel I am an oppositionist.60

Dissident writers were precise in their diagnoses, but lost their collective moral footing when the terrain irrevocably changed. Some gave in to opportunism, others to a desire for conflict, but the victory brought contradiction in all forms. Such contradictions were on full display many years later when leading opposition heroes like Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, Lea Wałęsa, and others voiced their support for the 2003 Iraq War.61 Their words were proudly touted by the Bush administration as clear evidence that the U.S. invasion was a righteous cause, endorsed by the world’s leading moral heroes.

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Revisiting “Other Europe”

Central Europe has ceased to be “Other Europe” like it once was. The chaos of the 1990s gave way to a more stable 2000s, tamed by investment, NATO membership, and EU enlargement. Unsurprisingly, Central European dissidents are today often remembered in one-dimensional ways, their slogans and moral message reduced to political talking points. Maybe it could be said that their hasty turn to victory and power injured their names, now readily evoked by whoever finds it useful.

Still, the dissidents’ advocacy of civil society has been under-appreciated, especially as it relates to our own time. Sometimes extreme conditions shed light on the most fundamental questions, and the dissidents were probing them incessantly. They valued what Western societies take for granted, and documented how public life degrades when it is captured wholly by power. As they rightfully argued, when civil society is independently strong, power better reflects the shared social interest. Their observations take on new meaning in our distrusting present.

And just as importantly, dissidents explored the dark depths of ideology, and how it can easily capture minds and transform people into disposable means for an end. “An omnipresent ideological fiction can rationalize anything,” wrote Havel, “without ever having to brush against the truth.” It’s a salient observation in a time of the internet when so many feel uprooted. When faced with uncertainty, we are especially drawn to a story or ideology to ground ourselves to a fault.

These writers and artists passionately demonstrated that, when everything is stripped away and only one’s inner core is left, it is enough for life. The voices of “Other Europe” should be understood within the realities of their extreme time, but they still call out to the present with surprising relevance.

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When it comes to history writing, one of the most recognizable frames is the story of the “rise and fall.” Although broad and often misused, it is a trope that easily excites the public imagination. Nowadays, one doesn’t need to look far to find anxieties over our own alleged fall. Discussions on “decline” and even “collapse” have become more commonplace online.1 And more generally, across all published literature, mentions of doom and gloom have reached new heights, irrespective of political leanings.2

But despite the cultural climate, catastrophes are hard to imagine, and even the doomsayers themselves usually say such things half-heartedly. This is because so few people alive and born in the Western world have experienced anything truly like it. Personal memories of war have also faded for most. Limited by experience, historical perspectives help to fill in the gaps of our imagination.

When we think of collapse, the immediate example that comes to mind is the Soviet Union. Even within the highest levels of American intelligence, its sudden end came as a complete surprise.3 Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak characterized the feeling for the average Soviet person as “everything was forever until it was no more.”4 The shock was explored further by Adam Curtis in his 2022 documentary series TraumaZone. In it, the viewer is carried through the experience year by year of “what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy” during the 1990s, told through archival footage of everyday people and their misfortune.5

The former Soviet Union is just one leading example. Both “decline” and even “collapse” carry so much weight because the last century was so strongly defined by them, particularly the first half. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt correctly noted that the first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”6 In such a short amount of time and without precedent, so many states and ways of living were swept away, and forced to start over. Today, these realities have left us with many ghosts: past ways of living that were suddenly cut short but persist as haunting memories, still affecting the present in very real ways.

One such ghost, often forgotten but lasting an exceptionally long time when it was real, is Austria-Hungary. Both Austria and Hungary were ruled by the Habsburg dynasty for what certainly felt like forever, centuries upon centuries, finally merging as a dual monarchy in 1867.7 Its emperor, Franz Joseph, reigned from 1848 to 1916, which only added to the perception of its eternal stability. But in the last year of World War I, the country collapsed and a generation of writers reflected on what they once took for granted permanently being no more.

Because its capital Vienna was a cosmopolitan city long famous for its literary tradition and art, the language to describe this loss came naturally. The result was a corpus of writing unlike any other, uniquely about the experience of coping with a world lost. As historian Eric Hobsbawm observed:

Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the 20th century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Joseph’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle.

Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multiculturalism of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective.8

This much is evident in the literature. While their German neighbors opted for more programmatic political solutions, Austrian writers settled into a more ironic style, sometimes even tinged with humor and a penchant for absurdity, alongside a cynical attitude toward the state’s ability to reform human life.9 When read today, such sentiments seem oddly contemporary as if speaking to our current detached sensibilities.

Still, their disposition should not be misinterpreted as being excessively pessimistic or even fatalistic. On the contrary, Austrian writers during this time produced works that stressed realism, almost like a documentarian would, but with an appreciation for drama. In their world, the writer's purpose was to provide a "probing analysis of the fundamental desire and principles” that constituted society.10 And so they came from all corners of the multicultural empire that was Austria-Hungary, intending to present and show life “how it really was.”11

It is understandable why such a social climate produced the likes of Sigmund Freud and his theories of the unconscious. He, too, was someone whose perspective noticeably darkened after the collapse of his homeland. Deeply affected, he wrote on Armistice Day, 1918:

Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.12

To these writers and thinkers, the world was to now be understood and written as if it were fragile and ephemeral, much like Austria-Hungary’s fate. They were a generation that uniquely internalized collapse as a literary tradition. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the summer of 1918 while on military leave: “Everything we see could be otherwise. Everything that we can describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori.”13

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When Austria-Hungary Was Forever

Three months into World War I on November 1, 1914, a short essay appeared in the Austrian paper Österreichische Rundschau titled “The Affirmation of Austria.” Its author, novelist-poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, took a triumphantly positive tone. The wartime difficulty ahead would be a powerful stimulus, he argued quoting poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, for when “things are not sufficiently anticipated, much greater human efforts and achievements are often called forth.”14 Austria-Hungary had, after all, only begun to live. “The life-feeling that is emerging among us,” he wrote, “is far more the life-feeling of a young organism than of a dying one.”15

Hofmannsthal believed himself to be channeling the popular energy of his day. He had come from a long line of wealthy industrialists and merchants, and his words represented the self-assured feelings of the upper classes of Austria-Hungary, especially the artists and intellectuals whom he had gotten to know frequenting Vienna’s famous cafes. Many of them would be employed by the War Office and War Archives during World War I.16

One fellow writer who also spent time at the famous Viennese Café Central alongside Hofmannsthal was Robert Musil. He wrote that summer in 1914 words he would later come to regret:

A new feeling was born. A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides defending the tribe. This feeling must have always been present: it is now awakened… a bliss, and over and above its earnestness, a huge security and joy.17

Another regular of the Viennese Café Central, the writer Stefan Zweig, spoke of the new popular mood with the same excitement. Although a pacifist, he, too, found himself caught up like Musil. The jubilation at the war’s outbreak was seemingly everywhere.

To be perfectly honest, I must confess that there was something fine, inspiring, even seductive in that first mass outburst of feeling. It was difficult to resist it. In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, and everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.18

The sentiments expressed by Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Zweig at the start of the war are attested to by many others who lived through it. Austria-Hungary possessed an eternal quality for its patriots and they believed themselves to be special among European states. Unlike the rest of Europe, it did not aspire to be a nation-state, but was a uniquely cosmopolitan world unto itself. Emperor Franz Joseph’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, famously went to great lengths to document every corner of the empire in its diversity.19 In the decades before World War I, the state increasingly began to see its positive role as arbitrating between its many national groups. Ethnic attribution became something of a bureaucratic obsession.

Writing in 1917, just a year before the empire disintegrated, Hofmannsthal still clung to this cosmopolitan dream. In his essay “The Austrian Idea,” he summarized his homeland’s historical duty as the “compromise between the old European, Latin-German, and the new Slavic world.”20 Europe, he asserted, “needs an Austria” to “comprehend the East.” For Hofmannsthal, Austria-Hungary’s historical mission was to be a bridge between worlds. But aside from this imagined destiny, the empire also viewed itself as a protector of ethnic minorities from the exploits of neighboring states. So strong was this view that even in the last two years of the war, a majority of Slavs in the empire still felt the Austro-Hungarian state was their best defense against the imperial desires of other great powers like Russia and Germany.21

This multinational foundation was a leading fascination for those who nostalgically looked back after the country’s demise. One such writer, Joseph Roth, characterized Austria-Hungary as an empire of “hyphenated” peoples. The hyphen was like a bridge between its many groups, he wrote in 1919, and when it disappeared “the Dual Monarchy was finished.”22 Speaking of its capital Vienna, Stefan Zweig viewed the city as one that “harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself.”23 “Free of narrow-minded prejudice,” he glowingly wrote, “nowhere was it easier to be European” — a place where “every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.”24

In some sense, Vienna and the greater empire was a microcosm of our globalized world today. When World War I broke out, the official proclamation came out in nine official languages: German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, and Italian.25 Joseph Roth himself spoke German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and French. The empire was also multifaith, the latest addition being Islam which was added as a state religion in 1912.26 Migrations and movements of people were common. By 1900, close to 40% of all Austro-Hungarians were living outside their traditional hometowns (heimat).27

While cosmopolitanism may have been a core feature of the culture, it was the state that created the feeling it was all permanent. Austria-Hungary’s bureaucracy strongly prided itself on hierarchal rank be it by education, class, or lineage.28 Regional loyalties to the state were forged by appealing to noblemen of particular ethnic groups. It was a very rigid society of excessive adherence to decorum to a fault. One joke was that the empire was slow to embrace the telephone because it took too long to get through everyone’s titles before the conversation began.

Robert Musil in his unfinished, multi-volume novel The Man Without Qualities (1930-1943) described the state as "clerical, but everyday life was liberal.”29 He humorously writes:

There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut.

There was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule.30

For Musil, Austria-Hungary was a state content with being “second-weakest among the great powers,” for whom words like “colony and overseas” sounded “untried and remote.”31 Even its only colonial project, the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 onward, was viewed as close to home and ambiguous. Politics was so often an afterthought for a large segment of the noble classes and the empire’s bourgeoisie.32 Many instead preoccupied themselves almost zealously with culture and the arts.

The many different languages, cultures, and peoples in Austria-Hungary—together with a state that firmly stressed order and rank—made for an empire that felt like a permanent and self-contained world. Nowhere is this forever feeling captured best than in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1941), right down to the opening sentences:

When I attempted to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security.

Everything in our almost thousand year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability.33

“Stability” is a common theme stressed in Zweig’s nostalgic stories of prewar Austria-Hungary. Zweig writes that he was “not born in a time of passion,” but instead a time of normalcy, and a complacency about the future.34 For middle-to-upper-class families like his, especially those in Vienna, it was a world of “clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure.”35

He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year when he would be advanced in rank, or when he would be pensioned. Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for holidays and entertainment; and what is more, in­variably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctor's bills, for the unexpected. Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings bank, as a "reserve” for the future.

In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason.36

For those obstacles that did persist, time was thought to resolve them: a belief in progress was widespread much like a religion. And within this progress, writes Zweig, the most valued asset of them all was security in life, which was steadily expanding to include more and more people in its circle.37 Compared to just a generation or two ago, people were said to be visibly healthier as hygienic infrastructure was introduced on a mass scale. Sports organizations were, too, sprouting up all over the empire. New modern conveniences, like electricity and the telephone, were being introduced. The development was swift and appeared almost natural. Amid these transformations, it is unsurprising that many felt that the “technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise.”38

Writing in the 1930s, Zweig was aware that this Age of Security was merely a “castle in the sky," but to his parents, it was lived as if it were a “solid stone house.”39 It was hard to imagine any alternative, so assuredly was their world self-contained.

The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan War itself did not penetrate the existence of my parents. They passed over all reports of war in the newspapers just as they did the sporting page, and truly, what did it matter to them what took place outside of Austria?40

Reading these words today, their descriptions may come off as surprisingly naive. Such criticisms were even put forward when The World of Yesterday was published, by Hannah Arendt and others.41 So, it is difficult to decipher how much of this past Zweig describes was real or imagined. Austria-Hungary was an empire fraught with dysfunction and division as well. Nationalists pejoratively spoke of its bureaucracy as a “prison of nations.” Still, even with these reservations, one must also consider Zweig’s difficult frame of mind. Being a Jew whose birthplace was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Austria-Hungary understandably took on special meaning for him. It was remembered as a time before the collective madness, when one could live normally in Europe.

Such feelings cannot be readily dismissed. In fact, many of Austria-Hungary’s leading nostalgics were its Jews. For Zweig, this longing became so extreme that he committed suicide just days after submitting The World of Yesterday to his publisher. Obsessed with memories, both real and imagined, he found himself deeply alienated from actual life. He wished to return to that lost time when "everything appeared long-lasting.”42

Zweig may have described halcyon days, but other forces were clearly at play beneath this veneer of stability. Somehow this world of “calm transition and without haste” sleepwalked into a world war. Since 1866, Austria-Hungary had only been involved in minor military incidents, and just a short war with Serbia was planned in 1914. Looking back, Robert Musil likened the shock to “like sleeping in the Pullman car of a train and being awakened only by the crash.”43 The possibility was unthinkable.

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When That Forever Ends

As I’ve recounted, Vienna and the greater Austro-Hungarian empire erupted into palpable excitement in the summer of 1914. Similar widespread jubilation over the war was recorded in the German Empire to the north. To us today, privileged with hindsight, the reaction seems nonsensical, even mad. But with modernity and its amenities then having little precedent, and with progress as its religion, everything appeared like an extension of the present. For many, war was the stuff of romance and heroic stories.44 Now was merely their moment to become heroes.

As Stefan Zweig notes, unlike the war of 1939 which had a deeper meaning, “the war of 1914 was ignorant of realities” for it was naively “still serving a delusion, the dream of a better world, a world that would be just and peaceful. And only delusion, not knowledge, brings happiness.”45 So that year, “the warring nations were in a state of over-excitation,” happiness was certainly in the air, “and the worst rumor was immediately transformed into truth, the most absurd slander believed.”46 The cultural climate left little room for worry and caution. In short, it had grown remarkably unaware of the “unimaginable.”

The “unimaginable” is a term used by critic Karl Kraus, one of the few Austrian writers who was against the war from the beginning. Kraus had become one of the most controversial men in the empire for his critical writings, often bordering on apocalyptic and full of vitriol. During the war, he compiled damning quotes from the press, later montaging them in full into a 1922 play called The Last Days of Mankind. Unlike Stefan Zweig, Kraus was a Viennese man who did not look at his city with rose-tinted glasses—for Vienna, he wrote, had become the “experimental station for the end of the world” due to its blind patriotism, self-obsession, and decline of language.47

In December 1914, just months after the war broke out, Kraus described the “unimaginable” in an essay titled “In dieser Großen Zeit” (“In This Great Time”), published in his magazine Die Frackel. It was written in a way as to confuse the censors.

In this great time, who I still knew when she was so small; which will become small again if it still has time…

In this time in which what one could not imagine happens, and in which what one can no longer imagine must happen, and could one do it, it would not happen. In this serious time which died laughing at the possibility that it could become serious; which, surprised by its tragedy, longed for distraction, and which, catching itself engaging in some new action, searches for words.48

[…]

In the realm of impoverished imagination… what is not thought must be done and what is only thought, unspeakable.

For many, the war unveiled the unimaginable for the first time: progress turned against humanity, science in service of war, anomie, collapsing states, and the loss of one’s homeland. By 1915, Kraus had already begun looking into the future, for he feared that the postwar period would lead to “more death and disease… than could ever have been contrived by the war itself.”49 Whatever this “unimaginable” was, it became intensely psychologized. Freud’s theories—that civilization was a facade that merely repressed deep, psychosexual and violent urges—gained widespread currency after the war. In 1918, Kraus published an essay titled The Techno-Romantic Adventure in which he imagined war as a scientific testing ground for immoral curiosities.

Coming to Terms with Loss

If we look at the literature after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, we find a variety of reactions to the loss. Many of them would be recollected not in the intermediate aftermath, but far later, after reality had time to settle. Joseph Roth noted that, unlike the prewar period where “anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten,” the postwar period thrived “on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”50 And for many, this was certainly the case.

Robert Musil’s writing is an exception, however. Writing as early as 1919, he was already connecting observations for what would later play a part in his novel The Man Without Qualities. Today, he is commonly considered to be Austria-Hungary’s greatest analyst, producing a body of work that grapples with the empire’s many failing parts. In 1919, he wrote that “one of the most telling symptoms of the catastrophe was the totally laissez-faire attitude toward the teams of specialists in running the machinery of the state.”51 This view of a governing class on autopilot, unable to see itself honestly, is a common theme in post-WWI literature—as are such descriptions like “sleepwalking” to describe the state of society before the war.52 The state had assumed its own permanence and had neglected the actual functioning of society for lofty goals and abstract ideals, not fully understanding their violent ends.

The shock of the war, Musil argued, “had called into question the very possibility of a coherent theory of history,” partly because it had completely defied rationality.53 In his characteristically humorous style, he wrote in 1922:

We haven’t really changed much, a little presumptuous before, a little hungover afterward. First, we were bustling good citizens, then we became murderers, killers, thieves, arsonists, and the like, but without really experiencing anything… I think there is only one explanation for this: we were lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.54

Musil’s observations here add yet another dimension to the experience of loss. Not only is there the “unimaginable,” but one so often lacks the language to absorb that which has happened. Such is the fate of the protagonist in The Man Without Qualities who is acted upon by this strange Austro-Hungarian world that, unbeknownst to him, is on the cliff’s edge. The novel is in dialogue with what were once certainties about the West being called into question. As if suspended in time, it is both in conversation with the past and the worsening postwar future.

If Musil is Austria-Hungary’s great analyst, then Joseph Roth is its premier elegist. But in classic Austrian style, Roth always keeps his ironic distance. As he wrote when the emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916 during the height of the war:

Even as I was condemning it, I already began to mourn it. And while I bitterly measured the proximity of the death to which the dead Emperor was sending me, I was moved by the ceremony with which His Majesty was being carried to the grave. I had a clear sense of the absurdity of the last years, but this absurdity was also part of my childhood. The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.55

For Roth, Austria-Hungary was not at all the best of all possible worlds. Unlike his later friend Stefan Zweig, he was born on the periphery of the empire in relative poverty in what is modern-day Ukraine. Often feeling like an outsider, difficulty followed him his whole life, along with a serious drinking problem that began during the war. After Austria-Hungary’s end, he largely lived from his suitcase as a permanent traveler. His nostalgia grew as the years went on due to being a marginalized Jew whose only homeland disappeared. His magnum opus Radetzky March (1932) is one of the great eulogies of a world lost, the story of a family whose decline over three generations tracks the slow fall of the once mighty Austro-Hungarian empire. World War I only enters the picture in the last few pages.

Roth’s elegy centers around individuals searching for security and in doing so, they often make a religion out of the empire. But they become disenchanted because “the state disappoints as God does.”56 Like God, the state is viewed as the source of both good and evil. As Roth writes in the forward to Radetzky March, “I loved this fatherland, I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland, and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses.”57 For Roth, the Austro-Hungarian idea was a worldview like Christianity or Judaism. Rarely, if ever, did Roth speak of his Judaism as a religion. And when such worldviews are shaken and fall apart, little is left, not even emotion. “Nothing ties me,” Roth wrote in 1925, “I am not sufficiently sentimental to believe in categories like future, family, etc.”58

Roth’s elegies have a certain timeless quality because they show how supposedly eternal ideas are caught up in ephemeral times. Roth does not have a politics as much as he believed in fate and the passage of time being erosive to human institutions. In Radetzky March, Austria-Hungary is described as having succumbed to the age as if it were destiny. Roth perhaps would have accepted this fate easier had Europe not been in such dire circumstances afterward. By 1933, he began to have apocalyptic visions for the continent. As he wrote to Stefan Zweig that year, “The barbarians have taken over. Do not fool yourself, hell reigns....”

In another letter to his friend Zweig a few months later, Roth tells him:

I hope you get home feeling calmer and stronger.
I can’t get away.
I need a new publisher and promise of new earnings.
Things are grim—both in the world at large, and for us as individuals.
We all overestimated the world: even me, an absolute pessimist.
The world is very, very stupid, and bestial. There are more brains in a cowshed.
Everything: humanity, civilization, Europe, even Catholicism: the cowshed is cleverer.

As far as I’m concerned:
I see myself compelled to follow my instincts and conviction, and become an absolute monarchist.
In 6 or 8 weeks, I will publish a short book about the Habsburgs.
I am an old Austrian officer. I love Austria. I view it as cowardice not to use this moment to say the Habsburgs must return.
I want the monarchy back, and I will say so.
Several thinking persons are of the same view.
I hope I succeed.59

In 1938, shortly before the Nazi takeover of Austria, Roth was sent on a mission to Vienna to persuade Chancellor Schuschnigg to re-establish the Habsburg Monarchy. Otto von Habsburg, the heir-apparent, was in exile at the time in Paris. Roth proposed that he take the throne to prevent Anschluss.

The absurd idea was a non-starter. The Austrian police ended up expelling Roth without him ever having met the Chancellor. The following year, Roth succumbed to tuberculosis, which worsened in no small part due to his chronic alcoholism.

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An Ephemeral World

In July 2011, some 100,000 spectators watched a funeral procession make its way to the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, Austria. Broadcast on live television, thirteen days of mourning were announced. Otto von Habsburg, the same royal whom Joseph Roth had unsuccessfully lobbied to rule Austria some 73 years ago, had died. Somehow, Austria-Hungary had found its way into the present, complete with representatives from the nation-states of the former empire. They all gathered in a strange twilight zone moment alongside ghosts from the distant past and traditions few remembered anymore.

The event mostly amounted to formalities, paying respect for a time no one could claim to truly know. But even in the immediate years after the empire’s collapse, that past had already become unrecognizable. Stefan Zweig, writing in the 1930s, recounted how even then “all bridges are broken between today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.”60 The supposedly eternal empire had quickly become unimaginable, just like its collapse was unimaginable before the war.

Since the Second World War, Austria-Hungary has gone under deeper reexamination. The cosmopolitanism of its late period possessed a kernel that was much like ours today, even down to its deep faults and malaise. Italian writer Claudio Magri felt that within Austria-Hungary was something “paradigmatic of the lost or fractured identity of the modern individual.”61 Perhaps this is why its literature, loosely called “Austro-modernism,” continues to be widely read. Franz Kafka’s existentialist themes of alienation and loneliness, for example, were in no small part affected by his experience in the overly bureaucratic empire. And if we look beyond Europe, works of the period have been consistently reimagined in other contexts, still resonating with readers. In China, Stefan Zweig is one of the only foreign writers who has been read every decade since the 1920s and he remains one of the most popular authors in the country.62 Famous for his emotional dramas, Zweig’s novels have influenced Chinese films and plays such as Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004), an adaptation of his 1922 Viennese novella of the same name but set in Beijing, 1948.

So often, Austro-modernist literature speaks to a sentiment that can be called “mono no aware.” It is not a term its authors used, but rather an old Japanese saying about life’s inherent ephemerality. In the works of Roth and Musil, the protagonist navigates a transient world, and is often left with just memories, confusion, humor, and oneself. Such sentiments need not be far from present-day realities. Today, we have seen an unraveling of expectations and an immense difficulty in imagining the future. So clearly are we, too, “lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.” Reading the literature of those who lived and lost is an antidote for the limits of our imagination and provokes us in asking, “what if it was all otherwise?”

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It can be said that much of modern America was born in 1939. That year, the New York City World’s Fair officially began. The mega-event would go on for two seasons (‘39 and ‘40) and break records, exciting audiences by promising a glimpse into the “world of tomorrow.”

The Fair condensed many ideas and developments that would come to define the coming era, famously called the “American Century” by media magnate Henry Luce. Those who attended described experiencing a feeling of awe and being overloaded with newness. The exhibits were futuristic, optimistic, and unyielding in their belief in progress and technology.

If you were there, something was bound to strike you — mechanized farms, car production lines, steelworks, home heating, glassmaking furnaces, dioramas of future megacities, long-distance phone lines, amusement parks, motorcycle shows, electrical appliances, diesel-powered locomotives, industrial plastics, nutritional science, mechanized milk production (with actual cows), nylon clothing, high-end fashion houses, watchmaking, rare jewels, orchestral performances, amusement parks, atomic science presentations, the first computer game, the first science fiction convention, over 500 world-renowned paintings and sculptures, an exhibit for each of the world’s leading nations (and for twenty-three U.S. states), and on and on.1

It was all so spectacular that even the otherwise boring, like new developments in the insurance industry, were dramatized with marionette shows. And if that didn’t suit you, you could always go see how Wonder Bread and Hostess Cakes were made in precise step-by-step detail.

The Fair had it all and promised to provide, enough so that you could live there. Forty-eight families were chosen as winners of the Fair’s “Typical American Family” contest, representing the ideal Americans for this new world. They spent a week at the Fair for free, living on the fairgrounds, enjoying all the latest amenities in “fully furnished bungalows complete with maid service.”2

So much of what would become modern America was on these fairgrounds. The American frontier—officially settled in 1912 with the admission of all the contiguous states of the Union—was moving to a new psychic plane. As the Fair demonstrated, the new untraveled frontier was now to be desire itself. A 20-minute film for the most popular exhibit at the Fair named Futurama opened by telling viewers that “the promise of distant horizons has always called men forward.” The film associated the frontier’s original, rugged roads with the new roads being forged in the mind: those untraversed desires and new ways of living that consumer society would bring.

“Men have moved on and on,” the film declared, “always to find that old horizons open the way to new horizons.”

I’ve been reading quite a bit about the 1939 World’s Fair recently. My interest has been not only in the sights, as spectacular as they were, but also in the ideas they represented. Rarely do you see so much ideology and meaning condensed into one event.

I’m of the opinion that any critique of the present is best done by understanding when its justifications were at their height, optimistic and full of hubris. Arguably, the 1939 World’s Fair was that moment. Yet, our vantage point is altogether different from the Fair’s attendees. Our world is no longer like theirs, and what was dreamlike then might easily appear otherwise to us today. So rather than recount the experience of the Fair as has been often told, I would like to instead turn to what the attendees did not readily see but had great consequences for the present day.

Many of the Fair’s attendees received a pin that famously read, “I have seen the future” and, in many ways, this was right. Americans would come to inhabit that promised future, but its repercussions were poorly understood. Looking back, the 1939 World’s Fair stands as an inflection point for how the U.S. would develop, but it was as much a forewarning as it was a dream.

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A New Consumer Democracy

If you were to attend the 1939 World’s Fair, you would be greeted with two structures named Trylon and Perisphere. The former was a tall, spire-like structure equipped with what was then the world’s longest escalator. The latter was a humongous sphere. These two modernist structures were the Fair’s mascots.

By stepping into the Peripshere, a new world would be unveiled to you. Inside, a diorama of a future utopian city was constructed called “Democracity.” It was designed to be inhabited by a million and a half people, covering 11,000 square miles.

Trylon and Perisphere, along with Democracity inside, were the symbolic heart of the Fair. But the branding behind it all was intentional for more reasons than one would initially assume. The idea was created by the Fair’s publicity director, Edward Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, known as the man chiefly responsible for bringing his psychoanalytic theories to the United States during the 1920s.

While Sigmund himself fell into despondency in Europe after World War I, Bernays became widely successful in the United States. Using ideas of the unconscious, he quickly gained a reputation as someone who could conjure up mass public opinion for products and issues like no one else. While his later critics likened it to “manipulation,” Bernays himself called it “public relations,” a term he coined.

Yet, reading his work, one finds a deeply cynical man. Bernays rationalized his activities by arguing that the management of mass desire was preferable to the alternative—that is, “letting the unconscious run wild” with its repressed urges. If these dark forces were actually unleashed, he believed, they could undo society itself. Consumerism was hence viewed as a bulwark against the primitive mind of the crowd, and managing its desires was rationalized as necessary in saving society against itself. As he stated openly in his work Propaganda (1928), “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”3 He was therefore one of the first theorists of what can be called "managed democracy."

Whether he really believed in his own rationalization or not, Bernays did become incredibly wealthy from his services. By the late 1920s, he was “living in a suite of rooms in one of New York’s most expensive hotels, where he gave frequent parties.”4 According to an employee of Bernays, the events were a “who’s who” of the business elite, the arts, media leaders, and the mayor himself.5 In due time, his clients also included those within politics and the state. He became a "sort of magician" of public opinion, even though he openly viewed this same public with open contempt.6 Given his reputation, it was unsurprising that Bernays was tapped for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

This time, however, the project was not any particular corporate brand or political issue. Instead, Bernays was tasked with marrying two fundamental concepts that made his profession possible in the first place: consumerism and American democracy itself. This was the Fair’s stated purpose as he outlined in a speech delivered in April, 1937. The goal was to demonstrate the “relationship of private industry and private enterprise to government and to the people.” Most importantly, as was so typical of Bernays, this Fair had to openly appeal to consumer desire, which had never been done before.

Other fairs were interesting, entertaining, exciting. This Fair will be, too. But only this one will answer the question, “what does all this mean to me?”7

Given that the American public was just coming out of the Great Depression, it was known that the reputation of “big business” in the United States was at historic lows. By framing the World’s Fair through the prism of desire, Bernays sought to rehabilitate this perception by giving Americans an open door—one that they themselves did not even know they wanted. Bernays’s daughter confirms this aspiration of his in an interview with Adam Curtis for his documentary A Century of the Self (2002).

Anna Bernays: To my father, the World’s Fair was an opportunity… Capitalism in a democracy, democracy and capitalism in marriage. It was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went together.

Adam Curtis [continues]: The vision it portrayed was of a new democracy in which businesses responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was a form of democracy that viewed people not as active citizens… but as passive consumers… [which] Bernays believed was the key to control in a mass democracy.8

As Curtis makes clear, this thinking reached its symbolic high point at the 1939 World’s Fair. A democratic vision was then constructed by its very own skeptic, someone who viewed democracy as nothing other than a form of social management. Historian of public relations, Stewart Ewen, summarized this view in an interview with Adam Curtis:

It’s not that the people are in charge, but that the people’s desires are in charge. The people exercise no decision-making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and if you can trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.9

At the end of the century, the consequences of this vision would be criticized by writer Christopher Lasch. Published after his death in 1994, Lasch wondered whether American democracy was now merely living off the “borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism."10 Lasch was a critic of the kind of managed democracy that began to emerge around Bernays's time. By the 1990s, the consequences had become self-evident: when Lasch was writing, civic participation had sunk to its lowest point since World War II.11

Perhaps this long trajectory—triumphantly advertised as a "new horizon" at the 1939 World’s Fair—helps explain why the state’s competency and ability to execute basic functions has deteriorated so badly in our own time. Needless to say, Bernays's model of managed democracy was not exactly resilient and built to last.

Decades later during the 1970s, optimism would dry up amid scandal as institutional trust collapsed, exposing the hollowness of this consumer model of democracy outright for the first time. The fact that the United States has still not recovered from that “crisis of confidence” is not accidental: the ultimate outcome of a Bernaysian model of managed democracy is not renewal amid crisis, but rather an entrenchment of its old managerial ways, because it has so little of an active public to draw upon.

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Magical Motorways

Democracity, however, was not the most popular exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. That title went to Futurama, a grand construction that really dazzled audiences in its day. Sponsored by General Motors and designed by Norman Bel Geddes, Futurama was an urban utopia for the automobile. The entire diorama stretched over 35,000 square feet featuring half a million buildings and houses. Its centerpiece was the “city of tomorrow” with its 14-lane highways that cut through a metropolis of skyscrapers.

The exhibit emphasized constant movement. Attendees were seated in moving chairs equipped with soundboxes that narrated the entire tour. One passed through the future countryside, mountains, industrial centers, and farm areas — culminating in the city of Futurama itself. All of this, Geddes promised, would be possible by 1960.

For many Americans, Futurama was the first glimpse of what would become the national highway system.12 Geddes privileged the multi-lane highway as the centerpiece of his urban design, the embodiment of “streamlined spaces.”

The issue was, while Futurama did excite audiences, there was not much of “them” in it. Sociability was frankly not built into its design, and this would be a troubling omen for the coming decades. In my latest piece for Palladium Magazine, I traced how a version of Futurama ultimately did become an American reality.

Planners after World War II went to work on the most expansive urban reconstruction project in the country’s history. As I documented in my essay, planners so often cut through city downtowns “as if they were shaping an inordinate and malleable mass rather than lived space.” Jane Jacobs criticized this in The Death and Life of American Cities (1961), writing that “a growing number of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problem of cities.” By the 1960s, local community involvement in virtually every American city pushed back against the urban highway and Geddes’s dream, but with mixed success.

Fifty years after the Futurama exhibit, sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote in his bestseller book The Great Good Place (1989) that “the problem of place in America has not yet been resolved.”13 He wrote of an America that had lost many of its places of belonging and meaning. Particularly, Oldenburg lamented the loss of “third places”—those places that are neither work nor home—as being responsible for the decline of America’s “informal public life.”

Last year, I wrote a widely-shared piece about the ongoing “social recession” where I documented this trend to the present day. Arguably, a line can be drawn between Geddes’s vision at the 1939 World’s Fair and our current atomized world. And it should be said that Futurama was also fitting for the kind of consumer democracy Bernays imagined. The former sought to reshape the lived space of everyday people in mechanically efficient ways, while the latter was about how this newly-passive public would be democratically managed. Both being of the same zeitgeist, the two visions complement each other.

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Science in Service of Other Ends

I have so far outlined two fundamental visions that fit together, both presented at the 1939 World’s Fair. There was Bernays’s view of consumer democracy and Geddes’s dream of magic motorways. However, although they won out in the end, these were not the only ideas in contention. There was a competing view that science, not consumerism, should be wedded to democracy instead. Such ideas were actively discouraged at the planning level.

While the Fair undoubtedly presented some scientific breakthroughs, this often came secondary to the actual goals of the event. Reform-minded scientists as early as 1936 began to express worry that there was no extended section of the Fair devoted to just scientific achievement. They also wished to see science openly associated with democratic thinking. As noted informational scientist Watson Davis told audiences in 1938, “in these perilous times for so many areas of the world, we can not reaffirm too often that the scientific way is the democratic way.”14 In a highly-corporatized atmosphere that privileged branding, exhibits came to instead present science as “gadgets, commodities, and magic.”15

The belief that science was a monolith that could “save the people” may appear short-sighted to us today. Nonetheless, such ideas had widespread currency because reformers viewed the scientific worldview as equivalent to a rational and more just society. They sought to make this case clear at the 1939 World's Fair. The idea that “a fair with the stated theme of ‘Building the World of Tomorrow’ could be predicated on anything but science seemed inconceivable to many scientists.”16

Yet, despite extensive lobbying, the actual scientific footprint of the Fair was marginal compared to the Bernaysian selling of desires. The science that was presented was often done in a flashy manner, resembling more of a carnival than education. This is reflected in the reviews at the time, as Peter J. Kuznick documents in his essay Losing the World of Tomorrow (1994).

For example, Esquire wrote of the Fair’s essence as being, “its unique ability to stimulate trade and commerce; its influence on style, customs, buying habits.”17 Likewise, The New Yorker describes the cultural shift of the Fair as being chiefly about replacing old buying habits with new ones, not about introducing a scientific worldview. These reviews are odd for a Fair billed as being about futuristic, technological achievement and the supposed “world of tomorrow.”

As Kuznick further documents:

Grover Whalen, a former president of the New York Advertising Club, admitted candidly to club members that, if successful, the fair "would be the advertising precipitant for the next 3 to 5 years, the sales stimulant of the decade, and the advertising agencies' own laboratory."

The New Republic editor Bruce Bliven retracted his December 1938 prediction of a democratic and visionary fair, and charged that he had been "sucked in by Mr. Whalen's publicity department," and he even dismissed the focal exhibits as a "salesman's dream of democracy.”

Apparently, in the view of corporate planners, citizens would participate in that exalted world of tomorrow not as socially conscious, scientifically grounded decision makers but as consumers within mass society.18

The sentiment that this was a “salesman’s dream of democracy,” rather than a testament to scientific achievement, was noticed among astute observers. Even Geddes’s Futurama exhibit was not spared criticism. As journalist Walter Lippmann wrote, "General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise."19

If we take world fairs to be akin to a “rite of passage” for any society, we can view 1939 as a cultural event that charted a particular course. The authority of science was employed as a means toward what essentially amounted to the selling of new lifestyles. Science provided the Fair with authority, but it was in service of mass consumer ends. Because scientists and their organizations were unable to mount an effective protest, the reformist desire to associate their worldview with democracy fell apart.

Kuznick posits that this fact helps to explain why science so easily came under the helm of Cold War military-related research for grants and approval during the 1950s. In all, we can speculate on how a Fair might have looked like had it been rooted in ideas other than those of Bernays and Geddes.

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The Other Fair

I’ve written this essay stylized loosely as a “tale of two Fairs,” focusing on what went largely unnoticed at the time. I’ve tried to capture another Fair that was also present then, whose possible consequences were noticed by some astute observers, but still lost in the dream. Ultimately, two fundamental visions were put forward, one by Geddes and the other by Bernays, which would reshape America thereafter.

Looking through the archives, one’s historical position clearly determines which Fair one sees. Reading contemporary comments on Geddes’s Futurama, I am always struck by the overwhelmingly negative reactions. The idea of a 14-lane mega-highway in a grid-based metropolis does not evoke much inspiration nowadays. For some, this is where it “all went wrong” regarding urban planning. Others call it excessively polluting, and the main reason why the United States does not have extensive public transit. Yet at one point, Geddes’s design was considered in line with the cutting edge of 20th-century modernism.

But at least, there were ideas. It is hard to imagine what the equivalent American Fair would be in this day and age, either due to our cynicism or because the infrastructural ability to build is simply no longer there. High modernism was reliant on grand national narratives told to an eager public. Having lost this sense of the future today, it’s no wonder the 1939 World’s Fair feels like a portal to a lost world, one that nonetheless made ours.

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In the past month or so, I’ve been on a kick reading about modernity and what it really entails. My last essay discussed a few early modernist writers, and how their words relate to the lived experience of far more people today than ever before.

In my view, thinking of the present this way gives it the weight it deserves. And since I like writing pieces in conversation with past ones, I wanted to continue this thought, but from a different angle.

If there’s an image most associated with modernity, it’s likely the locomotive. The train and railway have so often been the leading motif of modern culture. For countless political movements, writers, artists, engineers, scientists, and the like, the locomotive was viewed as the spiritual engine of the times. The main attraction toward it was its speed, which was thought to embody that relentless push forward so characteristic of modernity.1

The symbolism behind the locomotive has since lost some of its power, but in the early 20th century, it truly was everywhere. One can understand modernism just by following it across many different contexts. Italian futurists, for one, commonly evoked it to illustrate the momentum that would power their machine worlds. In another, completely different context, the locomotive became synonymous in the Soviet Union with history’s march forward.

The diverse use of the locomotive as an idea reveals what was actually at stake: it was effectively a battle over who could lay claim to modernity. The locomotive was not just about speed and industry. It was also about everything else, all at once: mass politics, history, and the imaginable future. The stakes could not have been higher, and countless died for them.

For this piece, I have collected literature and images relating to the locomotive as a metaphor. Through these historical artifacts, there is a story to be told of how an industrial machine was elevated into a representation of modernity itself. Perhaps by recounting such a history, we can better frame our own modern present and the energy that animates it.

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A Story of Modernity’s Casualties

It's easy to imagine why the locomotive spoke so directly to ideas of progress and its movement. It annihilated distance and allowed for an unprecedented opening up of the world.2

Still, the early railroad was equally as representative of that ugly underside of modernization. Amid all that unparalleled potential also came great loss. In this way, the locomotive embodies the core contradiction of modernity. It is a story of modernity’s tragedies as much as its dynamism.

The first causality was the pastoral, and many early 19th-century artists found the machines to be ugly and destructive.3 Writer John Ruskin lamented that “you can’t have art where you have smoke.”4 And poet William Wordsworth likewise found them “at war with old poetic feeling.”5 These objections may sound dated now, but they were put forward by a handful of artists and critics with luddite sympathies.

Still, these romanticized upper-class fusses were some of the weakest objections. In reality, it was people themselves who often found themselves in the way of the railroad and modernization. In the United States, it resulted in the importation of an underclass of exploited, immigrant labor; military encroachment on Native American lands; the near killing off of the American buffalo; the polluting extraction of coal and other resources; and thousands of on-site deaths which were never reported.

A similar tragedy unfolded in all corners of the world as empires industrialized themselves.6 One of the most moving illustrations of this sad reality came from Czarist Russia in the heavily-censored poem The Railway (1864) by Nikolai Nekrasov. Its influence was so lasting that a common connotation for the word "train" in Russia in the mid-to-late 1800s was "death."7 The poem recounts the tens of thousands who perished building the Russian railway, their souls singing as the train passes, and how "all along it there are bones, Russian bones..."8

By the late 1800s, railroads became bogged down in scandal after scandal. In the United States, the public openly asked to be saved from railroad monopolies.9 Critics contended that the speculative frenzy bred monopolistic corruption. In 1881, H. D. Lloyd wrote in The Atlantic that we must affirm that “the nation is the [real] engine of the people,” not the locomotive.

In less than the ordinary span of a lifetime, our railroads have brought upon us the worst labor disturbance, the greatest of monopolies, and the most formidable combination of money and brains that ever overshadowed a state.10

Many worried the railroad tycoons had grown so large that they were holding the state hostage, steering its power solely for their interests.

By the turn of the 20th century, a prevailing opinion was that the locomotive was not working toward what people expected of modernity. To somehow “reclaim the engine” thus became a thinkable concern. On this point, I have to return to Nekrasov’s poem The Railroad (1864). It hints at something which would later be a core trope of modernism.

As I already said, the poem laments the Russian peasants who died building the railroad. Yet, it also affirms the actual creator of the railroad as being the people themselves. There is this hope that someday they will harness this power to build a new road for themselves into “wonderful times.”11 In fact, the poem was one of the first to affirm industrial power as the "creative work of the people."

This transformation of the locomotive—from its initial association with domineering big business into a vehicle of popular creation—would push it into mass culture and politics. The locomotive as a metaphor took on new life in the early 20th century as it became intertwined with what people desired modernity to be.

The Locomotive Joins Mass Society

In the preface to The City of Tomorrow (L’Urbanisme), the famous architect Le Corbusier recounts how a vision of modernism came to him suddenly while walking down a Parisian boulevard in 1924. Frustrated and dodging dangerous traffic, “it was as if the world had gone mad” when just 20 years ago, “the road belonged to us then."12

Yet by the end of the passage, a reversal comes to him. Rather than fight the traffic, Le Corbusier instead gives in and fully identifies with it. He takes a symbolic leap and, as if speaking for industry itself, he realizes “the simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of [such] power."13 He writes, "one participates in it, takes part in the society that is just dawning. One believes in it.”14 At this moment, Le Corbusier learns to speak from the perspective of the locomotive itself.

Le Corbusier was no revolutionary. In fact, he saw this revelation as a way to create industrial mega-structures that would calm mass political zeal, not amplify it.15 Still, this short passage illustrates the transformation of the locomotive as a symbol. Culture began to reflect on the idea that modernity and its locomotive were not outside us, but rather one with "the people."

The ideological battle over who would control the metaphorical engine took shape in the early 20th century. Represented in a variety of contexts, each tells us much about the various contours of modernism.

The Locomotive As Modernist Art

One group particularly entranced by the locomotive and machinery was the early Italian futurists. World War I was viewed as a way to live out this artistic desire in all its variety. In a 1914 letter, founder of the Futurist Movement Filippo Marinetti wrote to the artist Gino Severini:

I believe that the Great War, intensely lived by Futurist painters, can produce true convulsions in their imaginations… [Boccioni, Carrà and myself] urge you to interest yourself pictorially in the war and its repercussions in Paris. Try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its mechanical forms (military trains, fortifications, wounded men, ambulances, hospitals, parades etc.).16

The bellowing sounds of locomotives also found themselves in modernist, musical interpretations. In Pacific 231, conducted by Arthur Honegger, an orchestra interprets the sounds of a locomotive accelerating, moving at top speed, and finally coming to a stop.

The Locomotive as Imperial Aspiration

Aside from art, the locomotive was widely utilized by imperial states to plant a flag in the new order they hoped to build. States attempted to embody their people through the locomotive. Emergent empires employed “propaganda-trains” and used their railways to project unity within their dominion in a time of great upheaval.

Balkanzug was one such propaganda-train for the German Empire during WWI.

Before the Balkanzug, there was also the proposed Berlin-Baghdad railway that caused a scramble among the great powers. It never served to be a propaganda-train, but was one of the major provocations leading up to World War I.

The railway was heavily symbolic because it tacitly signaled to the Ottomans that there was German support for “a jihad to liberate all Muslims under British domination." "The result would be a world where Islamism and a German empire would peaceably blend.”17 The Ottomans entered World War I on such conjectures.

The Berlin-Baghdad railway was an attempt by the Ottoman Empire to catch up to European powers, but there was another more successful one. Now forgotten, the Hejaz Railway was the last projection of Ottoman power that truly shocked European empires before World War I. It became fully operational in 1908.

The massive project was steeped in metaphoric importance. The railway would unite all of Islam behind the Ottoman state by constructing a long line between Istanbul and the holy site of Mecca. It was intended to pacify the rising tide of nationalism with Islamic unity through industrial might which ultimately failed.

In East Asia, Imperial Japan extensively used the locomotive as an idea to project cultural power. It was a core component of the state’s modern mythos. Disputes over the critical Chinese Eastern Railway led to a war with Russia (1904-1905). It ended with an industrialized Asian power decisively defeating a European one for the first time in history. The railway war prize was renamed the South Manchuria Railway.

The railway was heavily publicized both as a testament to Japan’s modernization of Manchuria and as a thread that tied together all the peoples under its dominion. When Japan left the League of Nations in 1932 after its invasion of Manchuria, the South Manchuria Railway was sent to Chicago's World Fair (1933-1934) to demonstrate the progress it would bring to the newly-occupied region.18 The railway corporation was also active in the financing and production of films, releasing over 200 titles.19

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Communism Claims the Locomotive

Communists were especially attached to the locomotive as a metaphor, particularly as a means for understanding history. This turn of phrase was originally established by Karl Marx in 1850 when he wrote that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.”20

Within Marxism, there was this belief that revolutions tore the very fabric of social reality. Philosopher Walter Benjamin likened it to “blasting open the continuum of history.”21 The locomotive's speed could not be more fitting for this millenarian view. Marxist commentary before and during the interwar years consistently debated the locomotive metaphor — if it was moving too quickly, what were the tracks, what was being left behind, and where it was even going.

In The Russian Revolution (1918), Rosa Luxemburg criticized the 1917 October Revolution in these terms—the locomotive had not gone far enough.

The “golden mean” cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, it drags down with it irredeemably into the abyss.22

Others considered that, perhaps, the locomotive was momentarily not in step with communism. In 1933, Leon Trotsky remarked that “fascism, it seems, has unexpectedly become the locomotive of history.”23

But the locomotive was not just figurative for communists. It was also an actual, physical entity capable of circulating ideology. From the very beginning, the motif of the locomotive cemented itself in the Soviet mythos with Vladimir Lenin’s return to Russia, arriving at Finland Station in April 1917. Both this train and the one that later carried his casket around the Soviet Union were the only two locomotives preserved by the state.

During the Civil War (1917-1923), locomotives wielded immense cultural power which was projected throughout the entire country. The metaphor broke into everyday life as the Bolsheviks constructed “agit-trains.” They were tasked with broadcasting the forces of modernization to the rural peasants of Russia. The most famous of the trains, October Revolution, served some 12 tours between 1919-1920.

Agit-trains were typically made up of 16 to 18 cars and screened cinema. They were also equipped with “broadcast radio stations, telephones, mobile camera shops, printing presses, and newspaper offices.”24 In two months alone, the October Revolution screened cinema to over 100,000 people in 97 sessions. Other agit-trains included Red East, Soviet Caucasus, and Red Cossack.

The purpose of the agit-train was to bring modernity right to the periphery with all the newest mediums. Many peasants undoubtedly imbued such experiences with religious connotation, as if something holy had entered their provincial space. Thanks to their novelty, the trains proved to be quite popular as a social phenomenon.

The locomotive as a metaphor reached its most ideological form in the Soviet Union. But the modernist novelty of its beginnings was patently ruined as it regressed into viewing its conductor as a single individual. On his sixtieth birthday in 1939, Stalin was given the singular title of “the great driver of the locomotive of history.”25 The locomotive as a metaphor for history transformed itself into a metaphor for a cult of power.

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The Metaphorical Train Departs

I close here at the end of this journey, having passed through many of the contours of early 20th-century modernity — from art and futurism, to imperial statecraft and war, to communism and the march of history itself. Providing us with a panoramic view in all its variety, the locomotive as a metaphor is inseparable from the drama of modernity.

Still, the idea rears its head today. It remains a core feature of Chinese socialism, both as a domestic representation of its industrial dominance and as geopolitical tactic. President Xi continues to use the 20th-century language of the “locomotive of history.” Amid the war in Ukraine, locomotives have also once again become choke-points with grand geostrategic significance.

While the train has definitely not left us today, the metaphor arguably has. The late Mark Fisher described the contemporary undercurrent as the “slow cancellation of the future.” The past few decades have seen a major decline in large-scale public projects, especially in the United States. The vitality that would power the locomotive metaphor into our current modernity has run out of steam. Many feel like the spiritual, creative well is running dry.

Some might contend that the locomotive metaphor was a spoiled one of hubris from the start, for mastery over nature is fundamentally misguided. But really, those that historically abused the metaphor in this way were the misguided ones. I would rather view the symbol as the explosive consolidation of human potential.

The idea behind the locomotive is so easily transferred over to the internet’s capabilities today. And in a time when narratives of meaning have collapsed, a comparable catalyst is certainly bubbling under the surface somewhere. My own opinion is that I am a believer in the spontaneous crowd and historical dynamism always returning. As I mulled over in my last piece, it could be that modernity is now picking up steam again.

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When we think of social upheaval and even revolution, the three catalysts that often come to mind are food insecurity, mass unemployment, and war. We can also include high debts and income inequality in the mix, among others. In recent years, another possible factor has entered the conversation: elite overproduction or the problem of too many prospective elites. It is a term popularized by Peter Turchin, a macro-historian and mathematician who specializes in modeling historical trends.

Turchin has garnered both intrigue and notoriety for pursuing what can best be described as Hari Seldon’s dream. In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi Foundation series, Hari Seldon is the brain behind a field called psychohistory: a methodology that seeks to predict the future through complex, statistical aggregates of the past. Much like Seldon, Turchin’s work argues that history does have predictive patterns that can be measured with an accuracy similar to the natural sciences.1 He does so by utilizing the heaps of data we have at our disposal nowadays, relying on dozens of socio-economic indicators said to weaken social cohesion, thus creating cycles of unrest. Elite overproduction is one such indicator and likely the most unique of the bunch.

Turchin’s scope has always been exceptionally large, analyzing the long durée of history’s processes to pinpoint patterns. He has even developed his own interdisciplinary field called cliodynamics—a branch of historical dynamics, the scientific modeling of history’s movement. For Turchin, history could be a hard science, and historians could serve as clairvoyants who can glimpse into the future. He has seen a surge of interest lately for predicting in 2012 that the 2020s would be a decade of “major upheaval.”

“If we are to learn how to develop a healthy society, we must transform history into an analytical, predictive science.” — Turchin, writing in Nature (2008)

I’ve always been someone who has viewed history as a literary form with scientific characteristics. Reducing history to mathematical inputs and outputs sometimes misses the point entirely (I’ve written something on this before). Still, Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction has much use.

In this piece, I’ll be tackling both the merits of the theory itself and some limitations of Turchin’s scientific history by discussing a period when elite overproduction was at an acute, practically terminal, stage. The period in question is Russia in the latter half of the 19th century. Artists and writers at the time often spoke of a resentful, educated group that was pushing the country in an unknown direction. Ideologically potent, what became of this faction and their followers ultimately turned out to be of immense consequence to world history.

An investigation into how elite overproduction unraveled Russia could also provide us with some perspective on how to assess the process in our own, present time. But more on all that shortly, because it would first be a good idea to properly define the term as Turchin understands it.

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What ‘Elite Overproduction’ Means

As someone who has often privileged looking at social history ‘from below,’ it is sometimes helpful to instead consider things from the vantage point of the very top. In democracies, rivalries within power itself often get misleadingly interpreted as possessing some popular character because that is the way we colloquially speak of its governance. However, given that U.S. electoral party politics has become less willing and able to integrate popular demands for decades now, perhaps an explanation ‘from above’ can be more explanatory.2

Turchin’s story of elite overproduction in the United States begins in the 1970s when workers’ wages first stopped keeping pace with productivity. You may have seen this chart before.

The resulting income inequality created not only an unprecedented gap, but the sheer number of wealthy people also increased.

According to the research by economist Edward Wolff, from 1983 to 2010 the number of American households worth at least $10 million grew to 350,000 from 66,000.3

As the concentration of wealth-holders increases, so do potential elite members. Turchin defines elites as “power-holders” who are able to influence behaviors by holding top posts within the four areas of social power: “military (coercion), economic, administrative or political, and ideological.”4 There’s some overlap with Turchin’s definition of “elites” and another term, the professional–managerial class (PMC).

Naturally, as the pool of potential elite members grows, so does enrollment within higher education. But because the various centers of social power cannot absorb this larger and larger caste of people, a degree no longer necessarily grants you the status it once did. Many college graduates, even from leading universities, find themselves today chronically underemployed, indebted and despondent. This is essentially elite overproduction: an excess of overly-credentialed people and not enough positions. It causes all areas of social power to become bloated and ill-responsive, effectively working more and more as if solely for-themselves and their own longevity because they must now be hyper-competitive and guarded.

Turchin is not the first to invent this theory, but he has given it a proper name. Some of the earlier assessments of American elite power include C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) and others. Yet, it is historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History (1934-1961) that most resembles Turchin’s work, at least in spirit. He put forward a cyclical civilizational theory where creative (elite) minorities devolve into dominant (elite) minorities that worship themselves, leading to decay.5 The ruling elites insulate themselves, and become slower and less attuned to the demands of the actually-existing society under them. At the same time, Turchin would argue, more people than ever want to join their ranks. What results is institutional sclerosis and inertia, weakened state capacity, the decoupling of the state from the base of society, and many other symptoms of malaise.

Naturally, there’s many directions you can take this theory. Maybe one could even say its consequences are greatly overstated, but Turchin could not disagree more. He argues elite overproduction is a transhistorical problem not rooted in any particular period. Among his indicators, he considers it “one of the more important factors” in predicting instability across all of history.6

Still, despite its usefulness, there has been little exploration on how this structural problem actually manifests in culture and politics. On account of these shortcomings, I come back to my initial criticism of Turchin’s scientific history for being incomplete. I instead turn to an artist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, for a more compelling understanding of elite overproduction actually rooted in social relations, as he intuitively understood it in his own country in the second half of the 19th century. It was then that a small, educated group was caught between the politically-inert peasantry and the regressive czarist state. Dostoevsky was in literary dialogue with this troublesome segment for most of his life.

Russia’s Educated But Impoverished Nihilists

In April 1866, Czar Alexander II’s life was almost cut short by a rogue assassin in St. Petersburg whose attempt missed. Initially, rumors spread that it was a noble who felt wronged.7 Maybe someone had tried to take the Czar’s life because of his 1861 proclamation freeing the serfs. Others assumed, if not a noble, it must have been some foreign plot. But surprisingly, it was homegrown. “Are you Polish?” the authorities asked the attacker. “No, pure Russian,” he told them.8 The assailant turned out to be a former law student from Moscow University, Dmitry Karakozov, who came from a poor provincial gentry family.9 He had been virtually homeless in the city for about a month before the act, occasionally working a factory job. He suffered from extreme hypochondria and depression. His intention was to kill the Czar to inspire the peasantry and then commit suicide.

Dostoevsky rightfully saw this as one of the most consequential moments in his life. It was the first time a revolutionary had ever tried to assassinate the Czar. Dostoevsky had already gotten a taste for such violence years ago when a group called Young Russia declared, “we will move against the Winter Palace to wipe out all who dwell there.”10 Their leaflets were shoved between door hinges throughout residential St. Petersburg. Karakazov’s attempt on the Czar’s life was this idea finally acted upon. Russia was now surely turning a page, something was in the air, and the unthinkable became possible.

At the time, Dostoevsky was just starting to write Crime and Punishment. The main character, Raskolnikov, was much like Karakazov. He, too, was an impoverished product of the university system and possessed a similar millenarian attitude toward violence. Critics like Dmitry Pisarev openly noted their resemblance.11 But perhaps the greatest similarity between Karakazov and Raskolnikov was their fundamental understanding of why they committed ‘the act.’ Court documents revealed that, after the assassination attempt, the Czar reflexively asked Karakazov, “what do you want?” to which he blankly responded, “nothing.”12 When Sonya plainly asks Raskolnikov for his motive at the end of Crime and Punishment, he responds as if in dialogue with Karakazov’s sentiment, “I just wanted to dare, that’s the whole reason.”13 The act was fundamentally about asserting oneself amid depravity, to dare, to finally be visible. It was about everything and nothing all at once.

Dostoevsky had demonstrated incredible intuition in foreseeing this socio-cultural development, but the coincidences happened not once, but twice. Remarkably, just days before the first chapter of Crime and Punishment was serially published, yet another Raskolnikov-like character appeared in the news. A law student named Danilov had killed his pawnbroker and servant in their apartment.14 The first few chapters of Crime and Punishment were already written by the time it had occurred.15 The crime was so similar to Raskolnikov’s, down to the double-murder, it bordered on prophetic. Later, when the closing chapters of Raskolnikov’s confession were published, they appeared “almost simultaneously with Danilov's trial and his condemnation,” which was widely reported together.16 Early reviews made sure to compare and contrast the psychological state of both young men.

In Danilov and Karakazov and others, Dostoevsky recognized a character profile that would repeatedly be referenced in his novels thereafter. There was a certain, small strata of Russian society that was emanating an energy at odds with the established order. Understanding their ideas and motivations would become Dostoevsky’s main focus for the remainder of his life. In it, he saw the fundamentals of an existential conflict that signaled modernity and one that would soon envelop the entire world.

Who Were the Nihilists?

Although small relative to the total population, this tiny group would grow to become among the most consequential in modern Russian history. They were defined by their rejection of the present state of things. As one memoir wrote, “everything that had existed traditionally and had formerly been accepted without criticism came up for rearrangement.”17 Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons spoke of nihilists as a group “who doesn’t bow down before authorities, doesn’t accept even one principle on faith.”18

The nihilists were thus negationists, hard rationalists, radicals, and often aligned themselves with socialism and romantic folk-like populism, viewing themselves as if leading a world-historical mission. They made up the ranks of groups like the Land and Liberty (Земля и воля) and People’s Will (Наро́дная во́ля). To wipe away all assumptions, to start new, was the guiding principle. As Bazarov said, “nowadays, the most useful thing of all is rejection—of everything.”19 This rejection was applied not only to thought, but also to traditional styles of dress and demeanor.

But who made up the ranks of the nihilists and their supporters? For a precise answer, let us return to the scientist, Turchin. He has compiled their numbers and background to see whether or not they could really be loosely grouped with elite overproduction.

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Turchin’s Assessment

In his 2009 book Secular Cycles, Turchin delineates 19th century Russia as fitting his schema. From 1782 to 1858, the number of nobles increased by over 2.5x and kept growing well into the 20th century.20 Most of them, however, were petty gentry who had few or even no servants. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the landed nobility began to steadily give up their land to merchants and the petty bourgeoisie. Without forced labor, many noble estates that produced grain failed and were sold.

Because the reforms were irreversible, solutions had to be found on how to appease the resentful nobility who had increased in number but were declining in economic terms. The answer was to expand their social and political positions of power. This occurred in two main ways. Firstly, local governing councils called zemstvo were established in 1864 and nobles made up over 3/4th of their positions.21 Secondly, higher education was expanded and the gentry were admitted in unprecedented numbers.

These ‘unprecedented numbers,’ however, were still remarkably small. In 1859, only 8,750 individuals were students of universities or institutes—and by 1897, this number grew to 30,000.22 However, Turchin writes, they still made up the bulk of the revolutionaries in the decades ahead: some “sixty-one percent of the revolutionaries of the 1860s were students or recent graduates,” and an even higher percentage came from the noble strata more generally. 23

Like for Dmitry Karakozov, the prospects for graduates were poor and many were impoverished. Some failed to even finish their studies due to tuition fees or expulsion over political activities. The state and civil society simply could not absorb them, even if the graduates and students wanted it. As Turchin writes:

Whereas the number of [university] students increased fourfold [between 1860 to 1880], the size of the government bureaucracy increased by only 8 percent from 119,000 to 129,000. Even if we add to this number the 52,000 zemstvo positions, it is still evident that only the minority of elite aspirants could be employed.24

The czarist state’s strategy of “education for the few” rather than “modest schooling for the many” had effectively appealed to no one.25 The educated gentry became poorer and resentful, and the peasants remained landless and destitute. A bridge between the two thus became thinkable and even likely. Add yet another element—the emergent industrial working class in the urban centers—and one sees how these three segments converged to end Czardom. Structurally, they all developed less and less of a stake in its continuation. This meant collapse was all but inevitable, finally reaching a head in both 1905 and 1917.

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Dostoevsky’s Intuition

Good artists have good intuition and Dostoevsky was no exception. He intimately understood the moment partly because he had once been part of these radical circles.

At 23 years old, Dostoevsky became a sensation for his book Poor Folk (1844), partly thanks to the praise of literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Through Belinsky, he was exposed to the ideology that would germinate by the end of the century. Belinsky peeled back the layers of Russian society until there was little left to critique. He negated virtually all of it and lectured Dostoevsky about “the end of property and marriage, the end of nations and religions.” Influenced by utopian socialists, he cited Pierre Leroux, Lous Blanc, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. “There will come a time—I fervently believe it—[…] there will be no rich nor poor, neither kings nor subjects, there will be brethren,” he told the young writer.26

Before being arrested and sent to do hard labor in Siberia, Dostoevsky’s last activity was reading aloud a letter from none other than Belinsky. Belinsky had tragically died the year before from tuberculosis. To the Petrashevsky Circle he frequented, Dostoevsky spoke of the “awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse.”27 The spy in the room later told the authorities the response was electric. Channeling Belinsky, Dostoevsky then directed his ire toward Nikolai Gogol and other reactionary writers, and made an absolute diagnosis of Russia—”look beneath your feet, you are standing on the brink of an abyss!”28

To the growing number of university students and graduates in Russia, the abyss under their feet was becoming impossible to ignore. While authorities may have viewed the nihilists as simply a sect to be squashed, Dostoevsky instead saw them as something homegrown from the soil, augmented by real suffering, and thus had to be understood at the root. These people were genuine, even fervent, in their beliefs. It could therefore not be shooed away through repression because it would inevitably come to a head again (and it did, many times over, eventually succeeding in killing Czar Alexander II in 1881).

Throughout Dostoevsky’s novels, we repeatedly find the trope of the university-educated but disaffected person, let down by the conditions in which they live. Aside from Raskolnikov, we have Ivan Karamazov from Brothers Karamazov, a well-intentioned but pessimistic materialist who eventually succumbs to devilish hallucinations. In Demons, there is Alexey Kirilov, a civil engineer who romanticizes suicide, and Ivan Shatov, a former serf expelled from the university system, along with other minor characters like Arina Virginsky’s sister, a nihilist student. In The Idiot, Ippolit Terentyev is an intellectual nihilist dying of tuberculosis. And in The Adolescent, Arkady Dolgoruky is a young man who eschews his university education, finding it useless, and instead opts to become wealthy ‘like a Rothschild.’ There are, of course, many more examples.

Then, there is the civil service worker—a position that an overqualified, educated person might begrudgingly do despite no fulfillment. The Underground Man in Notes from Underground occupies such a post, lamenting his invisibility in this soulless day-to-day existence. Dostoevsky’s absurdist short story The Crocodile evokes a similar sentiment: a tale of a civil service worker who is swallowed by a crocodile, but continues his work comfortably inside the belly of the beast despite his wife pleading he leave. In the end, she abandons him while contemplating divorce because she cannot afford to buy the crocodile from the animal’s owner.

Finally, there is the noble who has given up all pretensions of morality and social-rootedness. He is a product of the social stratification that is upending all of society, indicative of the ‘abyss under everyone’s feet.’ Nikolay Stavrogin in Demons and Prince Valkovsky in Humiliated and Insulted both fit this anti-social archetype.

Dostoevsky’s characters thus touch on the many socio-cultural dimensions linked to elite overproduction. From the disillusioned students themselves, to the mindless bureaucratic positions they would be working in, to the unrooted and amoral nobles who have lost all regard for the society in which they live—it is all part of an emergent social reality that Dostoevsky linked as unique to his time, a kind of literary historicization.

‘Predicting History,’ But Not Really

For Turchin, social reality is a puzzle dominated by empirical patterns. Accordingly, the highest goal of any study of society is the making of it into a hard science. Predictive accuracy is believed to be further and further developed by studying the confluence of structural forces and its various social indicators.

Perhaps Turchin’s model can help clarify how a certain strata of individuals structurally came to be, but it cannot explain why they adopt the ideas they do. Elite overproduction was certainly responsible for permanently changing Russian society, this much can be measured empirically in aggregates. Yet, ideas and the interpersonal web from which they spawn possesses an uncertainty that goes beyond empiricism. Turchin establishes the broad playing field where historical subjects act, but what emerges from the interplay within it is wide open.

How useful are predictions if their results are subject to such imprecise, wild volatility? Maybe you can loosely foresee coming turmoil, but if you cannot accurately pinpoint how it will manifest, you will likely fail to enact preventive measures to counter it. Your crystal ball, therefore, becomes a lot less useful, more akin to perceiving a vague figure approaching you in the distance that you cannot make out, rather than anything recognizable and able to be acted upon. This is because history is not purely an “analytical, predictive science” like Turchin claims, but inherently interpretive.

What Turchin sees as structural and repeating, Dostoevsky instead viewed as a problem of thought rooted in his time. Dostoevsky viewed reason as fundamentally unable to wholly account for the total sum of society. In a world of uprooted individualism within an educated but resentful stratum, this proved to be the question. As Shigalyov states in Demons, ”starting with unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”29 In a satire on writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment argues that the social sphere is merely a problem to be solved like a mathematical equation. Many of Dostoevsky’s characters also confront his question, written during a time when science was gaining recognition as the end-all solution to all social ills—as a possible form of salvation itself.

Yet, as Dostoevsky argues, this view is fundamentally misguided. As he writes in Notes from Underground, when “[man] crosses oceans, sacrifices his life in the search [for two plus two]… he’s somehow afraid. For he senses, once he finds it, there will be nothing to search for.”30 When speaking of social relations, hard empiricism can often conceal as much as it seeks to explain. In Brothers Karamazov, Father Zozima and Ivan touch on this same argument. Theologian Sergei Bulgakov best sums up Zosima’s position as meaning, “for the enlightened eye of the saints, the world is a continuously-enacted miracle [but] conformity to mechanical law of the world […] conceals divine Providence from us.”31 Such a sentiment need not be understood in purely religious terms either. Philosopher Hannah Arendt put it more secularly, “the new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability; The new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”32

Perhaps we can interpret Arendt’s words loosely as a critique of Turchin’s scientific history and its claim of hard predictive power. The structural realities of elite overproduction may be visible repeatedly throughout history and across societies. I do not doubt its usefulness as a social indicator. In fact, the idea has succeeded in reorienting my thinking on structural change. Yet, what ultimately sprung from it in Russia was not a pattern, but tantamount to a miracle: the end of the Czar, in what was formerly the most reactionary and traditionalist country in all of Europe, and the establishment of the Soviet Union. By Turchin’s own hand, we can discount his predictive power.

In a later piece I hope to someday write, I will be focusing less on critiquing Turchin’s philosophy of history and instead will be exploring elite overproduction as it has manifested today in the United States. Compared to Czarist Russia, the U.S. has been dealing with this social problem in a far more muted but still unsustainable way.

Edit (September 28, 2022): Historian Peter Tuchin has responded to this piece on Twitter, so I fixed a few minor words for the sake of accuracy.