Thursday, May 07, 2009

The Shape of Things to Come

Economic crisis, pestilence, wars and rumors of wars... Even allowing for the hype generated by the power-seeking governments and their media fellow-travelers, it ought to be intuitively obvious to a casual observer that the world is in a pretty rotten shape overall.

William S. Lind, whose columns on Fourth Generation warfare I've been following for a couple of years now, speculated about what might be in store in his 300th column, on April 21. I made a note to comment on it, but got sidetracked by the surge of jihadist propaganda.

Anyway, here's Lind, on April 21, at LewRockwell.com (emphasis added):

"...foreign policy failures and military defeats – or even more embarrassing "victories" – become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis (depression followed by runaway inflation), foreign exchange crisis (collapse of the dollar), political crisis (no one in the Establishment knows what to do, but the Establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself), energy crisis, etc. Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else. In the old days, it meant a change of dynasty. What might it mean today? My guess is a radical devolution, at the conclusion of which life is once again local.

That would be, on the whole, a happy outcome. But I fear this will be a trip where the journey is not half the fun.


All of which reminds me of another quote, a bit more poetic but saying much the same thing, from about 13 years ago:

"The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain."

3 comments:

Mark Johnson said...

Epic droughts, Pollution, Warfare, Food shortages, Peak Oil, Increasingly violent weather, Floods, Bats and Bees dying off, Melting ice caps, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Water shortages, Bad leaders.

We have a lot of problems in the world at the moment. No one seems to have the answers to these that real adults take seriously.

Even dedicated atheists I know can't help but admit the whole thing looks like it could fall apart into what the religious and spiritual may call an Apocalypse.

Any one of the problems facing us is difficult on its own. Taken all together, they can make a real mess of things.

Add in this 'Greater Depression', you have the glue that ties together all our problems and allows one to affect the other.

There you have it. The Depression: The Glue of the Apocalypse.

Or, God pressing the reset button. Which at this stage of the game, is the only thing that I can think of that would really allow us to start living in anything resembling peace and harmony.

Johan said...

"... Epic droughts, Pollution, Warfare, Food shortages, Peak Oil, Increasingly violent weather, Floods, Bats and Bees dying off, Melting ice caps, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Water shortages, Bad leaders. ..."

Add this:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE09Df01.html

CubuCoko said...

Firefly, I don't think it's "God pressing the reset button." That would be way too easy, and we're not that lucky. Or deserving.