Should we embrace the monsters of chaos? Thoughts on Being Ready for The Event

Why now? What brought about this sudden jarring shift from a government that cares for us “cradle to grave” into one saying “we can’t cope, you need to be resilient”.

“You fear the monsters of Chaos, mortal? Well you should. They will shrive your soul before the altar of their infinite lust. They are powerful, and terrible. But, and here is the root of all forbidden knowledge, even such creatures as these are nothing but the creations of the minds of men. Without our dreams, they are mere phantasms. It is our thought that conjures them into the world of flesh. And so this is the most dangerous lesson of all. There is nothing so perilous in all the world as the unlocked mind of a man. There is no escape from the consequences of our nature. In our unfettered imagination, the very thing that makes us great, lies the seeds of our ruin and damnation.“

—The Proscribed Scrolls, Folio XIV Mavolion, The Heretic of Framburg

The British government recently launched its “Be Ready” campaign:

“The UK is urging households to stock up enough emergency supplies to survive for three days in a crisis as part of a new campaign to strengthen national resilience.

The “Be Ready” push focuses on the need to be prepared for more familiar emergencies such as floods or wildfires, but also comes as ministers warn about the possibility of war.

Headed by the Cabinet Office, an updated government website advises everyone in the country to consider stocking up on water, non-perishable food, medical and other supplies.”

You can (assuming the looming disaster hasn’t interrupted your internet) visit the Government’s website to download a useful checklist. And, people being what they are, the result is a whole load of modest “prepping” by Brits, accompanied by shortages of corned beef, the first rush on Spam since the 1950s, and empty spaces where once there was bottled water. I’m sure it has been great business for the makers and retailers of clockwork radios, solar chargeable lamps, old-fashioned barbecues and torches. It’s all great fun and a super opportunity for the survivalists among us to flex. We will Be Ready for The Event.

But why? Why now? What brought about this sudden jarring shift from a government that cares for us “cradle to grave” into one saying “we can’t cope, you need to be resilient”. The first hint of this journey from our government saying “we’ve got your back” to “we’re too busy, we’ve done all we can, you’re on your own, hug your neighbour” came with the loud and intrusive mass messaging tests using mobile networks. Despite - or perhaps because of - the advances in sophisticated technologies the first reaction of governments is to run around like Chicken Licken saying we’re doomed. Followed closely by passive aggressive lectures on resilience and paying consultants more money to improve security. Not real security with guns, planes and ships but “food security” and “energy security” all spiralling down into an economic idea called “securonomics”.

Interruptions to power, internet or transport reflect the increased complexity of systems. On one hand this, when those systems work, provides real betterment for most people but on the other hand we become more reliant on these systems. It is less than 20 years since smartphones became commonplace, but try to imagine a world without those phones. What’s also clear is that these systems are fragile and vulnerable, dependent on a few cables and wires and open to vandalism and sabotage in the guise of “hacking”. Aris Roussinos, using the example of a vacuum cleaner called Henry, sets out the distinction and the risks of the ‘interconnectedness of everything’:

“Originally designed to clean out commercial boilers, the Henry is a second-order product of Britain’s lost age of heavy industry, still assembled by hand in a Somerset factory. It does one job, sucking up dirt and dust, and does it as well as it needs to do, without communicating its performance, or user data, or its first flickering doubts and anxieties of consciousness, to distant data centres. When it comes to it, I don’t need my hoover to decide what to clean, or how to do so most efficiently, or act as a high-performance showcase for innovation, but just to perform a simple task, well and reliably. It is more reliable, more robust, simply, because it is less complex.”

When you boil down the advice from the government about being prepared, it amounts to us not being caught short of essentials and having some machines and tools that aren’t going to let us down if there’s no power, water or broadband. But there’s a deeper message that feeds back to ideas of self-sufficiency, resilience and even personal independence. Our government is telling us that we cannot rely on the complex systems - power, water, transport, information - that are central to 21st century civilisation. We are urged to consider, in the manner of nerdy games about the zombie apocalypse, that this civilisation is too fragile, too vulnerable for us to rely on it too heavily. Plus, of course, that us being good, straight-backed, prepared citizens is the final wall preventing a complete collapse into chaos and anarchy.

My fear in all this isn’t that we are in imminent danger of social and economic collapse but rather that the attention of the state, in all its guises, has turned away from making the systems that serve the station strong and protected. Instead there’s a mostly imagined remembering of wartime spirit accompanied by a cult of ‘making do’ all made necessary because the government has given up making electricity supply cheap and reliable, stopped caring much about transport networks (other than who owns them), and believes having among the world’s cleanest drinking water is a failure of private control.

Our government doesn’t plan on attending to security of supply or the maintaining and upgrading of networks because it doesn’t have the cash to do so and, worse, believes that asking the private sector to undertake this task merely creates greedy profiteers. The idea that private investment can make these systems cheaper, more resilient and safer simply doesn’t compute for the average state planner. As a result the systems we have gradually degrade. This is why fridges get hacked, why bad winters and dry summers cripple electricity and water supply, and why trains are late, buses break down and the streets are mostly badly repaired potholes. The government wants us to be tolerant of their failure to do their basic job and, given that government has no intention of even trying to do that maintenance job, it tells us to be prepared for when the systems that supply our lives fail.

There’s a reason for all this, of course. A reason why we pay higher taxes and high energy bills for a worse service. Well two reasons really.

The first is that the main priority of our state is to manage a welfare system while ensuring its own employees are featherbedded. So we have an out-of-control benefits system alongside a vast army of public servants counting the days till they can retire on their great pension. All under the direction of managers for whom exiting a wet paper bag is a major logistical, organisational and financial challenge. And probably impossible.

The second is net zero. Not being concerned about climate change but instead a strategy that directs vast proportions of public investment away from creating resilient systems and spends it on an arbitrary reduction in carbon dioxide emissions at an arbitrary date in the future. Worse, this target is being managed by people who think that bans, controls, taxes, limits and restrictions are the only way to reach that target.

As a result of prioritising welfare and demanding investment is almost all directed towards net zero, we (and Britain is by no means alone here) have a government that tells its populace to mend and make do, to be prepared for systems failure and to get used to the idea that not only are the systems we rely on going to periodically fail but that the government doesn’t care.

Oh, the government will tell you it cares, that’s why it has a website telling you how to prepare for disaster. That the seals are broken, that there’s no longer anything between our lawful, untroubled world and the chaos beyond. Be prepared!

But maybe a bit of collapse, some chaos, is needed? That our government can’t cope with the basic systems of a modern society perhaps sounds a warning that the great bureaucratic edifices of our state are ripe for an injection of chaos. Instead of the dull bureaucratic certainty of modern government there’s a need for some creative destruction, for a new idea of government’s purpose. But are we ready for chaos?

Somewhere in our discussion of preparedness and the fragility of systems that sustain our modern lives there’s an answer Perhaps we can see our way to a theory of change that envisages the creation of new administrative structures and the destruction of the old systems. Perhaps the new systems will be smaller, more local - or at least the control and management of those systems? Maybe the global systems will sustain as gossamer threads linking armoured fortresses of data? And it could be that the chaos forces the transfer of control from singular, monopolistic states to multiple agents, private or public?

What’s certain is that we cannot sustain the current manner in which we fail to manage essential systems while spending a larger and larger part of all we create on the administration of government programmes. Or maybe we can. Is the most resilient thing in our modern culture the bureaucracy that fails to sustain or maintain our systems - a real world Kafka’s Castle? And most days nothing goes wrong, we stumble through our lives without collapsing into depression or screaming in unfocused rage. We can dodge the inevitable failure of systems either by being stoic and prepared or else by the good fortune of bureaucratic failure falling on some other poor soul.

Perhaps we really are, as my wife tells me often, just boiling frogs who haven’t yet noticed we’re about to die. The inertia of bureaucracy means that it doesn’t end but simply, like some strange hive, reinvents itself constantly to the point where everything is government. And it was too late.