The Confusion Crisis
Is it possible to transcend the uncertainty of the present?
I’ve cut back my podcast consumption recently, but a guilty pleasure of mine is tuning into every episode Bill Simmons records with the writer Chuck Klosterman. The two catch up a few times a year, and their latest, appropriately titled, “A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything,” was typically broad, loose, and wide-ranging, filled with the sort of open-ended, “just asking questions”-driven discourse which makes the medium so popular. To the extent Simmons and Klosterman are “experts” about anything, it’s consuming and analyzing culture (Klosterman wrote a book about the Nineties which was apparently quite good), so sticking them together results in conversations almost Socratic in their dependence on open-ended questions which neither man has any idea how to answer. Which, I have to admit, can be pretty entertaining, and even, occasionally, really useful.1
I found their dialogue between 30:00 and 60:00 of the episode to be especially instructive, because I think it’s indicative of how lots of people are feeling right now: super fucking confused. Klosterman attempts to diagnose this feeling by citing a highly anecdotal example: after the election, he says, he texted a range of friends, asking them, on a scale of 1-10, how surprised they were by its result. He reports that his best-informed friends, the ones on top of not just the news but the niche discursive cycles within mainstream media, were overwhelmingly more surprised by the outcome of the election, giving answers from 7-10, than his friends who were relatively less dialed in to the media. Klosterman has an interesting takeaway from the exercise:
“I now sort of have the creeping suspicion that engagement with media distances us from reality. That the more information I take in, the less I understand the world. And I don’t know what to do about that, because that’s a real issue if that’s true. And that’s how it feels for me now. It feels that my perception of what the world is is being so shaped by these things that I’m not even close to what’s actually happening.”
Simmons, whose out-of-depthness here actually helps to frame the conversation, goes on to run through a few of the common post-election talking points thrown around in the wake of the Democrats’ defeat (it was the Rogan bros, Biden’s family, inflation, etc.). Then, amidst Simmons’ revisionism, Klosterman suddenly interjects:
“Anything in the past can prove anything. All these things people have been saying about Harris, if she had won, would still be part of the discourse. It would just be, ‘See, it was true.’ So because all of this discourse is, I hate to say it, it’s just made up…I just don’t fucking know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happening in the world.”
Now, Klosterman’s opinion here is being shaped by an impromptu text he asked a few of his friends to respond to. I understand. This is methodological malfeasance, a statistically inadequate, crackpot way to assess the current state of the American population. But I also think that it matters. And it matters because this unofficial style of “polling,” the tiny, anecdotal experiences that everyday people have with their friends, neighbors, and colleagues, disproportionately swing how people feel about the larger world around them, providing takeaways which may be erroneous and understudied but which nonetheless make up a significant percentage of the human experience (for someone in Klosterman’s milieux, that plays out as the dissonance between seeing that New Yorker cover in August and living through the election itself in November). Over-dependence on lived experience is of course a bias to be aware of, particularly as a writer. But it’s precisely because it has such a disproportionate impact on people’s perception of the world that it should not be ignored.
And I think a lot of people right now, both inside and outside the indigo blob/Professional Managerial Class milieux, at all levels of society, feel like Klosterman: we don’t have any idea what’s going on. This sense is then reinforced by the anecdotal understanding that none of our friends and family seem to know what’s going on, either. We’ve been unsuccessful in our efforts to identify one grand narrative, a singular cohesive thesis, to explain the admittedly strange…mood?...that’s seemed to settle in over the world lately.
I can hear the cries of protest already; too much dependence on lived experience! Too many chimerical words like mood! Stick to some objectivism!
Which is all well and good. Stats, data, models; these are all obviously essential tools in the quest to understand the modern world. I read and trust lots of thinkers who depend on them. But what’s too often overlooked amidst the pushback to anecdotal experiences like Klosterman’s is that, more often than not, it’s the confusion itself, in the middle of disorienting epochs, which throws society off-kilter and begets further crisis. Rather than dismissing individual, disorienting experiences as extraneous and unhelpful, it would be wise to recognize that the contemporaneous confusion people feel about the world is often the entire point.
Turning to the past can help contextualize such a situation. In his seminal history, “The Weimar Republic,” Detlev Peukert, perhaps the all-time leading historian of interwar Germany, makes the following point after introducing a methodology for categorizing the different aspects of interwar German society between 1920 and 1923 into organized, neat segments:
It should, though, be borne in mind that a schematic approach of this sort runs the risk of distorting the historical picture in an opposite sense, since the broad shape of events during the years of post-war crisis was, after all, obscure to people living at the time; indeed, the very confusion felt by contemporaries and the interdependence of the problems in which they were caught up were perhaps the most decisive factors of the post-war era. (52)
To push Peukert’s message forward a century, Klosterman’s uncertainty is in itself indicative of a crisis, and the mass effects of large parts of the population feeling equally confused and disoriented really matter. In post-WWI Germany, a multitude of factors, most notably hyperinflation (by December of 1923 German inflation had ballooned to 1,261 thousand million times higher than it’d been in 1913; for comparison, U.S. inflation under Joe Biden peaked at 9.1% year over year), pushed the psyches of everyday Germans to the brink.2 On the 1920s German reaction to hyperinflation, Peukert writes:
We should remember that the effects on individuals were far more confused and confusing. Two individuals from the same broad social class might be affected very differently, depending on the precise period in question, the part of the country in which they lived and their exact role within the fabric of the economy. Indeed, it was precisely through the confusion experienced by individuals and their fears for their social status that the real psychological impact of the inflation made itself felt. (66)
Now, we are not living in Weimar Germany, as it’s become something of a cliché for armchair historians to suggest over the last decade. I don’t mean to insinuate that we’re sliding towards 1933 Germany (the Weimar Republic, it should be noted, survived the hyperinflation crisis and continued on for another decade). One of Peukert’s central theses, in fact, is that Weimar is worth studying in its own right, separate from the fact of what looks, from today’s standpoint, to be its inevitable demise. Even if it appears clear in retrospect that global conditions signaled a tragic outcome for Germany, German citizens living through the 1920s did not feel as if the ultimate rise of Hitler and the Nazis was inevitable. They were living in the moment, perplexed and disoriented, attempting to sort out what was going on in the world and survive.
How might we, in real-time, grapple with this confusion? There are methods of analyzing such a situation in real-time. The economist and historian Adam Tooze’s framework of the “polycrisis” attempts to reckon with exactly this real-time uncertainty (emphasis mine):
A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts…what is striking is the deep uncertainty that surrounds several of the crises (e.g. new COVID variants, or nuclear escalation). These are tail risks which can no longer be ignored but to which it is hard to attach a real probability.
Tooze’s “risk matrix,” from 2022, looks like this:
Yeah. But however crude and arbitrary such a map may be, it at least attempts to recognize the profound and peculiar ripple effects which one crisis can layer atop another, creating a maze of intersecting lines and angles which are, above all, highly confounding. And it’s precisely their confounding nature—the sinking feeling you get looking at Tooze’s chart—which reinforces the confusion, in itself adding more chaos and further disorienting large swaths of the population.
By synthesizing Peukert’s and Tooze’s frameworks, we see how the seemingly separate issues of “confusion” and “interdependence” are actually deeply interrelated. Both academics are concerned with broad societal trends, yet each of them accepts as an underlying assumption that individual confusion itself can self-reciprocate, creating unpredictable and often bizarre feedback loops prone to generate novel and strange material historical outcomes. The confusion you feel, in other words, matters, not just in a therapy-speak, “you are Kenough” sense, but in real, material terms borne out by history.
It’s important to take lessons away from the election in an effort to diagnose exactly what’s going on in the country and the world; I myself feel strongly, for example, that Democrats should seriously reconsider their platform in the wake of November’s verdict. Alongside such revisionism, though, it’s equally relevant to continue exploring the exact vagueness Klosterman and so many others are feeling in the present moment. More often than not, it’s this confusion itself which portends a crisis.
The episode reminded me of this Ian Williams piece from last month, about why college students love podcasts: “When we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truth-telling seemed to matter a lot more than the actuality. Joe Rogan may be a gigantic dumbass, but he performs that he’s curious, interested, and engaged. And, here’s the thing, he probably actually is those things… Rogan is some version of curious, but he performs as even more curious than he actually is. And that’s what matters to people.”
Peukert, “Weimar Republic,” 64.