Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air was made into the critically-acclaimed 2009 film starring George Clooney. His memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever chronicles his own adventure going from rural Minnesota to the Ivy League. Lately, he co-hosts the podcast America This Week and is the co-founder of County Highway, a new print magazine about America in the form of a nineteenth-century newspaper.

In late June, I flew to Montana and drove out to meet Kirn at his home in Livingston, on the Yellowstone River, where he’s lived for 33 years. Livingston’s last industry, a local sawmill, fully shuttered a few years ago, and the town now sustains itself on summer tourists to Yellowstone National Park.

Downtown Livingston could be confused for a Hollywood backdrop, which suits its resident part-time Writers Guild of America screenwriter. He tells me he’s on strike for “the duration” and can’t talk to the producer of the new film he’s writing. He’s also working on a new book that’s a travelog of his road trip across the Mountain West during the pandemic.

Between meals in Livingston’s hipper cafes and a long drive out into the mountains in his pickup truck, I ask Kirn how it was that the big American story got so far off script.

There seems to be a growing chasm between the real-life experiences that people have and the grand narratives about our common story—about what we suppose is normal. How did we get here?  

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things?

The final lesson wasn’t that any of this was inevitable, but that by growing up and being good citizens and standing with the right kind of people, it could all be averted. It was portrayed as navigable. It wasn’t portrayed as catastrophic but merely as a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome. Even the Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb were construed as something that would probably not occur because we were so strong, so influential, so virtuous.

As I grew up and went to college in the early 80s, the sense of these dangers seemed to dissipate somewhat. I knew that on the religious right, among the born-again evangelicals, there was a continuing fear of some kind of theological apocalypse. Because my family had converted to Mormonism when I was twelve, and because I was a listener to late-night talk radio, out in the country—which was dominated by current event shows done by apocalyptic religious types—I was very aware of this possibility. But it did not feel like something that was bearing down on us in the real world—perhaps in some spiritual realm, that I, for one, didn’t buy.

Religious apocalypticism I found somewhat entertaining. Environmental apocalypticism seemed to be weakening as I grew up because the air and water got cleaner and everyone who had a soul seemed to be on the side of conservation, environmental protection, and so on. Then came the fall of the Soviet Union, and by that point I was intellectually mature—out of college at Princeton and Oxford, writing and editing in New York glossy media—and everything seemed like a kind of carnival. You’re living in a prosperous country whose chief enemy has just disintegrated.

The end of history. 

Yeah, exactly. I’m capable of reading Fukuyama at that point and seeing that democracy has triumphed and we’re in our final stage, after which everything is going to be a steady state of liberal democratic paradise. Or if not paradise, then at least some kind of predictable and peaceful world. It was only toward the end of the 90s with the rise of global warming that I felt like this was déjà vu—returning to something like the tone I remembered as a school child. Then came 9/11, the War on Terror, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Still, though, there was not a sense that these were insuperable challenges. Global warming was something that, through some adjustment of our carbon output, we could deal with. The War on Terror, though frightening, consisted of outlier groups that we now had the laws and the military capabilities to counter. It was only around the mid-2010s, with the election of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, that I felt the clouds really begin to gather again.

When I went to cover the Republican Convention in Cleveland for Harper’s in 2016—this is not remembered very clearly now—we had the Ferguson riots, and we had a few really astonishing outbreaks of what seemed like racial violence. A bunch of Dallas police officers were shot not long before the convention. Reporters were actually warned, in a way that made the news, that they might want to wear bulletproof vests in Cleveland; it was imagined that it might very well turn into Chicago in 1968.

My earliest memories as a child were of the Vietnam War on TV and the student protests. Bridges in Minneapolis were blocked by protesters, bonfires were lit, and there were bombings all the time. If you turned on the TV until about 1976, you were getting a constant down-beat feed of internal dissent—and, of course, assassinations. I was old enough to be conscious by the time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot.

Right around the time I went to Cleveland, I saw that my wife was concerned for my well-being and that there was reason for her concern in the rhetoric that was breaking out on the news. But when I got to Cleveland, nothing much happened. Alex Jones was driving around with a bullhorn and there was a lot of noise and circus-like convention rhetoric, but nothing bad happened. I thought, wow, this is all overblown.

At the convention, I felt that I was at the tip of a narrative that had caused me to expect something to happen that did not occur. I started to be skeptical about that new apocalyptic strain. I thought, why do they keep on this in the absence of actual events? At the time, I was writing a cultural column for Harper’s. My filter for the world is literary and dramatic, not political, chiefly. I see things in terms of stories, plays, dramas, characters, symbols, themes, and motifs.

As the Trump presidency started, almost instantly—even back at the convention—the notion was that he was a kind of instrument of dictatorial Russia. I was thinking, are they going to keep this up into his presidency? I can see why, in the heat of a campaign, you might throw all kinds of overheated accusations at somebody.

I had expected Trump to win, especially after the convention. I was astonished by the novelty of his performance. He came on the stage like a casino pit boss, shooting his cuffs, rearing up as tall as he could be, coming out from a curtain that first showed his silhouette to all this spectacular music. Four years earlier, in 2012, I had written a cover story for The New Republic contrasting Obama and Romney—two very polished and establishment figures between whom it’s now, in retrospect, hard even to tell the difference.

Trump ran through the American predicament in very dark terms, as if he was our last defense against some vaguely described cultural and economic enemy that was undermining the normal progress of the country. It reminded me of when punk rock came to the Midwest. This was a new sound—good, bad, or whatever. It breaks through the encrusted coating on the brain and makes more neurons fire than usual. If nothing else is clear about America, it’s that our society is addicted to novelty and Trump was something completely new. The archetype of the salesman had not had much play in our politics in a very long time.

When Trump won, I saw that rather than come together, as had been the norm after previous presidential elections, the suspicion of this figure ramped up. There were lists in the mainstream press of publications that were suspected to be Russian fronts; they included all sorts of outlets I happened to read, from CounterPunch on the left to the Drudge Report on the right. I thought, are we really going to push the narrative that the president is a Russian agent and a huge part of our media has been infiltrated and subverted by enemy agents? That America is headed for some terrible reckoning over race, international alliances, and so on?

Since the fall of 2016, it has gotten worse and worse. More American institutions have been cast as dubious, unpatriotic, and perhaps manipulated from abroad. More American attitudes, whether they be religious, cultural, or even intellectual, have been redlined as dangerous. More individuals from citizens to media figures to authors and artists have been cast in the role of dangerous dissenters.

The sum total, to bring it right up to the present, is that we now live in an age of profound anxiety. The political emergency, the environmental threat, and later COVID, were all globbed together as one giant example of our need for vast controlling authority that would keep us from dying. No longer could the citizens be trusted to make their own decisions, associate freely, speak openly, and spontaneously carry out their lives. All the risks had risen to the ultimate level, DEFCON 1. Our communications had to be monitored—and even manicured. Politics was too dangerous to be left in the hands of the population. Very suddenly, on every front, there seemed to be a rationale for total control and also a scenario in which, should we fail to yield to that control, doom was certain.

This is not to speak to the truth or accuracy or validity of these warnings, but merely to the social and emotional cost of them. We talk a lot about environmental sustainability but I am also concerned with emotional and social sustainability. I see no way that we can sustain this level of panic, fear, mutual suspicion, and anger. Unlike a lot of my colleagues, other writers and journalists, I don’t blame it on Donald Trump. I see him as a player in a drama that involves many characters, but whose basic storyline was set before he even came along, and which is now grabbing a whole new set of characters like Elon Musk and other supposed villains.

I’ve lived in Montana for thirty-three years. Montana is often portrayed in the national press, even recently in The New York Times, as some hotbed of reactionary and ultraconservative rebellion. Every few years, Montana is brought out on the stage and painted as a haven for antisocial rebels. Because I live here and know that’s not true, I have a hard time with the new schema around white supremacy and so on. If the place is so damn full of white supremacists then how come I haven’t met them? I drive everywhere, I talk to everyone. I consider everyone to be a source for my journalism, from the guy at the hardware store to a farmer whose truck is broken down by the road. I gather stories from all of them, and it’s just not true that there is some nascent revolution about to break out here.

But the fact that it is imputed so often has started to scare me. Because those who want conflict and those who profit from it are creating boogeymen all over the place. That causes me to think there is, not a plan, but rather an expectation that events will occur in which this thematic structure can be brought out for political gain. I await that moment with trepidation.

You mentioned the social and emotional state of affairs, in which people treat each other with suspicion. That has not been the normal condition in American society, has it? 

It’s absolutely the opposite of the normal condition!

This fact seems so basic and so true and yet so ignored and unremarked upon in favor of these other narrative explanations—like this idea that you should be very afraid of the other half of the country.

COVID was a nonstop opportunity for narratives about how one part of America does not care if the other part of America lives or dies. States that were relatively laissez-faire about their COVID rules were depicted as wanting some kind of death cult vengeance on more progressive states. It was as though everyone was carrying this grenade called “COVID” and the good people were making sure that the pin was in place while the bad people wanted to throw it at the others.

The notion that people without symptoms of a terrible disease were the most likely to spread it allowed for an Invasion of the Body Snatchers science fiction terror of other people to which I had seen no equivalent in my whole life. I’m now supposed to fear other people as such? Their decision to walk too close to me or to travel is in itself an aggressive act? Not locking yourself down, covering your face, and withdrawing from society was prima facie evidence of a murderous heart. That was nuts!

It’s hard to be optimistic about a society that would frighten and harm itself at these levels with such obvious economic consequences, especially for people at the bottom and especially for the young. During COVID there were kids in this town who were harming themselves. They had lost their social lives at school—maybe they weren’t getting regular meals. They were unmoored from their social lives and their emotional bonds. That was a real disaster.

Where are the big stories to shed light on these disasters? Everyone I know has some experience of deep distress themselves or within one degree of separation, but these are interpreted as personal crises that people are expected to bear on an individual basis. They are divorced from any big narratives, which focus on these supposed massive emergencies, the mutual suspicion, and why you should be deathly afraid, and so on. The big narratives don’t reflect these personal traumas.

In America today, if you are having experiences going about your day that run counter to the mega-narratives on the news and social media, you have a choice. Do you compare notes with other people? If you do, you have an instinctive sense that somehow you are endangering yourself. Because you’ve seen other people be mocked for it and examples made of famous figures who have stepped out of line.

Isn’t this the very essence of social sense-making and reality—to be able to talk to your family and friends and not to have your every experience intermediated or interpreted narratively for you in advance by your iPhone or some kind of institutional apparatus?

There’s a Solzhenitsyn quote that at some point we wondered if we were allowed to talk about the experiences of our own lives, and I think America is at that point. I live in a kind of throwback America. I live in a town of 8,000 in Montana. Because it’s a tourist town, and because it’s become a sort of shelter-from-the-storm city since COVID, it has people moving in from all over. Even the newcomers kind of conform to the preexisting culture, which is to meet at the post office, talk, stand on the corner, share the news, and understand life through gossip, storytelling, and anecdote. That’s still a legitimate way to understand life here. It was sorely tested during the pandemic in particular, when people were afraid to talk.

The main news source in this town is the steps of the downtown post office, but people hurried up and down with eyes averted and masks over their faces. That media source was blotted out. People started to understand things going on here through social media and even national outlets rather than by talking to someone who had just been there. The crushing of the anecdotal, the personal experience, as a valid form of cognition was amazing to watch. And it wasn’t completely successful here, but I imagine in other places that don’t have as deep a tradition of street corner news, it was much worse.

Yeah, this process was almost total in San Francisco or in Boston, where I’m from and lived for part of the pandemic. These are places where people were already more atomized, not only in the sense that they may not have known their neighbors to begin with but also in a lot of their social life. Even with local friends, life occurs by text message or on social media.

Growing up, I thought that if a town had a Dairy Queen, it was a city, and I looked out toward the Oz-like horizons where stores were open late and pizza was available. In the American West in general, especially in the small-town Mountain West and the Midwest, there is a high tolerance for crankiness and outsider opinion. Partly, this is due to the person-to-person game-of-telephone distortions that come with gossip and oral sharing of information.

If you grow up in farm country, you grow up in a place where everyone has an opinion but the weather has the final say. It’s a place where all sorts of forces exist, which outsiders don’t understand at all, that govern your daily life. If you grow up in rural America, you can’t afford to hate your neighbor or withdraw into tribal groups because your car might break down and someone from one of those groups might be your only hope of getting a ride to the tire store or the gas station.

There’s a dependency on other people in that context. One of the things you get with the rise of digital technology is less material reliance on other people. Once you don’t have to rely on other people, you can let go of the emotional and psychological dependence too.

You can edit people out of your life. You can block them. Here, I can’t edit my neighbors out of my life. If I decide to have a feud with someone, I better be pretty stoic, because I’m guaranteed to see them the next day at the grocery store or need them when I pull into the mechanic with a busted fan belt. So tribal and factional withdrawal is not an option in any practical way—unless you don’t need to go to the store, or the post office, or leave your house at all since you have a one-way Amazon channel through which to get all your goods.

But isn’t that the tendency of the way things are going even in a place like Livingston, Montana?

It certainly is. There’s a tendency toward the curation of your social life at a granular level. It starts on social media but it creeps out into the street. Although I would give Montana a solid B+ in its ability to retain civility and humanity in the face of these constant gales of apocalyptic catastrophizing media, there has been a degradation even here. It’s because you can make virtual friends to replace the real friends you’ve lost on the street. You can get people to agree with you in ways that you probably couldn’t if you went down to the bar. You can obviously create a synthetic social life that is almost, in some ways, as gratifying as the one you used to have—surely, it’s less risky in some essential facets.

It’s easier on your ego probably. 

And you don’t risk a fistfight!

In the metropoles where people are so atomized, and supposedly every need can be met by Uber or Amazon or Twitter, the default preference is clearly never to escape one’s own little bubble. Why would you risk it? Someone could invalidate the story you are telling yourself about who you are, what is true, and who the heroes and villains are in your own psychodrama. 

I like to imagine the world from the vantage point of an alien or someone who doesn’t speak the language and see what’s going on in structural terms. I think you hit on it. Instead of this lateral relationship with our community and our neighbors and our family, what’s being proposed is that everyone triangulate their relationships through an authority center. Whether the method of that triangulation involves having talking points for Thanksgiving dinner or just going on social media to find out what good people think and then repeating it, the trend seems to be toward the outsourcing of all responses, thoughts, and reactions.

Why do I hate that so much? Maybe that’s the solution to our ignorant and fallen status in society. Let’s take the devil’s advocate there. Over the last few years, we’ve been told that there are certain infallible organs of truth: the intelligence community, Science with a capital S, mainstream media, etc.

It was my privilege to meet a physicist named Murray Gell-Mann who discovered the subatomic particle known as the quark. But he also is the namesake for a principle of skeptical inquiry called the Gell-Mann Effect. When you read one article or piece in a newspaper on a subject you happen to know something about and you find it to be misinformed, wrong, or even deceptive, why do you then assume that the same paper is accurate about subjects that you don’t know about? Why would you extend credence to that source on other topics when you’ve caught it lying or being wrong about one you do know about?

Do you have an answer to that? 

Logically, of course not. My dad was a lawyer. I see a lot in terms of the law. If a witness is caught lying early in their testimony and can be shown to be lying, or just nutty or incompetent, it colors everything they say afterward; they are discredited, and sometimes that’s the end of their usefulness in that trial. But this doesn’t extend to journalism. A certain amount of wrongness can be put down to just error and mistaken-though-well-intentioned failure. But after a while, that no longer explains it and you start to see almost systematic wrongness on certain topics particularly. So why do we keep going back to the well for poisoned water?

Yeah, this is what I want to know.

It’s very interesting. I have several guesses. I was a Mormon in my teen years. Young adolescents are the most skeptical beings. They are starting to catch adults in inconsistencies and acts of hypocrisy, so they are really heat-seeking missiles for error and contradiction and lies. So you’re in the Mormon church, and it’s all your friends and your parents’ friends. And someone with status in the church, maybe an elder, says something. Maybe it’s about doctrine or the news, and it’s just a whopper. You know it’s untrue or absurd. You are then faced with a problem. Do you leave the church? Do you stop going? Do you lose your social circle? Do you flush down the toilet all the stuff that you bought into? Do you retcon it all as junk and then go off on your own? What is there to go off into? Isolation? Loneliness? You know that you’ll be mocked once you disappear. They’ll be talking behind your back.

Not that the newspapers will talk about you behind your back if you stop reading them. But if you’re a journalist, and you stop writing for them, they will. I have seen endless examples over the past few years of journalists who left the consensus on some particular issue and then woke up one day to find themselves the subject of a “What Happened To X” article.

Persona non grata.

So one of the reasons you don’t leave if you’re a journalist is you will be disciplined, mocked, and cast out. If you’re just a consumer of news, you think, but where else do I go?

But surely there are truer big-picture stories we in journalism could tell about what is going on? That’s what I’m asking.

There are. But you see, I’ve lived through an economic change of fortune for the press in my lifetime since I’ve been writing for it. It’s an expensive proposition to send people out, to have people in the field, to interview a lot of sources, to get on planes, and to maintain stringers like Time Magazine did in every major community in the country. Why do that when you can supposedly find out about anything virtually?

You can just report the Twitter feed.

Most reporting now is some kind of Escher-like circle that turns in on itself. Almost all stories now are media stories. Hard news stories are now media stories in which the most salient element is how something will play and whether it will serve the interest of the good people or the bad people. The underlying actuality is secondary. It’s as though reality only exists to provide fodder for media now.

A total simulacra in which the referent to the real only exists for the symbol, not the other way around.

In that, it’s all literary criticism. If you want to find out who actually believes what, you have a very hard time. But if you want to find out which imagery supports what narrative, they can tell you all day long. And as an actual literary critic who has made money for decades reviewing books and weighing in on art and so on, to see that domain take over the news is utterly amazing and disheartening for me.

All events are to be judged according to optics. I remember when that kind of language—that sort of second-order critical language—entered the conversation on the news. A few years back they started using the term “the narrative” and a few years before that they would talk about “optics.” But now it’s just full-blown. There’s almost no other topic.

It’s just the appearance, the perception. 

Everything is a kind of dream. And it’s another way in which primary reality is being lost. In fact, to even use the phrase “primary reality” as I sit here causes me to recoil slightly because I know it marks me as some kind of nineteenth-century character or Enlightenment throwback. What am I, John Locke, sitting here talking about natural law? I don’t want to be trapped in this critique, but I can’t help but make it.

So how do we wake up from the dream? 

Well, that’s the real question. I’m going to stipulate—no one has to agree with me on this, but I have tried the case and come to this conclusion for myself—that between the deceptiveness, the agenda-driven nature, and the social-media-oriented vapidity of the press, it is no longer a reliable source of information about the world. It’s a very good source of information about itself. If you wish to know who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out, who scored points and lost points, it’s a great scorecard. But if you’re looking to find out what’s going on, it’s a terrible one. In fact, it will actually conceal what’s going on in almost every respect. So I’ve given up on it.

The press is a document, it’s a stage play, it’s an artifact, and insofar as I want to use its own methods and study it as such, it’s kind of fascinating. But as a guide to what’s happening? It’s worse than useless. It’s beyond propaganda. Propaganda was a kind of simple word that described boosting a point of view in a pretty obvious way.

Propaganda fide. The propagation of the faith. 

Yeah. Destroy the Hun! Look at the Kaiser with his bloodthirsty fangs! Here’s a real American with muscles holding a bayonet! Propaganda usually could be seen as such, and you almost liked it for that reason. It was morale-boosting. It made you hate the enemy and love your side. It simplified issues and you kind of knew it was propaganda. You let it work on you the same way you let a salesman work on you because you want to be sold. It gets you aroused for the fight and it reminds you of the basic values involved.

So propaganda is almost a simple and innocent version of behavioral pressure. This is something else. This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.

We’re like passengers in a plane who know we’re flying over Kansas but can only see a cloud layer. And drawn on the cloud layer are simple pictures of Kansas. Do we want to see underneath it or will we be content with this cartoon that’s drawn on the cloud? I can’t be content with the cartoon—not as a human being, not as a journalist, and certainly not as a novelist.

There is no excuse as a novelist for not knowing how people are actually living and behaving and thinking. You can maybe write a satire of people who are misled and who are acting robotically according to engineered inputs, but you have to know it’s satire. You can’t write sincerely about that as though that is reality; you must see below it. Your job is to see below it.

How do you deal with it? I’ve grown increasingly radical in my beliefs about this. At first, I thought you interrogated and inspected it and looked for patterns. You almost reverse-engineered it. You looked at the news layer knowing it was false but also that it was false in certain ways that showed certain trends. You could detect what’s being hidden and what’s being pushed, in the way that the CIA used to analyze pictures of party congresses at the Kremlin to see who was sitting where and who wasn’t in the picture at all. The idea was that I could decode reality by deconstructing this information layer that’s being spread out before me. But I no longer think this is fruitful.

You hear people say that they consume “both sides” of the news—because they watch both FOX and MSNBC, or read both The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—and imagine that they are well-informed.

Garbage in, garbage out. This idea is that you can somehow split the difference between various sides. But anyone who is at all a systematic thinker realizes the sides were conceived in opposition to each other. So if the first one was wrong, the second one is just the opposite of it, but it’s as wrong in the opposite way. And maybe a third one came along that was some kind of combination of the two, but it was just the combination of two things that were wrong. And now I’m going to put them together, divide by three, and come up with the real answer?

You don’t get any closer to the truth by performing that operation. All that operation reveals is who the powers that be are, what they think is going to work, and what’s succeeding now in terms of getting attention versus what was succeeding yesterday. You are fooling yourself if you think you can decrypt this misinformation layer—whatever you might call it—and get to reality. This game of running a counterintelligence operation on our information streams appeals to the ego, and to our sense of intrigue and our own skill, but there’s no reason to believe it gets us any closer to the truth and it may indeed take us further away. On issue after issue, we seem to be involved in prefabricated dialectics, oppositions, and architectures. Maybe the issue du jour isn’t even an issue at all.

That’s my big question here. If we were the aliens, like you mentioned, or if we’re looking back as historians a hundred years from now, are we going to care about any of these narratives? 

Dude, I already can’t remember the significance of things that I was urged were of apocalyptic import a few years ago. Will we remember them? No—because structurally the assault is on memory itself in issue after issue. A memory is a drag on action. It causes you to raise your hand and go, wait a second.

Let’s take the problem of where COVID came from. The very latest, as we speak now in June of 2023, is that COVID leaked from a lab in China. It’s pretty strongly suggested that it came from a lab in China that was doing terrible research and that the virus itself is some kind of engineered entity. Go back three months. This was still being debated, and people who were fundamentalists on the lab leak were, still three months ago, certainly six months ago, thought to be somehow unkosher, perhaps xenophobic, and maybe Trump-adjacent radicals. But if we go all the way back to the beginnings of COVID, it was almost the first common-sense assumption. Each slice of this narrative is only credible if you forget the one before. Wait a second, I’m being told that the much-vaunted American intelligence community has now “officially determined” the same thing that got me kicked off of social media eight months ago for agreeing with?

It’s so weird for me because I was raised on all of these fables like The Emperor’s New Clothes and the one about the good old boy who put his finger in the dyke. What was more valorized in my youth than anything else was being the lonely person who, like in the Norman Rockwell painting, stands up at the town meeting, raises his hand, and says, “I won’t stand for this,” or, “over my dead body.” Now that person is subject to an FBI investigation because they did it at a school board meeting. And I, for noting this cultural change, am some kind of dissident, when all I’m doing is remembering what I was taught?

Entire generations were taught the same lessons. Are most people just remarkably flexible? Did they not learn the moral of the story in the first place? Did they forget it when it was no longer convenient or enforced in the same way? 

Kids who are in their early twenties now, who I speak to because I have family members that age, will often tell me that they feel very old. You’re 23 and you feel old? “Yeah, because I remember what it was like not to have an iPhone.” Or, “I grew up watching Hannah Montana and a few basic shows on TV rather than TikTok.” What used to be called generational change now takes place culturally like every two and a half years. I’m meeting 20-year-olds who already feel ancient compared to 14-year-olds.

I feel like I’m from the nineteenth century, and I’m 27.

Yes. And so where is memory going? Is it that people are forgetting these particular cultural lessons I cited about standing out, being skeptical, speaking up when you see a wrong, and going against the crowd? Every damn movie I saw as a kid was about not succumbing to peer pressure. The entire anti-drug propaganda effort of my youth was about being the kid who sat back while everybody else got drunk and high. They trained me in that and now I’m expected to forget it?

But once you start preaching the virtues of forgetting, everything gets forgotten. The reason people want to forget is that they don’t want to be slowed down. Everything that you remember is in a sense stuck to a world that has now been superseded. Forget the particular moral lessons. To remember at all is to be inefficient in your encounter with the present.

One of my formative intellectual influences is a guy who some consider a crackpot, a psychologist named Julian Jaynes who taught at Princeton while I was there. He was an outlier in the academic community and he published one book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

His thesis was that before about 3,000 years ago, consciousness was an entirely different thing. People didn’t “think” consciously, they experienced life as getting commands from a seemingly outside god-like agency. Instead of the modern form of consciousness, “I think I should go to the store,” causing me to get up and go to the store, ancient people heard a command: “Go to the store.” And it was often in the voice of an ancestor, a leader, or a god. Jaynes claimed the primordial form of consciousness was a lot like what we now call schizophrenia; it was hearing voices, hearing commands, and acting immediately on them: “Go out and start planting!” I think we may be returning to that state, where consciousness is no longer an interior process, one that we carry around with us, one that is locked in the suitcase of the mind.

If you want to throw off the ballast of the past in order to be more responsive to the present, there’s a logical next step which is to be no longer loyal to the present—to exist in a constant state of anticipation—such that one does not even form memories to get attached to! You don’t bond with the present because you’ve learned that it’s about to become the past, and the past is a bad thing, and memories only hold you back, so why even form them? Why even have experiences? Because if I have an experience that lodges deeply enough in me, it will turn into a memory and it will hold me back.

In other words, I need to sail in front of the wind! I need to get on the front of the wave. Not only do you not want to have memory, you don’t even want to have profound experiences! Where are you then? You might think that you’re on a great individualist adventure ahead of everything else. But what you really are is a total pawn of someone else’s power. You are a perfect victim. You are owned. Not only are you not attached to the past, but you don’t even fall in love with the present. You can’t even counter their story with your own. You don’t have a story at all.

As a dramatist, I can tell you that without memory, you don’t even have a story. Unless Othello remembers what it was like when he first saw Desdemona and fell in love with her, then Iago’s attempt to get him to distrust her is meaningless. Unless the temptation to see her as deceptive is posed against an earlier honeymoon period, it has no meaning. When you live perpetually slightly ahead of the present, never bonding, never settling down, never letting yourself be penetrated—even by experience let alone memories to hang onto—you are a digital bit of information to be formed into anything. You volunteered for it!

As a lifelong visionary and an adventurer with a unique mix of scientific education, Army officer experience, and classy pedigree, Brand participated in many of the key scenes and events of late twentieth-century American culture.

More recently, he is known for cofounding the Long Now Foundation, which has built a clock inside a mountain designed to run for 10,000 years to promote long-term thinking, and the Revive & Restore project, which is applying genetic technology to wildlife conservation, ideally including the resurrection of the woolly mammoth.

Stewart often warns that “we are as gods and have to get good at it.” Humanity has become a planetary force with an emerging planetary consciousness. What kind of civilizations emerge from taking that seriously? We called him up at his library north of San Francisco to discuss the future of man’s dealings with nature:

Wolf: We’ve recently been discussing where society ends and nature begins. How should we relate to ecosystem services and the ecosystem balance as parts of our industrial and social order?

Stewart: The only two magazines that I get anymore—I’ve got rid of everything else—are Palladium and Noema, Berggruen’s thing. Noema had this campaign—they interviewed Jerry Brown and me about it a while back—where they said, look, we’ve been thinking globally for a while now. And there’s some things for which it’s been great, when the global economy makes all the cities grow and we get out of poverty. But there’s also the planet, and the term “planetary economy” has no meaning. The dynamics of the planet are of a different order. And I think what you’re talking about here is getting those two whole-system bodies of thought to engage each other rigorously.

We used to talk about EGG: Emerging Global Governance. And the realization that, you know, it’s not done with black helicopters. It’s done with all the economists talking to each other and having a global economy to sort of share a frame of reference, and a body of economic thought to share thoughts about. Now that they’re using models instead of equations, they’re getting a little more predictive for a change.

That happened because of the Santa Fe Institute, where I served on the board for 14 years. The Institute was founded by bored nuclear physicists at Los Alamos. It’s often the case that biology moves forward when physicists get bored and decide that they can take their rigorous thinking and deploy it against biology. Sometimes that works. Mostly it doesn’t. But it worked to the extent that they were recognizing complex adaptive systems as being of a different order than those that had been studied before. So they reinvented cybernetics with computers. With the computers, they could do modeling. 

They got a bunch of economists and physicists together—basically their friends—and asked the question in a series of sit-down meetings in Santa Fe: “Is there anything we can talk about together? What we need to do first is become familiar with each other’s discipline enough to be able to talk at all.” So they flipped a coin to see who goes first—economists or physicists—and the economists went first. They had a Nobel Prize-winning guy (Ken Arrow) and some others in the group. They were really good economists. They got up and went to the board and started writing out the equations that were their current understanding of how you think economically. The physicists kind of glanced at one another. Finally, one of them raised their hand and asked, “What are you doing?” And the economists replied, “We’re writing the equations; we learned that from you!” And the physicist said, “We haven’t used equations in years.” And the economists said, “What do you use? You’re still doing physics, right?” And the physicists answered, “Well, we use models, don’t you?”

And what finally happened with the Santa Fe Institute is the economists said, “Okay, prove it. Model us some economics.” They came up with a concept which they called Bounded Rationality, which is what humans actually operate on. Most of economics up to that point had been based on “what would the rational person do?” and on a theory of games consisting of rational players, and so on. Then, they began to model large quantities of these creatures that had imperfect knowledge, or were doing the best they could with it. This was called agent-based modeling. And each of these players operated either on a different theory of the world, which we all do, or on different information that they had access to. How did they behave under those circumstances? The answer is that it’s a complex adaptive system. And there’s all of what goes on with chaos theory, like strange attractors and all of that—profound unpredictability in most cases. This then gave them the beginnings of a swing in economics actually, which flipped from witchcraft to become more predictive because they started to behave like weather forecasters.

This is Philip Tetlock’s contribution to intellectual thought: forcing people to make falsifiable predictions and state their degree of confidence in each prediction about what is going to happen and by when. You get the superforecasters who learned to do that and then learned from studying, basically, the video of the game. “How did that guy get by me on the basketball court? He did this other thing I’ve never seen before. Well, I’ve seen it now. Now it won’t happen again.” And so game two is different from game one. And that’s, ideally, what you can begin to do.

That’s why my wife, Ryan Phelan, who runs Revive & Restore, came up with the concept of “Intended Consequences,” which she immediately turned into a workshop and then into a paper. When we’re doing any kind of genetic work with wildlife that would lead to some kind of intervention on the ground, people would say, “You can’t do that because ecology is very complicated, and unpredictable. And you know, there will be unintended consequences, and you’ll be really sorry.”

So, it turns out nobody’s ever done the research to find out if that’s what actually happened with conservation interventions. All they knew about was things like cane toads in Australia, which was not done by conservation scientists. At the time, the scientists said, “Don’t do it! You will be really sorry!” And the agriculturists went ahead and did it anyway. And likewise, there were species introduced in Hawaii. Basically anytime you introduce anything larger than a bug to an island, it’s going to have deleterious consequences. That’s not so true on continents, by the way.

Anyway, some of our scientists did the research. There’s been about a thousand cases of intervention in the United States by wildlife conservationists where a species is introduced or reintroduced. And the “golden boy” story is the wolves of Yellowstone Park, or the beavers in Scotland, and so on. They’ve been gone for 400 years. They came back and immediately did good for everybody. So the question for these thousand interventions is, first, do they cause any harm? Because at the time, people often ran out of money fighting for the permission to try something that they knew damn well was going to work. Some things were surprising, but they didn’t matter. They were neutral. And sometimes the species didn’t take. So you’d say, well, it was a failure. But it’s not! It’s just that nothing bad happened, but no good thing happened either. But then, if they had the money, they would go back with the lessons learned from the first reintroduction and do it better the next time. And then even better the time after that. And by then, the animals are starting to learn how to behave in the environment, too. So they’ve got their own story going again. And that’s a success.

Nobody pays any attention when these interventions tail off into a success. It’s failures that are news. But we discovered that when it’s professional biologists doing the work, they don’t cause problems. There was one introduction in the southeastern United States which apparently led to the extinction of a local fish in the stream. It was just a local fish. And so the harm was local, and minimal. And only that one case!

Matt: I wonder if there’s some over-sensitivity in the biology world because there’s historical experience with pathogens. Today we could say, look at the dangers of gain-of-function research. But maybe those should be considered a totally different category.

I think it does. It’s mainly in medicine. Really only in the last century has it become worth your time to go to a doctor. From 1920 on, it started to become a slightly better bet to go to the doctor. Now, it’s a much better bet. And that has happened with an organism which we do not understand completely at all. We understand a whole lot. We can draw a map that is the size of the wall behind me of just the metabolic pathways, not only in humans but in any large animal. And so, are you going to have unintended consequences when you meddle in that? Yeah. But then you develop double-blind, phase-three research and whatnot to head off the possible harm. And by the time you finally deploy something, you have a lot of confidence it’s not going to cause any harm and it looks like it might cause some good. 

We are in the process of figuring out how to do that at a planetary scale. That’s what geoengineering is largely about. The best researchers, like David Keith at Harvard, are completely doing incrementalist research—way smaller than a volcano. I mean, the main information we have about solar geoengineering, so-called reflective stuff in the stratosphere, comes from the Mount Pinatubo eruption, and others which are way bigger than anything that humans would do. But we want to be able to do it for a while, and actually stop the temperature rise and even bring it down a bit. That way, we buy time to do all the other stuff so that climate is not an issue anymore. That will take one to two hundred years.

So anyway, I came to all that because of complex adaptive systems. You have to adopt the understanding that they are, in some senses, intractable to define in a way where you know for sure that it is going to do what you had intended. You never have complete enough knowledge to know that until you experiment in a number of small and illuminating ways. But once you do that, you can actually manage these very complex adaptive systems. And that’s what humans are taking on in this century, I think.

Wolf: So then, our big picture is this idea of complex adaptive systems in the context of the relationship between industrial civilization and our natural environment. A lot of people see human civilization and nature as opposed. Do you think we can find a more symbiotic relationship? That seems to be a theme in your work. What do you think that looks like?

I think it’s actually useful to keep the distinction between human activities and nature. I think that both nature and human activities in this century are in the process of learning to blend in with each other. But I think the distinction is actually helpful for doing that. What we do with intention, what we do with abstraction, what we do with language, and so-called culture involves a lot of Darwinian sorting. But it’s not Darwinian evolution in the sense that ideas have to individually reproduce in some fashion in order to carry on. We have broadcast capabilities that nature does not, for example.

What I know as a conservationist and from working with conservation biologists is that the rate of evolution has generally gone up since humans started having large impacts on all the kinds of environments that various creatures, plants, and microbiota live in. There’s this very good book, Inheritors of the Earth by Chris Thomas, that documents this increased rate of evolution. More and more, people are seeing wildlife in town: raccoons, foxes, coyotes in California. Everybody that shares a biome spends a lot of their time evolving in relation to one other.

And that’s coevolution, which is a profound concept. One of the most cited papers in all of biology is by Peter Raven and Paul Ehrlich, who was an advisor of mine at Stanford. He said it was a great paper to write with Peter because they didn’t have to do anything. They just had a couple of cups of coffee together, then reported on what they were finding in their research.

Coevolution is a profound concept that, I think, scales. It scales up from microorganisms to the planetary scale. Some of it is expressed in the Gaia hypothesis. Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis came up with that long ago and I got to print an early version of it. Actually, the Gaia hypothesis itself opened up a whole new avenue of nature and humanity, in a sense, taking each other seriously, and gave us the scale and scope to think about human activities having a planetary-scale impact. Gaia is different after humanity shows up and takes dominion. And presumably, Gaia never had a model of herself; the planetary self-regulating system got there by evolution, got there without self-consciousness, and got there without a model. But humans generate models all the time, we can’t help it. And the Gaia concept was a wonderfully inclusive model of engaging nature at planetary scale.

Wolf: One way that humans and nature then fit together, in a way that’s going to change both, is that we’re now in this position of modeling these planetary effects and the planetary ecosystem. And so we have to learn how to garden that ecosystem. And we have to learn how it affects us and how to integrate those things well.

A lot of this is kind of like medicine. And gardening in some respects, because of the “do no harm” injunction. In a way, the part humans are sorting out is moving beyond conquering nature. Danny Hillis made this point a while ago when we were starting the Long Now Foundation, that humanity’s story, up until pretty recently, has basically been humans learning to conquer nature, to master nature, to whip it to our aims. And that story is complete enough that we can move into the next mode, which is basically conquering ourselves in relation to nature and realizing that, while we can do everything, we should not do everything—we should only do some things and stop doing some things that cause undue harm.

And that’s part of why the idea and practice of de-extinction appealed to me, because it’s kind of a new level of thinking through undoing harm. We’re not going to bring back dinosaurs, but we can bring back the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger. That one is well along right now. And it would be nice to have an apex predator back in Tasmania and in the parts of Australia that used to have thylacines. It’s not as crucial as something like a woolly mammoth, where we really need to get the mammoth steppe fully back, to help stabilize the climate over the long term.

Wolf: What distinguishes a reality-based framing on a problem like this as opposed to other ways of thinking about it? This is a concept you’ve used previously. Why is it important?

A guy named Rapoport said something that I quoted in the beginning of one of the books I did: “Knowledge will never replace respect in human dealings with nature.” You can know a lot, and generally the more you know, the better, but you’re never going to know it all. And so it’s about a certain amount of modesty. If you can’t manage humility, modesty will do. In the face of complex systems, it’s actually a prudent and usually necessary approach if you’re doing anything that is going to stay useful. You can make big changes, but then they take on lives of their own. Some of the ways they go may not be what you wish would have happened. The models are always evolving. They’re evolving in terms of your ability to sense things, like getting knowledge of oceans at depth, for example. They evolve in relation to notions that people have of how to put ideas together in a way that’s effective in the world.

Science is about organized skepticism to determine what you keep having to come back to, because it’s the part that won’t change in relation to your opinions. And we’re sort of missing that in the public discourse right now: the idea that you can make up the world that you think the way you think is convenient, and then act on that. And that’s as important as what scientists turn up. It’s good that people got postmodernism and all that other stuff. Science is embedded in scientists who are human and fallible. But science takes account of that, in a way that strictly postmodern thinking doesn’t really allow for. There’s been this fashion these past years, maybe decades, to think of everything in terms of power relationships—gender, colonialism, and “late capitalism,” whatever that is, when those terms are not actually appropriate. It’s a simplistic filtering of experience and knowledge that you always want to bear in mind, but not fall completely into, where you can’t see anything else.

Wolf: You’ve mentioned that ecosystems and human society are complex adaptive systems. Can you say more about how we should approach those kinds of systems in theory and practice?

Back in the 1990s, climate scientists were getting worked up about what was happening with the Keeling Curve, that we were going to have way too much CO2 and methane, and that the atmosphere was going to heat up badly. And so they said, quite rightly, that we’ve got to mitigate the greenhouse gas getting into the atmosphere, which means we’ve got to mitigate the use of fossil fuels for energy. And then a guy named Jesse Ausubel, at Rockefeller University in New York, came up with a paper saying, absolutely, we need to do all that. And we’re probably not going to be able to do all of it as fast as we need to, just because there’s so much friction in the system. And so we need to think about adapting to temperature rises that are going to happen anyway. This was treated as a moral hazard violation [that adaptation would reduce the incentive to do the “right” thing, which is to mitigate fossil fuel use]. Efforts were made to destroy Jesse’s reputation. And so, adaptation was a taboo line of research and discussion for a decade or two. Now, could you have known at the time that this was actually a stupid thing to do?

Wolf: It seems pretty straightforward that you don’t want to shut down some line of questioning just because it might slightly take the pressure off some other important thing. There’s also a big dosing of bad faith in those things. There’s people who get attached to the idea of reducing fossil fuel usage, and bring in other unrelated motivations. It may be that for them, it’s not about global warming, it’s actually that they don’t like industrial society. And then anyone who’s providing solutions to the original problem becomes an enemy.

This is true of various kinds of intellectuals, including me, I’m sure. And this happened with my old teacher, Paul Ehrlich. He is a brilliant population biologist. He’s not a brilliant human population biologist, however, and so he actually became part of the problem by imagining that the authority with which he could speak about butterfly populations and co-evolution situations could be directly applied to human populations. And with his sense of humor, which is great, he became very persuasive on the Johnny Carson Show, and so on. And people who actually studied human demographics had a completely different view that was basically suppressed by Paul and my fellow environmentalists of that time— including me, by the way.

Wolf: This was the Population Bomb theory that human overpopulation was going to consume all the resources and cause a collapse?

Yeah, the Population Bomb theory probably appealed to us for a number of reasons. One of them is that it had this kind of algorithmic clarity. We weren’t looking at real data the way human demographers were at that time. And those demographers were seeing this thing in response to what they saw in the world, not in response to theory, which got named the “demographic transition.” It turned out that with the prospect of prosperity when women moved from the village to the city, they immediately stopped having seven children and had two instead. And then they would get them educated. So they’re trading seven ignorant children for two educated children. This is a good deal, and clear thinking by the women. And that is one of the mechanisms by which the demographic transition actually happens. But we still have people screaming about overpopulation.

Matt: There is this Weberian distinction between science and politics as vocations, that these are two fundamentally different domains that require very different types of thinking. They select for different types of individuals. If you look at the history of the twentieth century, did the fact that Oppenheimer was pivotal in the creation of the bomb give him some special privilege? Should the atomic scientists themselves have a special privilege to talk about the use of nuclear weapons, or is that actually out of their domain of expertise? This question of the relationship between sciences, and between science and politics, seems to be at the center of so many of our controversies.

On that particular subject, we saw the whole idea of nuclear winter. Friends of mine, like Carl Sagan, bought into it, and the JASONs [scientific groups that advised the U.S. government] looked at it. Freeman Dyson was part of the JASONs at that time, and they could not make sense of the numbers. And over a few years, some scientists did put in some time to try and understand it. They came up with, at most, a “nuclear autumn.” And that’s part of why Freeman then was dubious about climate change, because he had been through that thing with the nuclear winter exaggeration. And he feared that there was exaggeration going on with the climate. And there is, by the way, a lot of exaggeration in relation to climate. That is not to say it isn’t going on in the biggest way. But the main event gets put in apocalyptic terms, and I think that’s completely misplaced.

And then that shifts over into another discussion: is apocalyptic thinking good for anything whatsoever, other than excitement? My girlfriend in the 70s was Stephanie Mills, the woman who got up in front of the Mills College and was valedictorian or whatever she was, and said she was not going to have children, because the world is overpopulated. And it would be irresponsible of her to think about having children. To her credit, she never did. But it was actually a goofy thing that my generation got up to. It was based on nothing, it turned out.

Matt: You’re saying, it wasn’t just a pose or a theory to believe in overpopulation, people really changed how they lived.

Yes. And they are now! There are people figuring “I’m not going to have children because it’s going to be a hot world, and all these other bad things are going to happen.” And therefore, don’t reproduce. Part of it is, I think, a scale error. Maybe it’s even a pacing error of some kind.

David MacKay, who was Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government, wrote a great book on global warming. One of the things he addressed is people who are imagining that their personal behavior is going to save the world, like people who will unplug their phone charger when it’s not actually charging their phone. As if that was anything other than performative virtue signaling. He said, “Let’s look at the actual energy involved here. And then I’ll compare that to one bathtub that this person takes and the heating that was involved with getting the waters to the right temperature they like.” And how many mega-years of not having your phone charger plugged in does it take to match one bathtub? And so just keeping the scale of things in mind helps a lot.

So there’s over-personalizing stuff. “Live the change you want” is, in some respects, a really valid idea. But not in all respects, I think. It reminds me a little bit of landfills back in the day. In the 1970s, we got all worked up about landfills. And then this guy did a book that looked into what actually goes into the landfill. Is it those terrible burger-enclosing plastic things that you get along with your burger at a fast food joint?

Or is it building materials? Turns out, it’s mainly building materials in the landfills. It’s buildings and all the spare parts, all the spare leftover boards you can’t use after all, and all this kind of stuff. I’m becoming somewhat of a fan of landfills. I think it’s a great way to sequester carbon.

Matt: Does this mean you’re anti-recycling, Stewart?

Well, a lot of recycling is kind of like the newspaper drives during the wars, that I actually remember. In World War II, we had to go out and collect everybody’s newspapers, and they were bundled up and sent off to the government for some purpose that we never understood. And it turned out there was no purpose and actually, it was just something to mobilize citizens so they’d be part of the cause.

Wolf: It reminds me of this story in rural Canada during World War II: they had people guarding a bridge just in the middle of nowhere in the prairies, as if the Germans or whoever were going to show up.

Can you imagine how much fun that is? Actually spotting airplanes, and learning all the various airplane silhouettes and whatnot. There were aspects of World War II that were great fun, if you weren’t in combat.

Matt: All that gets to this important question about the scale at which we intervene to solve these problems. I think there’s a tendency, especially in the mass media age, to make everything about the individual: if only I were to sacrifice going on an airplane, and so would everyone else, then we would solve the problem. In fact, more often the scale has to be at the level of the state or of collective action.

I think with the climate, it’s useful to ask what the things are that actually function at the scale that you want for the result that you need—in this case, a planetary scale. And thinking through that reversed my opinion about nations, in the sense that nation-states still pretty much control their tax systems. To the extent that you want to use the tax apparatus to make coal and gasoline expensive and clean forms of energy cheap with a carbon tax, the UN can’t do that. Nonprofits can’t do that, businesses can’t do that. Only governments can pass laws and enforce them. And likewise with geoengineering, with sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere you don’t have to go to planetary scales to start finding out to what extent it can work. You do it in tiny, tiny amounts. It actually changes things in the direction that you want, without causing regional problems like stopping the monsoon— that would starve India, or cook India.

But unilateral geoengineering has been treated as the great crime that might come out of taking geoengineering seriously. Somebody might just go off and do it without asking everyone else’s permission. And this is where you get into a really interesting mode of this century, having to think through global permission for planetary actions. Do you need to get total unanimity of everyone on Earth saying, “Okay, let’s do it”? Do you need to get unanimity of all the nations? Of most of the nations? Measuring how? These kinds of things will be worked through in this century.

Wolf: To continue the question of scale of action, this also gets to sort of what time-scale we are acting on. It’s like your idea of pace layering: you want to act and learn at the appropriate pace in relation to the phenomenon, or else you risk reacting too fast or slow.

When I was studying organic chemistry for my biology degree, it felt like special cases all the way down. But that’s not actually true. Physicists like Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute came along and said, well, there is a scaling effect. It is clearly the case that—they call it Kleiber’s law—that large animals have slower heartbeats and live a long time, and tiny animals have very rapid heartbeats and live a short time. It turns out that mice and elephants both have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. And the difference has to do with scale. Mice are small, but the network effects of being a mouse are quite different from the network effects of being an elephant.

Geoffrey West’s book Scale went on to look for Kleiber’s law in human institutions like cities. Cities, in particular, have a reverse relationship: the bigger they get, the faster they go, instead of slower. And this frightened him! At least, more than it frightened me. He believed that clearly the great thing about cities is, yeah, they create these extra problems, but because they’re faster at everything they can come up with solutions to the problems that they cause faster than they caused them. And therefore, they get bigger and more advantageous, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole urban global civilization. And then he just sort of hit some kind of interior wall, thinking “this can’t go on!”

He thought that infinite acceleration is not something that humans can live with, that it’s going to just slow down and break. So he was worried about a collapse that may come about from these cities getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster, until something breaks in a big way. I’m not persuaded by that. And maybe it’s because by training, I’m a biologist and he’s a physicist. I just see so many ameliorating Gaia-like mechanisms that biology has to manage big change.

I mean, the planet’s shift from anaerobic to aerobic life as the primary life form was a huge and seemingly catastrophic change. Certainly, if you’re an anaerobic microbe, you didn’t like it. But the great oxygenation worked out actually pretty well—so we oxygenating organisms say. You might think the anaerobic guys that have to hide down in the soil are saying, “Yeah well, fuck you! We’re down here hating you to this very moment!” But none of that happens. I’m pretty sure they don’t even know.

Wolf: You’ve been around for many decades working on all of these problems, meeting all the key people in the field and seeing how things have changed over time. What do you think are the most important lessons from these last decades that we need to be carrying forward?

I’m trying to figure out if apocalyptic thinking is actually destructive, or just a waste of time. How much longer will the term “existential threat” be something that we are constantly hearing in the high intellectual public discourse? It’s gotten so generalized, you can say it about anything now. “Is Trump an existential threat?”

Martin Rees, the former Astronomer Royal, is a friend in England. I was trying to think of the real existential threats. I thought, well, there are comets that are pretty rogue and are pretty big. We can head off asteroids pretty well now, but comets are probably not in that category. So I wrote Martin and asked him, should I be worried about a comet hurtling in and blasting into Earth? And he said that the odds of that are so close to zero that you might as well consider them to be zero.

This is a guy who came up with a bet with Steven Pinker about how there’s going to be a million people dying from bio-error or bioterror. And we thought that Steven won in 2020. But there’s still the question of COVID-19, which has killed more than a million people worldwide— was that a case of bio-error, getting out of the Wuhan lab? That’s still not decided yet. So those guys are relitigating the bet.

But anyway, Martin Rees is the one who was saying he expected a million people to die from a bioterror or bioerror. He’s not a biologist, but if it did escape from the Wuhan lab, he was right. Was that an existential threat to humanity? Not even close.

Wolf: There’s a lot of these sorts of risks that are very disruptive and cause a lot of trouble, but our ecology and our civilization are incredibly deep in their resilience. For example, the last time an asteroid big enough to matter hit Earth was 65 million years ago. That’s a long time. Like Rees says, statistically it’s not happening again any time soon. But even then, life goes on.

Even then, life goes on. Exactly. This is what I’ve sort of realized, you know, if we had a major nuclear exchange—life would go on. Differently, but mostly in recognizable ways. I did put this question up on Twitter the other day. I was thinking in the morning, pulled out the coffee—actually, I was reading Palladium—and I got thinking about civilization, thanks to you guys. And I put up this question: Individual civilizations come and go. Civilization continues. It has for five to ten thousand years. So when you think about a global civilization, does that mean that therefore it’s deeply fragile? Or deeply robust? Which lesson do you draw?

Wolf: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know the answer.

Matt: Well, while we have a global civilization at a certain level of analysis, we also have the diffusion of certain kinds of technologies, of certain ways of thinking and doing politics and economics. There’s still a lot of deep cultural distinction between, say, Japanese and Indians, or Africans and Americans and Europeans. So in a sense, that would make me optimistic about a sort of resiliency.

You have this modern, technological civilization that’s diffused among many different deeper historical cultures. These existential risk questions don’t really get resolved or mitigated by this phenomenon I’m describing. But what it might mean is that even if you had some major crisis in say, the Anglosphere or in India, it would not necessarily cascade or translate into a global catastrophe. When Rome collapsed, that culture was only one instantiation of their peak technological development. Or is that not the case now?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think that global civilization is robust, for some of the reasons we just discussed. There’s a fair amount of variety, and it’s one of the things that culture does. It’s one of the things that nations do. And even Jared Diamond’s book Collapse ends with him saying that all of these prior civilizations that collapsed didn’t know about each other. But we know about all of them, right? And ourselves. That awareness means that we do not take longevity for granted, which these other civilizations did.

And so in that sense, the concept of existential risk is a good one to have out there. It’s probably not one to obsess over. Yeah, things really can end, at any scale you want to think about. But at a giant scale there’s a lot of micro-robustness built in. There’s a lot of subsidiarity built in, of these various things operating regionally, at different rates, independently of each other. Or even contrasting enough between each other in terms of pace layers that the system can handle shocks.

Wolf: You know, it reminds me a little bit of the story of the Tower of Babel, where humanity comes together and builds this big central civilization to control everything. It’s fragile and hubristic. But once you do that, all the ambition in the system is towards differentiation, and the system fragments back down to some stability. God has a plan for this, so to speak.

I guess every now and then people get experimental. They learn the hard way, but it works out.

That was one of the things going on over the PA system at Woodstock. “Don’t eat the brown acid! Brown acid is bad acid!” That was all being managed by the Hog Farm, because they were running the overdose tent, the tripping tent. And you saw kids coming in really bad. And so you sort of ask them through there, what kind of acid did you take? Oh, the brown acid. Okay, no brown acid! That’s the Ken Kesey approach to science. “If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?” And I think that actually, societies at various times get into that mode of “screw it, let’s do it!” And it’s a good thing. You know, some hippies died, some went crazy and stayed crazy. But that boldness, that fearlessness made it an exciting time to be around. And because everything was illegal, everything had to go by word of mouth. And we’re talking about reality: what’s the real world that you fall back on? Personal experience is the real world that you fall back on, to some extent. And if you have avenues to transmit that, talking with the hitchhiker you picked up because they were dressed like you are, information gets around.

And then that flew in the face of the going theories! “No hope without dope!” Well actually, there’s such a thing as too much dope. I just saw that Kim Stanley Robinson, in the beginning of his wonderful book The High Sierra, is talking about how when he was dropping acid in the 1970s, he grew up in Newport Beach in Southern California. And then he went up into the mountains. And he says, “I got high and I never came down.” And he’s been in love with the High Sierras ever since. What does that say? That youthful folly has its functions for society.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have existed in a world order defined by nuclear-armed superpowers. This balance colored the era of the Cold War. From the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole hegemonic superpower. It was so dominant, in fact, that we began to believe this imbalance was natural or that it could last indefinitely. In reality, it was a historical anomaly.

American hegemony in the world should not be taken for granted. From inside, the system of American hegemony looks so totalizing that it’s easy to confuse the particulars of the current power arrangement with the nature of the international system itself. It becomes difficult to tell what is fundamentally true about the international system as a whole versus what is true about the American sphere of influence in particular.

With the partial recovery of Russia, the rise of China, and the stagnation of American power, some of the assumptions of the hegemonic era are coming undone. But the basic reality of nuclear-backed great power politics remains. That reality must be the backbone of any useful fundamental model of security, power, and diplomacy. As we navigate this transition from American hegemony to a more multipolar world, it’s even more important to understand the fundamentals of international politics.

Security Comes From Power

Power never stops being important for states, since states are made up of people who are vulnerable to attack. If you have anything that someone else wants, you need security. To have security, you either need to have the power to defend your property yourself, or you need to be able to appeal to a higher, more powerful authority that can defend it on your behalf. When you appeal to a higher power, you generally need to give up something valuable in return. This usually requires giving up some measure of autonomy. Security is not free.

When there is no higher power to which one can appeal, one can be secure only by having absolutely nothing of value—which is nearly impossible, not to mention undesirable. Security, therefore, remains the only option.

There are many non-violent forms of power: prestige, wealth, information, influence, technical capability, and so on. But these all exist within a social and political order ultimately backed by the most fundamental kind of power: military power.

Since the time when men fought with rocks and sticks, we have used our relatively big brains to fashion weapons, and to play politics backed by those weapons—thus multiplying, through the use of technology and social organization, the ease with which we can project power relative to our bodily strength. Weapons technology has become the essential factor in whether or not one has the power to defend oneself. This includes not only the weapons themselves, but also the social and material technology needed to deploy them.

Nuclear Weapons Dominate the Power Landscape Today

Over time, we have developed more powerful and more destructive weapons, along with the human systems that control and deploy them. The trajectory of weapons systems development over time has been a game of cat and mouse, playing out between offensive and defensive weapons systems. In the 19th century, infantry and cavalry could be defeated by the trench and the machine gun. The trench, in turn, could be defeated by the tank and the aircraft. The tank and the aircraft could be defeated by more powerful explosives, aircraft, and radar that enabled anti-aircraft artillery. In 1945, we developed the first nuclear bombs. Over the next decades, we devised the command and control systems that make up the nuclear enterprise.

The question of security does not deal with abstractions of how to make oneself perfectly secure from any possible threat, but how to defend oneself from the real weapons technologies that will be used by likely adversaries in a war. The nature and character of the great power war that would be fought, and the preceding period of diplomacy, is therefore shaped by the most powerful technologies available to the great powers both to defend themselves and attack others.

In our time, the most powerful weapons systems are nuclear weapons. Rather than being offensive or defensive dominant, nuclear weapons are deterrence dominant. All the great powers have ‘secure second strike’ nuclear capabilities: the ability to retaliate even after having been subjected to an initial nuclear attack. This means that there is no way for them to attack another great power without the potential for that power retaliating with nuclear fire.

Among the great powers in the world, there is no higher power to which they can appeal for their defense. This is, in fact, a good way to tell if a state is actually a great power. Even among weaker powers in the world, defense is very important, but defense consists as much in the careful maintenance of the relationships with the stronger powers as much as in the raw realities of weapons systems themselves. Since war among great powers is never fully off the table, international politics is regulated chiefly by mutual intersubjective perceptions of who would win the great power war were it to take place.

War is Power Computation With Weapons

There are nearly an infinite number of factors that determine which side would win an all-out war, such that the only way to know for sure would be to fight it out. Power is always a matter of potential in a constant state of flux and uncertainty. It cannot ever be accurately measured in its potential state. Not even the most powerful computers and most sophisticated models can simulate all the necessary factors of a total war.

The computation of who has what power, and who has more, can only be ultimately decided by running the experiment with live weapons. But we do know that a great power war would be extremely costly, especially in a world where the great powers are all armed with nuclear weapons.

Instead of actually running the experiment, we build approximate conceptual models of power that give us indications of who would win in a war. When the power imbalance is extreme, it is much easier to guess—but a guess is all it is. The nature of power is that sometimes those who have it do not want others to know just how much of it they have. Often we don’t even know our own strength, or the strength of some known capability possessed by our adversary.

Nobody knows who would win a total war between the United States and China today. All we know is that it would be catastrophic for the whole world.

The prospect of great power nuclear war is so costly that it would only be risked by a power who believes—rationally or otherwise—it gets such an unfair deal in the present arrangement that the benefits of a post-nuclear war settlement outweigh the costs of the conflict itself. A more likely path to nuclear war consists in the accidents, miscalculations, blunders, and errors that emerge from the complex nature of the present global nuclear deterrence system. For instance, two adversaries could find themselves in an escalation spiral, where neither side feels as if it can back away from the brink at any intermediate step in the escalation ladder, thereby risking the peace of the world in a game of nuclear chicken.

The history of the nuclear age is littered with many examples of diplomatic escalations and nuclear close calls. The 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis may be the most famous example of an escalatory nuclear standoff, but NATO’s military exercises in 1983 also led the world to another nuclear near miss—perhaps the closest we’ve ever been to the nuclear brink.

Add to these fateful confrontations the tally of numerous false alarms caused by everything from Canadian geese and meteor showers to failing computer chips, and the moratorium on the use of nuclear weapons looks less like careful risk management and more like seventy-five years of successful geopolitical Russian roulette.

Great Power Competition Sublimates Into Other Areas

All of international politics today rests on these fundamental realities. Power is grossly unequal. There is no higher authority to which the great powers can appeal. The ability to project power and maintain security rests on weapon systems technologies. The strategically dominant weapon system is the nuclear bomb. But no one wants to use the nuclear bomb, because nuclear war would be so devastating.

The great powers today are at once mutually opposed, never taking off the table the potential to rain down nuclear fire on their adversaries, but perpetually unable to consummate conflict in the military domain. The fundamental power competition is therefore radically unresolved, locked in its potential phase, seeking whatever other avenues might be available to release its potential energy and gain advantage.

Most often this energy is sublimated into other more virtual modes of conflict, such as the political, economic, cultural, scientific, and the technological domains. Ambitious actors hope to gain power through upending the current military paradigm, or at least influencing status quo power perceptions and negotiations while the current paradigm lasts.

This sublimation of unconsummated great power war into other domains tends to take three primary forms:

First, power competition spills into an extension of war by other means (to invert Clausewitz). Specifically, the competition continues with the development of science and weapons technology that could bring a material resolution to the nuclear deterrence balance. Currently, this consists of cyber weapons developments, and advanced technologies that could one day be used in nuclear missile defense or its circumvention such as autonomous weapons systems, satellites, lasers, and drones.

Second, competition continues in other domains because they are signals of how one might fare in the imagined great power war, and they allow for more-virtual competitions short of war while the status-quo security paradigm persists. Often today this type of virtual competition can be seen in the economic domains of trade, finance, money, and infrastructure. Wealth is certainly a good thing for a state to have once it can be sure of its security.

It is always better for a state to be powerful, and therefore secure, than to be wealthy. This is because converting wealth into power is a very hard coordination problem when done on a massive scale. In the meantime, your wealth could simply be seized by another more powerful state. In the past, you needed to raid a treasury to take your enemy’s wealth. Now, you simply need to instruct your banks to freeze certain accounts.

We also see this virtual competition taking place in the realm of intelligence activities, especially cyber and information operations, which often accompany more conventional political, economic, and military efforts in what some have called “hybrid warfare.” The internet and digital communications technologies that have proliferated over the past three decades provide new methods for achieving foreign policy objectives in the gray area that falls on the spectrum between ‘war’ and ‘peace.’ This kind of international conflict—based not on military strength, but on shrewd political and economic influence operations—is to be expected from great powers vying for influence over a world that is increasingly multipolar.

Even symbolic gestures by great powers carry weight because they are signals of a great power’s strength and intentions. An effective posture demonstrates strength, and thus changes the balance of perception and respect. A good example of this is the way the Soviet military poured effort into its Olympic athletes, creating an international image of excellence, but also demonstrating the physical prowess and strength of its citizens—a sign of military capability. Sputnik was both a demonstration of advanced rocket technology in particular and a signal of scientific and technical prowess in general. When you are a great power, even relatively small gestures carry lots of weight. 

Third, power competition spills into undermining those aspects of the great power nuclear paradigm that are nonmaterial but just as essential as nuclear weapons—especially the political coherence of the opposing state, its institutions, and its concepts of power, security, and legitimacy. The Cold War was won not with weapons but with Hilton hotels and Billy Joel.

As Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, it was the failures of Communist ideology and institutions against their liberal rivals—the failure of the Second World’s system to measure up to the affluence of the First even in the minds of its own elites—that did more to break up the Soviet Union than any operation the CIA ever devised. 

More recently, a rising China has used economic leverage and influence over its significant diaspora, among other means, to exercise ‘sharp power’ and fortify its interests. However, in both the case of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the United States today, institutional and ideological problems are aggravated much more from within than from outside. 

Great Power Diplomacy Requires Elite Consensus and Will

If total war—in our time, nuclear war—is at one end of the spectrum of how great powers can resolve their great power competition, at the other end of the spectrum is great power diplomacy: the bona fide settlement of disputes through political and legal means rather than violence.

The United States was forced by the circumstances of World War II to develop keen strategic and diplomatic capacities that shaped the international order for the last eight decades, largely with advice and influence from some of our British and German friends. But like all institutions, these fruits of competent American foreign policy stagnate and decline over time unless they are maintained. It is therefore the highly functional state of elite consensus, competence, and coherence that must be explained, not its absence or decay. All institutions ossify on their own by default.

A power elite within a great power is the ‘who’ that runs its foreign policy. Without an elite consensus, there is no capability for a state to conduct great power diplomacy and shape the international institutional order. Great power diplomacy is a complex problem that requires coordination between a large number of people and institutions over much longer time than one or even several presidential administrations. There was a foreign policy establishment after World War I that among other things started the Council on Foreign Relations, and one after World War II that waged the Cold War. By these historical standards, there is no U.S. foreign policy establishment anymore.

The consensus that we call an ‘establishment’ is the minimum condition to have a great power foreign policy, but for it to actually be successful requires two further conditions: first, that at least some of the most skilled people within the elite class devote themselves to these questions, and second, that the elite, in general, has a willingness to coordinate in order to shoulder the burdens of governance. On the necessity of skill, Realpolitik is a brutal sport even when played by the most skilled players, but it is an unmitigated bloodbath of blunder and friendly-fire when run by amateurs or middling clerks. 

On elite coordination and will to govern, our current picture is bleak. To the extent there is any elite coordination at all, it is in the alignment of individuals by virtue of their shared status- or profit-motive within a market or bureaucratic structure. Unfortunately, neither individualism, nor the market, nor the petit-bourgeois careerism of the bureaucracy can sustain a coherent elite consensus that actually advances the interests of the state over those of individuals or special interests.

Our ever-aging gerontocrats, many of whom came of age during the counterculture of the 1960s, have long imagined a world with no countries. They have indeed completed their long march through the institutions of power only to discover that you can’t run an institution on the strength of your individual values or ability to express yourself against the establishment. Rather than engage with the messy complexities of power in the world today, they appear to make decisions off intuitions and value-judgments that were crystalized decades ago.

These gerontocrats go to great lengths to avoid describing politics in terms of power realities—as if ignoring these realities will make them go away—eschewing the mundane fundamentals of coordination and organization for the ever-gratifying politics of media spectacle or ideological gesture. In the final analysis, this avoidance and obfuscation doesn’t vanquish power; it just ensures that power is not wielded responsibly, straightforwardly, or in service of noble ends.

The Tasks of the Rising Generation

The rising generations of elites—who tend to recognize at least implicitly the incoherence in their elders—have become even further disillusioned by the nature of elite politics. As the establishment has decayed into fragments and special interests, the personal path to participation in good governance appears even more fraught. A keen observer of the institutional landscape would conclude that you’d have to be a psychopath or a fool to enter here. Better to simply work for McKinsey or Goldman or Google and invest in index funds or Bitcoin. The opted-out elite culture that this creates only deepens the problem.

And yet, geopolitics and great power diplomacy will continue to be the games we are forced to play, even if we don’t want to or know how to play them well. If we are to get anywhere, some among the rising generations will need to step up and find ways to rebuild America’s elite institutions, instead of just following local incentives and opting out.

The only way to thrive in this situation is to undertake a skeptical inventory of the encrusted foreign policy assumptions we have inherited from a previous paradigm—keeping what is still useful, but discarding the many illusions and delusions that clutter our tired foreign policy thought. When your task involves operating outside of exhausted institutional and conceptual pathways, clarity and sanity are at their highest premium. In particular, we are facing a change in international paradigm from American hegemony to a shifting landscape—a world which is more multipolar but still nuclear-dominated. The basic facts of power in the world are the foundation for the clarity and sanity we need to navigate that change. 

It will be up to our rising generation of American elites to both find a new modus vivendi and to right the ship of state. The alternative is a path to further danger and devastation—not just for Americans, but for everyone. America is still a great power in the world with the lion’s share of influence over the international order. A post-American world will not be a liberation from America’s dysfunctions, but an even deeper and wider chaos. As goes America, so will go the world.

Since the end of the Second World War, the ideological landscape of American foreign relations has been dominated by the latest incarnation of Winthrop’s call in the form of post-war liberal internationalism. It morphed slightly to become American “liberal hegemony” following the end of the Cold War, but has remained fundamentally the same. This liberal internationalism served to legitimate and make coherent—even imbue with a sense of eternal meaning—a set of institutions built and actions taken to manage American security, political, economic, cultural, and ideological needs following the end of the Second World War.

This ideology tied together security interests (bipolar competition against the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear war) with political ones (a bipartisan Washington consensus on foreign policy that made big institution-building and power projection possible). At the same time, it captured the underlying economic need to build domestic and international markets for American consumer goods. Most of all, it satisfied a deep, almost religious need for Americans to be part of something righteous—this wasn’t merely a justification for security, party politics, or consumer capitalism: God was on our side.

Post-war liberal internationalism resulted from this statecraft and was designed to address a set of underlying needs domestically and internationally. As productive as it may have been for effecting an American sphere of relative peace, prosperity, and freedom, this ideology emerged as a means to those ends, and not as an end in itself.

But underlying needs and interests often change faster than institutions created to manage them. Institutions ossify and, unless reformed or replaced, continue to do whatever they were created to do, regardless of whether that is still necessary. Ideologies work the same way.

America no longer faces the same security, political, or economic problems that it did in the late 1940s. But in the case of American liberal internationalism, successive generations of foreign policy leaders—especially since the end of the Cold War—have taken on this ideology less as a rational conclusion of statecraft and more as an article of faith. With the ideology ascending to the point of hegemony, the statecraft that birthed it has atrophied to the point of near extinction.

To understand the difference between statecraft and ideology, it’s helpful to study the milieu out of which this statecraft emerged; and to make the clearest distinction, it’s useful to look at cases where action deviated most strikingly from public ideology. This does not refer to the long history of American ideology betraying the national interest, but rather to cases where, out of public view, statesmen sought to advance the national interest, as they understood it, in ways that clashed with the ideology of the day.

***

Perhaps the best example is how the United States protected and employed former Nazi German officials, beginning just months after Hitler’s death and persisting into the 1960s, to aid U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union. Many readers will be familiar with Operation Paperclip, a secret intelligence program to bring German scientists, technicians, and engineers to the United States to assist with the Cold War and Space Race. The most famous case is the exfiltration and assimilation into NASA of Werner von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists who took America to the moon. Sometimes scarce human capital provides a decisive strategic advantage.

What is less well-known and more illustrative of the post-war American strategic milieu is the figure of Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat and expert on the Soviet Union, whom the Americans rescued in 1945. The U.S. government relied on Hilger for his expert knowledge of Soviet strategic thinking and his advice on how America might subvert Soviet control of the Eastern European territories which had been newly liberated from their German masters.

During Nazi Germany’s occupation of Eastern Europe, the German bureaucracies (such as the Foreign Office, where Hilger oversaw “Eastern questions”) learned extensively about the worldviews of the people whose land they occupied and whose lives they often disrupted and ended. The Third Reich’s focus on carrying out a national and racial expansion project, including the destruction of states and the imposition of mass violence upon these populations, required an understanding of both terrain and people. Hilger not only had knowledge from this wartime “German experience” in Eastern Europe, but he had also lived in the Soviet Union for most of his life and had dealt with its leaders for decades.

The life of Hilger at the intersection of U.S.–German–Soviet relations from the 1930s to the 1950s is a useful microhistory through which to understand the American strategic culture Hilger influenced and benefited from. Hilger was apparently the only person who knew Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Konrad Adenauer, and George Kennan personally—four of the most consequential figures of the 20th century—and yet almost no one has heard of him. With the notable exception of a German book last year by Jörn Happel, The East Expert—Gustav Hilger: Diplomat in the Age of Extremes, Hilger remains largely unknown—especially in the Anglophone world. (For example, he did not even have an English-language Wikipedia page until I created one in December of last year.)

An ethnic German born in Russia to a German businessman in 1886, Hilger spent most of his life in Russia until 1941. Hilger’s CIA file notes that Stalin supposedly said of him, “German heads of state and German ambassadors to Moscow came and went—but Gustav Hilger remained.” Fellow Western diplomats in Moscow in the 1930s considered Hilger an encyclopedia on all things Russian and Soviet.

After the war, Hilger was brought to Virginia for debriefing interviews in 1945 and then sent back to Germany to oversee analysis of the Eastern European spy ring created by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen (former head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front) that the Americans had taken over sponsoring. (It would be turned over in 1953 to Adenauer’s government to become West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service: the BND.) When Soviet intelligence got wind that Hilger was back in Germany and demanded his arrest, the Americans arranged a complex rescue operation to bring Hilger and his wife to the United States, where the Office of Policy Coordination (the CIA covert operations arm) paid his rent and salary. He worked on papers for the OPC and the State Department.

***

To understand how Hilger came to Washington to advise the U.S. government, it’s necessary to return to a dacha some twenty kilometers south of Moscow in the early 1930s. Several of the junior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Moscow rented this dacha in 1934 for relaxation and recreation—just a year after the U.S. government established ties with the Soviet Union and reopened its embassy in Moscow. In the words of George Kennan’s biographer John Lewis Gaddis, “not far from Stalin’s own country retreat, it had a log house, a tennis court, a garden, horses to ride, and a high wooden fence.”

What emerges from study of memoirs and contemporary papers is the picture of a “Dacha Crowd” centered around the American diplomats Charles Thayer, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Carmel Offie, and Ambassador William Bullitt. But membership in the Dacha Crowd extended to other Western diplomats posted to 1930s Moscow, including Brits like Fitzroy Maclean (considered one of the principal inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond).

The group also included Germans, notably, Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, whom the Americans called Johnny (and who spied for them), and Gustav Hilger, whom this group “widely appreciated,” in the words of Burton Hersh’s The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. In his own memoirs, Herwarth declares Hilger “the most outstanding member of the [German] Embassy’s staff.” On the Dacha Crowd, Herwarth recalled, “In fact we founded such a group; like Great Britain, the Society had no written constitution, but it existed nonetheless. Since our discussions were frank, we were careful to admit only people in whom we had complete trust.”

The group was the epicenter of the “carnivalesque atmosphere” of the Western diplomatic scene in 1930s Moscow. Writing to Kennan in 1940, Thayer recalled the “madness of ’34” in Moscow and the “not entirely sane existence we led before with Mrs. and mistresses all together in an alcoholic haze.” Hersh describes how the dacha served as a “kind of clubhouse for the beleaguered Americans to socialize and relax, quite often with their counterparts from the other uneasy Western delegations.” This Dacha Crowd, many of whom would grow up into the Georgetown Set, were crucial to bringing Hilger to the U.S. after the war and saving him from probable execution either by a war-crimes tribunal or at the hands of Soviet intelligence.

***

The intervening years had proved fateful for Hilger. He worked on brokering a series of diplomatic agreements between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany—most notably the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact that enabled the destruction of the Polish state under German-Soviet partition and invasion in September 1939.

For all his geopolitical skill, Hilger appeared to his contemporaries “naive,” especially about the motives of the Nazi figures that were now running his own state. Like many in the diplomatic corps and military, Hilger was critical of the way the war was being conducted—especially the breaking of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.

According to Zachary Shore’s account in What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy, the few times that Hilger briefed Hitler, he argued against invading the Soviet Union and tried to paint a “balanced picture of Russia’s strengths.” Hitler had little patience for officials whose views of German state interest were not aligned with Nazi party ideology, and Herwarth describes how Hilger’s interactions with Hitler “did little more than leave Hitler wondering where the loyalties of this russified German lay.”

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Hilger was expelled from Moscow along with the rest of Germany’s diplomats. He returned to Berlin to advise Foreign Minister Ribbentrop on “all Russia matters,” although apparently Ribbentrop paid very little attention to his advice. Hilger continued to oppose the decision to go to war with Stalin (apparently unaware that in Hitler’s mind this had been part of the plan from the beginning). When Hilger wrote a memorandum deprecating Germany’s chances in the war on the Eastern Front, Ribbentrop “threatened him with concentration camp [sic] if he continued in this vein,” according to now-declassified American intelligence reports.

None of his objections to Nazi policies, however, prevented Hilger from continuing to “serve the Reich dutifully throughout the war,” according to Simpson. The recent book Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Foreign Office and the Past) has documented the close association between the Foreign Office, the S.S., and the Reich Main Security Office (RHSA) in an 880-page report much too detailed to recount fully here. While Hilger was never a Nazi party member, his senior post in the Foreign Office under Ribbentrop made him aware of and complicit in war crimes and atrocities, especially the “Holocaust by bullets” in German-occupied Eastern Europe, from his perch in Berlin.

By spring of 1945, Hilger was “thoroughly depressed and reproaching himself bitterly for having worked with Ribbentrop and thereby promoted Hitler’s policies,” wrote Herwarth after visiting Hilger in his home outside Salzburg. His only son had been killed on the Eastern front near Orel. That their son “should have been killed in a war between Russia and Germany came as a terrible blow to Hilger and his wife since their love and loyalty was equally divided between the two countries.” According to Herwarth, Hilger “could think only of suicide,” but instead he soon surrendered himself to U.S. forces in Salzburg on May 19, 1945, in part out of fears of what his treatment would be if he were captured by the Soviets.

***

When Hilger was wanted for “torture” (read: war crimes and atrocities) by U.S. war crimes investigators, the Dacha Crowd came to the rescue. Charles Thayer, now working for the OSS, on a tip from his old Dacha Crowd companion Herwarth, helped Hilger get transferred to the U.S. with other top Third Reich civilian and military officials. During some nine months of internment, much of it at P.O. Box 1142, the comfortable secret military interrogation center in Fort Hunt, Virginia, Hilger met John Gunther Dean. Dean was himself a German Jew, and a young Army intelligence officer who had fled Germany in December 1939. This was no ordinary prison; Dean was tasked with keeping the “prisoners” happy. This often meant playing tennis or horseback riding.

Much later, after his own career as an ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service, Dean spoke of his formative relationship with the man:

Gustav Hilger was the most knowledgeable man about a country we knew relatively little. He was a fine gentleman. People came from all over the U.S. Government to talk with him. Sometimes they needed interpreters. Sometimes I would just take him to a tea house and have a cup of tea with him—always in civilian clothes. He told me his life. I kept him company…He held very balanced views. Hilger represented what I thought was good in the German people…I learned that perhaps sometimes bad solutions are better than the alternative, which might be a tragedy.

Hilger’s knowledgeable responses to a series of interrogation questions on the Soviet Union proved his intelligence value to the Americans. Hilger’s interrogations, on topics ranging from Russia’s administration of Eastern Prussia and the constitution of the Soviet Union, to the collectivization of its agriculture and Russian antisemitism, produced detailed commentary that filled dozens of reports.

In an answer to “How much reliance is placed on the United Nations security organization as compared with bilateral alliance and military preparedness to protect the position of the Soviet Union?” Hilger responded with an eleven-paragraph treatise on the history of how the Soviets viewed the world and what effect it had on their lack of confidence in any “international security organization.”

As useful as his insights were on the sundry intelligence topics covered in the interrogation reports, it would be a November 8, 1946 paper “Observations on General A. A. Vlasov and the so-called ‘Vlasov-action’” that would positively confirm Hilger’s usefulness for the Americans. In the paper, which remained classified “Secret” until 2006, Hilger describes his conversations with the Russian General Vlasov, and the potential—both in the view of Vlasov and Hilger—for a German military and psychological operation to have gathered anti-Bolshevik defector forces across the Soviet Union, defeated the Red Army, and overthrown the Bolshevik regime—if only Hitler had put it in place in time.

The paper is written to teach the U.S. government lessons about conducting psychological operations against the Soviet Union:

…the discontent of the peoples of the Soviet Union with their present rulers is so deep-seated and so great that they would support every effort from abroad which would appear to them as fit to free them from the hateful regime. This task, however, cannot be achieved by military means alone. Skillful psychological warfare is absolutely necessary and must be conducted simultaneously.

This paper came to Kennan at a key moment on U.S. thinking vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Kennan and Offie, of the Dacha Crowd, would within two years create such a “psychological operations” organization in the OPC at the newly established CIA and task it with conducting the same anti-Soviet “psychological operations” Hilger had prescribed.

***

In 1946, when American military intelligence joined with former Wehrmacht military intelligence chief Gen. Reinhard Gehlen to continue sponsoring Gehlen’s “Organization,” a network of spies in the Soviet Bloc, the U.S. Army secretly returned Hilger to Germany to head up analysis of the Gehlen Organization’s “frequently worthless” intelligence output.

After Soviet intelligence learned Hilger was back in Germany, they requested his extradition as a war criminal and arrested members of his family in the Soviet Zone to force the issue. Hilger was later told Soviet intelligence considered him to be the “most dangerous German” who had served at the Moscow embassy before the war.

So in 1948, Hilger sought refuge in the United States. At the same time, George Kennan and Carmel Offie, now senior officials in the State Department and CIA, needed advice on destabilizing the Soviet Union’s satellites. What followed was an elaborate American operation to bring the rest of Hilger’s family first into the American sector in Berlin. The Dacha Crowd, many of whom had grown up into the “Georgetown Set,” managed to bring Hilger back to Washington for a second time.

The OPC became, in effect, the operational arm of Kennan’s office, and above it, the Truman administration’s newly minted National Security Council. Its “Policy Coordination” name betrayed OPC’s real role as the U.S. government’s principal worldwide covert action arm. National Security Council directive 10/2 of June 1948 assigned to OPC responsibility for:

“propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberations [sic] groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

It was the OPC, through Carmel Offie, that would bring Hilger to the United States and handle him under project names “EUCHRE” and “PBSTEAM,” using the personal aliases of “Arthur T. Latter” and “Stephen H. Holcomb.”

Kennan and Offie also pushed for the Hilgers to receive visas and waived normal protocols in the process. Kennan wrote in his appeal to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), “Hilger was never a member, or sympathetic to, the Nazi Party, but rather he was a conscientious and able civil servant of the German government…[who] should receive special consideration.” Offie and the CIA paid Hilger $500 a month, helped him get a house, and tried to “obtain for [Hilger] some connection to Georgetown University, for which organization he will actually do very little work.”

Jörn Happel describes how Kennan “paved the way for Hilger in the United States,” which included campaigning “for his fatherly friend” by visiting him, providing him with contacts, and encouraging him to write his memoirs. Happel writes, “within a short time Mary and Gustav Hilger created an open house in the USA. Visitors came and went.”

By April 1949, Hilger had already written sixteen reports ranging from “Strategy and Tactics of Bolshevism” to “The Ukrainian Problem as it Showed up in the War between Germany and the Soviet Union” and “Observations on the Collapse of the Hitler Regime In Germany and the Weak Points of the Stalin Regime in the Soviet Union.” Hilger would meet frequently with his old friends Kennan and Bohlen, then considered Washington’s top experts on U.S.–Soviet relations. Bohlen recalled, in an interview with Christopher Simpson for his book Blowback, that he, Hilger, and Kennan “formed an analysis team specializing in the interpretation of Soviet geopolitical strategy following the outbreak of the Korean War.”

According to now-declassified documents, Kennan continued to intervene personally for Hilger to receive high-level security clearances. This upset some in the CIA who saw the danger in giving a man with such foreign allegiances access to raw intelligence, and, in practice, that even Hilger’s occasional presence in the CIA’s cafeteria could potentially blow covers.

It was not just clearances and access that the Dacha Crowd was able to provide. Kennan and Offie secured for Hilger a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, through the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, to work on his memoir-history of German–Soviet relations, The Incompatible Allies. The book’s preface states: “the present work would not have been possible without the active interest and help of a great number of people.” Hilger thanks Kennan and Offie by name. Hilger was also invited by Professor Clyde Kluckhohn to present a paper and seminar on “The Soviet Foreign Service Officer through the Changing Years” at Harvard’s Russian Research Center in 1951.

Having served in Washington as an unofficial envoy for Konrad Adenauer and the new government he was forming in West Germany, it is no surprise that Hilger would accept in September 1953 a high post in the new German Foreign Office. Hilger was appointed Botschaftstrat (Counselor) in the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), the exact same position in the same office—it should be noted—where he had worked under Ribbentrop. Hilger was promised a full pension for the entire period from 1923 to his future retirement in 1956 as “bait” to leave his comfortable life in Washington for a new one in the West German capital.

Nicholas Poppe, a Russian linguist who had worked for the S.S.-affiliated Wannsee Institute and who was brought to the United States under similar circumstances to Hilger, gives Hilger even more credit for supporting Adenauer behind the scenes. Poppe writes in his memoirs that “the existence of the Adenauer government was to a large extent the result of Hilger’s activities.” Hilger was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1957. He continued to provide informal advice to West German and American officials until his death in 1965.

***

The Hilger story is useful to understand the statecraft and ideology of U.S. foreign relations. In studying Hilger and his connections with American officials, we span the formative years of an elite cohort (that Hilger would know and influence) whose rise to prominence in American foreign policy-making during the Truman administration set the stage of American Cold War strategy and ideology.

While this elite group was looking at foreign relations and strategy from the perspective of rather dispassionate analysis—influenced by the British and German strategic cultures they observed during the 1930s and 40s—the ideology they projected to go along with the liberal international order they were building sold a different image to the American people, especially the great American middle classes that dominated public life. This ideology was one in which America was for spreading truth, justice, and the American way in the face of the evil Soviet menace.

No matter whether you call them the Dacha Crowd, the Georgetown Set, the Old Boys, or the Wise Men, the same strategic culture that birthed the post-war liberal international order also birthed the OPC, which recruited the likes of Gustav Hilger and had a worldwide mandate for covert action, psychological warfare, and destabilizing governments. A notable shear exists between the story liberalism tells about itself, and reality.

We end up in a rather dissociative situation. It is quite easy to view the Hilger story simply as an instance of American institutions acting hypocritically with regard to their liberal foundations. But what if success had not depended on such principles at all?

Today, the institutions of American empire chug on largely out of sight and out of mind. Surface level discourse is dominated by reductive ideology that, by the end of the Cold War, was less well-adapted to addressing the underlying needs for which it was created: peace, security, and prosperity. America looked very different entering the nineties than it did after World War II, but it relied on largely the same institutional framework to deal with the world, and it preached much the same messages. Since then the dominant alliance of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism has led only to the consensus of “liberal hegemony” resting on even less sound strategic thought.

The ideological layer is just the tip of a much bigger institutional iceberg—institutions that have ossified as this strategic culture of concentrated and coordinated agentic activity has declined. What remains are just formal institutions that putter along and an ideology that persists in dominating discourse, regardless of its usefulness. The spirit is gone. It’s hard to keep institutions functional.

In the era of Hilger, the people behind these institutions were deeply interconnected and shared overlapping goals. To the extent that these goals differed in reality from public ideological reasoning, the players involved knew the whole score. That was how the Dacha Crowd could cooperate so effectively in bringing Hilger, an official of a former enemy, to work on helping them defeat a current enemy.

But when an initial generation dies off, it becomes more difficult to keep everyone on the same page. The expansion and bureaucratization of institutions as time goes on accelerates this tendency. It’s quite difficult to give continuity to implicit and informal goals. The generation of officials following the Dacha Crowd might, at best, apprentice under those with living memory of the old guard. But by the following generation, any connection to them would require archives and histories: learning from the dead, not the living.

Instead, most have to make do with the public frame. It has become a common trope to discuss how liberalism needs a resurgence in its values and ideals. Liberalism itself is presented as a very good idea which has led to global prosperity. The implication is that liberalism is at its core a philosophical development rather than a concrete institutional heritage, as if a cadre of political philosophers in university laboratories deduced it from pure reason. It certainly presents itself that way.

But given a close examination of the origins of post-war Western liberalism in institutional expediency and practical power politics, it is a mistake to take it too seriously as a coherent philosophical ideology. As an intellectual system, it is the output of shrewd statecraft and is as much a propaganda product as a philosophical one. For every sincere liberal thinker trying to apply a set of principles, there were numerous actors responsible for cooking up that set of principles on far more pragmatic grounds.

And cooked up it was, in this case of its post-war iteration, to galvanize the population for a war stance towards the man formerly known as “Uncle Joe.” Recast as the red tyrant, Stalin now became the enemy of freedom.

Foreign relations—even those of a democracy—will always require some degree of official secrecy and dissimulation. This has remained an unresolved problem throughout the whole history of statecraft and diplomacy. But foreign relations dominated by decadent ideology, and institutions that are increasingly unmoored from the underlying interests and needs they were designed to address, can serve only to further aggravate the schizophrenic nature of our relationship with the rest of the world and our increasingly less productive behavior abroad.

The first step toward resolving this discoherence is bringing our political worldview and institutional machinery back into alignment by reexamination and reformalization. Only then could we undertake real moral improvement of that machinery.

Our default trajectory is to bumble into a crisis that will force that realignment the hard way. But we could also preemptively undertake the necessary program of harsh self-examination and reorientation. Understanding parts of our history like the Hilger story, which discohere with how we’d prefer to see ourselves, is a good start.