System Failure
System Failure
Words Anna Sinofzik
Photography Colette Pomerleau
Gold goes to South Sudan, but the self-designated “enlightened” states are catching up quickly. Following highly controversial campaigns, the US and the UK in particular have registered sharp upswings in the three key indicators: “Group Grievance”, “Factionalized Elites”, and “Security Apparatus”. Beyond that, avowed fans of failure may congratulate Turkey: a few years ago still inconspicuously ranked in the midfield, the country has repositioned itself. Always a serious competitor amongst its middle-eastern neighbors, Erdogan’s regime has managed to move it right to the top ranks. In the discipline of “Increased Destabilization”, only Ethiopia and Mexico are left leading the field.
Results are drawn from the latest Fragile State Index (FSI), an annual report released by the think tank Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy. Assessing the vulnerability to conflict or collapse of nearly all sovereign states, the non-profit initiative is currently raising red flags on a growing number of countries, including the world’s major powers. Obviously, it is not alone: propelled by precarious times, the sentiment of failure has become a highly emotional staple within and beyond scaremongering populist camps.
According to a recent Harvard study, the US-American system is “doomed to fail” due to corruption caused by a lack of competition. In Germany, many consider the continuation of the grand coalition as a political suicide-mission devoid of friction and fresh ideas. In many European countries, established parties and politicians are accused of a fatigue that will drive the whole system into the ground. Amongst many other careers, Angela Merkel’s is said to clearly be over. Long destined to fail, as many argue, because she fears failure more than anything else, with the result that all her decisions are dictated by polls.
Tempted to tune in with the same “motivational” failure quotes that adorn the walls of today’s tech offices, we have long learned to overstretch our notion of failure. Now flexible enough to engulf its own opposite, it is, above all, considered a steppingstone to success - or at least an opportunity that can, potentially, give rise to all manner of fresh starts. If not downright glorified, then certainly gentrified, failure has come to be celebrated rather than feared.
It seems as if only the world of sports is not entirely there yet — not even the sprinters. We see it clearly in the faces of fourth place finishers. The frustration. The pain. The soul sucking burst of their bubble — or rather, the loss of a long-held hope that had, only a few seconds ago, seemed too tangible to be called a bubble at all. The Olympics, some say, are simply “too big for failure” — while outside the arena, the concept of it is catching on in contexts no smaller than world affairs. If, size — or rather dimension - does matter, as one my assume in connection with failure, we should sometimes look into the faces of freshly failed athletes and remind ourselves that in the original sense, to fail is no fun at all; that before paving the way for promising new beginnings, failures are, above all, painful ends, many of which leave little room to recover or even rise straight back to the top.
“The term failed suggests a certain degree of finality,” affirm the heads behind the FSI. Formerly called Failed States Index, the report’s name was changed to Fragile States Index a few years ago to make its findings sound less finite. According to the initiatives Co-Director, J.J. Messner, the term “failure” had been great to create a buzz, but drew interest away from any sort of deeper, constructive dialogue: “When the FSI was first published in 2005”, Messner notes, the concept of the ‘failed state’ was “designed to highlight the very real risk that people faced if their state failed to address the factors and conditions that we were measuring. However, while the term certainly gained people’s attention, it also became a distraction away from the point of the Index, which is to encourage discussions that support an increase in human security and improved livelihoods.”
The FSI’s explanation debunks the modern mind’s dubious foible for the extreme. More existentially charged than its milder siblings — the flaw, fragility, or the mistake - the term failure clearly thrives on an attention-grabbing force that fascinates populists along with their alleged enemies of the so-called “cultural elite”. Inspired by generations of radical intellectuals, the latter has, for more than a century, famously feared that which lies between failure and success, namely the feeble and average. “Mediocrity is bourgeois,” Simone de Beauvoir noted in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. “In lovers’, poetic, or political discourse, tepidity is virtually always considered unworthy,” writes the French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia. “Perhaps this conviction is a remnant of an aristocratic ethic in democratic times: one no longer judges the substance of a behavior, instead preferring to accentuate the excellence of its style and to evaluate its intensity.”
“To the modern mind, averageness is the ultimate form of defeat”, agrees Scott A. Sandage, author of The Invention of Failure. According to the historian, the concept of failure was adapted from economics and swapped over into broader usage relatively late in time: at least in terms of language, it has rarely been used outside the word of finance before 1860, when American novelists first “recognized the metaphoric value of business failure” and began to use it to describe a particularly desperate state of the human psyche. In political science, the concept of the “failed state” cropped up and first gained currency a lot later, reports the German scholar Wolfgang Hein. Until the early 1970s, one referred to crises-ridden countries as developing ones - even if the respective political system was, at least from the western point of view, very fragile or practically destined to fail.
The notion of failure remains highly disputed in a political context for obvious reasons. Notions of success will always be subjective — and subject to constant change. Security, for example, has gathered distasteful associations in recent decades. Once the core of what the bourgeois wanted and the radical intellectuals refused, it now summons to mind the loss of privacy rights, as well as the hegemonic hubris of a national security state that is more concerned with securing its own power than the livelihood of its people. Much like mediocrity, stability can give us shivers. But would we really want to swap it for chaos?
Think tanks like the FSI work with a variety of different indicators to assess the fragility of political systems, but like ours, their perspective is based primarily on Western perceptions and interests. While we have all messed up a home-cooked meal and then called up for sushi take-out instead, our notion of severe political system failure is rarely shaped by first hand experience. Much like the way failure’s most successful advocates (Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey, et al.) speak of professional failure, most of us watch at it from the secure remote of relatively privileged positions. Brought to us via digital connections, some of its images degrade into cheap forms of entertainment.
Naturally poised between fear and fascination, our newfangled foible of failure is not free of ʻSchadenfreude’. As such, it has given rise to the epic fail meme that, ever more often, intermingle silly mishaps with truly dramatic decisions. A few days ago, one of Donald Trump’s innumerable epic fails ranked top on the web’s “most popular” lists: Sitting in a White House listening session with a group of survivors from the Parkland school shooting, the American president was pictured holding a cue card, reminding him to listen and at least act empathetic. A day later, he announced his plan to prevent further rampages by arming teachers with guns.
“The epic fail involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well,” once wrote Christopher Beam of the online magazine Slate: “Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.” Overconfidence is in fact a big issue in Trump’s politics, too. With the difference that there is more at stake than wet floor, broken glass and a few paralyzed fish.
The hubris involved in the fetishization of failure in contemporary political discourse goes hand in hand with a certain readiness to steer right into the abyss, without recognizing that on paths paved by mistakes, there are other ways to learn and improve than to “epically fail”. As the linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested, some of the most reasonable ways to stabilize fragile states sound in fact fairly boring and bourgeois: most importantly, Chomsky argues, “facts, logic and elementary moral principles should matter.” Now is certainly no time for conservative fatigue. But also not the right moment to meet failure half way for the sake of click-bait and drama.