The World of Yesterday

Inflation, protectionism and other hubristic undertakings...

(Earth, as seen from space. Source Substack: Image Generator)

“We believed – and the whole world believed with us – that this had been the war to end all wars, that the beast which had been laying waste to our world was tamed or even slaughtered... We were foolish, I know. But we were not alone.”

~ Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1942)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Cairo International Airport, Egypt...

We’re on the road today, dear reader... or rather, in the skies. Soaring over the scorched Sahara Desert this morning, from the ancient city of Aswan en route to the capital, we were again taken aback by the sheer marvel of it all.

No Egyptian Pharaoh, no matter how impressive his tomb... nor how many slaves perished during its construction... nor how lavishly decorated his death mask... ever experienced the gift of flight.

Never did a Ramesses or a Ptolemy soar above the clouds on wings of steel, view the land from such great heights... nor so much as suffer an in-flight meal. For century upon century, millennium upon dusty millennium, was man bound to terra firma, the stars above him wandering the heavens like gods, forever beyond his reach.

Meanwhile, outside the plane’s window, the Nile continues to flow... the earth continues to turn... and man continues his journey ever onward; to what end, is not given him to know.

The papers are full of the latest “news.” But there’s nothing “new” about our story.

Tariffs and trade wars... debts and deficits... war, hubris and political chicanery...

History gives some clues as to how these endeavors inevitably end, but seldom does man take his cues from such quaint notions as the experiences of those who went before him, preferring instead his own sense of certainty that “this time is different.”

And so, as the past tumbles headlong into the future, we take a look back into The World of Yesterday, penned by one of modern history’s most astute biographers and novelists, Stefan Zweig, to see what may be learned about what comes next.

We’ll return with your regular Notes, including our impressions of Egypt (as promised), later this week...

---

The World of Tomorrow

By Joel Bowman

With the embers of the First World War still smoldering across the European continent, the writer, poet and unfashionable pacifist, Stefan Zweig, set out from neutral Switzerland to return to his beloved home country of Austria. He had been in Zurich for the premier of his play Jeremiah, fashioned on the “weeping prophet” who, like Cassandra in Troy, had issued grave warnings to deaf ears.

Zweig’s play was a plea for brotherhood, for peace, and an injunction to stand firm for justice, even as the prevailing voices of the day, dazzled and beguiled by the intoxicating spirit of patriotism, marched lockstep toward conflict. How that return to his once-proud Austria must have wrenched at the young man’s heart, to witness the culture, the society he so adored, the civilized world of yesterday, torn asunder by the blunt stupidity of war.

At the border, itself a political line imagined into existence by man, the passengers were instructed to change from the clean Swiss carriages to their dilapidated Austrian counterparts. Wrote Zweig:

“You only had to set eyes on those carriages to know in advance what had become of the country. The conductors showing us to our seats looked thin, hungry and shabbily clothed. Their worn-out uniforms hung loose on their stooped shoulders. The leather straps for pulling the windows up and down had been cut off; every scrap of leather was valuable. Bayonets or sharp knives had been hacking at the seats as well, and whole chunks of upholstery had been ruthlessly cut away by some unscrupulous person who, anxious to get his shoes mended, was carrying off any leather he could find. The ashtrays had been stolen as well for the sake of their small nickel and copper content. Soot and cinders from the poor-quality brown coal used to heat the engines these days were blown in through the broken windows by the late autumn wind, leaving black marks on the floor and walls of the compartment, but at least the stink of it took the edge off the sharp smell of iodoform that reminded me how many sick and wounded men must have traveled in the skeletal carriages during the war.”

The sensation, for Zweig, stood in gross contrast to what he had felt but a few months earlier, when the train had carried him in the opposite direction, away from the horrors of war and toward an enclave of sanity in a world gone mad.

“Every tree seemed to me more beautiful, each mountain had a greater air of freedom about it, every landscape was lovelier – for in a country at war the blessed sight of a meadow seems to the sad eyes of its people like impertinence on the part of an indifferent Nature, every crimson sunset reminds them of all the blood that has been shed. But here, in a natural state of peace, Nature’s indifference seemed noble, right and proper again, and I loved Switzerland more than I had ever loved it before.”

But back to the post-war future...

The “Severed Torso”

On top of crushing war reparations, the “severed torso of Austria” suffered the amputation of large swathes of productive land, including areas of great manufacturing and commercial power. In the years immediately following that “great” conflict, practically all state enterprises in Austria ran at a loss, even while the number of state employees in the capital, Vienna, rose to more than during the monarchy, when the economy was eight times the size. Steadily, industry moved from private to public hands, but the ersatz economy was as bitter as its fake coffee and frail as its scarce supply of goods. Zweig describes how “almost all the men went around dressed in old uniforms, even Russian uniforms, collected from a depot at the hospital, clothing in which several people had died already.”

The situation now firmly in the government’s control, the ruling elite naturally did everything in its power to make matters worse. With growing desperation on the streets, it wasn’t long until the nation’s central bank, caving to that age-old temptation of man, set about leading the nation’s currency into the fray. Like so many unarmed soldiers, piling over the top... unbacked banknotes flew off the state’s printing press, into the blazing crossfire. The ensuing hyperinflationary period, which lasted from October 1921 to September 1923, peaked in late 1922, when the official, annualized rate reached 1,426%. Zweig recalls the scene...

“The situation grew worse by the week, and the population more and more agitated, for financial devaluation was more obvious every day. The neighbour states had replaced the old Austrian banknotes with their own currencies, leaving tiny Austria with almost the entire burden of redeeming the old crown. At the first sign of distrust among the people, coinage disappeared, for a small copper or nickel coin still represented something more than the mere printed paper. The state might crank up the printing presses to create as much artificial money as possible, in line with the precepts of Mephistopheles, but it could not keep pace with inflation, and so every town and city and finally every village began printing its own ‘emergency currency,’ which would not be accepted in the neighbouring village, and later on, when it was recognized, correctly, that it had no intrinsic value at all, was usually just thrown away.”

As the inflationary blight metastasized throughout the economy, so too did the attendant chaos, as people lost their bearings with reality, their connection to value, their ability to engage in reliable, honest exchange. Zweig, again...

“Soon no one knew what anything cost. Prices shot up at random; a box of matches could cost twenty times more in a shop that had raised the price earlier than another, where a less grasping shopkeeper was still selling his wares at yesterday’s prices. His reward for honesty was to see his shop cleared out within the hour, for one customer would tell another and they all came to buy whatever there was to be bought, regardless of whether they needed it or not. Even a goldfish or an old telescope represented ‘real value,’ and everyone wanted real value rather than paper...

“This crazy state of chaos made the situation more absurd and illogical from week to week. A man who had saved for forty years and had also patriotically put money into the war loan became a beggar, while a man who used to be in debt was free of it. Those who had observed propriety in the allocation of food went hungry, those who cheerfully ignored the rules were well fed. If you knew how to hand out bribes you got on well, if you speculated you could make a profit. Those who sold in line with cost price were robbed; those who calculated carefully still lost out. There were no standards or values as money flowed away and evaporated; the only virtue was to be clever, adaptable and unscrupulous, leaping on the back of the runaway horse instead of letting it trample you.”

Follow the Money

Where goes sound money, so too goes civil society. Eventually, trade in paper currency collapsed almost entirely as one of the most advanced societies of the modern age slipped back into a dark and ignorant prehistory. Zweig...

“Humanity had already cheerfully reverted to the cave-dwelling age in trench warfare, and was now rejecting thousands of years of conventional financial transactions and going back to primitive exchange. A grotesque style of trading spread through the whole of Austria.”

By the time any semblance of financial stability had returned to Austria, during the mid-twenties, the scourge of hyperinflation had already spread to neighboring Germany, where a charismatic political strongman was waiting in the wings to exploit the misery of the situation, promising his people a kind of deliverance only Mephistopheles himself could imagine.

Ah, but that’s a history for a future musing...

In the meantime, stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Said the Spanish-American philosopher and essayist, George Santayana…

“Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.”

Judging by the cyclical nature of man’s story thus far, those who have never opened a history book handily outnumber those tortured few who have. Were it not so, we might jettison unfree markets, unfree minds and unfree people and, instead, proceed directly to their obviously superior alternatives.

And yet… here we are, condemned to write these pages, making the lonely case for liberty’s lost cause...

BUT!

The times, they are a-changin'!

These humble Notes, for example, are now read in 139 countries around he world and ALL 50 US states! True, our readership is not as strongly represented as it could be in, say, Pennsylvania… or Illinois… or Ohio…

…but maybe that’s about to change, too! (Ahem…)

Wherever you’re from, support the case for liberty in your backyard by joining our growing community of critical thinkers, independent minds and curious contrarians today. Cheers ~ JB