#inevitabalism

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty was referring to "primogeniture," the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.

Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's "great powers" stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a "great house."

After a couple generations' worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn't get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.

For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world's chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they'd claimed as their property in order to carry on the "eternal" tradition of every son starting his own fortune.

It's a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century's defining events. That's why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.

Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Perhaps the reason Piketty's primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that "all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed. Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either. The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!” Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you. He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”

Thus: Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no alternative,” a polite way of saying “Resistance is futile,” or, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” This is inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change. It’s the opposite of science fiction. As a science fiction writer, my job is to imagine alternatives. “There is no alternative” is a demand pretending to be an observation: “stop trying to think of an alternative.” At its best, science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s an important exercise, maybe the important exercise. It’s the method by which we seize the means of computation for the betterment of the human race, not the immortal, rapacious colony organisms we call “limited liability companies,” to whom we represent inconvenient gut-flora, and which are rendering the only planet in the universe capable of sustaining human life unfit for human habitation.

The human condition is…not good. We’re in the polycrisis, a widening gyre of climate emergency, inequality, infrastructure neglect, rising authoritarianism and zoonotic plagues. But that’s not the bad part. Stuff breaks. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not up for debate. Things fall apart. Assuming nothing will break doesn’t make you an optimist — it makes you a danger to yourself and others. “Nothing will go wrong” is how we get “let’s not put any lifeboats on the Titanic.” Let me say, “to hell with optimism and pessimism.” Optimism and pessimism are just fatalism in respectable suits. Optimism is the belief that things will get better, no matter what we do. Pessimism is the belief that things will get worse, no matter what we do. Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things. The belief that nothing will change — that nothing can change — is the wrecker’s most powerful weapon. After all, if you can convince people that nothing can be done, they won’t try to do anything.

Science fiction doesn’t predict. No one can predict. If we could predict the future, then what we did wouldn’t matter, because the future was coming no matter what. In the Inferno, Dante sentenced the fortune-tellers to a pit where their heads were twisted around 180', so they forever looked behind them as they trudged naked through waist-deep molten feces, goaded on by demons’ whips. Dante let the fortune-tellers off easy. Science fiction writers are not fortune-tellers. Science fiction does not predict. Science fiction does the opposite of predicting. Science fiction contests. Science fiction demands we always seek out alternatives, where we find something far better than fatalistic optimism: we find hope. Hope is the belief that if we make a change that betters our circumstances, that from our new vantage point we will espy a previously obscured next step that will bring us closer to a better future. Hope is how we’ll get through the polycrisis.