On the Politics of Economic Optimism
2025
The global tautological enclave is an outcome of market saturation, where economic growth has far exceeded its own capacity. Under this environment, capital is limited to the greatest hierarchies, with the majority population unable to afford a basic living. Those that espouse to “build back better”, through unlimited growth and improved living standards, are indoctrinating unending economic optimism by a political strategy of the most cynical nature.
To be clear, periods of heightened economic “optimism” are by nature partnered with a political climate of cynicism. A divide and conquer strategy, where all the spoils of wealth are parcelled out for the benefit of a few and well connected, in what is in essence a “zero sum” game. By promoting unlimited economic growth, circular stagnation results in the accumulation of capital at the higher end of social class, while optimism throughout the market system prevails, and fear persists that a structural adjustment must be avoided at all costs. “Faith” in market expansion brings hopes of prosperity, when all evidence to the contrary is presented.
In many ways, this marks the period of democratic capital, or at least its general trajectory, but the enclave is inherently unstable because entrenched economic optimism “is” built on a political cynicism. In this system, there is no room for conflict or formative competition, surface collaborations predominate and success is not achieved by individual or collective merit, rather by what is inherited or occupied.
In a world that is being divided by concentrations of power, capital can no longer flow freely to invest in new inventive organizations, largely resulting in the establishment of government-corporate monopolies that are anti-competitive, and systems in themselves that are entirely self-referential. New productive organizations are quickly absorbed to neutralize any competitive element. In its place, the establishment of uncountable government and corporate innovation programs demonstrate the failure of a targeted approach to “innovation by collaboration”, where winners are carefully selected to achieve a predetermined outcome, essentially amounting to risk-mitigated investments. Entire departments of the banking sector are devoted to reducing risk, contributing to innovation stagnation and the consolidation of wealth and power, leaving one question unanswered: what is the risk of not taking a risk?
Although it is difficult to know precisely the duration, this age of the economic and political enclave may persist for many years, decades or centuries, but the extended trajectory of systems results in the opposite market tendency, where political optimism is accompanied by market adjustment. The global enclave may be temporary in the broad history of things, where contemporary trends in market capitalism fail to recognize the “natural” tendency of systems: “all” systems tend towards greater uncertainty. In physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy, can be broadly applied to ordered systems, and especially to the politics and economics of human nature … or its evolution.
All systems will become more distributed over time, where a politics of optimism is distributive rather than consolidated. Redistributions, the dissolution of binary states, parity achieved for new productive organizations and increased innovation from the uncertain spaces beyond measure, will conclude in a historical irony that all of the promises espoused by the global enclave are achieved by its opposite. Generally speaking, new productive organizations emerge from the “grey”, analogous to the “whiteness” and “lightness” of all colours at once.
The tendency towards uncertainty partnered with a conscientious modulation of market cycles, will generate new “worlds”, where something accidental emerges that defies the rationality of origins created. Uncertainty results in technologically generative climates that are sustainable because they are adaptable by nature. Significant shifts are periodically engendered by the accident of things that transform the very nature of invention itself: an invention of invention.
After an unimaginable amount of time, when the entropy of things has reached its infinite level, where every element of the “world” has been distributed to the ends of space, something emerges by accident, and maps “everything” back onto a new beginning…