Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 13, 2020 - July 19, 2020

Everyone has been asking whether the US and China will decouple. Is it a divorce or a Thucydides Trap to war? Is this all about G2, G7, G20 or the United Nations? There are no simple, straightforward answers to a system-wide complex problem. Anyone who can give you a “yes” or “no” answer is only bluffing. We cannot predict the future precisely, because the present is a mess.

How big a mess can be seen from imbalances from six interacting global ­megatrends. There are imbalances in ­Mother Nature through pandemics and climate warming; human injustice and inequalities through worsening poverty; technology disruption with the few dominating the masses in know-how; the sharpest, deepest and perhaps longest economic depression since the 1930s; incredible financialisation leading to unimaginable monetary creation with inflation, the largest debt in history and at zero interest rates; and last but not least, geopolitical rivalry, with a clash of civilisations, values and, most of all, technology.

Human competition has always been about technology. Thucydides defined war as stemming from “fear, honour and interests”. Systems thinker Eric Beinhocker wrote in The Origin of Wealth (2005) that wealth creation is the product of three converging technologies — physical, social and business technologies. Sociologically, this is summed up as Sex, Money and Status (SMS). What differentiates the alpha male or female in the animal kingdom? Sex (right to reproduction), resources (alpha gets more share to maintain position and fend off rivals or intruders) and status (hierarchy and order).

Rock-star futurist Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century) is absolutely right that human beings control others through myths or story-telling. In complex and threatening moments, those who use the best story (narrative, legend, theory, paradigm) and can get others to trust and believe in them, win and control their group, community, company or nation. In other words, humanity uses knowledge and technology to compete and impose order on disorder, including creating disorder to win. Competition in technology is a strategy game.

In the Game of Thrones, the winning king or kingdom is not the one that is most good or saintly, that cares for his people, but the most cunning, devious, ruthless and who tells the best story or promises the best future. Democracy and freedom for all sells the view that all men are equal, when manifestly there are some more equal than others. Individual freedom is not absolute, because man is a social animal. Freedom is a right that comes with responsibilities and obligations to society. You have to wear masks, because if you don’t, you can infect others.

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx are wrong because they tell only half the story. As the joke goes, capitalism is about man exploiting man, and socialism, the other way round. Capitalism enables the few to control the many, and socialism is the many empowering the few to control themselves. These “isms” are ideological myths that the winning elites (what Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz calls the 1%) use to persuade the 99% that the present order is good for all. But the current mess shows that more and more are convinced that we are spinning out of control.

We are in this current mess because capitalism by definition values capital more than labour. Consequently, those with physical and mental capital (knowledge and technology) dominate others first physically (slavery) and, then, mentally or spiritually through religion, nationalism and debt bondage.

Most people living in the most expensive real-estate cities do not realise that they may get a high pay, but they are in fact in bondage to bankers and real estate tycoons. Those who think they are digitally free have not woken up to the fact that they are slightly better-paid drones manipulated by media and digital godfathers who have no qualms about mixing with kings and presidents.

Harari made the key insight that when Homo sapiens elevate themselves through artificial intelligence (AI) and biotech to become godlike Homo deus, the greatest threat is hacking of data — meaning that Big Brother (corporation or state) knows more about individuals and crowds than they know about themselves.

Through hacking and using big data and biotech, it is now possible to do “data colonialism”, meaning that you can remotely control human beings and even nations through AI, without spending huge sums on physical weapons of mass destruction. Instead of being a hacked slave, you become a drone controlled remotely without even realising it.

The reason Huawei is getting flak from the US and her allies is all about 5G, or rather who achieves the technological edge, as the winner takes all in the 5G domain. Simply put, under 4G, the Five Eyes intelligence-gathering allies (the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand) have all the tech advantage to read more about you than you know. They dominate the English-speaking information space, in effect the modern media world. But if Huawei becomes dominant in the 5G infrastructure and internet product ecosystem, then the Five Eyes data colonisation strategy would not work as good as before.

Human competition has always been about who is smarter, faster and more powerful, namely, through technology and know-how. All individuals, companies and empires get to the top by taking it, making it and faking it. As Chinese families know, behind a great fortune is sometimes a crime. Politicians also make a Faustian bargain with the devil. Empires are created by taking over the lands of other people, such as Rome taking Gaul; Spain taking over Latin America; the UK taking over much of North America, India and large parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.

Rome was a continental power, but the UK has a small population and, at her peak, ruled over one-quarter of mankind because she used maritime power, utilising slavery proceeds to open up markets in America; invested in steam and iron industries, including science, such as perfecting the naval clock; and improved governance in the form of long chains of naval command. The British business model was formed by pirates and entrepreneurs from Sir Francis Drake to Clive (India), Rhodes (Africa) and Raffles (Java and Singapore), who mixed commercial interests to East India Company empire building.

The “faking it” part came from the British elite evolving the art of “divide and rule” to a new level, learning how to balance racial and social differences to control very diverse colonies. Like the alpha that is ageing and weaker, they used the balance of power between competitors and allies to ensure that they kept the top post.

They lost that to their former colony, the US, which used superior geographical position guarded by both the Atlantic and Pacific, superior land resources with fresh new migrants and industrial-military technology garnered from the Civil War to overtake the UK by 1870. But it took the US another 70 years to build the financial expertise and military technology to become the dominant currency and techno-military power by the end of World War II.

In the 1970s, the US cultivated China to counterbalance the Soviet Union. Today, China’s rise has come to challenge the US, so the US policy is to use India and other countries to counterbalance China. With a population of 1.3 billion, India has also opened up to science and technology and, by 2019, had overtaken the UK and France together in GDP size to become the fifth-largest economy in the world.

The technology game so far has been about size, speed and scope — the country with the biggest population, superior technology and management skills wins. The US has far superior military, economic, financial, management and technology advantages than her rivals. But mismanaging the pandemic has made her stumble. Physical technology requires not just good social technology but, vitally, strategy execution. Without that, winners can become losers.

This is not a battle over technology, but a marathon game of wits and will. If not properly managed, the competition between nuclear powers will end with mutually assured destruction (MAD) and (not or) a burning planet.

How to avoid both is clearly the real existential question, a super-wicked game with no simple answers, only an unfolding story.


Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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