Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“The recession has been terrible in Ireland, hasn’t it,” Tooly said.

“Only as bad as most places,” he replied. “The same old story: unregulated property market, wild mortgages, the obvious crash.” Conifers brushed past the jeep on either side. “Supposedly, it was the history of poverty in Ireland that made them lose their minds.” He paused, reflecting. “Actually, history was to blame for a lot of this crash. Certainly what’s destroying Europe.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, trying to staple all these different countries together,” he said. “This whole European Union idea, getting sworn enemies invested together so they’d stop slitting each other’s throats — and with the Germans to finance it all out of war guilt. Only now the Germans are asked to pay the debts of Greece, Spain, Italy, and every other country that stuck its hands in the public pocket. What they’re really saying is ‘How historical do you feel?’ They’re asking, ‘Will you still pay for what your grandparents did seventy years ago?’ ” He turned off-road, driving through high grass, and parked before a wired-off pasture occupied by foraging chickens. “History is the issue,” he continued. “People, it turns out, aren’t a product of their own time. They’re a product of the time before theirs.” Keys swinging in the ignition, he hopped from the jeep, splatting into mud. “Need a hand?”

“If Europe is such a mess, why are you in it?” she said, stepping out.

“I came because things were a mess. I used to think you needed to go where places were flourishing. But you have to follow chaos. That’s where the dynamism is. As the poet said, ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!’ ”

“Which poet said that?”

“I’ve done well in Ireland,” he continued. “But I’ll be out of here soon.”

“Where to?”

“Why? Do you want to warn them?” He pinched her arm fondly. “There’s opportunity wherever there’s distress, little duck. Obviously, I’d prefer that no place fell into ruin and no one suffered. But success requires failure, sadly. Success is relative: you make a billion while everyone else makes a billion and one, then you just got poorer. Individuals don’t rise together. That’s a great lie of our time, like this myth of meritocracy: ‘Work hard enough and you will make it! Just want it enough!’ Everyone does want it enough. But only a few can win and nearly all will lose. People can’t accept this, so they convince themselves that, secretly, privately, in their own terms, they’re not failures. But, ah well,” he concluded, smiling, “the individual ego, like the national ego, is wonderfully impervious to fact.”

He led Tooly into an aluminum shed, its corrugated walls lined by nest boxes with hens peeking out, each of which he checked in turn.

“I’m annoyed that you’re not more shocked I found you,” she said. “Aren’t you a little bit impressed?”

“The name gave me away,” he guessed. He had been gathering names, and other information about people, for years. At the Brain Trust, for example, each applicant for membership had filled out detailed forms with personal data that they would never have disclosed in other settings but that they surrendered unthinkingly on an official-looking form. Long after the demise of the Brain Trust, several former applicants had the same strange experience, a growing sense that their lives were haunted: strange charges on their iTunes accounts; a failure to receive mail; businesses calling them about products they’d never bought. It was as if a double operated under their names. Xavi had visited the Brain Trust once on Tooly’s recommendation, had met with Venn, and he’d filled out those forms. When he died, his identity became all the more valuable — no Xavier Karamage to interfere with the actions of “Xavier Karamage.”

“But that photo online, the guy with a red mustache?” Tooly asked.

“Who knows,” Venn answered. “Just a picture sucked from cyberspace by the computer geek who set up that website. My whole company, as I’m sure you realize, is somewhat of a shell operation.”

“Your receptionist hasn’t even met you.”

“She gave out this address? Can’t say I’m too impressed with that.”

“Not her fault. It was my cunning that pried it from her!”

“Of course it was.”

“How long have you been here, Venn?” she asked, with an unexpected surge of emotion. “I’ve been wondering for ages what happened to you. Thought you were going to be in touch. Where were you?”

“Where? There aren’t places anymore, duck,” he responded. “No locations now, just individuals. You didn’t hear? Everyone’s their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody’s putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It’s the era of self-importance. Everyone’s their own world. Doesn’t matter where people are. Or where I was.”

“Nicely dodged,” she said. “And, for the record, this isn’t supposed to be ‘the age of self-importance.’ Everyone’s busy fighting for causes on social media, aren’t they? The whole Occupy Wall Street movement.”

“Clowns of no consequence,” he retorted, taking a brown egg from a hutch, turning it over appraisingly. “Long after their tents are gone, Wall Street will still occupy. Not the other way around. Was there ever any doubt?”

“The protests in Greece and France and Italy?”

“Those aren’t for a social cause. They’re riots for self-interest. It’s Greek statisticians and Italian taxi drivers and French bureaucrats all saying, ‘How dare anyone threaten our entitlements?’ while their countrymen starve. You have to admire the gumption.”

“The Arab Spring stuff isn’t all self-interest,” she countered. “And they’re doing it through social-media stuff.”

“The Arabs rebelled because of Facebook? They rebelled because they’re not on Facebook. Because they’re not installed in their hardware like the West is. Don’t imagine that digital code topples generals. It’s analog human beings. Not tweets and viral videos. That’s just the sideshow of our times.”

“You’ve become another declinist,” she said. “Everywhere I go! I was with this old friend in Connecticut — you remember that law student, Duncan? All he talks about now is doom and collapse. But there were way worse times than this. People used to suffer famines in Ireland, right? You can’t imagine that today.”

“I agree with you,” Venn said. “The West isn’t collapsing. Empires don’t crumble like they used to. Westerners are just in a bad mood. Suddenly, they don’t have their way, and they won’t stand for it. A bunch of spoilt children. (Then again, the difference between spoilt brats and successful adults is never that large, is it.) But anyone who frets about the fall of empires is missing the point. You have no West or East now. Like the poet said, ‘No such things as societies anymore, just individual people.’ ”

“Who’s this poet you keep quoting?”

“There is no poet,” he confessed. “They’re just lines I pick up. When I go, ‘The poet said,’ people lean in close and listen. Which makes me laugh. Especially since nobody listens to actual poets anymore.”

“But you, at least, are not predicting the end of the world.”

“Definitely not. Things are changing, but I don’t mind that. Look at what everyone’s so upset about: pollution and corporate greed and obesity. It’s all just forms of gluttony. Even this global-warming farce. Horrific. It is. But inevitable, too. Nobody can stop it now. All that happens if you quit consuming is someone else eats your lunch.” He smiled. “Remember all that nonsense about globalization — how the world was a village, how free-market democracy was going to unite the world? There are only individual operators, some pretending to belong to a group, others so naïve that they really believe a group exists.