Page 49 - AEI Insights Vol. 7 2021

Bajrektarevic, 2021

Origins of Future
Does our history only appear overheated, while it is essentially calmly predetermined? Is it
directional or conceivable, dialectic and eclectic or cyclical, and therefore cynical? Surely, our
history warns (no matter if the Past is seen as a destination or resource). Does it also provide
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for a hope? Hence, what is in front of us: destiny or future?
Theory loves to teach us that extensive debates on what kind of economic system is most
conductive to human wellbeing is what consumed most of our civilizational vertical. However,
our history has a different say: It seems that the manipulation of the global political economy
(and usage of fear as the currency of control) – far more than the introduction of ideologies –
is the dominant and arguably more durable way that human elites usually conspired to build or
break civilizations, as planned projects. Somewhere down the process, it deceived us,
becoming the self-entrapment. How?

One of the biggest (nearly schizophrenic) dilemmas of liberalism, ever since David Hume and
Adam Smith, was an insight into reality: Whether the world is essentially Hobbesian or
Kantian. As postulated, the main task of any liberal state is to enable and maintain wealth of
its nation, which of course rests upon wealthy individuals inhabiting the particular state. That
imperative brought about another dilemma: if wealthy individual, the state will rob you, but in
absence of it, the pauperized masses will mob you.
The invisible hand of Smith’s followers have found the satisfactory answer – sovereign debt.
That ‘invention’ meant: relatively strong central government of the state. Instead of popular
control through the democratic checks-&-balance mechanism, such a state should be rather
heavily indebted. Debt – firstly to local merchants, than to foreigners – is a far more powerful
deterrent, as it resides outside the popular check domain.

With such a mixed blessing, no empire can easily demonetize its legitimacy, and abandon its
hierarchical but invisible and unconstitutional controls. This is how a debtor empire was born.
A blessing or totalitarian curse? Let us briefly examine it.
The Soviet Union – much as (the pre-Deng’s) China itself – was far more of a classic
continental military empire (overtly brutal; rigid, authoritative, anti-individual, apparent,
secretive), while the US was more a financial-trading empire (covertly coercive; hierarchical,
yet asocial, exploitive, pervasive, polarizing). On opposite sides of the globe and cognition, to
each other they remained enigmatic, mysterious and incalculable: Bear of permafrost vs. Fish
of the warm seas. Sparta vs. Athens. Rome vs. Phoenicia… However, common for both (as
much as for China today) was a super-appetite for omnipresence. Along with the price to pay
for it.
Consequently, the Soviets went bankrupt by mid 1980s – they cracked under its own weight,
imperially overstretched. So did the Americans – the ‘white man burden’ fractured them

2 Flow and irreversibility (as well as the non-directionality and the Boltzmann’s unfolding) of time is one of the
fundamental principles that governs visible (to say; comprehensible) universe. If and when so, the Future itself
must be certain, but unshaped. Hence, Future is a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics (one of the
fundamental principles of chemo-physics that governs us), but it also has to be (a net sum of) our collective
projection onto the next: Collapse of the (multivectoral) probability and its realisation into (a four dimensional)
possible tomorrow. For a clerical reason, we tend to deduce future events from human constructs (known as the
theoretical principles) or to induce them from deeply rooted/commonly shared visions (known as past experience).
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