If everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis

The tariff crisis in full swing. The crisis in Iran expands. The energy crisis making life hard. The global climate crisis burning our cities alive. The bond crisis is imminent! A liquidity crisis putting us on the brink! The impact of the migrant crisis on our cities! Crises galore, so many your eyes bleed.

I'm in the latter part of my 30s – a 9/11 millennial. But considering how many crises I've survived, I feel more like I've lived two millennia between world wars and depressions, battle scars and all.

Some of these are personal: the housing crisis is a real obstacle. The cost-of-living crisis or the inflation crisis means that everything is getting more expensive all of the time.

But we should admit we've reached Peak Crisis. An inflation of crises so complete that they don't mean anything anymore.

As Johan Norberg has made a career of stating, life is actually pretty good. And getting better all the time. Why, then, are we always oscillating between this crisis and that crisis?

A crisis makes it easy to do the hard things. Or nothing at all.

I was reminded of this listening to the televised debate last week between the candidates for Québec's next premier.

The people who want to govern the province of my birth discussed the obvious "tariff" crisis and why unprecedented situations mandate unprecedented solutions (mostly just paying everyone subsidies). But seemingly every political issue had been elevated to some kind of crisis.

It seems every institution needs some type of crisis to justify expanding power or control, the bending of rules, or yet more bailouts and subsidies.

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Here's a simple attempt to answer why: In non-crisis times, it's hard to do things. Institutions are inert. Protecting the status quo is the prime directive that supersedes everything else. People have gotten used to a certain way of doing things. We're comfortable. Change is too much to ask, even though we know we need it.

But when there's a crisis, then OH MY, we have to throw the rulebook out the window! Now it's time to consider action that, yesterday, would have been dead on arrival. The crisis now justifies extraordinary action.

A refrain

We lived through this with the excesses of the War on Terror. Mass surveillance and erosion of civil liberties would temporarily be enacted to protect our normal way of life.

In the 2008 financial crisis, the credit default swap risk was simply too great to ignore and institutions were too-big-to-fail. That justified shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars to poorly capitalized banks and failing businesses.

Let's not forget the pandemic crisis, which made both the War on Terror and the 2008 bailouts look like picnics. Our governments now have a blueprint for restricting individual movements and behavior in a way we never thought possible. None of it would have been possible without the coronavirus crisis.

After crises like these, though, the mechanisms, power, and bureaucracies don't just evaporate. They have staying power.

Austrian author Stefan Zweig once lamented the loss of liberty that came during the First World War, in which passports were introduced as a temporary measure:

Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without a passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.

Passports are no longer temporary. They're required for moving about the world. Identity papers are so ingrained in every regulated transaction today that we don't even think about the dozens of KYC forms we have to fill out every year. To our chagrin.

The 'crisis' crisis

If there's anything to learn, it's that the invocation of a crisis is an invitation to go around the system and its safeguards. Budget discipline, supervisory processes, individual liberties, and the rule of law are sacrificed to get us through the crisis.

We are thrown for such a panic and loop that we're willing to endure just about anything to solve the crisis. But what if this framing is exactly the problem? There are thousands of books on the shelves that teach us what happens when reactions to crises make or break leaders, start revolutions, or jumpstart paradigm shifts we could not have foreseen.

Is this how we want our societies governed, constantly in a state of panic?

Rather than jumping from one crisis to the next, I would prefer a system that upholds its standards and allows those with agency (i.e. individuals) to come up with solutions. Maybe that's naive and too hopeful. But at least it's not a crisis of confidence.