TL;DR: Opportunism will undermine the society’s very structure until it breaks down; bad times are coming.

A superficial look on the recent government-led reforms in Israel may leave the impression of some principled disagreement over the theory of government. However, in essense, the move is an opportunistic grab for power; the mechanism it aims to install is little more than the individual survival of a certain milieu of political operators and their patrons, some of whom are not even residents of Israel.

I’d like to use the opportunity to present some learnings from the Soviet society, which entered a period of unbridled governmental opportunism in 1965-1985; right at its end, the period was labeled as “stagnation” (“zastoy”, застой). It is of that that the great Russian poet Iosif (Joseph) Brodsky wrote in the early 1970s

A person of second-rate times, I proudly
Declare that thoughts I conceived most profoundly,
Were second-rate; I hereby leave them for all generations
As a guide to contending with suffocation

(Partial translation: Uri Yanover)

Economics: waste at multiple levels

Opportunism’s earliest symptom is the government losing motivation to serve anything but niche interests. Inherently what follows is the waste of public goods (such as the budget), followed by a waste of productivity, a waste of good will and cohesion and over time - a waste of lives.

During the Soviet stagnation, the economy simply froze solid in its tracks, exhausted by massive defense spending, high investment/low yield civilian projects and the progressively growing burden of corruption and black market dynamics.

A great example of the waste of lives is the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, which quickly escalated a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States, continuing which was not in the Soviet interest - yet it was allowed to drag on for a decade.

The forecast for Israeli tech should be apparent here: its current assets will be used in a very short sighted way to cover governmental spending, whether directly by excessive taxation or indirectly through inflation and lack of public services. Within a startup generation (5 years), this will drive key people and resources to seek a more equitable locality.

Nepotism/Corruption as a scourge of human capital

Since an opportunist doesn’t care about outcomes, the most advantageous choices for staffing positions are those that involve kickbacks - the consideration could be financial, quid pro quo or familial (nepotism).

In case the position in question does not accommodate a choice that favors the opportunist, it should at least do as little harm as possible. Hence, the opportunist will not dare to bring in new and promising upstarts, lest the opportunist be eclipsed! Even compared with humanity at large, which is pretty cowardly when it comes to fresh faces, opportunist regimes are plain and simple scared of new people coming on, no matter how brilliant.

Remarkably hundreds of thousands of people from the Soviet Union who led lives not matching their respective talents, went on to immigrate and win new places for themselves in new countries. There they had a chance to demonstrate their brilliance, breaking through the bonds imposed by immigration and smashing their own individual glass ceilings; such was the story of my own family. Yet, millions of other brilliant people likely could not or did not immigrate, and remained in a society that wasted their talent and indeed their very lives.

Capable people notice that an opportunistic regime shunts their growth all too quickly; in Brodsky’s words, they feel suffocated. Given even an iota of an opportunity, they will run, the more talent - the quicker.

The practice of patronage and quid pro quo protectionism has always been present in Israeli public life. After a few good decades, with the weakening of public order, that practice is going to come back with vengeance. The heart of Israeli tech companies is small businesses. They are highly susceptible to regulatory changes, public relation disasters, even minor brushes with the law. Even mild and well-considered changes can hurt them; raging rug-pulls such as the one going on now, are murderous.

On a personal level, Israel is already a major exporter of talent for academia and art; doubtlessly this will also be the case for the talent-rich local tech industry.

Normalizing the stench

A necessary aspect of opportunist governance is an adoption of a specific messaging to delay the government’s inevitable fall from popularity and then tries to hold off discontent for as long as possible.

One core strategem of an opportunist government is to progressively take over ways to signal merit.

Consider the following dialogue, which took place between Brodsky - the poet who wrote the epigram to this blog post, and a trial judge, who was soon going to sentence him to forced labor due to “not being a productive member of society”:

J: And what is your occupation in general?
B: Poet, poet-translator.
J: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poets?
B: No one. (Unprovoked) And who put me in the ranks of humanity?
J: Did you study it?
B: What?
J: How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an institute of higher learning … where they prepare … teach …
B: I did not think that it is given to one by education.
J: By what then?
B: I think it is … from God.

It is apparent that for the judge it was genuinely inconceivable that Brodsky could be a poet at all without being a member of some association - and of course in the Soviet system, that could only be a state-affiliated association, in which he would be expected to abide by the wishes of the incumbent generation of poets and administrators - a notion that was fundamentally incompatible with Brodsky’s temperament as an artist.

Opportunistic regimes select for people who are numb towards rot. Tech, on the other hand, requires the opposite: people who are aggressively fighting rot to make their business a success. While it is possible for small pockets of excellence to remain in the midst of overwhelming depravity, they will find an increasingly hard time growing; without being able to grow they will cease being a viable target for investment and eventually cease adding up to an industry.

Long-term ideological setup for oppression

While a lot of Westerners have the mental image of the Soviet Union as a society of Communist zombies, this is simply not the case. As anywhere else on the globe, Soviet political operators tended to follow their own personal interests.

Similar to corporate “company value” sets, state ideologies do not aim to provide guidance on which decisions to make, but rather serve to legitimize the decisions made by those in charge.

In the Soviet Union, communism was used as a pretext to justify the state’s various obsessions and to smother discontent regarding the populace’s awful living conditions. The notion of ill-willing foreign bourgeois elites was a convenient pretext for both the brutality of the regime and its hypertrophied imperialistic tendencies. But in truth it was all a concealment mechanism for the regime’s inability to steer itself to safety.

Since the old elites form by far the greatest political threat to the government, the government will need a pseudo-moral mechanism to delegitimize and oppress them Hence, an opportunistic Israeli government will concoct an ideology for preserving itself in power with the elites framed as an Adversary. Quite a lot of the Israeli tech will get hurt because it has a massive representation of the old elites (arriving from academia, industry and finance). As with any type of opression, the onslaught will be cynical, wanton and cruel.

Summary

It’s funny how reading some sources, for example the Russian Wikipedia, one is tempted to assume that the Stagnation was “not as bad as it sounds”, perhaps a little step backward for an otherwise functional society. However what transpired right after it ended lends to a much darker view.

In 1985, a new Soviet leader was elected - Mikhail Gorbachev. He declared that the preceding epoch of stagnation has ended, and an epoch of rebuilding was forthcoming. He had power and he used that to carry out multiple reforms - which were too little and too late. Gorbachev was ousted in 1991, and the Soviet Union was disbanded. So shabby grew the fabric of everyday life in the Soviet Union that most people met the country’s demise with relief - at least it was relatively bloodless.

Opportunism is not new a thing in Israel, and was not a new thing in the Soviet Union. However there’s a point in which a damaged structure will crumble beyond repair; and I hold that with all of the earthquakes, water leaks and intermittent fires, real and imaginary, we are in the vicinity of that point. Whether we’ve passed it already, only time will tell; in the meanwhile I wish all involved best of luck.