Science is making the world get more and more expensive. When science brings out a new gadget it costs more than the others. People have to earn more to buy it. So science is making the world more difficult, more complex. It makes people run more. What we need is to rest more, talk more, walk more, fuck more and enjoy things in life more. There’s a limit to what Europeans call technological and industrial development. When that limit is achieved society just crumbles. That’s why I see the day Europe, America and Russia will come to a standstill.

Before moving on, let’s recap:

• Bureaucracies are replication machines. They’re designed for exploit, not explore.

• Bureaucracies tend to be monocultures. They’re run by individuals temperamentally inclined to favor the status quo.

• Bureaucratic information systems fail to capture the hidden costs of one-sided trade-offs. As a result, many decisions are underinformed and, therefore, suboptimal.

• Bureaucracies tend to enforce uniform trade-offs across the entire organization. Though unsophisticated, this preserves the center’s power and sense of order.

• The bureaucratic aversion to ambiguity leads to either/or thinking. Rather than maintaining a creative tension, organizations tend to whipsaw between counterposed priorities.

Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer— as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns— they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.

There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political.

Now Xi is shoveling money toward scientists. I’ve interviewed over two dozen scientists in China, most of them were trained in the United States, who have told me that it’s easier to receive funding in Chinese universities than in American universities. Their money comes without many strings attached, whereas a grant application to the National Science Foundation demands fastidiousness on formatting, endless reporting requirements, and the threat of jail if they don’t make a proper disclosure.