7/7🌎The Most Important Tradition Is the Tradition of New Beginnings

The Collapse of an Empire – and a Taxi Driver Named Putin

In December 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. A world empire that considered itself indestructible dissolved into thin air within a few months. In St. Petersburg, the former Leningrad, a man named Vladimir Putin sat behind the wheel of a taxi. The former KGB officer, now a civil servant in the chaotic city administration, drove passengers through the streets to supplement his meager salary. It was a steep fall – from the secret service into the anonymity of taxi driving. Yet this very moment of downfall became his turning point. He began anew. He learned to adapt, to build contacts, to seize opportunities. A few years later he stood at the head of Russia – and stayed there.

This fate shows with dramatic clarity what the one true tradition is that outlasts all others: the tradition of new beginnings. The Soviet Union broke apart because of its own rigidity. Whoever clung only to the old disappeared. Whoever found the strength to rise again and start over survived – and shaped the future.

What Kipling Teaches Us: Rising Again and Starting Anew

Rudyard Kipling conveys exactly the same lesson in his poem “If”. With unyielding clarity he describes the moment when everything collapses:

“If you hear the truth you once spoke

twisted by fools’ mouths

and see your life’s work shattered before you

and kneel down to begin it anew

You stake your winnings on a single card

and are not sad when you lose it

and you start all over again from the beginning

and say not a word of what you risk in doing so.”

Kipling urges us to treat triumph and defeat alike as “both impostors.” Putin’s years as a taxi driver are a modern echo of this poem. The man who had lost everything forced himself to keep going. He started from scratch – without grand speeches, without self-pity.

From Personal Downfall to Rise

Someone loses their job, a relationship breaks, illness knocks them down – and then the question arises: will they get up and begin again, or will they give up? Most of those who achieve great things have done exactly that. They reinvented themselves. Yesterday’s taxi driver can become tomorrow’s mover and shaker – if he has the will.

The tradition of new beginnings is brutally practical. It demands the will Kipling describes so powerfully:

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

to serve your turn long after they are gone,

and so hold on when there is nothing in you

except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’”

Societies in Upheaval: Renewal or Rigidity

Societies work the same way. After the Second World War the Germans dared a new beginning: democracy instead of dictatorship, market economy instead of planned economy. The economic miracle was the pure power of starting over. In 1990 reunification followed – again it was not rigidity that prevailed, but the willingness to risk something completely new.

In an age when rigid systems fail because of their own immobility, this tradition becomes a question of survival. Whoever refuses to rise and start anew will perish. Whoever dares it wins the future.

Brussels and the Temptation of Bureaucratic Rigidity

Today the Brussels bureaucracy with its commissioners similarly clings to old patterns of regulation and centralization. A system that often recalls the late Soviet Union: centralist, sluggish, full of rules that regiment life instead of enabling it. While economies groan under regulatory overload, many decision-makers cling to old recipes. They manage stagnation rather than break through it. The parallel is bitter: here too the fate of the Soviet Union threatens if the capacity for renewal is stifled.

Why New Beginnings Are Inevitable: Systemic Crises as a Law of Nature

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “End of History.” The democratic market state had triumphed once and for all – an eternal victorious march without major setbacks. This view seems naïve today. As early as the 14th century the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun described a very different mechanism: the rise and fall of communities through the principle of ʿAsabiyya – the strong sense of group solidarity.

Communities with high ʿAsabiyya conquer power, form a ruling elite that increasingly cuts itself off from the broader population, lose their inner strength, and eventually perish.

The beneficiaries of the system – the ever more self-isolating elite – will not voluntarily give up their privileges. They will not spontaneously reform before it is too late. One might as well ask a fish to dry itself off properly.

This cyclical dynamic does not apply only to autocracies or empires. It applies to every complex system that loses sight of its own dynamics. Western democracies are not immune either. Constant new beginnings are therefore not coincidence or wishful thinking – they are the logical consequence of the nature of systemic crises. As long as people live together in groups, elites emerge who isolate themselves; and as long as such elites exist, tensions arise that eventually lead to rupture. New beginnings are the mechanism that softens the violence of collapse.

The Hidden Disease of the West: Statism and Financialization

It is a firm belief among the supposedly enlightened supporters of today’s system that autocracies and dictatorships of the past were blind to their own mistakes. Yet the credit-financed democratic state is hardly less disastrous in the long run.

Supporters of democratic parties routinely spend more than half of national income, yet they live in economies that will eventually collapse if the tax burden permanently exceeds what can be raised while maintaining people’s willingness to perform – roughly an effective tax rate of 30 percent.

The apparent escapes are dangerous. One can keep expanding debt, sell long-term bonds at low interest rates and later buy them back cheaply when rates are higher – ideally with the “business partner” abroad. But that is no longer sustainable fiscal policy; it is aggression aimed at interstate extortion and therefore a policy of war.

Or one shaves the domestic middle class with the razor of inflation – at the price of division and social unrest.

Both paths lead to decay and violence, whether directed outward or inward.

This tendency toward state over-consumption, referred to here as statism, dresses itself elegantly in the garb of the caring performance state.

Viewed soberly, statism is the state’s consumption of national income, paid for coercively through taxes and government debt, serving less the satisfaction of benefit recipients than the self-legitimation of a political class that stabilizes and reproduces itself.

Credit expansionism, by contrast, creates capital through debt without offsetting it through genuine savings discipline or real expansion of production – usually via Keynesian deficit spending.

State power and private capital coordinate, merge, concentrate the circle of their beneficiaries, and expand the circle of those who must bear the socialized costs.

Both mechanisms – statism and financialization – weaken real value creation and reward political adventurism instead of genuine performance. They produce precisely the self-righteous and dysfunctional elite Ibn Khaldun described – only now packaged in democratic form. Vitality and productive capacity dwindle.

The Rampage of Human Nature

A successful society is a question of balance.

People tend to argue idealistically and socially when it comes to other people’s duties – yet when real economic advantages are at stake, they unreservedly prefer their own natural and ideological communities. For those who have only ever experienced the strength of their own system, the willingness to maintain balance becomes mere lip service.

The assumption that the decoupling of the elite from the broader population and the resulting loss of dynamism and ʿAsabiyya only occurs in tribes and archaic power structures – but not in modern societies that have finally committed themselves to humanistic values and the common good – is naïve.

The forms and labels are new; the fundamental mechanisms continue to operate as they always have.

They do so not least through the structures of statism and financialization.

Statism proclaims the primacy of the common good while concentrating power and letting resources disappear into a few hands.

Financialization dissolves real capital into opaque financial flows and diverts it away from those who create genuine value.

The Tightrope Walk on the Wire of History

The remedies do not lie in further differentiation and elaboration of the system itself, but in its targeted rollback.

The state’s share of the economy must be noticeably reduced so that less value creation is consumed by those who did not produce it. Instead of the artificial distinction between “rich” and “poor,” what is needed is a clear distinction between genuine value creation and political adventurism. High inheritance taxes, oriented toward historical state shares, on politically acquired wealth – not wealth earned on the free market – can help bind the self-isolating elite back to society without punishing genuine performers.

Without effective state bankruptcy mechanisms and orderly debt restructuring, however, any reform remains half-hearted. In the private sector, insolvency and debt restructuring have long been accepted instruments that dissolve failed structures and make room for new actors. States have avoided this mechanism for decades – through endless debt rollovers, monetary financing, or inflationary expropriation. This avoidance is itself part of the problem: it protects the isolated elite from the consequences of their actions and prevents precisely the painful but necessary new beginning that Ibn Khaldun described as inevitable. Only when states too can be forced to correct excessive debt through genuine, orderly debt reductions will the pressure arise that compels a real rollback of the system and a return to sustainable value creation.

These measures are not cosmetic repairs. They are an attempt to break the cycle of rise, isolation, and downfall before it fully closes. They create the prerequisite for any system to remain capable of reform at all.

The Will for New Beginnings as the Last Hope

Kipling ends his poem with a promise that is more relevant today than ever:

“Whoever is willing to start anew,

to him belongs the Earth and everything that’s in it.

And – which is more – he will be a Man!”

The true human being – and the living society – is not the one who never falls. It is the one who rises again after every fall and begins anew. Fukuyama’s “End of History” was an error. Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical view of the rise and fall of communities is the more realistic description of human history. Therefore we must expect constant new beginnings – not because we wish for them, but because systems that fail to correct their own dynamics will sooner or later collapse.

The tradition of new beginnings is the only force that repeatedly interrupts this cycle. It took Putin from the taxi to power. It rebuilt Germany after 1945 and 1990. And it will also decide in the future whether we suffocate in old structures – or whether we find the courage to pull ourselves together and start over. Whoever internalizes this tradition will not only survive. He will shape the future.

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