I’m going to jump to the end of Montaigne’s essay about sumptuary laws — a rather archaic topic — where Montaigne brings up something highly relevant to our times. He concludes with this:

Plato, in his Laws, considers no plague in the world more harmful to his city than this: to let the young change at will from one fashion to another in dress, gestures, dances, exercises, and songs, shifting their judgment now to this position, now to that, running after novelties and honoring their inventors; whereby morals are corrupted and all ancient institutions come into disdain and contempt. In all things except those that are simply bad, change is to be feared: change of seasons, winds, food, and humors. And no laws are held in their true honor except those to which God has given some ancient duration, so that no one knows their origin or that they were ever different.

Montaigne is, for the most part, paraphrasing Plato accurately here, and it’s not worth getting into the minor points that Montaigne might be exaggerating. What’s more important to point out is that we now live in an all-innovation-all-the-time culture, one where young people in particular are the harbingers of cultural change.

It is young people that drive language change, technology adoption, styles of music, dress and entertainment. We basically live in Plato/Montaigne’s nightmare, where all ancient institutions (unless embraced nostalgically) are brought into disdain and contempt.

We are, however, in an interesting moment where young people are showing signs of turning against technology in interesting ways. AI is embraced most readily by people 45 and older. Younger generations are increasingly skeptical about it — and they have become increasingly negative towards social media as well in certain niches, despite overall social media usage remaining highest among the young.

Dating apps are viewed extremely negatively by young people. Physical media are increasingly popular over streaming services. Activities with strong tactile elements — playing music, reading physical books, gardening — are all seeing a renaissance.

But here’s the interesting paradox of these counter-revolutionary movements — they too are acts of innovation. Rebelling against the status quo of the digital economy is a rejection of the current institution of power, more proof that a culture of endless innovation isn’t even safe from the consumer class it has cultivated.

I draw two conclusions from this. First, in a Plato/Montaigne frame, what would be most beneficial to the culture right now would be a consolidation period where the rapid social change of the past half century became widely accepted and normalized. Instead of a right-wing MAGA-like revolt against recent social changes, the truly conservative move now would be to let everything that’s happened since the 1960s take root.

This would, however, require cultural next steps to be delayed, and there’s no reason for people who continue to face some level of oppression to accept that. I am not arguing for the Montaigne-Plato conservatism here, rather I’m just pointing out that wishes for radical reversals of the rights of individuals are deeply disruptive and just as likely to lead to societal chaos as the changes conservatives complain about.

My second conclusion is that we may be about to reach a point where slowing down or reversing innovation is simply impossible. I think we’ve reached a fork in the American experiment that will have massive consequences in the very near future.

Capital has placed its bet on the future, and it has laid all of its chips on AI being a transformative technology. The amount of money currently fronted for capital expenditures for AI firms is mind boggling — in the trillions of dollars and rising — and it is crowding out every other source of capital funding, including the bond prices for governments worldwide.

This isn’t to say, however, that the bets are right. I don’t want to go through all of the scenarios of how the AI race will play out, but they range from it’s a massive bubble waiting to pop to, if the best case scenario is right, there will be no consumer economy left when the job market disappears.

Put all scenarios aside for a moment, because no one really knows how this will play out. But consider that the U.S. government is currently carrying $45 trillion of debt, with an annual budget deficit exceeding its GDP. Consider that the Social Security system is less than a decade away from having to make dramatic benefit cuts unless the system is bailed out. Consider that public employee pension systems are wildly underfunded, even after massive stock market gains in recent years.

We’ve back ourselves into an economic corner where AI basically has to lead to massive widescale abundance, because we know of no other solutions that involve just muddlng along.

But also consider the massive political changes that have happened in recent years, mostly due to horrendous U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have consolidated power within the Executive Branch.

It’s now widely expected that the Democratic Party will take back at least one branch of Congress in the next election, perhaps both. And it seems a reasonable bet that the Democrats might win the 2028 Presidential election. What exactly are they going to do with their next chance?

In all likelihood, the Democrats will, once again, be in the role of cleaning up for a Republican mess. Except this time that mess will include basically having to rebuild the Federal Government from scratch.

Democrats will be faced with the woeful choice of either giving up the Executive Power acquired by the Trump administration and strictly limiting what they can get done in office — and given the scale of problems, that would almost certainly lead to a backlash. Or the Democrats will take the power given the Executive and push in the opposite direction.

Just think of where the political world might be going — Democrats nuking the filibuster and passing Medicare for All, expanding the Supreme Court to 13 Justices and adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states. Sounds wonderful to many on the left, but consider that the Democratic Party has not governed for more than 8 consecutive years since FDR and Truman.

If the Democrats are kicked out after four or eight years, the Republicans will expand the Supreme Court to 21, repeal Medicare and Medicaid altogether, and find their own crazy schemes for adding new states (such as declaring Venezuela and Greenland states or, in a bizarre but plausible move, declaring Canada a state and extending the vote only to Canadians who accept U.S. sovereignty, basically creating a second California of MAGA.)

Now that we’re on this merry-go-round of asserted Executive Power and compliant partisan legislators, there may be no getting off it. Our democracy could become such a cruel joke of endless “innovation” that we’ll beg for the United States to be broken up.

I raise these nightmare scenarios to point out that Plato and Montaigne — as dull and old fashioned as they were about innovation and cultural change — may have been wrong in most circumstances, but are almost certainly right at the extremes. And we are closer to those edge cases than we want to admit.