The globalisation summoned by Blair certainly belongs to "the lost futures of our time". Another, and decisive, lost future of our time is the West´s refusal to build the "Common European House" demanded by Mijail Gorbachev, after he had forsaken the use of force to prevent the reunification of Germany, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The great occasion to create a world of peace was miserably lost.
Lost. Now leaders are resurrecting the walls, cynically in an attempt to build a stronger, lucrative have/ fortress for the few and a hell for the many. We are working to rebuild bridges.
Similar sentiments were expressed after WWI by junior members of the USA delegation to the Paris negotiations, and John Maynard Keynes. I worked for the George McGovern campaign in 1972. In retrospect, it was probably the first time we had a chance to turn the Military-Industrial Complex around, after the experience of the Vietnam War. We now know more about the beast slouching toward Bethlehem. Hopefully now enough people can put their shoulder to the wheel and make all governments accountable in a peaceful manner. Do you think the UN framework could work, if honorable people are chosen to serve there?
Putting together Lostalgia and the notes about William Gass’s book The Tunnel, both the Nazis and the Magas invoke a history that never was to mobilize self-serving delusions of the future (Take back our country!). If we are lucky, the rage at the empty promises and empty purses can be a creative form of destruction.
The nostalgia not for the past but for lost futures, the ones that were promised and never arrived, or that arrived and proved to be someone else's salvation built on your community's drowning, names something that the standard vocabulary of political disappointment cannot reach. The glossary from the Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures is extraordinary and the table of contents alone is worth the download: Kapwa, the Filipino concept of the unity of self and others, sitting alongside Jainism's three jewels, alongside the Hebrew argument for the sake of heaven, alongside Merantau, to wander from home. This is what Article 33A of the Basic Law of the Commonwealth has been attempting to constitutionalise: the recognition that the universal principles of survivability and commons governance are carried in particular vessels, independently arrived at across every cultural tradition, and that the convergence is the proof that the principles are genuine rather than imposed.
The bullet points at the end are where the piece stops precisely where it most needs to continue. Think politically. Who is the we? These are the right questions. But the stopping point is the specific evasion that the series my Substack has been building is designed to address. Who is the we is not a rhetorical question or a provocation to self-examination. It is an institutional design problem with a specific answer that has a documented historical track record: the we is whoever is randomly selected to govern, which is the only institutional mechanism that makes the we genuinely inclusive rather than genuinely Platonic.
Because the specific failure of the we in every version of the cosmopolitan policy conversation, and the Singapore workshop is a beautiful exhibit of this, a staggeringly cosmopolitan group of folks deliberating about vocabularies for other worlds in a room they were invited into, is that it is always someone's room and someone else's exclusion. The philosopher-kings have been updated to multilingual policy intellectuals with access to Koselleck and Mark Fisher, but the selection mechanism remains the same: the right education, the right institutions, the right networks, the right fluency in the vocabulary of the conversation. The we that Mr. Tooze is invoking when he says think politically is the we that was in the room in Singapore. The we that the sortition principle constitutionalises is whoever happens to be alive in the polity when the lot is drawn, which is the only version of the we that does not require the prior selection of the right people to do the political thinking on everyone else's behalf.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. The Singapore conversation produced something genuinely valuable. But the specific irony of a glossary designed to resist lostalgia and help us re-enter time differently being produced by a government policy unit's invitation list is the irony that the Basic Law's institutional design is specifically attempting to address. The vocabulary for other worlds was assembled by the same institutional mechanism that produced this world. The meiotic recombination that governance requires, the random introduction of the retired nurse, the construction worker, the farmer, the recent immigrant into the deliberation about the vocabularies and the frameworks, did not happen in Singapore in August 2024. It happened in Dublin in 2016, when the Irish Citizens' Assembly resolved the question that the policy intellectuals had been deferring for thirty years, and it happened because the selection mechanism was random rather than invited.
Mark Blyth is right that climate breakdown is a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities and that there is no return to normal. The institutional response to a non-linear outcome generator is not better forecasting by the right people. It is the maximum possible variation in the governance configurations that address it, which is what sortition generates structurally and what the invitation list cannot.
Gauguin had been a student at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, just outside Orléans, from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen. His studies there included a class in Catholic liturgy; the teacher for this class was the Bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup. Dupanloup had devised his own catechism for students to lead them toward proper spiritual reflections on the nature of life. The three fundamental questions in this catechism were "where does humanity come from?" "where is it going to?", and "how does humanity proceed?" Although in later life Gauguin was vociferously anticlerical, these questions from Dupanloup's catechism had lodged in his mind, and "where?" became the key question that Gauguin asked in his art.[3][4]
Looking for a society more simple and elemental than that of his native France, Gauguin left for Tahiti in 1891. In addition to several other paintings that express his highly individualistic mythology, he completed this painting in 1897. During the process of creating this painting, Gauguin experienced several difficult events in his personal life. He suffered from medical conditions including eczema, syphilis, and conjunctivitis. He faced financial challenges, and going into debt. He was also informed about the death of his daughter from Copenhagen. From one of many letters to his friend, Daniel de Monfreid, Gauguin disclosed his plan to commit suicide in December 1897.[1] Before he did, however, he wanted to paint a large canvas that would be known as the grand culmination of his thoughts.
Following the completion of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin made a suicide attempt with arsenic.[5]
Tversky & Kahneman's work has been the most important done during my lifetime, in the interests of recognizing our own unconscious and self-defeating rationalizations. This needs to be taught in schools at the earliest age of appreciation. Lev Tolstoy wrote a long time ago: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself". Still true today, in spite of what all the world's major religions have been teaching forever.
Thank you for these thoughts and the Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures glossary.
In my futures work I've been pondering this for several years. The future definitely seems largely backward-looking now, between overt nostalgia (MAGA, religious conservatives), the popularity of dystopias, and the conserving reaction to major stresses (climate, demographics, neonationalism). I find myself doing more present-day scanning and less future generation.
“Lostalgia” discussion reminds me of Keynes’ vision of the world of his grandchildren and their ample leisure time. What he missed, and which we characteristically continue to miss, is that the financial benefits of advancements accrue to the few rather than the many. Asset managers (other than Vanguard) haven’t passed on their economies of scale. Same thing in medicine. The one percent owns 50% of equities; the bottom 50% none. The prices of electronic goods has fallen nicely, but the biggest rewards go to shareholders. For many, this is how it should be. But it falls far short of “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
Tooze: To kick things off, I was asked to give a short fire-starter about “Polycrisis, the past, the present and the future”.
'Thinking that this was a policy-orientated meeting,' ('....a multi-day workshop organized by the Centre for Strategic Futures inside the Strategy Group of the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore.) 'I ended with bullet points of advice':
This was Toozer's last point:
'•Open the black box of the big aggregates.'
'As Niklas Luhmann puts it, “the future cannot begin.” '
'Optimisation crowds out imagination. We are saturated by frameworks and models, yet starved of meaningful horizons.' (Tooze)
'And whenever we speak of a shared future—a “we”—it is worth asking who is included in that pronoun, and who is placed beneath the table that makes the illusion possible.' (Tooze)
The future that I see is more Climate Change, fires and floods; Starvation; War, Drones, Destruction and Death; mostly, unregulated AI; Megalomanics in the molds of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu... ; social fear and blindless.
Time seems stuck' (Tooze), and I connect with 'the block box of the big aggregates'. Along with that, I walk in the park, listen to music, read poetry, books and articles, spend time with friends, participate as a citizen and a friend; see, witness and think. Love was not mentioned in this Chartbook. I am glad to say that love is alive in my life, along with feelings of deep concern for us.
Tooze ends with 'This book gathers alternative ways of thinking about the world: vocabularies, frameworks, and perspectives that resist lostalgia and help us re-enter time differently. Let us make space for what else is possible.'
Also of note: One of Elon Musk's grandfathers, Joshua N. Haldeman, was associated with the Technocracy Movement. I believe this is discussed in the Slobodian and Tarnoff book, Muskism.
The BIS chart is the whole argument. There never was one globalization, so there cannot be one deglobalization - yet the consensus keeps pricing it as a single switch that flipped and stayed flipped.
Watch the flows, not the narrative. Goods trade ran about 13.7 trillion dollars in the first half of this year, up more than twelve percent. Part of that is price, but critical-mineral flows jumped thirty-eight percent. The very stuff everyone insists is being walled off is moving faster than ever.
That regime trade is three different trades wearing one coat.
Lostalgia is the right word for the feeling, and Koselleck earns his place here. One thing the essay leaves implicit: a lost future is not only a structure of feeling, it is a maturity schedule. The Washington Public Power Supply System stopped building nuclear units 4 and 5 in January 1982, at 24 and 16 percent complete, and in July 1983 defaulted on about 2.25 billion dollars of bonds raised against them, then the largest municipal bond default in American history. Which of the futures lost since are still on somebody's balance sheet?
The globalisation summoned by Blair certainly belongs to "the lost futures of our time". Another, and decisive, lost future of our time is the West´s refusal to build the "Common European House" demanded by Mijail Gorbachev, after he had forsaken the use of force to prevent the reunification of Germany, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The great occasion to create a world of peace was miserably lost.
Eugenio Bregolat
Former Spanish Ambassador in Russia and China
Lost. Now leaders are resurrecting the walls, cynically in an attempt to build a stronger, lucrative have/ fortress for the few and a hell for the many. We are working to rebuild bridges.
Similar sentiments were expressed after WWI by junior members of the USA delegation to the Paris negotiations, and John Maynard Keynes. I worked for the George McGovern campaign in 1972. In retrospect, it was probably the first time we had a chance to turn the Military-Industrial Complex around, after the experience of the Vietnam War. We now know more about the beast slouching toward Bethlehem. Hopefully now enough people can put their shoulder to the wheel and make all governments accountable in a peaceful manner. Do you think the UN framework could work, if honorable people are chosen to serve there?
Putting together Lostalgia and the notes about William Gass’s book The Tunnel, both the Nazis and the Magas invoke a history that never was to mobilize self-serving delusions of the future (Take back our country!). If we are lucky, the rage at the empty promises and empty purses can be a creative form of destruction.
The nostalgia not for the past but for lost futures, the ones that were promised and never arrived, or that arrived and proved to be someone else's salvation built on your community's drowning, names something that the standard vocabulary of political disappointment cannot reach. The glossary from the Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures is extraordinary and the table of contents alone is worth the download: Kapwa, the Filipino concept of the unity of self and others, sitting alongside Jainism's three jewels, alongside the Hebrew argument for the sake of heaven, alongside Merantau, to wander from home. This is what Article 33A of the Basic Law of the Commonwealth has been attempting to constitutionalise: the recognition that the universal principles of survivability and commons governance are carried in particular vessels, independently arrived at across every cultural tradition, and that the convergence is the proof that the principles are genuine rather than imposed.
The bullet points at the end are where the piece stops precisely where it most needs to continue. Think politically. Who is the we? These are the right questions. But the stopping point is the specific evasion that the series my Substack has been building is designed to address. Who is the we is not a rhetorical question or a provocation to self-examination. It is an institutional design problem with a specific answer that has a documented historical track record: the we is whoever is randomly selected to govern, which is the only institutional mechanism that makes the we genuinely inclusive rather than genuinely Platonic.
Because the specific failure of the we in every version of the cosmopolitan policy conversation, and the Singapore workshop is a beautiful exhibit of this, a staggeringly cosmopolitan group of folks deliberating about vocabularies for other worlds in a room they were invited into, is that it is always someone's room and someone else's exclusion. The philosopher-kings have been updated to multilingual policy intellectuals with access to Koselleck and Mark Fisher, but the selection mechanism remains the same: the right education, the right institutions, the right networks, the right fluency in the vocabulary of the conversation. The we that Mr. Tooze is invoking when he says think politically is the we that was in the room in Singapore. The we that the sortition principle constitutionalises is whoever happens to be alive in the polity when the lot is drawn, which is the only version of the we that does not require the prior selection of the right people to do the political thinking on everyone else's behalf.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. The Singapore conversation produced something genuinely valuable. But the specific irony of a glossary designed to resist lostalgia and help us re-enter time differently being produced by a government policy unit's invitation list is the irony that the Basic Law's institutional design is specifically attempting to address. The vocabulary for other worlds was assembled by the same institutional mechanism that produced this world. The meiotic recombination that governance requires, the random introduction of the retired nurse, the construction worker, the farmer, the recent immigrant into the deliberation about the vocabularies and the frameworks, did not happen in Singapore in August 2024. It happened in Dublin in 2016, when the Irish Citizens' Assembly resolved the question that the policy intellectuals had been deferring for thirty years, and it happened because the selection mechanism was random rather than invited.
Mark Blyth is right that climate breakdown is a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities and that there is no return to normal. The institutional response to a non-linear outcome generator is not better forecasting by the right people. It is the maximum possible variation in the governance configurations that address it, which is what sortition generates structurally and what the invitation list cannot.
squirrelbrain77.substack.com
D'ou venons nous
Que sommes nous
Ou allons nous
-- Gauguin
For the US, this is prescient advice for leadership, to understand the change we need, the changes we cannot avoid.
Background (From Wikipedia):
Gauguin had been a student at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, just outside Orléans, from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen. His studies there included a class in Catholic liturgy; the teacher for this class was the Bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup. Dupanloup had devised his own catechism for students to lead them toward proper spiritual reflections on the nature of life. The three fundamental questions in this catechism were "where does humanity come from?" "where is it going to?", and "how does humanity proceed?" Although in later life Gauguin was vociferously anticlerical, these questions from Dupanloup's catechism had lodged in his mind, and "where?" became the key question that Gauguin asked in his art.[3][4]
Looking for a society more simple and elemental than that of his native France, Gauguin left for Tahiti in 1891. In addition to several other paintings that express his highly individualistic mythology, he completed this painting in 1897. During the process of creating this painting, Gauguin experienced several difficult events in his personal life. He suffered from medical conditions including eczema, syphilis, and conjunctivitis. He faced financial challenges, and going into debt. He was also informed about the death of his daughter from Copenhagen. From one of many letters to his friend, Daniel de Monfreid, Gauguin disclosed his plan to commit suicide in December 1897.[1] Before he did, however, he wanted to paint a large canvas that would be known as the grand culmination of his thoughts.
Following the completion of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin made a suicide attempt with arsenic.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Come_From%3F_What_Are_We%3F_Where_Are_We_Going%3F
Al Gore’s inconvenient truth for example.
Lostalgia happens in trading too.
A losing position gets held for the future it promised at entry, and selling means conceding that future is gone.
Societies seem to hold their lost futures the same way, which would explain why backing out of a dead end is so rare in politics.
Tversky & Kahneman's work has been the most important done during my lifetime, in the interests of recognizing our own unconscious and self-defeating rationalizations. This needs to be taught in schools at the earliest age of appreciation. Lev Tolstoy wrote a long time ago: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself". Still true today, in spite of what all the world's major religions have been teaching forever.
Kahneman spent fifty years on biases and said it barely improved his own judgment. Knowing turns out not to be the treatment.
Which makes me wonder about the schools idea, can it even be taught, or only installed as a habit?
Thank you for these thoughts and the Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures glossary.
In my futures work I've been pondering this for several years. The future definitely seems largely backward-looking now, between overt nostalgia (MAGA, religious conservatives), the popularity of dystopias, and the conserving reaction to major stresses (climate, demographics, neonationalism). I find myself doing more present-day scanning and less future generation.
“Lostalgia” discussion reminds me of Keynes’ vision of the world of his grandchildren and their ample leisure time. What he missed, and which we characteristically continue to miss, is that the financial benefits of advancements accrue to the few rather than the many. Asset managers (other than Vanguard) haven’t passed on their economies of scale. Same thing in medicine. The one percent owns 50% of equities; the bottom 50% none. The prices of electronic goods has fallen nicely, but the biggest rewards go to shareholders. For many, this is how it should be. But it falls far short of “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
Tooze: To kick things off, I was asked to give a short fire-starter about “Polycrisis, the past, the present and the future”.
'Thinking that this was a policy-orientated meeting,' ('....a multi-day workshop organized by the Centre for Strategic Futures inside the Strategy Group of the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore.) 'I ended with bullet points of advice':
This was Toozer's last point:
'•Open the black box of the big aggregates.'
'As Niklas Luhmann puts it, “the future cannot begin.” '
'Optimisation crowds out imagination. We are saturated by frameworks and models, yet starved of meaningful horizons.' (Tooze)
'And whenever we speak of a shared future—a “we”—it is worth asking who is included in that pronoun, and who is placed beneath the table that makes the illusion possible.' (Tooze)
The future that I see is more Climate Change, fires and floods; Starvation; War, Drones, Destruction and Death; mostly, unregulated AI; Megalomanics in the molds of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu... ; social fear and blindless.
Time seems stuck' (Tooze), and I connect with 'the block box of the big aggregates'. Along with that, I walk in the park, listen to music, read poetry, books and articles, spend time with friends, participate as a citizen and a friend; see, witness and think. Love was not mentioned in this Chartbook. I am glad to say that love is alive in my life, along with feelings of deep concern for us.
Tooze ends with 'This book gathers alternative ways of thinking about the world: vocabularies, frameworks, and perspectives that resist lostalgia and help us re-enter time differently. Let us make space for what else is possible.'
That's an excellent sales pitch.
'We' shall see.
“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!”
― David Lynch
Henry Farrell. We need to escape the Gernsback Continuum. Outdated science fiction is hobbling our dreams. Jul 02, 2025.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-to-escape-the-gernsback-continuum
This was really fascinating! Thanks for sharing —
Also of note: One of Elon Musk's grandfathers, Joshua N. Haldeman, was associated with the Technocracy Movement. I believe this is discussed in the Slobodian and Tarnoff book, Muskism.
The BIS chart is the whole argument. There never was one globalization, so there cannot be one deglobalization - yet the consensus keeps pricing it as a single switch that flipped and stayed flipped.
Watch the flows, not the narrative. Goods trade ran about 13.7 trillion dollars in the first half of this year, up more than twelve percent. Part of that is price, but critical-mineral flows jumped thirty-eight percent. The very stuff everyone insists is being walled off is moving faster than ever.
That regime trade is three different trades wearing one coat.
Fascinating post, thanks for the link to the Singapore document
This speaks directly to my plug for Afrofuturism during this polycrisis moment, thank you! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aron-goldman_chartbook-461-polycrisis-nostalgia-for-share-7487864159334998020-e7r8
Lostalgia is the right word for the feeling, and Koselleck earns his place here. One thing the essay leaves implicit: a lost future is not only a structure of feeling, it is a maturity schedule. The Washington Public Power Supply System stopped building nuclear units 4 and 5 in January 1982, at 24 and 16 percent complete, and in July 1983 defaulted on about 2.25 billion dollars of bonds raised against them, then the largest municipal bond default in American history. Which of the futures lost since are still on somebody's balance sheet?
— Nazem
Lostalgia is the essence of the MAGA movement.
Wasn’t it George W Bush that said “the future’s not what it used to be?” Funny to see AT and W saying the same things. 😂