Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 11 of 21

On January 17, 2023

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There’s a lot of talk about friend-shoring and bringing industry back to the US and its allies, but the reality is quite different.

China's trade surplus reached US$877.6 billion for 2022, an increase of 30% of the already record high year of 2021. This is the biggest trade surplus ever achieved by one country in human history. Trade surplus with the US accounted for almost half at US$ 404 billion. pic.twitter.com/P37rbLGczI

— America-China Watcher (@PandemicTruther) January 14, 2023

The bottom line, right now, is that if the US went to war with China, the American (and Western) economies would virtually collapse.

The US is making serious preparations for war: they are fortifying allied countries in Asia in a similar fashion to how they did Ukraine after 2014, although obviously with less of an eye to ground invasion. Japan has doubled its military budget and stated that it will no longer obey the “peace” constitution but will participate in offensive operations with America. US bases are popping up around China wherever they are allowed.

But to fight a non-nuclear war with China, the West has to genuinely re-shore its critical industries, and it isn’t doing that beyond a few steps with regards to semiconductors. A vast swathe of basic industrial goods are made by China, and not by the West, or not in sufficient quantities.

However, to seriously repatriate industry requires reducing the cost-structure: and that means reducing housing costs, and in the US, health-care and tuition costs, so that Western industry is cost-competitive. Right now the US is grabbing a swathe of energy price sensitive industry from Europe, and especially Germany, but that doesn’t help much in an general war: they’re taking from their allies, not their enemies.

Genuine oligarchic plutocracies, which is what most of the West is, including the US, are generally very bad at industry and war, though there are exceptions (Venice, at various points. But being merchants concentrated their minds on naval power.)

The steps required for America and the West to rise to the challenge of China require Western elites to make painful choices they so far are avoiding: they simply have to give a better deal to their populations, and not concentrate on keeping wage increases under inflation increases (which is what has happened in the US.)

America’s elites can be absurdly filthy rich or they can just filthy rich and have a chance of retaining their global pre-eminence. It’s unlikely they can do both, though I suppose they could bet on ruling a post-nuclear wasteland, if they’ve gone fully insane.

A Map Showing The Two Main Geopolitical Blocs

On December 28, 2022

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Yeah, it is mostly this simple:

It really is the imperialist West vs. the entire world

This is how they voted on a UN resolution calling for a new international economic order based on equity, sovereign equality, and cooperation, opposing unilateral sanctions and advocating for debt relief for the Global South https://t.co/veNO3uMdC5 pic.twitter.com/wy6amH7TUm

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 15, 2022

This is pretty much the map for UN resolutions aimed at Russia, too.

As I’ve noted before the bottom line is that if you are a developing country, China offers cheaper loans and cheaper and faster development work like ports, airports, hospitals, roads, railways, schools and even cities. If you aren’t close to them, they don’t care about your internal politics, either.

I remember reading an interview with a minister of an African state who said approximately, “every time a western minister visits us we get a lecture, every time a Chinese official visits we get a new hospital.”

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As for sanctions, well, everyone’s scared of them, and everyone in that green zone knows that they could be sanctioned at the drop of the hat and that the sanctions never go away. Even if they don’t approve of some things Russia or China does, they don’t want the precedent of more and more sanctions and they want to belong to a monetary system which won’t lock them out.

Afghanistan is a particularly “amusing” case: when the US pulled out it then sanctioned Afghanistan and froze its foreign reserves. There was an immediate famine effecting millions. Biden is a perverse evil genius: by ending a war he was able to kill FAR more people than if he’d left troops in country.

Then there is Iran, where a treaty was signed under Obama which would remove sanctions. Iran kept its side, but the US pulled out anyway under Trump, and lo! Biden did not reverse him. Even the Europeans disagreed with that one.

China simply offers a better deal now than the West, and there’s a couple centuries or more of resentment towards Europe and America and Japan. Most countries would rather be allied with China.

And that’s why this map is fairly close to what the cold war map will look like. A few “green” countries will cut deals with the West, but most will go with China and Russia. And why wouldn’t they?

A New Age Of Vertical Integration

On December 27, 2022

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There was a time when companies preferred vertical integration: they wanted to own their supply chain. Then, for a long time, the mantra was to concentrate on one’s core business and let other specialists take care of all the non-core parts of your business.

Well…

The reason vertical farming failed is that if you want to do it you also need to control your power source. In a world where civilization is slowly collapsing, you need vertical integration.https://t.co/jXtY1GOKg5

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) December 25, 2022

This is no longer viable business practice. In a period of civilization collapse supply chains become unreliable: you may not be able to get what you want or you may not be able to get it at a price you can afford.

Supply chains will become more unreliable as time goes on. Leaving aside the fact that logistics companies make out like bandits during periods of supply constraints and thus have little incentive to fix the problem, climate change, environmental collapse and the new era of cold and hot war will make supplies more and more unreliable and scarce.

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The more something matters, the more this will be true: many countries couldn’t get vaccines, no matter what, and countries which created them gave them to themselves and their allies first. When water, food, minerals and energy becomes scarce, countries and companies will prioritize themselves first, their allies second and everyone else not at all. Strong countries, faced with famine, will not export food they need, and weak countries will be forced to export resources they need even if it means death and deprivation for their people.

If you need something, you better make it yourself, or be in lockstep with a company or country who needs you as much as you need them.

The smaller you are, the worse this will get. Amid the shortages of the pandemic small and medium enterprises, including stores were largely cut off: the biggest customers got served first and everyone else got the scraps.

A reliable supply chain and predictable politics are necessary for ages where companies and countries specialize. Eras of war and decline and collapse are eres of vertical integration and keeping ones suppliers close. The extreme version of this was feudalism: make or grow everything you have locally, because you can’t count on anything more than a day’s travel.

Most areas of the developed world won’t wind up that bad for some time yet, but that’s the extreme end of the road we’re on. Hopefully we’ll never get there, but wise countries and companies will no longer rely on widespread supply chains they have no control over.

The Rules Based International Order is the Minority

On October 31, 2022

I’ve said this for a while, but now we have empirical proof that most of the world likes Russia and China more than the US (h/t Johnstone):

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

However, across a vast span of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to the north and west of Africa, we find the opposite – societies that have moved closer to China and Russia over the course of the last decade. As a result, China and Russia are now narrowly ahead of the United States in their popularity among developing countries.

While the war in Ukraine has accentuated this divide, it has been a decade in the making. As a result, the world is torn between two opposing clusters: a maritime alliance of democracies, led by the United States; and a Eurasian bloc of illiberal or autocratic states, centred upon Russia and China.

Now, what they’re saying without quite saying it is that the Ukraine war correlated with even better public opinion towards Russia and China.

I find the next chunk predictable:

However, what matters may not be so much the presence of democratic institutions, but
rather, whether they are valued and appreciated by citizens. If so, attitudes towardscountries such as Russia or the United States might take into account their potential to assist – or damage – the health of their democracy. For a closer look at Figure 20 reveals anumber of electoral democracies, such as Indonesia, India or Nigeria, in which the public remains sympathetic to Russian or Chinese influence, in spite of a difference in political regime. Thus it is not simply whether democratic institutions exist that countsbut rather, the degree to which they are seen as functional and legitimate.

This seems reasonable, at first glance. Here’s the chart:

Eyeball those nations above and below the 50% mark.

What does the grouping below 50% all have in common? What does the grouping above 50% have in common?

Whether or not they could be considered part of the Westerns sphere. Those above the line are generally not those who have done well under US hegemony and who are not Western allies.

So, yeah, this looks to me to be a case of “correlation is not causation”. I would gently suggest that what creates the legitimacy of “democratic institutions” is whether they have delivered for people and that those countries under 50% tend to be those who have been inside the Western (US/EU/close allies bubble.)

So, yes, it is actually about the new cold war.

Now remember, China now does most of the world’s development. It isn’t even close. They build the new ports, airports, hospitals, roads, bridges and even cities. Further, they do it cheaper than the West does it.

So, if you’re a developing nation who isn’t inside the “blessed bubble”, even as bad as that bubble has become under neoliberalism, China looks good and America looks… well, not so good, especially since the US has been the primary driver of trade and finance rules which have been very bad for the third world.

This has been going on for a long time, but since the collapse the USSR there hasn’t been another option. China offers one, and Russia is thumbing its nose at a global order that has gone out of its way to screw over the countries which are above that 50% line.

So, I wouldn’t say it’s exactly about “democratic legitimacy” — that legitimacy is a dependent variable and it is associated with America, NATO and to a lesser extent the EU. When a global regime doesn’t deliver it is discredited, and in fact even in countries under the 50% mark, most have been losing trust in “democratic legitimacy” as well. Americans and British will know well of what I speak.

The end result is that most of the world now slightly favors China and Russia and the important part is that trend is likely to continue. There will be a cold war, and most of the world wants to remain neutral or slightly favors China/Russia. On election Lula in Brazil said they would keep trading with both sides and not be drawn into the cold war, but Brazil is one of the founding members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) the most important economic bloc that doesn’t include the US. Brazil will remain “neutral” but 31% of Brazil’s exports now go to China and 11% to the US. If the US is stupid enough to push, and military might isn’t determinative, Brazil would be foolish not to go with China.

Power follows industrial capacity and popularity follows treatment. With a few notable exceptions, if you’re a third world country, China treats you better than the US has in ages. As for Russia, well, they may screw with nearby countries, but otherwise they don’t get involved much (remember Syria invited them in, and is a long time ally.) Indians, in particular, remember that Russia was a friend for generations when the US and Europe were not. As for Africa, China has been developing good relations thru trade and development for decades now.

In this cold war, the West is going to be the one isolated, as the above (older) map from the Economist suggests. Yes, they are “neutral” for now, but if forced to choose, don’t assume they’ll choose the current order.

The “rules based international order” is rather small and how it has been run has damaged democratic legitimacy far more than “China” or “Russia”.

Ukraine Is The First Major War Of The “Age of War and Revolution”

On October 10, 2022

There are periods that tend relatively peaceful, and there are eras of war and revolution.

Back in 2016 I added a new category, “The Age of War and Revolution”. It’s now 10 pages long. I added it because it was clear we were transitioning, and we’ve now hit a marker point: the first major war in the Age.

It’s the first, but it won’t be the last.

Sri Lanka was the first collapse of the Age (related “The Twilight of Neoliberalism“, a sub-category).

There will be more of those. My money is currently on England (good chance it won’t be the UK by then) being the first formerly 1st world nation to collapse.

I was talking to a friend about the “get out of the US” advice I’ve been giving for years. People have (rightly) often asked, “but where?” The obvious answer used to be somewhere in Europe, but Europe has chosen decline, and if they don’t manage it well, collapse. Many European countries are going to wind up in 2nd and 3rd world status (many are already 2nd world, and the UK, if you aren’t in the top 10% or so, is already a 3rd world nation, as is America, outside of Europe.)

I’m seeing two interesting trends:

The US is losing its allure to the best and brightest technocrats;
Though anecdotal, for the first time in my life, I know multiple people who want to, are, or have moved to China.

A lot of what made America “special” and led to it being a tech, science and engineering leader for so long is just that so many of the smartest people would emigrate there.

For a long time now I’ve told Americans that Canada is heading in the same direction as the US, we just started in a better place.

But that still matters. If I had gotten cancer in the US, I’d be planning my funeral and considering suicide to avoid the last months of hell. I’d be dead, even if still walking. In 10 years, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be true in Canada, in 20 years, I figure it’s likely.

Some countries will pull together and take care of their populations. Some won’t. Many won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to.

Wars will rage: there will be less resources; food and water will be scarce and per-capita food consumption is going to drop for at least 70 or so years, maybe longer. If you’re young, you’ll see the end of 1st world obesity, though that will be partially driven, at first by countries needing their citizens to be in fighting shape. (Most Americans are too wide to fit thru the hole into an Abrams tank, for example.)

Revolution will be common and so will civil unrest. The idea that non-violence is superior will fade. It will be used some places and times, but the hard ideological commitment to it among the left will die.

I’m unsure how technology will play into it. The obvious play for the rich was always autonomous robots, to overcome the “Who will watch the watchers” problem of police, military and paramilitary forces. But most countries probably won’t have the resources to create and maintain large numbers of armed robots and even the rich ones may find it’s beyond reach outside of certain protected zones.

But for now, just understand, the world has changed. This is a new historical era, we’re now solidly at its start, and Ukraine is only the first of the major wars, not the last.

Understanding and Surviving the Post-Prosperity Era

On September 16, 2022

I don’t usually write about my personal life much, but today will be an exception.

The other day I had to go the hospital, to a cancer clinic (nothing to sweat, I have a type of cancer with a 98% survival rate) and the clinic I was at had only one doctor. It normally has three or four. I asked the nurse, and she told me that the others were out with Covid.

Emergency departments across Canada are having shut-downs because they don’t have enough nurses. Covid, either temporary, or nurses having quit because they can’t take the over-work any more.

Before Covid, at the same hospital I’m going to now, imaging tests for possible cancer got done in a month. After Covid, it was about 8 months, and treatment didn’t start until about 11 months. Before, 2 months.

As I say, I’ll probably live, but if I die of cancer, it will be because of, not Covid, but because of the way Covid was mishandled. For cancer, how fast you act matters. Taking an extra 9 months to start treatment isn’t a small thing: it’s a lot of dead people.

If I die, it’s a marginal (or excess) death. It doesn’t get put down as Covid, and it isn’t, but it is because of how Covid was mishandled.

And, of course, what is the government response to hospitals being slammed “we should get the private sector to do some of this stuff.” Classic neoliberalism: “make service shitty, then privatize.”

But this sort of thing is all across the spectrum. I’ve got friends on the edge, people who would have been OK ten years ago, who are now not OK. The cheap places for rent have mostly gone away; generally speaking rent at the bottom end in Greater Toronto is up about 80 to 100%, if you can find anything at all at the bottom price ranges.

More homeless people. More people paying most of their wage on rent and skimping on food and dental and medicines, because universal health care doesn’t cover dental, and Canadian drug prices are bad, just not completely “American whacked.”

As conditions get worse, people who would have made it, don’t: they get pushed off the edge, because there isn’t as much “safe” space. Homeless, sick, dead, poor.

I’m poor, have been for somewhat less than a decade now, and I’ve been poor in the past, particularly in the early 90s. (In the old days I didn’t ask readers to funds, because I didn’t need to.) I don’t use social support other than some help for cancer meds but when you’re poor, who you know includes other poor people

This period is far worse for people on the margins than the early 90s were, and they were, anecdotally and statistically, worse than the 70s.

So there are more homeless. More dead people. People who under previous regimes would have made it, stayed housed, stayed healthy, stayed alive, aren’t.

It’s a trend, it’s been a trend for over 40 years now, but it’s an accelerating trend.

The rich are running out of money to take. In America and the UK they’ve shattered the middle and working classes, In Canada and much of the rest of the world they’re working on it. I’d guess Canada has 15 to 20 years before it reaches about where the UK is now, and where the UK is that they’re going to slide to 3rd world status. In principle it can be turned around, but in practice it’s unlikely to be. That’s why I supported Corbyn so hard, because he was the last chance they were going to get.

This trend is accelerated by climate change, and by the insistence on fighting a cold war with China and Russia. Right now the primary target is Russia, yes, but the real target in China. Breaking Russia would weaken China massively, and China is the actual threat to the current hegemonic structure, not Russia, which is not a superpower any more, just a great power (and a fairly weak great power in certain ways.)

The point here is that the way the elites are running the world, and most nations, and Canada where I live is a direct threat to my life at this point, and to many many other people. I have joked that I’m damn glad I got cancer now, because even though treatment is delayed, I’m getting it. In 10 years, I don’t know. I’m seeing stories in the UK of people who have to go private because the NHS is so overwhelmed.

To state what’s obvious private isn’t some miracle. It doesn’t create resources the society doesn’t have, it just distributes them differently: to those who can pay. In fact, generally speaking private uses more resources, because it has to make a profit.

Meanwhile the fact is that the world’s resources are actually shrinking. When climate change dries up rivers and burns up forests and increases bad weather and droughts; when aquifers go dry and glaciers and snow packs(resevoirs of water) diminish and die; when biodiversity crashes and fish stocks go away, the real resources we need to survive are being reduced, close to permanently, since recovery will take a long time even where it is possible.

With people having less resources, they can withstand less shocks, and with resources concentrated at the very top end, many people can’t take hits. More and more people are one hit away from homelessnes or death, and to top it all off Long Covid disablement is soaring and will soon be in the double digits in many Western nations.

This is, then, the culling. It’s been going on for a long time, but it’s speeding up. I wrote for a couple decades to warn other people, and now I can see my personal horizon: I can see when I’ll be on the edge. I’m already on the edge, really, as my emergency fundraiser (a first) and the delays in my cancer treatment show. I used to be able to keep other people out of poverty with help, now the aid I can give is restricted. I’m no longer much of a material resource for other (though I help with showers and food and sleep).

But this isn’t mostly about me, it’s about a lot of people being pushed towards the cliff. It’s about you and people you know. Even a lot of people in the middle class have no resiliency left: one bad bounce and off the cliff they go.

The next stage is the elites turning on each other. Having stolen all the fat and most of the muscle of the lower and middle class, they’re going to see no choice but start chewing on societies organs and to start seriously preying on each other, because there’s hardly any reserve left. In the UK, the NHS is the only major thing left worth selling. Once that’s gone, there’s nothing left to loot. All the stuff worth having will be held by other rich people.

Now, there are a few points here, and readers will have picked out some of them, but let’s state a couple clearly.

First, a lot of people, a hell of a lot of people, aren’t going to make it. If you want to not be one of them; if you want your friends and other people you care about not to be one of them, you’re going to need to do something. Probably the best thing is to organize in groups. Do what you can to help yourselves, and make it clear to the rich and powerful that your problems are theirs: that if you get pushed off the cliff, you’re going to make it hurt them.

The second is that on the mass scale, it’s now us or our elites. They go, or we go, and they want it to be us.

Plan for this era. Climate change is now and it’s just going to get worse and our elites are going to become greater and greater predators, trying to liquidate everything they can find to keep themselves in power.

Remember that personal resilence has its limits: you need other people who care about you and have the ability to help. You need more than family, you need a community, a group and that group needs to take care of its prosperity and have a commitment to caring for its own people.

We did that thru government for a long time, but government isn’t going to hack it for a lot of people. When times like that happen, you form your own mini-governments to do what larger society won’t.

It’s sad, it’s bad, and it’s what millions of people, including myself, spent our lives fighting to avoid, but it’s here and that’s just how it is. Even if some societies turn it around and start doing the right thing, it’s unsure which ones those will be and by the time they get to it, if you aren’t caring for yourself and your chosen group, you may be dead or on the street.

And understand that everyone’s doing the wrong thing. No major society is taking this seriously. When they stop building suburbs and stop pushing cars and stop allowing planned obsolescence, you’ll know they’re serious. No government which has not done at least those three thing is serious, and since our entire economy is built around cars, real-estate expansion and throwing shit out which was designed to last only a few years, we haven’t even started.

Be well, take care of yourselves, and if you can, please organize and take care of others.

The Trifecta+ Which Will Make The Next 100 Years Hell

On August 19, 2022

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

We have three major challenges all coming to peak close to each other.

Or possibly four, depending on how you define your terms.

First: the end of a sub-ideological era. Neoliberalism is on its last legs, just as New Deal liberalism was in the 70s. Ends of sub-ideologies tend to be tumultuous and it’s worse when it’s the end of a fundamentally extractive sub-ideology like neoliberalism, than it is with the end of a “building” ideology like the New Deal which worked to strengthen people, regulate companies and build vast human and inanimate infrastructure.

Neoliberalism was, fundamentally, the realization that all that build-up led to a huge looting opportunity. Get rid of the regulations, stop enforcing anti-oligopoly laws, force massive asset bubbles and those on the inside could get stinking rich.

The New Deal was a reaction to the problems created by a certain type of exploitative capitalism: a “we can’t allow this sort of abuse”, where neoliberalism was “man, abusing people, and destroying/privatizing institutions makes a lot of money.”

So, the 70s sucked, but they were nothing near as bad as the great depression and WWII.

But that’s also because the transition to neoliberalsim did not coincide with—

Second: the end of a hegemonic era. 1914 to 1945 is the end of not just British but European world hegemony. At the end WWII the USSR and US divide Europe in half, with the US controlling the Western half and the USSR the eastern. That the America glove was often velvet, did not change the fact that there was a steel gauntlet underneath (look up Gladio, as an example.)

The death tolls of WWI (21m), II(50m) and the Great Depression (uncounted), plus the anti-colonial wars, famines and the Japanese conquests(14m) and colonial wars is in excess of a 100 million. At the end of WWII, the world population was about 1.33 billion people. That’s a lot dead people and we aren’t counting all the people who were maimed, impoverished, made into refugees, raped or tortured. Nor are we counting the USSR pogroms (we probably should) or the colonial famines (we probably should.)

Hegemonic powers do not go easy into the sunset, and the more powerful they were, the harder they die.

But although there were some serious environmental problems in this era (the dust bowl, for example), the simultaneous end of the hegemonic and sub-ideological cycles which occurred in the early 20th century (which includes communism), didn’t have what we have coming—

Third: a worldwide environmental crisis which will reduce the Earth’s carrying capacity semi-permanently. At best reversal will take hundreds of years and be partial, because we aren’t going to be able to un-extinct all the species we’re killing and the depth and vibrancy of the ecological web is a huge part of Earth’s biological carrying capacity.

So, we can reasonably expect that a significantly greater proportion of the Earth’s human population will die during the upcoming period and more people will be impoverished, tortured, raped, turned into refugees and so on. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that didn’t happen, but it requires human social groups to act with decisiveness, wisdom, compassion and forethought which have no precedent in human history I am aware of.

These is what I’ve partially labelled in my categories as “The Age of War and Revolution” and “The Twilight of Neoliberalism”, but they are much larger than that.

Now there is also a larger cycle coming. You’ll note that I kept calling New Deal Capitalism and Neoliberalism sub-ideologies. They’re both capitalist ideologies, and the capitalist world-system has been around since the late 15th century, blossoming with the industrial revolution into a global world-system. Previous to this, contradicting the name, most world-systems didn’t cover the entire globe, but capitalism did. Even communism was part of the system (that’s an entire other article, but the USSR was not in autarchy and was forced to play the game by capitalist world rules.)

Capitalism is ending. There are a bunch of reasons (follow the prior link), but one big part of it is simply that it’s going to have been seen to have failed and be blamed by everyone for the environmental crisis (it’s not just a climate crisis, ecological collapse is at least as important). Democracy stands a chance of getting it in the neck too.

We aren’t just going to be changing sub-ideologies and swapping hegemonic powers and dealing with an enviro-collapse; we are going to be changing how we fundamentally run our societies, because it is almost certain that you can’t be capitalist and fix the environment, and in any case, again, capitalism will totally be discredited by all the deaths and catastrophes during this era.

Likewise, we are going to have to transition from the hydrocarbon era which has run since near the start of the industrial revolution because we cannot fix our environmental issues and have hydrocarbons be our primary energy source.

So, depending on whether you count the transition from capitalism to whatever, we’ve got the end of 5 eras or so. (WWI to II also saw a sub-transition in energy, from coal and steam engines to oil and internal combustion.)

This is compounded by the fact that end of sub-ideological and ideological eras always occurs with fanatically incompetent elites in charge. The classic western example is the fall of Rome, but look at the Weimar Republic, at Hoover, at Nixon/Ford/Carter and so on. The generations who created the previous system are dead or out of power and their heirs are boobs who don’t know how to repair their system. When the Lost generation, the last generation to remember the 20s, not just the great depression) died, a subset of the GI and Silent generations then destroyed the New Deal, both negatively (unable to deal with the oil shocks) and positively (Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman, etc..)

The people in charge now are radically incompetent at everything except internal power games. They are good at accumulating money and staying in charge and bad at everything else. They cannot fix any problems, at best they mitigate, and their mitigations (such as central banks printing money in response to the 2008 financial crisis) make underlying problems worse. On top of simple mechanical incompetence, they are also unimaginative: they cannot conceive of different ways of running society. Even when there are partial exceptions (Chinese leadership handling Covid semi-competently is an example) the elites can’t see their way to ending the ideology (capitalism, and yes, China is a capitalist mixed society) which is destroying the conditions for its own existence.

So this is where we are: the end of an ideological era; the end of a hegemonic era and a huge environmental crisis, all of which can’t be handled without fundamental ideological and leadership changes and which an reasonably be expected to kill billions of people while we “figure” or “fumble” it out.

Welcome to the fin de siecle. More than one. Enjoy the fruits of decadence while they still last.