Let the Illusions Die

Changing our relationship to power and where it is taking us

This is an anxious time. Old orders are vanishing along with the illusions that sustained them. New technologies are transforming human life without a sense of where it is all going. Somehow, the daily realities of life coincide with the forces remaking it, systems that feel beyond our control despite our participation in them.

That’s a lot, I know. For the last few weeks, on the back end of a book tour and amidst the normal slowing down of summer, I’ve felt – more than usual – the sense that this new age of anxiety is trying to tell us something. So, as I’m in between subjects to write about, I thought I’d share a few observations about some of the bigger things happening around us.

First, it is unusually hot. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in places – from London to Des Moines – under severe heat advisories, the temperature soaring over 100 degrees. No one thinks this heat is normal, and yet each year it gets hotter.

Of course, this is what we’ve been told would happen over the course of the 21^st century. Yet at the precise time that what was foreseen has happened, the belief that human beings should do something about climate change has receded. Meanwhile, it keeps getting hotter.

Second, war is being normalized. It is no longer shocking, or even surprising, to read about the latest escalation in Eastern Europe or the Middle East – two thirds of the map that made up the two World Wars. No one can say how these wars will end; instead, they become a kind of background noise, with diminishing focus on the people trapped within them.

Of course, most people do not want these or other wars to go on. Yet they do, acquiring a self-sustaining logic of their own. Consider the war against Iran, which now exists for a purpose – reopening the Strait of Hormuz – that did not exist at its outset (and which, conveniently for this essay, is about getting access to fossil fuels).

Third, the technologies remaking life are accelerating. No day passes without some new hyperbolic proclamation about the onset of Artificial Intelligence, while hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated for its deployment. No one – not even the best AI model – can explain what destination this is leading to; what’s clear is that no government is doing much at all to steer it.

Of course, we have recent experience of how new technologies can transform society. Social media has done more to change how humans interact with information, and each other, than anything before it. Yet we still don’t really understand its impact. My own memory of life before it is hazy even though it wasn’t that long ago.

There is much else happening in the world. But something about this nexus of climate, war, and technology feels much bigger than, say, Donald Trump hiding in a catering cart. Because it feels like the future that we are all hurtling towards, and yet that kind of future does not feel sustainable.

I am not suggesting we succumb to doomerism. What I do think we need to do is understand better what is happening, why it is happening, and what are potential remedies. And no, I am not going to do that in one post, nor would I ever claim to have all the answers. Indeed, part of what got us here is people who think they have all the answers.

Let me offer a couple of thoughts that have been ricocheting around my head in between algorithmically delivered images and information.

First, power is running amok like an uncaged predator. Yes, there have always been powerful and power-hungry people in the world. But there has been a steady dismantling of the guardrails around power, particularly in the United States. And now, there seems to be no end to the pursuit of domination.

We have recently seen the world’s first trillionaire (who also dismantled the world’s largest development agency). We have grown accustomed to an oligarch class that speaks openly about replacing human beings or ignoring the onset of climate change. We have a president who makes ignoring or weaponizing the law a feature of his administration. We have reclaimed the language or empire while launching two regime change wars within a few weeks of one another.

Ok, you might say, but it’s always been like this. But not when you consider how power, at this scale, is interacting with the transformation of the climate, the dangers of mass violence, or the subservience that human beings are coming to feel relative to technology.

Now, to put the onus on us: we all, in some way, plug into and sustain these systems. We fill up our tank and don’t want higher prices. We vote for the people who start the wars and pay the taxes for them. We share our data and download the newest models. We are, each in our own way, part of these systems which have acquired their self-sustaining logic.

So, clearly, there is no way off this trajectory without fundamentally altering our relationship to power. Unusual, particularly for Americans, it must be seen as something to be constrained instead of pursued.

Second, it feels increasingly clear that the course we are on is not one that most people want. Some of this is for obvious reasons. For instance: everything costs more while a handful of people vacuum up the wealth.

More fundamentally, though, people seem to be groping for a way to be – well – people amidst all this change. I’ve written recently about how much people seem to want to be together in public spaces (sometimes watching a Homeric epic nonetheless); to celebrate a common identity or watch the World Cup; to spend less time on screens or hating one another because it serves some political agenda. The horrors of Gaza changed public attitudes, if not policies. And yes, people would rather not live in extreme heat.

This impulse – to be human – is fundamentally connected to our problem with power. Because we will not find a way to preserve our humanity without figuring out a way to constrain those in power: who want to keep profiting off fossil fuels or starting profitable wars or insisting that new technologies could never be regulated.

This is power that insists you have no agency. But there is nothing inevitable about that, precisely because you are a part of the systems that sustain this power.

When I started writing this, I decided to title it the Age of Anxiety before remembering that was a poem by Auden.

We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die

These were not, upon first re-reading, reassuring words. But if you consider them closely, there is a useful lesson that carries something approximating hope.

We must first let some illusions die. About the way things have been. About the inevitability of a certain kind of progress, particularly the American brand. No, we cannot reverse change and return to some idealized past. But if we let that go, perhaps we can take control of change so that it serves us rather than ruining us.

The people who want you to think nothing can change are, most often, the people who are changing things – more often, for the worse. Look around (in the physical world, not the online one) and you will find people who want better outcomes, for themselves and for other people. The question is how to make the future look more like that than the one being foisted upon us.

There is something freeing about letting illusions die, even the ones that were comforting. Because then the self-perpetuation of systems is no longer a foregone conclusion. Then, and only then, can we figure out not just where we’re going but where we want to go.