(Why) Censorship is a Milestone in Authoritarian Collapse

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a hug from little Snowy.

Today we’re going to discuss authoritarian collapse, and what it means for finance and investment. “It’s not really free speech anymore,” said Trump, recently. Chilling words. Moments like these are milestones in authoritarianism.

Why? 

Censorship is a shadow institution. When I use that term, I mean it in several ways. Shadow means it arises from, in, amidst, the rubble of democracies. And I also mean it in a psychological sense, a Jungian one: shadow institutions express our dark sides. In particular, the malevolence, the hyper malignant narcissism, of authoritarians. 

What are shadow institutions? Some examples I’ve given you before are the Gestapo and the SS—classic ones. They express the shadow in both senses, psychological and social. Think of them for a moment. See how they are literal extensions, projections, of the autocrat’s very own personality. They are like his limbs and claws and teeth and screams made real.

When societies develop shadow institutions, alarm bells should ring. Does that make me an “alarmist”? If you’re not alarmed, you haven’t been paying attention. Shadow institutions point to societies crossing a threshold. The malignant narcissism, the malevolence, of the autocrat, his warped psyche, his twisted, infantile wishes for revenge, violence, his compulsion for violence—all these are now being institutionalized.

And when a thing is institutionalized, of course, then a society comes to live in its shadow.

Now. There are many forms of shadow institutions, and we’ve discussed a few already. Paramilitaries turned official Republican Guards. Types who want to check papers given the power to check them. And now we are seeing the rise of another kind of shadow institution: censorship.

All shadow institutions are inversions of their healthy, democratic counterparts. Democracies have policing. Autocracies have Gestapos. Democracies have armies, bound by the rule of military law, and civilian law both. Autocracies have SS’es, given special and extraordinary powers. Censorship is the inversion of a classic democratic institution—in fact, many of them: freedoms of expression, speech, association, and more. It is the elimination of many rights at once. It is the taking away of a society’s voice—but even more than that.

What do autocrats want? What all types of this kind want is the same. To break. Narcissistic, malignant sociopaths want to break people. Autocrats are such personality types on a social scale. They want to break societies.

Let me say it again, because not enough understand it. Autocrats want to break societies. Not just “into parts, to sell off”—which we’ll come to. But like sociopaths want to break people. In their souls, spirits, and minds.

This brings us back to censorship. What does censorship do? It breaks a society’s mind. It saps a society's will. What is a society’s mind? It is the ability to grasp reality, to form a consensus, and to reach certain shared arrangements, which we call democratic institutions. But what censorship does is break a society’s mind, by institutionalizing the mind of the autocrat in its place.

Now. There are different kinds of censorship. Every society is censored—let’s not be idealistic. But the shadow institution of censorship is very, very different. It is when things get bleak, dark, and dangerous.

Let me give you my own example, to make it clear. When I began to warn of American collapse—and in those days I was on TV and the news often, enjoying writing columns, and so on—I found myself swiftly blacklisted. So did many of my peers. This is soft censorship. Don’t cry for me—understand the point. Even at this scale and stage, a society stops being able to think.

Instead, those in our generation who weren’t its best thinkers found themselves promoted to positions of power. So you had figures like Ezra Klein, laughing at the possibility of fascism. Today, they’re all falling over each other to warn you—but it is too little, too late. Soft censorship even in this way began to break America’s mind, because it left society unable to contemplate or reflect on the possibility of its own collapse into autocracy.

But hard censorship is a giant leap beyond even this. Hard censorship is the institutional kind. It is when institutions themselves become formal censors. In Rome, of course, Censor was a formal position: they conducted the census, and also were responsible for public morality and controlling information. And it’s that last part where the modern notion of censorship comes in.

Hard censorship means, of course, that there’s an agency, or body, or department, whose official task it is to enforce…what, precisely? To make society a reflection of the autocrat’s mind. His wishes. His sense of—or lack—of reality. So in the modern conception, censorship is there to portray a certain impression of a society to the autocrat, and to teach a society what not to be.

Now. The question of censorship isn’t just about that part. But the slippery slop that it is. If we are to now say things that offend the autocrat, the question then becomes: what are the penalties? And here, the question becomes very, very murky, very fast. In America, the penalty is already apparently losing one’s license. But from there, where does it end? Will the government now punish people for saying “the wrong things,” those which conflict with the autocrat’s narcissistic grandiosity? Conversely, will the saying “right things”—those which flatter delusions of persecution, of omnipotence, and infantile fantasies of pleasure—be rewarded?

You’ve heard the word “dissident” before. But now you can know what it really means. A dissident isn’t just someone with a different opinion, but one whose opinion is censored. And while it’s obvious that lunatic and crackpots think this is true, pointing out something is foolish and false isn’t censorship, nor is paying it little attention. What narcissists want is unconditional attention to their sense of entitlement, recognition of their superiority, and they confuse not receiving it with “censorship,” but these aren’t remotely equivalent.

So now America is in a position to have true dissidents. And in that respect, it is becoming Soviet, very, very fast. Where will it end?

In Rome, the Censor was the highest political office one could hold, outside the Senate. That is because the Censor exercised such power over society, controlling information (literally, the Census, which in modern times we’d equate with all government records of economy, society, and politics,) and exercising power over public behavior, virtue, and conduct. So much as that when Rome crossed the line and democracy fell, the Emperors took over the powers of Censor. See eerie parallels there? Perhaps some dark foreshadowings?

Now. All of this brings me to the wealth of nations. When we economists advise the world’s sophisticated investors, we look at indicators like these. We don’t just look at numbers about stock markets and so on, because ultimately, they depend on the health of a nation politically, socially, and mentally. To see a nation crossing a red line like formally developing the shadow institution of censorship does ring alarm bells for us, and tell us that investing in such a place has suddenly become much, much more risky.

Why, precisely? I shouldn’t have to spell it out, but let me, in case it’s not clear yet. There’s the complex set of reasons: an economy can’t function very well if censorship is an institution, because of course, investment, profits, returns can all be censored, too. Manipulated, redacted, altered, and so on. Nor can an economy function well, if at all, if businesses and banks can’t make decisions outside of simply pleasing an autocrat’s daily whims, no matter how foolish or malevolent they are. For these reasons, non-democratic nations face severe penalties in finance and economics.

But those technical reasons obscure the simpler, more lethal truth. If they can take away your speech, they can take away your money, too. All of these are just forms of capital. Censorship says: your intellectual and human capital no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the autocrat. That is one tiny step away from saying that your financial capital no longer belongs to you, either, really. And for this reason, we attach serious and severe risk to nations in which censorship is an institution.

Now. I don’t think that America’s talking about this in intelligent ways. Your money guys probably don’t talk about this with you. But they should. Because this is a sophisticated discussion about what authoritarianism means, in hard terms, that you deserve to have to know. Maybe Krugman discusses it a little, but that’s about it. And yet all this is very real. Sophisticated investors aren’t exactly throwing money at Russia, are they? But what is America becoming?

Now you must take care of yourself in sophisticated ways. Think about all this clearly. Don’t accept the silence or non-answers as in any way adequate. What is unfolding now will have a severe price. How much of it you will pay—that is up to you to decide.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!!)