My definition of “the Anthropocene”

To decompose neoliberal globalism into a differentiated set of smaller and more locally responsive nation-states has many attractions as a proposal, especially in settings whose yesterdays themselves held more attraction. Such states might in some cases be able to provide better protection. But whatever gains re-localization might offer in citizen comprehension or mutual sympathy, what it could not conceivably offer people is control over most aspects of their lives. That is not something which states or anything else can now supply.

(John Dunn, political theorist, accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii161.pdf: 46-47)

Reframing major economic narratives psychoanalytically (with the example of financialization)

The recasting.

Economic narratives function remarkably like what Freud called dream-work, the process by which unconscious material is transformed into the manifest content of dreams through mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and symbolization. Just as dreams allow forbidden wishes to find disguised expression, economic narratives permit societies to maintain contradictory beliefs and unsustainable practices by transforming threatening realities into acceptable stories. The pervasive narrative of ‘green growth’, for instance, allows continued capital accumulation while displacing anxiety about ecological limits onto fantasies of technological salvation.

Consider how displacement operates in policy discourse. When central banks speak of ‘financial stability’ or ‘systemic risk’, they displace attention from the fundamental instability of leveraged speculation onto technical management problems. The 2008 crisis was preceded by extensive discussion of ‘risk management’ and ‘financial innovation’, terms that displaced recognition of basic overleveraging onto reassuring technical vocabulary. As Shiller (2019) demonstrates, stories spread through economic systems with their own epidemic dynamics, but psychoanalysis reveals these are not neutral information transmissions but defensive operations protecting against unbearable recognitions.

Condensation, the compression of multiple meanings into single symbols, appears throughout economic discourse. The term ‘growth’ condenses fantasies of progress, fears of stagnation, competitive anxieties, and ecological denial into a single metric that becomes unquestionable. When policymakers declare that ‘we must restore growth’, they mobilize this condensed symbolic power without examining what drives the compulsion for endless expansion. Similarly, ‘inflation’ condenses anxieties about value, stability, and social order into a single number that becomes the focus of obsessive management while its symptomatic meaning remains unexplored.

Denial, the most primitive defence mechanism, structures entire policy frameworks. The efficient markets hypothesis itself functions as systematic denial of the unconscious processes driving market dynamics. More recently, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s claim that sovereign currency issuers face no financial constraints represents denial taken to its logical extreme, the fantasy of unlimited monetary power unconstrained by material reality. While MMT correctly identifies the conventional nature of fiscal constraints, it denies the psychological limits to monetary authority, the point at which symbolic credit collapses into Real worthlessness.

The concept of ‘forward guidance’ in monetary policy exemplifies how economic narratives attempt to manage not just expectations but anxiety itself. Central banks promise to keep interest rates ‘lower for longer’ or maintain stimulus ‘until conditions improve’, offering reassurance that paternal authority remains in control. Yet as Braun (2016) argues, central bank communication increasingly resembles what psychoanalysis calls ‘empty speech’, signifiers that circle around a void without addressing the fundamental uncertainties they purport to manage. The more central banks talk, the more apparent becomes their inability to guarantee the stability they promise.

But just what does this mean for actual policy?

Recognizing the unconscious dimensions of economic life transforms how we understand policy intervention. Central banks and fiscal authorities do not simply optimize economic variables; they manage collective psychological processes through symbolic intervention. This shifts focus from technical calibration to what we might call economic analysis, working through collective resistances and repressions.

Central banks function less as optimizing agents than as institutional analysands, compulsively repeating policies despite their manifest failure. The Bank of Japan’s three decades of zero interest rates, producing neither inflation nor robust growth, exemplifies repetition compulsion at the institutional level. Each new governor promises fresh approaches yet implements variations of the same policies, unable to work through the trauma of the bubble economy’s collapse. Breaking such repetition requires not better models but institutional analysis, bringing to consciousness the unconscious fantasies driving policy.

Modern central banking increasingly involves managing transference rather than managing expectations. Forward guidance attempts to shape not just rational forecasts but unconscious fantasies about institutional omnipotence. When the European Central Bank promises to do ‘whatever it takes’, it offers not credible commitment in the game-theoretic sense but transferential reassurance, performing the role of powerful parent who will not allow catastrophic abandonment. The effectiveness of such interventions depends not on their technical credibility but on their capacity to contain unconscious anxiety.

This reveals the impossibility of purely technical solutions to economic problems. Every technical intervention carries symbolic meaning that shapes its effectiveness. Quantitative easing was initially presented as temporary emergency response but became permanent because its withdrawal threatened not just asset prices but the fantasy of unlimited monetary support. . . .

Ceyhun Elgin (2026). “The economic unconscious: Towards a psychoanalytic macroeconomics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1–23 (accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/cje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cje/beag032/9002026; my bold)

So what?

It’s easy to dismiss the above by exclaiming, e.g., “Does this mean the US Federal Reserve or other central bank must become more like a diagnostic clinic?!” But there is a more immediate issue being discussed here, namely: How to read and interpret economic narratives.

Below is a May 2023 article by respected Financial Times columnist, Gillian Tett. Its title, numbers and trends don’t matter here. Indeed, its factual basis is no longer the crux of interpreting her report. What matters more is you reading the below as an illustration of how to apply the lens of reading the above. I quote it in full and without edit:

We should all be worried about the ‘financialisation’ of our world

Shut your eyes and try to visualise $160tn. It might seem impossible. Those zeroes in $160,000,000,000,000 — which almost take up a line by themselves — are enough to make anyone dizzy.

But right now we should try anyway because a new report about the state of the world’s balance sheet (that is, its assets and debts relative to growth) contains a startling finding. Number crunchers at the consultancy McKinsey believe that, since 2000, the world’s stock of paper wealth (the speculative, unrealised price of all its financial assets) has jumped by some $160tn. Yes, really.

Partly, that reflects real economic growth. But it primarily stems from a sharp rise in global debt and in the supply of money through quantitative easing, particularly in countries such as the US, which has raised asset prices. For every dollar of global investment made since 2000, some $1.90 of debt has been added. During the 2020 and 2021 period, this “accelerated to $3.40 for each $1.00 in net investment”, McKinsey says. This was the fastest rate in 50 years.

That has raised the putative value of all global assets, relative to gross domestic product, from about 470 per cent of global GDP in 2000 to more than 600 per cent today, with real estate and equity markets booming faster than the “real” economy to a truly remarkable ($160tn) degree.

Most of the time, this pattern is rarely discussed. That is partly because tracking this global balance sheet involves so much guesswork that few analysts have ever tried (except for some mavericks at the Bank for International Settlements). But it is also because it is a trait of human nature to assume that whatever we grew up with represents “normality” and will continue. And since stealthy asset price inflation has been happening for so long, even before 2000, it now feels entirely“normal”.

Two factors now unfolding should make us all rethink this. One, asset price inflation has been a key factor behind the rising wealth inequality that economists such as Thomas Piketty have identified in recent years and which has poisoned western politics. Two, this trend of ever-rising asset prices might be about to change. A key factor behind it is that interest rates have been on a decades-long downward trend, making debt cheap. However, last year, rates jumped up, wiping some $8tn, equivalent to a third of the US economy, from household assets in 2022 alone.

Perhaps this is a blip. The price of bonds suggests that many investors expect rates to sink in the future. And the McKinsey report, titled “The Future of Wealth and Growth is in the Balance”, outlines four potential future scenarios — one of which is a return to what we consider “normal”, namely low rates and more asset price rises.

But I personally doubt that this is likely. This week Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, warned that “everyone should be prepared for rates going [even] higher from here”. That raises a key question: if we are moving into a new “normal”, how will we cognitively adjust?

Unnervingly, the answer is unclear. Another of the scenarios sketched out in the report is one where inflation stays high and volatile for a long time, combined with some growth. If that happens it could unleash a pattern known as “financial repression” — the economic term for a place where the yields on long-term government bonds stay lower than inflation for several years, essentially causing anyone who holds such bonds to lose money each year.

A third option is a wave of balance sheet restructurings and recessions that reduces the excess debt. As David Graeber wrote in his book Debt, when debt and asset prices have surged before, it has typically produced political implosions or sent governments scrambling to create social “safety valves” — such as debt forgiveness — to avoid meltdown.

This sounds sensible in theory; as ancient Mesopotamia discovered several millennia ago, the idea of “wiping the slate clean” of excess debts can enable a society to reboot. But McKinsey estimates that a fully fledged balance-sheet recession and restructuring could wipe out $48tn of household wealth in the coming years, with 30 per cent falls in equity and real estate prices in places such as the US. That would probably help to reduce inequality in the long run. But it would be such a shock that it could dampen confidence — and economic growth — badly.

Of course, there is also another possible scenario: a productivity miracle that enables real economic activity to expand much faster than paper wealth and debt, rebalancing the world. That would be the holy grail. But it is hard to believe it will occur. So I would urge you, once again, to ponder that dizzying $160tn number. And then ask: can we adjust our minds to an era where asset prices do not always rise? What will be our future “normal”?

(accessed online at https://www.ft.com/content/2672c4a8-7076-49be-94e3-532c847c0f6b?syn-25a6b1a6=1)

Or picking up where Tett left off, another scenario is that these terms–unimaginably large numbers, the world’s balance sheet, yes really, the real economy, guesswork, normality, cognitively adjust, unnervingly, financial repression, safety valves, miracle, dizzying, and all those scare quotes around terms–represent an order of a techno-managerial elite desperate to convince the unwashed: “Not to worry, we know what we are doing.”

A radical optic for policy and politics

I. The optic.

[Mary Ellen] Carroll’s current exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” . . .took seven years of planning, and it shows. The curator, Rebecca Matalon, worked with the artist, known also as MEC, to showcase some forty years of often confoundingly immaterial work. The spine of the exhibition, structured around six themes — Doubling, Climate, Policy, Media, Sovereignty, and Being—is the artist’s ever-growing library of index cards [e.g.]. . . .

ON JANUARY 17, 1991, the day the Gulf War became the first war broadcast live on television, MEC wrote the following lines on an index card: “we are living in a political epoch, everything is about policy. but—who (cnn) gets to participate (technology) in this process simultaneously 24/7 there are personal policies, workplace policies, government, community, etc. policy is/as a material.”

Matalon, when I met her in Houston, suggested to me that nearly everything Carroll has made could be read through the lens provided by this one card. In her catalogue essay she went further, asking whether MEC’s entire career is one long performance devoted to bearing out the idea that the propositional and the real, the political and the practical, are not only mutually contingent, but inseparable.

(Kat Herriman. “Pushing Paper: Kat Herriman on Mary Ellen Carroll’s daredevil encounters with red tape.” Artforum [November 2026]: 39 -43; my bold)

II. An application.

against policy (a tiny manifesto): The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.

(David Graeber [2004]. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm #14. Prickly Paradigm Press. The University of Chicago Press.

WRONG. Life’s too sketchy to write up policy and politics like that.

Key Blog Entries: Updated November 1, 2026

—Latest blog entries include

**”Yearnings for a solving unity matched by contingency happens, context matters, and there is no tabula rasa–these still drive better policy and management“

**”Switching out ‘success’ for ‘accomplishments’ in policy and management“

**”It’s not–repeat, not–‘short-run versus long-run’; instead, it’s the combination of their different orientations when it comes to ‘crises’“

**”Policy counternarratives to extend further (ongoing series)“

—When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene can be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

–If interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)“

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]” structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-last-newly-added/

**”Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Elevent examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID, collective bargaining, and more“

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management (recently added)“

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism”

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability”

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy“

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management”

**”‘Learning discrepantly’ for policy & management (updated and expanded)“

**”The value added from rethinking ‘prediction’ and ‘imagination’ in more granular terms“

**”I understand why others feel compelled to defend the humanities and arts. But their direct relevance for public policy and management has always been obvious.“

**”The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications”

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”If not corpse-pastoralism, then what are we seeing? Four other suggestions and key upshot for re-seeing what we thought we knew.“

**”Time to think more radically: three new policy narratives extremely different from current positions in pastoralist development”

**”Working pastoralism as a scene-making infrastructure“

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)”

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development”

**”Twelve new extensions of ‘pastoralists as reliability professionals’ and ‘pastoralism as a critical infrastructure’“

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples”

—Key blog entries on updating Narrative Policy Analysis are:

**”Updating NARRATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS (1994)“

**”Narrative policy analysis: then, now and ahead”

**”The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)”

It’s not–repeat, not–“short-run versus long-run”; instead, it’s the combination of their different orientations when it comes to “crises”

Much of what we hear and read today are complaints about short-termism and “Why aren’t people taking the long term far more seriously?” It takes only a moment’s reflection, however, to see how many long-runs are imported, indirectly and ambiguously, into all kinds of policy and management analysis.

“Indefinitely” and like terms squeeze time outwards or towards some later closure, e.g., “There is every reason to believe the present can’t continue this way indefinitely.” Declinism and like concepts slip in comparisons that posit “across time” as the unit of analysis, e.g., “It isn’t a question of will it happen but rather when and where it’s going to happen.” Really-existing infrastructures, investments in the forward budget, net present value calculations, talk of path dependencies–all and more add to that archipelago of long(er)-run orientations.

Even more explicit “long-runs” appear to exist in order to differentiate them. British historians are apt to talk about the long 19^th century from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Some Western historians are more apt to talk about the short 20^th century running from 1914 (the start of World War I) to 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall). For me, the analytical crux is not ‘long term versus short term’, but rather complex policy and management crises are differentiated by one or more of these orientations.

Start with: “The present rise in health-care costs in the US cannot continue this way indefinitely.” Now, rescript the crisis through three other orientations to “the long run”: “The current crisis in health care is that we can’t predict health-care requirements with the specificity we need for taking action now”; “Health care continues to be characterized by seriatim technology and digital upheavals, one after another”; and “It’s not if, but when the next worldwide pandemic will happen.” In this reframing, “the health-care crisis” reflects not only multiple and different long-run orientations are at work, but also their sequencing is a major way for differentiating and tracking time: e.g., “the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as its own health-care crisis”. In this recasting, different crises no longer unfold at different times; rather, differentiating crises are the way we unfold time.

Now complicate that notion of temporal orientation further. A core urgency moves to the fore when we focus on the nature of the present in any long/short: Where does “not knowing the present” come into play in each orientation? It may turn out that even conventional short-termism – the present matters more than the future – requires more certainty and confidence than warrantable. The virtue of center-staging not-knowing is to remind those preoccupied with various short-runs and long-runs that predicting the future is difficult for the very same reasons learning from the past is difficult: Both require stability in objectives, institutional memory, fallback reserves in case something
goes wrong, and low environmental uncertainty. But these conditions do not prevail.

III

For many, the absence of preconditions for predicting the future and learning from the past is the problem. For me, it is positive to start from the fact that not-knowing, inexperience, and difficulty are each variable. Why becomes clear
when we move to the more granular case level.

Some regional climate change modelling is of such a high resolution today that climate model results can be and are disaggregated in ways of use to some critical infrastructures. It is now possible to project estimates for rising sea-levels,
storm surges, and inland flooding in, say, 20-year increments to better reflect those already existing near- and longer-term cycles for infrastructure depreciation and forward investments, among others. Do such modelling results reduce uncertainties related to depreciation and investment cycles? No, not necessarily. Do modelling results increase
confidence that action with respect to these cycles can be taken, nevertheless? Yes, possibly: in fact, entirely possible.

NB. For more, please see my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

Switching out “success” for “accomplishments” in policy and management

Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist, reportedly said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way. Note that “accomplished”.

I grew up in a career that made much about policy success and failure, and then elsewhere, project or program success and failure. I now think that success and failure are inadequate terms to encompass the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems. What do we do with the fact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, even with setbacks, when it matters”? Reducing the latter behavior to “coping” and “sub-par” seems to me one crisis too many.

It just isn’t that longer time horizons make for persistently mixed results rather than declarations of overall success or failure. There’s also the no-small matter of hope. Hope, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, doesn’t fail. Yes, hope is disappointed but it does not fail. Hope, in this view, is what accomplishments sustain, and failure is not something we associate with that hope.

Policy counternarratives to extend further (ongoing series)

A more complicated Orientalism

Domestically, the Confucian revival [in mainland China] dates to the 1980s, raising the question of whether Orientalism and its objectification of the Orient are a thing of the past — as proclaimed by postcolonial critics — or if Orientalism, now re-appropriated by “Orientals” themselves, has emerged victorious in the age of global capitalism.

(accessed online at https://www.anpec.org.br/encontro/2022/submissao/files_I/i2-cc30002858ddbe3439ced57760bda47e.pdf)

A more complicated environmental conflict

Environmental degradation driven by the climate crisis systemically worsens living standards, thereby heightening socioeconomic and political tensions. These tensions often ignite armed conflicts, forcing populations to migrate and creating environmental refugees. The mass migration stems from both the decline of ecosystems and conflicts intensified by resource shortages. As a result, the climate crisis inflicts extensive and lasting damage on ecosystems and human communities, aligning with the definition of ecocide. Recognizing this causal chain highlights the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217251382404)

And yet:

We draw three initial conclusions from [our review of the literature]. First, across the five environmental issues surveyed, the evidence on the contribution of environmental variables to violent political conflict is thin, weak, uncertain, and/or contradictory. Notwithstanding headline claims about climate being “a risk factor for conflict,” for instance, the consensus view of even the mainstream scholars who reached this verdict is that climate is a relatively low risk factor for conflict (evaluated as fourteenth out of 16 factors considered), is particularly uncertain (evaluated as the most uncertain of 16 factors), and is a factor over which there is “low confidence” in the mechanisms through which climate affects conflict . . . Second, scarcity accounts of environmental conflict, which focus on the security impacts of natural resource availability shortages, are particularly unconvincing, there being much stronger evidence on the conflict effects of relative resource abundance, as argued in “resource curse” or “honey pot” . . . interpretations of environmental conflict, and discussed further in the next section. And third, although the body of evidence on climatic variables and conflict is much more extensive than on the other environmental issues considered here, dominating climate–security research, it is no less uneven. Indeed, our assessment is that the evidence is most robust on water and forests, through resource curse dynamics; that it is most extensive but also mixed on climatic variables; and that it is thinnest in relation to biodiversity and pollution.

(accessed online at https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/energy/49/1/annurev-environ-112922-114232.pdf?expires=1770499611&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C4CF5A6FB183C2A3D71433B9DE166270)

Take-away: All dominant policy narratives, including those for the climate emergency, come with more granular counternarratives. Does the one negate or cancel the other? No, but it does compel new questions, in this case: What local injustices would this or that global governance produce?

A more complicated surveillance

With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings (Eluère 2024). As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’ (Norman 2024), where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’ (Economist 2025a).

(accessed online at https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/refugia-reflection-five-years-on)

A more complicated “power of imagination”

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim — that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible — is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order — which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however also means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009; my bold)

Yearnings for a solving unity matched by contingency happens, context matters, and there is no tabula rasa–these still drive better policy and management

Have you wondered how narrow the world must be if indeed “power is the master narrative of politics”? What’s more bloviating: The economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome.” Either way, their scapegoating “regulation” is to discipline.

Remember, the very same politicians believe there is not any major legislation or market reform that can’t be corrected once implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong. Also think of those cases where power politics and material interests led to counterproductive outcomes unforeseen by power-makers. There surely had to be cheaper ways for the US to get the oil than undertaking two wars in Iraq.

Nature is on an investment strike in the climate emergency, and the Precautionary Principle insists we avoid positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The question immediately arises, however: Where does the control come from to achieve that avoidance? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its execution. More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoidance of consequential events we can’t control?

“Wicked problems, what do you want from us?” Yet consider all that has been lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So like the absence of official scenario planning in the Soviet Bloc because there were no alternative scenarios to compare against. If everything is political, how then is that not ridiculous? The repeated calls for Big-T transformations are a fixture like baby Jesus in all those Renaissance paintings of the Virgin.

Complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. Just as war and pandemic create their own contingencies, so too the monumental wreckage of human intentions—good ones and bad—unmakes a stable present. Or if you prefer, make a complex one where unrealized intentions criticize everything that happens instead. I want to underscore just how much prejudice any “reliance on hindsight” is in this world of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty. Even if we instead improvise with what’s at hand rather than “rely on the past,” it is as an avant-garde reinvents itself.

If, as so often advised, we are to scale up program and project success, how then do we scale out their failure, which is just as interconnected a phenomenon? The point is that success, just like progress, is something understood at best only retrospectively. This means it is better to talk about accomplishments, admitting all the while that their past and future interconnections are not complete. Even classical ballet, which put perfection before reliability, didn’t have a stable choreography.

To believe Kant, the three most important questions in our lives are future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? That is the pull side: The often ambiguous ends to be achieved through more knowledge and hope are what pull us into the future. There is the push side of present tensions as well: the centripetal pressures of closing in on what we think we really know (or can know) and the centrifugal pressures of opening up what has been taken as intractable, for granted or unknowable. The good news is that ambiguity, like any metaphor, demands to be evaluated.

The litmus test that a policy or management issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. If—and yes it is a big “if”—a simplification can be recast as complex in ways that new interventions are now plausible or if the issue thought to be so complex no further action is possible can be recast to show otherwise, then the gist of the matter has been pushed and pulled beyond the current exaggerations. To recognize that your account can and should go further is, on the other hand, no exaggeration.

Prose cantos for yesterday’s tomorrows

No one talks about the War on Cancer now. Have you wondered how narrow the world must be if indeed “power is the master narrative of politics”? What’s more bloviating: The economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome.” Either way, their scapegoating “regulation” is to discipline.

What value added do we get as viewers of Monet’s water-lilies from his having them dusted and washed before painting? But, remember, the very same politicians believe there is not any major legislation or market reform that can’t be corrected once implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong. Also think of those cases where power politics and material interests led to counterproductive outcomes unforeseen by power-makers. There surely had to be cheaper ways for the US to get the oil than undertaking two wars in Iraq.

Nature is on an investment strike in the climate emergency, and the Precautionary Principle insists we avoid positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The question immediately arises: Where does the control come from to achieve that avoidance? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its execution. More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoidance of consequential events we can’t control?

So sayeth Job: “Wicked problems, what do you want from us?” Yet consider all that has been lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made because of the Covid-19 pandemic. So like the absence of official scenario planning in the Soviet Bloc because there were no alternative scenarios to compare against. If everything is political, how then is that not ridiculous? The repeated calls for Big-T transformations are a fixture like baby Jesus in all those Renaissance paintings of the Virgin.

Such is the defense of “power”

Of course, “power” can refer to control, authority, or domination, and obviously this is related to oppression and can be presented as an oppressor vs. oppressed binary. But the anthropological study of power also examines indirect, oblique, diverse manifestations of power and agency. Power is not simply a repressive or oppressive force but also reflects generative dynamics. How well can an LLM, limited to just an abstract, evaluate nuanced analyses of power, such as Robin G. Nelson’s engagement with anthropological world building and everyday life? What about articles that draw on Bourdieu’s “symbolic power,” Sally Engle Merry and co-authors’ “quiet power,” or even Marshall Sahlins’s critique that the very concept of power has lost its interpretive value?

(Accessed online at https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-not-to-critique-anthropology?sra=true)