The Dinosaur Effect

 

The experts contemplate signs appearing in the sky

Putin’s formal annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts looks like an example of what Marshall McLuhan called the “dinosaur effect.” It also perhaps gives insight into what is going on in the wider world right now.

According to McLuhan, things commonly reach their greatest extent, indeed, suddenly balloon, just before they become extinct. This is not quite an accurate description of the dinosaurs, as it turns out, but it looks superficially plausible in some other cases. Consider the British Empire. It reached its greatest extent after the First World War. On paper, on the map, it was magnificent. It had just won the war to end all wars against its great rival. 

Yet, thanks largely to debts incurred in the war, it was already financially unsupportable. Within twenty five more years, it was being rapidly dismantled.

It is just when they realize they are losing their grip—as Putin is now—that the powerful will lunge for grandeur. The instinct is to grab the last few glorious moments of power before it is gone forever, and exercise that power fully. That is what Putin is doing, annexing provinces he does not even now fully control, the day before his forces are surrounded in Lyman. He is living his preferred fantasy while he can; because he knows the reality is slipping away.

And this is just, I submit, what the clerical elites are doing now all around the world, in countries as widely spread as Canada, New Zealand, China, the Netherlands, the USA. They have grown abruptly more dictatorial, because the underlying news is bad for them. They have become suddenly more censorious, because their instinct is to suppress the news and pretend. For now, men can decide to be women, there is no right and wrong, and the narrative is whatever you want the narrative to be.

As in the case of Putin’s Russia, this cannot last much longer. Communications technology is making the established elites redundant to the rest of society. We are witnessing the mad thrashings of a dying beast.