In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.

This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.

It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.

To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.

Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

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Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.

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Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.

This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.

In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

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Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.

In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

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New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.

Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.

This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

Belief in the value of neutrality was a hard-won product of bourgeoisie political revolutions and religious wars. Having lasted for centuries, it is teetering today under attack from two directions. On one side, a brand of political activism condemns the very idea of remaining neutral as being a cover for subjugation and exploitation. In this view, the passive act of not denying someone banking services is recast as an affirmative endorsement of their entire political outlook. Simultaneously, digital networks are thrusting formerly apolitical institutions into the general arena of public surveillance, where failure to affirm new ideological mantras is seen as an act of treason against the whole system.

Ironically, given its role as a pioneer of thought policing and financial cancellation, the Canadian government website hosts an astute paper on the techno-surveillance model pioneered by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). “Big data and the social credit system: The security consequences” argues that the purpose of the “social governance process” in China is “upholding the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position: ensuring state security”. This is “not simply about domestic or foreign-security policy. In the PRC, internal and external are also about what is inside and outside of the CCP. The Party is protecting an ideas space not bounded by physical geography.” Security, in this context, is not measured by protecting Chinese citizens from outside attacks but, rather, by the state’s ability to exercise control over ideas, which it sees as essential to maintaining the party’s power.

The process is more decentralised in the US and UK than in China, but functionally the West’s policing of disinformation and illicit ideas, combined with punitive cancellations, achieves the same goal. Once seen as paragons of amoral profit seeking, banks now espouse “values” because they fear that to not do so would place them at risk of being deemed “distasteful” and “out-of-touch”. Those phrases, used by Farage’s bank to condemn him, are euphemisms for anything that threatens the ruling class ideology — something powerful institutions must avoid lest they be evicted from the palace of global technocracy. It is no coincidence that the most technologically advanced countries are also the most aggressive practitioners of de-banking.

Immediately after the January 6 riots in the US, PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organising the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protestors. GoFundMe said that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the 2020 election. Two years later, numerous people “prosecuted for low-level felonies and misdemeanours such as trespassing and disorderly conduct” at the Capitol “have been blacklisted by banks and shut out of social media fundraising services,” according to a recent report that cited a dozen such claims. In 2022, Justin Trudeau’s government used debanking to punish truck drivers engaged in mass protests. Canadian financial institutions cut standard payments as well as freezing cryptocurrency accounts used by the protestors. Tellingly, one of the first instances of de-banking targeted WikiLeaks, the organisation founded by Julian Assange, arguably the most powerful critic of the emerging alliance between tech monopolies and the national security state. In 2010, one month after Wikileaks published a trove of leaked State Department diplomatic cables, Paypal froze its account.

Ultimately, the driver of this new social reality is not radical activism but the power of the tech monopolies. Moralistic fervour is burning away centuries of tradition, leaving the digital oligarchs to claim the new territory. The world we are living in is the one they have authored. In the same way that railroads once changed the world by collapsing physical distances, social media has collapsed the spaces that once differentiated private from public, as well as separating institutional spheres of power. Thus financial disconnection can be used as a tactic of warfare against Russia as well as a domestic tool in every country where digital networks predominate.

In the US, the unprecedented coordination between the various sectors of the counter-disinformation complex, which includes the media, intelligence agencies, non-profits, and universities, testifies to the same principle at work. Connected by a lattice of digital networks, they reinforce the same belief system while wielding their power to attack people accused of wrongthink and spreading disinformation. Political censorship and financial disconnection are two sides of the same coin.

Today, organisations such as the World Economic Forum and World Bank are promoting global digital IDs as a progressive cause to help lift “unbanked” people out of poverty. Their solution would herd billions of people into globalised surveillance databases where their every transaction, movement, and sentiment can be monitored and analysed. If the spread of debanking shows that the danger today comes from an interconnected digital web reaching into the foundations of privacy and neutrality, the response of the global elite is to insist we build a bigger bank.

Cast your eyes elsewhere and witness another phenomenon. It is to do with how we decide what to think, and it is founded on the idea that no good can come from someone we deem as bad. This sinner commands scant sympathy, no matter their plight. Whatever they say is right is actually wrong, and whatever they say is wrong is actually right. We can set our compass by them.

Now look in a third place, where we find motives and incentives. Here, one is rewarded for coming to swift and certain judgments, no matter how flimsy the evidence. The prizes are symbols of affection and words of praise and a quantifiable increase in influence.

It may seem laughable to cast the above as context for a dispute between a man and his bank, but various currents in contemporary culture have swept us to this point. If only they would leave us here, we could view the episode as trivial, or mildly vexing or wryly amusing. But these currents are strong, and they will not leave us here, and they may destroy something.

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Much discussion surrounding the matter of Nigel Farage and Coutts has been rather like a curious game of ping-pong, one played without a net or even a table. One says this, one says that, and back and forth it all goes. But one has been able to say pretty much anything, because the known facts have been so scarce. Hit the ball wherever you like and your opponent will return it; it can never be called out.

Farage has at least now provided some documentation to support his claims. Minutes from the bank’s “wealth reputational risk committee” stated it “did not think continuing to bank NF [Nigel Farage] was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.” It added: “This was not a political decision but one centred around inclusivity and purpose.”

Later, faced with the resulting ire, it responded by clarifying: “It is not Coutts’s policy to close customer accounts solely on the basis of legally held political and personal views. Decisions to close an account are not taken lightly and involve a number of factors including commercial viability, reputational considerations, and legal and regulatory requirements.” Complicating the issue is an apparent offer from Coutts for Farage to bank with its parent company NatWest. So Farage’s claims may not have been entirely debunked, but neither has he been entirely debanked.

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Yet there is surely a question over those minutes, and what they mean in a broader sense. Despite everything, it seems our trust in banks has never been greater. We are only a few years on from the Great Crash and resulting bailouts, and yet the way we pay is becoming vastly more dependent upon them. The drift towards a cashless society and an enormous increase in online transactions have left us at their mercy. Stashes of cash, privately held, are of diminishing use. Living without a bank account is becoming impossible.

We may well think it fine for certain companies and institutions to proclaim certain ethical principles; we may even find it admirable, and give them our custom. And we would expect them to conduct business in accordance with these principles: if their actions told a different story, we might then call them hypocrites. But the more essential the service, the more concerning this becomes.

Coutts may not be an essential service, but normal high-street banks are. And it is easy to imagine such a business boasting of being “inclusive” and driven by “purpose”, a term used in boardrooms today meaning, according to one definition, a desire to be a force for “positive change” in society. In denying its services to someone who failed to comply with its “values”, it could justify itself not only commercially, but morally.

This principle extends into a form of investing known as ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance), which, like “purpose”, looks beyond the financial: it encourages the direction of money towards enterprises that the investor believes are moral, and away from those the investor believes are immoral. This may be laudable, and is doubtless well-intentioned. And yet.

The problem is that these are ideologies that fail to realise they are ideologies. To many of their proponents, it is just a matter of being kind, doing good, keeping on the right side of history, and making life better for more people. Their virtue is self-evident, so anyone who opposes them is a creature of vice and must be resisted. And thus we find ourselves in a strange place, where the nice people are coercing us into becoming more like them.

I should be happy about this. I am a Guardian-reading, Remain-voting, lockdown-supporting, double-Covid-vax-boosted Anglican who defends the BBC and wore masks more often than was strictly required during the pandemic. But it is hard to ignore the stirrings of a certain polite and cuddly totalitarianism (it would obviously laugh at the word and create mocking memes, rather than reflect upon itself meaningfully). There are other noxious forces in the world, too — not least a kind of nihilism that seems to be emanating from Russia — and these may be equally destructive, but these tend to be easier for us to identify and thus resist. The evil that wears our own clothes is more able to do its work unhindered.

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And here is where it affects us all, because our economy and way of life more generally will struggle to survive if these currents continue on their path. At its best, the free market is democratic: the free market is obviously ideological and flawed in itself, but in principle it treats everyone the same, regardless of their political views. A financial system that favours certain views over others is obviously a threat to this. And who is to say whether those views currently in fashion will be viewed so favourably in years to come? The progressive Left once advocated for eugenics, after all; which of today’s right-on beliefs will be damned by tomorrow?

Farage versus Coutts, then, is a diverting tale that has added to the gaiety of at least some of the nation. Cashlessness, philosophical shallowness and the warping effect of social media have played their part. But this story feels like a staging post on the way to somewhere else. Sometimes, revolutions come in the strangest ways. A bank for the super-rich may have just accelerated the demise of capitalism.