The world is evolving towards insane and surreal. Right now we are likely to face a considerable decay in the world’s living standards. With “we” I am saying, “all of humanity”. By doing some minor arrhythmic the conclusion should be that if we lose collective affluence in some kind of collapse, the vast majorities of humans will suffer greatly (even if only subjectively); lets assume that 75% of human beings would suffer a drop in standard of living of half; that means – half the income, half the spending power, half the monthly available money for housing, food, energy and medical expenses. Just a casual glance at how people living in this day and age would shoe everyone almost immediately that this would cause a societal economic traffic jam – people would stop consuming, business would go bankrupt, people would cut down on anything but necessities, would be unable to pay rent for housing, pension funds (who heavily invested in real estate) would be unable to pay pensions.
All these people would come knocking with the state for help. The state would be hard pressed to offer health as long as we had any democracy, and the state would get the “help” money from people who have money left; generally the top of society. In other words – the people of most countries would compel the state by means of their voting power to nationalize resources and “money” from rich people.
So – if we have a collapse or severe crisis, it should be clear that the consequences of such a collapse would reverberate upwards in society; the shockwaves of destitution (and desperation) would begin at the lower most economic rungs of society and cause a domino effect of nationalizations (or income redistribution). Most people would suffer from severe “austerity” (or deprivation) but as the crisis would bite deeper and deeper, more and more the raw desperation of the vulnerable would eat itself up the food chain towards the affluent.
It should be clear that (provided this mechanism is true) the rich should be concerned by now, and should be preparing themselves for the contingency of this process of “collapse fall-out”. In other words; we may see the rich become all busy in a range of proactive defensive acts against likely re-distributive fervor. And guess what – it can be argued this is precisely what we are seeing right now. Have a look at how the cops are treating protesters and unions these days and you’ll get a clue.
The absurd and arguably psychopathic attitudes of a presidential candidate such as Mitt Romney should be seen in the light of “a race forward”, and that’s all I will say about that particular disaster.
But there is a cynical way to look at this – Look at Mars. Mars is a severely inhospitable planet, right? Yet at this stage the sheer inhospitable character of Mars is becoming less and less of a consideration – The fact there are no humans on Mars would actually be a selling point. So in comparison, barren places (and this would include deserted regions on earth, Antarctica distant islands, etc.) are becoming more appealing than “habitable” Earth itself. Think about this! We are entering a state of saturation and overpopulation where there is a pervasive urge in humans to leave, run, flee…. There is this pervasive collapse of gregarious humanity – we have crossed the rubicon in to a pervasive human sphere of resentment or misanthropy. In essence we had a society, and in the last decades we are seeing a steadily encroaching mechanism of individualization or atomization, where humans tend to resent collectivism, “the state”, greater society. This is what some Rastafari would call “Babylon” – society becomes a dreadful thing of vulgarity and competitive stress – and those people want nothing to do with it.
So I would call this transition of society and the state being a benevolent entity, to the collective of humanity becoming widely regarded as a plague, to be a Singularity of sorts, as we can not longer fully appreciate what comes after it. In essence, when we can no longer trust the collective body of humanity, we are left on our own devices.