In the last few months there has been a spade of articles warning us for civil unrest. The reasons for this civil unrest might several years ago have been popularly attributed to phenomenon such as technological unemployment, resource depletion, immigration, banker shenanigans, political gridlock (and mismanagement), lousy media, outsourcing or climate change. But the money is now on rich people manipulating the system and using their ill-gotten means to foment an ever more corrupt system of international governance and horrific financial management. Rich people pay politicians to manage society in a way that favors primarily rich people. In the old days that phenomenon was counterbalanced by such intricate systems such as “democracy”, but because of a bunch of aggressive right wing politicians (reagan, thatcher) this societal equilibrium was disrupted. Unions were eliminated, global news media were corporatized, democratic entitlements were gradually rolled back and the end result has been pretty catastrophic. And pretty well documented.
We are now in a society where rich people are becoming concerned about this problem escalating. I have been following gossip about these kind of shenanigans by a well-known DC Billionaire – she functionally turned in to a prepper, buying large tracts of undeveloped wilderness along the Canadian border, clearly with the intent to increase survival odds as soon as the poor start rolling out Guillotines. I heard lurid stories about a house on a hill, only accessible with tracked vehicles through a winding maze of roads. Food stores for years for all family members and their spouses and kids. This has become the new normal for most very rich people.
Yes, there is reason for all this. After Occupy and Ferguson (and the Zeitgeist movement, etc. etc.) the idea of armed insurrection is no less ridiculous. It may not seem probable or plausible that people would rise up, but the tragedy is that no when in history did tyrannies anticipate people rising up – and then it happened.
So let’s assume that next month the vessel cracks spilling the hot oil in to the fire. We can not pin point a definitive wild card that would trigger such a flash point, and I can guarantee you that various alphabet soup agencies world wide (and in particular in the united States) are hot on the heels labeling anyone near such respective flash points as terrorists, or otherwise defusing the risk. The problem is that we (in the US, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, EU, literally everywhere) or all people complicit are increasing pressure on society. Bankers increase pressure with every dollar they print. Oil people are increasing pressure with every barrel of oil they frack from the Earth’s crust. Consumers are increasing pressure with every ton of methane or CO2 they emit in to the atmosphere. We are putting pressure on an increasingly overexposed and fragile system, and increasingly there will be people suffering unintended consequences they didn’t ask for.
The perfect storm triggering paradigm shift would be a blend of a climate collapse, a very sudden economic crisis, very sudden and severe inflation, disruption of food stocks and a possibly a racial trigger. Such an incident can easily be spun in to a mundane racial issue. Or it can be labeled terrorism, domestic or otherwise. But such contrived misdirection won’t work forever. The entrenched media will try their best to pour sugar over any pervasive and catastrophic societal flaws (inside the US or anywhere else) but that won’t forever.
A lot of people have started desiring this, and this is precisely where the weakness is. There are a lot of people that are highly educated and aware of how things are wrong, and completely fed up with the simple fact no one seems to be able to do something about it. At the end of the day it is all very simple – the system we are in favors a very small elite, and the system favors such elite in a way we have never before seen in human history. These people are pretty concerned that things do not change. They have mouths to feed, and other expenses. Their insistence is comparable with their recent profits. This sense of urgency is somewhat comparable to addiction to a lethal street drug.
The end will be gruesome. The breaking point for the system will be gruesome. There will be no amount of prepping that can measure up to the end when it comes – either it will get so bad that all preppers will turn in to local Afghanistan style war lords in a matter of a few months – or the system will change allegiance so fast that the old powermongers will find themselves dragged in front of a firing squad faster than they’d regard as conceivably possible. Some will try flee to remote airstrips in New Zealand – most of these rats abandoning the sinking ship won’t get out in time, and many who do will be put in prisons and extradited back to stand trial.
We have seen this before and hopefully we will see a lot less of this tragedy in the future. Revolutions routinely put (even) worse people in charge than before, and a lot of innocent people die along the way. But it has become inescapable mostly everywhere, even if the magnitude of all this still staggers the imagination. This will happen.
References
* Americans hate the federal government now more than ever