Delusion, Denial, and Disappearance

Now to be honest, I don’t know whether this is an actual saying or not, but it struck me, and no least because because when one branch of my family bailed on Bavaria, they went to Indiana. And the sentence seemed pretty apt. Delusion is not just a creek in Southern Indiana.

Down here in the ortsmitte of the Third World, we have an equally folksy quip: Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.

But whatever the origins, they’re not only insightful examples into a serious problem, but the one leads to the other. Here’s a good example. In a recent poll in the UK, people were asked to rank how they believed their economy compared to to the 51 American states. The respondents said they thought if would be seventh, that is in the top thirteen percent.

But actually, it was at the bottom. That’s right, if the UK was an American state, it would be the poorest one. Actually, poorer than the poorest one.

But that’s where disappearance comes in, and in several different senses. At a wild guess, the current British government, and their public relations branch (mainstream British media) is probably doing an excellent job of disappearing any mention of the survey.

But I not only have no idea, but in my view the UK’s view of itself is about as important in global affairs as Lichtenstein’s or Andorra’s. Because their delusions and denials have conspired to disappear the really crucial fact, and here it is.

When the eminent American economic historian Douglas North wrote his account of our economy from 1790 to 1860, he argued that by 1860, American was second only to Great Britain in its economic power. I have a reservation: my interpretation of the data he used is that although he was technically correct, it was a very distant second. But there’s no doubt about Great Britain being in the top spot, as evidenced by Peter Mathias titling his explanation for the how and why, The First Industrial Nation.

So the real problem is not that nowadays the UK is basically the poorest of our states. Germany, Italy, France, and Spain are pretty much in the same leaking boat. It’s that between the last half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first, Great Britain went from being the wealthiest and most powerful nation around to pretty much the opposite. That’s what’s important—and it’s a data set, an entire array of incontestable facts, that’s basically been disappeared.

So delusional thinking is obviously pretty potent, and it leads to denial. So the basic question is this: does it also lead to disappearance? That is, not just to an economic fall, to a collapse in its geopolitical importance, but to its disappearance as an actual state.

There’s no real answer, but you only have to go back to 1600 or so to wonder, and over the next centuries history affords us plenty of examples of decline, collapse, and even disappearance. And when I look at the delusions and denials current in Iran, Russia, and the Euro-powers, I wonder if that wasn’t the case back then as well. And when I used that verb wonder, I’m serious. I have no bloody idea.

Back in the 1840s Charles Mackay framed it this way in the first paragraph of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, when he observed that

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

A perfect description of the problem, and it’s still going on.

Now if you’re scratching your head,, trying to figure out how this relates to Iran, it’s simple. The current leaders (whoever they are), grew up after 1979 (the math is easy), so in their confusions, their delusions about Iran’s successes and power, they’re just as much in denial about their current situation as the French, the British, and the Germans. Apparently half a century is all it takes.

Now in talking about the survey, I deliberately began with an example relating to an economic reality, because that’s where the Delusion-Denial-Disappearance problem is the most widespread, Marx and Malthus being the most influential examples of this kind of thinking. And to a remarkable extent, it’s wide spread.

And in my view that accounts for the current obsession with the Straight of Hormuz. As though it controls the world’s oil supply.

Speaking of delusions, guess who’s the world’s leading producer of oil. Close you eyes, no fair cheating!

It’s the United states, which produces almost 1,5 times as much as Saudi Arabia, and almost three quarters as much a the Saudis and the Russians combined. And as Venezuela’s production gradually increases, the imbalance will only widen.

The other important energy product is natural gas. We currently produce a quarter of the world’s available natural gas. So the importance of the Straight of Hormuz to the United States is about the same as the importance of Lamborghini to American motorists.

I can explain why this isn’t understood, why it was denied and so forth, and in a recent post I tagged it as the Ehrlich-Carter syndrome, an excellent example of delusional thinking. But the bottom line is that economic power is the precondition not only for prosperity, but for military power, and by definition military power means industrialization, which was the point both Mathias and North were making.

And here’s where Mackay’s remarks about delusions really come into play, because already in his lifetime, we can see the denial both of the extent to which industrialization leads to prosperity, and that it requires energy. I’m referring to the Luddites in the first case, and what in popular parlance nowadays is called the “Greens” in the second.

Now in the drive towards industrialization, the three sources of energy historically required were coal, oil, and natural gas. That’s somewhat less true today, because of nuclear power, but even in France, where nuclear power plants supply a little over two thirds of the country’s energy needs, oil is still important But just as the Luddites were opposed to factories, their contemporary descendants are opposed to nuclear, as well as industrialization itself.

But their delusions about industrialization and energy have by now created a more basic problem. So today we’re seeing the political and military consequences of delusional thinking about industrialization. The Europeans (as well as Australians and some Americans) are pretty much in denial about, well, just about everything, but the relationship of conventional energy to industrialization to prosperity and power is the most significant.

I should add that when I’m being lectured about saving the environment, climate change, and alternative source of energy, I very politely ask the lecturer the following question: “If 4 x squared is 36, what’s x?”

The invariable reply is that has nothing to do with saving the planet. I reply that if you can’t do 8th grade algebra off the top of your head, you can’t possibly have an informed opinion on this topic.

It either shuts them up or reduces them to some kind of rant, but I’m well aware that logic and math doen’t win arguments.

But how industrialization relates to military power seems pretty obvious, except apparently it’s not, because the EEU seems pretty evenly divided between those who have adopted policies that have shut down what native energy sources they possess, so they’re totally dependent on imports, and those where the policies are explicitly, or openly, aiming at deindustrialization. The UK is a good example of the former, Germany the latter.

The supposed leader of the EEU has already dealt with the problems caused by the Ukrainian and now belatedly recognized as a result of the Iranian war. The solution, she announced, is simply to use less energy. A statement that’s right up there with Mao’s idea that people could have blast furnaces in their back yards and make steel, or what appears to be the IRGC leadership’s ideas about why they don’t need to meet American terms.

And at the same time, in both Europe and Iran, their leaders are in complete denial that they no longer have the military power to have any effect on the situation.

Now at this point I need to introduce a poorly understood technical point about oil production. I do with reluctance, because first, it sounds far too neat, and second in the time frame I’m positing, all sorts of things could happen. So I’m just going tho throw it out there.

Now if you don’t understand the actual process of drilling. extyracting, and tranporting oil—how the petroleum industry works—it’s logical to think that if you just sit tight (Iran) remain intransigent, or in the case of the Europeans and the Chinese, eventually open the Straight of Hormuz, you’ll win.

So they don’t understand the real problem, which isn’t that the Iranians can’t ship out their oil, and that the American blockade is global, as in it doesn’t just affect Iranian tankers leaving Iranian ports, it affects the dozens (maybe hundreds) of “shadow” tankers sailing around. The United States has already seized one Iranian ship trying to break the blockade, boarded another, and the nabbed two others out in the Indian ocean.

And in addition, Washington will now go after any Iranian ships trying either to lay mines, or interfere with shipping.

However, the real problem is this. There’s really no such thing as a temporary stop to pumping oil. It’s not at all like turning off your water faucet. Whether the “you” is an individual or a town. If you stop the pumping operation, starting it back up isn’t a trivial operation. In fact it’s about as far from trivial ad uou can get. We’ve already seen that happening with Venezuela, where the former regime was so inept it managed to reduce their country’s oil operations by over half.

And even though major American operators are just on the other side of the water, are getting involved, it’s going to be a while before Venezuela is producing anything close to what it should be producing.

When the storage tanks are full—which is already happening, since by definition their only function is to store the oil for tankers, the oil wells have to be capped, shut down, because the alternatives if you don’t, range from the dangerous to the calamitous.

So all the blockade has done is start the clock, the countdown to the end of Iran’s oil production. And although we probably don’t know precisely what the countdown is, it’s not very long: more on the order of ten to fourteen days, not months.

I’ll conclude this with an inconvenient fact about Germany’s surrender at the end of the First World War. It wasn’t achieve through a military defeat, but by the naval blockade that led to the near starvation of German, although Lenin’s attempts to overthrow the basically socialist replacement government that emerged after the abdication of the emperor certainly contributed.

At the same time, it’s interesting that the impetus for negotiations is coming from Pakistan, a country that Beijing has been deeply invested in, and China really needs Iranian oil. So you have to wonder what’s going on behind the scene—or under the table—to make them ask for an extension of the “Ceasefire.”

I have no idea, but it’s clearly not in Pakistan’s interest to see a powerful Iran, and unlike a good many of the other powers I’ve named, their leadership seems pretty realistic—at least by comparison.

Finally—as if the situation wasn’t already fiendishly complicated, there are all sorts of other delusions that are crashing and burning, and here are the three most important

In Europe, Russia, and China, the steadily increasing signs of internal discontent. In each one both the causes and the forms are different. For the Europeans, it’s a multi party system that appears to be headed towards a paralysis. With China, it’s the collapse or their economy, which even the most cautious observers (like “Tony” on China Update) see is happening. In the case of Russia, it’s the Ukrainian quagmire.

But the common thread is an array of denials by their leaders in all sorts of different ways, perhaps the most important being that it’s created a population that’s fed up with them.

Then there’s the inability to recognize change and adapt to it, In this case a change represented by the emergence of states that in their view have always been inconsequential: Poland and Ukraine, for the Europeans and Russia, the emergence of a powerful anti-Chinese block, led by Japan, for China. And globlly. the dramatic shifts away from communism in Central and South America, and the steadily increasing economic power of India, together with the self induced failures of Mexico, Canada, and Australia.

Finally, there’s the approaching collapse of already wobbly international agreements as exemplified by the UN and NATO.

At some point, illusions turn into delusions, and denial is an understandable response. But as Mackay pointed out, it’s not a good survival mechanism. Or possibly Milan Kundera put it better.

But this is the way life goes on: a man imagines that he is playing his role in a particular play, and does not suspect that in the meantime they have changed the scenery without his noticing, and he un­knowingly finds himself in the middle of a rather different performance.