Let me make that more concrete. Our systems — the most basic ones — will begin to fail. They already are, in fact. Water, food, healthcare, medicine, education, transport, energy. Nations will fight a losing battle to try and repair these systems, which will be absolutely ravaged by the next wave of catastrophes.
That brings me to the first domino effect. The huge sums to be spent on trying to repair the harm of climate and ecological catastrophe will have a consequence. They’ll drain the public purse. That means that governments will have to impose austerity. In concrete terms, they’ll have to cut spending on existing social systems and institutions. You can already see the catch-22. Should we educate the kids in this city — or try to repair that one’s devastation? Should we cut back on healthcare — to try and save this metropolis?
The austerity to come in the 2030s will be brutal and vicious. Social contracts will be slashed to the bone. That will of course cause systems and institutions to break all the faster — the ones that weren’t harmed and damaged, anyways.
What does austerity do? It makes people poorer — fast. You don’t have to look very hard to see it. Take the example of modern-day Britain. Just a couple of decades ago, it was the envy of the world. Two decades of austerity have left it a wrecked, battered shell. Now, you can’t get a blood test, you have to wait hours for an ambulance, and hospitals don’t function. That’s the kind of ruin to come.
Or take America, where this cycle has already occurred, too. America’s had perma-austerity — it never invested in functioning…anything. The result is that Americans ended up living the poorest lives in the rich world, much more like people in a poor country.
Let’s be clear about what “poverty” really means. It means three things. Like Americans, people end up living their whole lives under the thumb of mass, unpayable debt. Two, it means, like Brits under Brexit, people face shortages of goods that once used to be commonplace, and necessities become luxuries. Three, it means spiking inequality, as billionaires get massively richer by profiteering — just as they have during Covid.
That brings me to the next domino effect. What does poverty do? Poverty in the form of mass debt across a society, which is lifelong and unpayable? In the form of shortages of basics, as necessities become luxuries?
Sudden explosions in poverty of this kind breed political meltdown and social implosion. Again, you don’t have to look very hard to see it. Just glance at modern-day Britain. The effect of austerity wasn’t just to make Brits poor — it was that they went into a nationalistic mania, blamed…Europeans…for their woes…and chose Brexit. But Brexit, of course, only made Brits’ lives much, much worse. Bang — welcome to the feedback dynamics of social implosion.
Sudden explosions in poverty breed the darkest political poisons — the great and ancient enemies of civilization. All of them. Nationalism. Fascism. Authoritarianism. Theocracy. Again, just glance at America. Where did perma-austerity lead it? America’s middle class imploded, and it’s working class fell apart. Both became one giant underclass — today, half of Americans work “low-wage service jobs.” America feels like a poor country because it is. But that poverty had a consequence — by 2015, it led to a vicious wave of neo-fascism, as Trump rose to power. And that fascist wave has only hardened. Today, Republicans believe things like “the election was stolen from us” and “violence is necessary to save the country.”
And that’s putting it mildly. Poverty didn’t just breed fascism in America. It bred all the political poisons there are. Texas is persecuting women in some weird real-life take on the Handmaid’s Tale, turning men into bounty hunters…for women. Theocracy is rising in state after state, as is the overt fascism of banning books and local scale intimidation at town meetings. Death threats to minor-league civil servants by Trumpists are now commonplace. And the violent authoritarianism of Jan 6th hasn’t gone anywhere — but now represents mainstream Republicanism. America’s polity has collapsed into brutality and stupidity — even more so than it ever was. A new era of Jim Crow redux and an American Holocaust is clearly visible around the corner. The Trumpists want an ethnically cleansed homeland of the pure of faith and true of blood — and they’ll stop at nothing to get it.
So let me say it again. Sudden descents into instability and poverty breed political ruin. You’d think the world would have learned this lesson from Weimar Germany — but it didn’t. Hence, nation after nation is repeating the very same mistakes of the 1930s. America, Britain, India, China, Russia to name just a few. But there will be many, many more.
How precisely does that sea change happen, though? How does poverty breed fascism? Well, because feelings of pessimism and disappointment and disillusionment in broken systems soon turn to despair and anger. And those are easily transformed into mindless rage, brutality, and violence by demagogues. Boris Johnson and Theresa May and David Cameron all scapegoated Europeans for Brits’ woes — and Britain believed them just like that. Trump scapegoated everyone but “real” — aka white — Americans for their woes — never mind the fact they were the ones voting for their own ruin over and over again — and they believed him, just like that. India’s scapegoating Muslims and immigrants, China the same — it goes on and on around the globe. The pattern’s easily visible: a people driven to poverty are easily tempted by scapegoats. It’s easy to drive them into senseless, mindless rage — just like Americans and Brits are in now — once you’ve made them poor, defeated them inside, broken apart their bonds. Then you can conjure up almost any imaginary enemy — and they’ll slaver for blood.
The transformation from poverty to fascism, in other words, happens through a change in social attitudes. You can see just how fast social attitudes shift in the example of Britain. Just a couple of decades ago, Europeans were cousins, welcomed, respected, admired. Today, they’re hated minorities, literally persecuted by the state, and shunned socially and culturally, pariahs. Who’d have thought Brits could be made to…hate Europeans? After the last World War? And yet here we are, and they do — just, snap, like that, in a matter of years. That is how fast and hard poverty causes the human mind and spirit to turn on itself.
Social attitudes changing, though, also spells ruin for societies in broader ways. It means that brutality and cruelty and violence become generally accepted social norms. Take a hard look at America today. A Trumpist (“allegedly”) executed two people in cold blood with a machine gun, and injured another and today, the nation’s “debating” whether that was acceptable.
What happens as poverty bites is that the expansive attitudes of modernity corrode. Modernity is made of a certain set of values — gentleness, empathy, warmth, dignity, friendship. You can feel this — and see it — in the examples of Canada and Europe. Canadians are renowned for being “nice,” and Europeans, for being warm and gentle and kind. What both are above all is modern. They live in modernised societies where people do not have to resort to violence and brutality to obtain the basics — and so attitudes of cruelty and spite and hatred have been kept at bay.
But that’s not the case in America. In America, social norms aren’t niceness and kindness and warmth. LOL — Americans think of such things as weakness. They aren’t allowed to be that way, because being weak is punishable by death. Be nice to someone on the street? Are you kidding? It might make you late for a meeting, you lose your job, and there goes your healthcare. Americans have to wake up every single day, and fight each other to the death for the basics — a little bit of money, a place to live, medicine, food, water. The right to exist does not exist in America. The “right” to compete exists. That is whyAmericans are so spiteful and hateful towards each other. They really are adversaries in a brutal, bitter battle to the death.
Canadians and Europeans aren’t. Their societies function at a modern level. Nobody has to compete for the basics. And so people can be nice and warm to each other, gentle with one another, respect one another. Dignity is something available to all — not just a handful of billionaires.
Now, all that might sound abstract, but it’s not. Take a look at America. The change in social attitudes is becoming absolutely catastrophic. A few years ago, I’d have said: “Americans are incredibly cruel and violent people — they deny each other healthcare.” But today, the situation is much worse. Americans are literally attacking each other at local town halls, school board meetings, where death threats are now commonplace. This is a massive corrosion of basic social norms — and an incredibly dangerous one, too. How long is it going to be before the Trumpists begin shooting their scapegoats? They’ve already begun justifying violence. America is a powder keg of violence waiting to explode.
As societies implode, it’s not just systems which die. It’s the most basic glue holding civilisation together — norms of decency and respect and warmth. They implode, as social bonds are severed. What happened in Britain? Social bonds between Brits and Europeans — even their neighbours living next door — were severed. What happened in America? Social bonds never existed to begin with — the poisonous legacy of centuries of slavery and supremacy. The presence of social bonds is called friendship, trust, warmth. The absence of social bonds is called hate, violence, and brutality.
An every-person-for-themselves mentality sets in. Whatever you can take through violence and brutality and cunning becomes legitimate. The contest for survival kicks into high gear — and the most violent and brutal of all emerge as its winners. But that kind of society isn’t a very nice place to live. The violence I’m talking about isn’t abstract — it’s as real as a Trumpist gunning down opponents with a machine gun. Now imagine societies fighting over food, water, air, shelter. Societies already starved of investment, everything falling apart, basic systems broken. How are you going to feed your family? You do what you have to do, Americans say. What they mean by that is: anything goes.
At this stage, the rule of law has ceased to exist. And a new social order is emerging. The social order of modernity is a kind of equality undergirded by dignity for all, like in Europe and Canada. But the social order of failed states is a pecking order of violence. Think of America again. The most violent men in society rule it with an iron fist. No, they’re not warlords — LOL, warlords merely harm a few hundred or thousand. They’re billionaires, who “raid pensions” or poison young women with misogyny or cheat a country of medicine or profit from selling it addictive painkillers or scapegoat minorities and become President. They feed off America’s despair, and feed it with rage and fury.
A pecking order of violence all the way down means that the most violent end up at the top, and those who willing to do just slightly less violence end up as their capos and commandos and so on. Think of how the Nazis operated. The town bully who was beating Jews and gays soon became an SS “officer” in a fine suit, with official powers. The social order was reconstructed — and hate and violence were formally legitimized. The same is very likely to come true in America. All those enraged Trumpists screaming death threats at…school principals…election officials? After Trump’s re-elected — which at this rate, is looking to be a sure thing, since Biden’s Presidency continues to fail — they’ll become the Gestapo and SS officers of a newly fascist America. They won’t be called that, sure — they’ll have some innocuous sounding title. So what? They want to ban books and teach hate and ensure supremacy goes on and on. They’re tomorrow’s capos in the pecking order of violence.
And as violence becomes the linchpin of a new social order, all is lost. If you’re thinking of the Purge, frankly, you’re not too far off. The difference, really, is that the violence to come is organized. It isn’t random gangs of criminals out to steal your jewelry. It’s entire nations turned fascist, dreaming of ethnic cleansing and supremacy, hate simmering in their blood, singing songs of victory and triumph. Society reorients around violence as it becomes institutionalised and legitimised — like in Nazi Germany, or now, in America’s Jim Crow 2.0 era. And all is lost then.
Let me try to sum all that up. A domino effect is now kicking off. Climate change and ecological collapse are going to be too costly for societies to afford. Their public purses will empty. Austerity will have to be imposed. People will grow suddenly, rapidly poorer. Poverty will breed what it always does — the political poisons of fascism, authoritarianism, theocracy, totalitarianism. Social attitudes will dramatically transform, as people grow senseless with despair and fury. Violence, hate, cruelty will become norms, replacing whatever remnants of modernity’s cultures of warmth and thoughtfulness still exist. The rule of violence will finally be the axis around which society is reoriented, and the new social order will be a pecking order of violence. Those most willing to do it will rise to the top, and those incapable of it will be hunted and annihilated.
You can easily see that all taking place already in America, where the process is advanced too far to stop it now, and in Britain, too, which is about a decade or so behind America. They are parables for our world. Our civilisation is dying, my friends. And it’s best that you know how and why its deaths throes will happen.
Umair
November 2021
Clipped from: https://medium.com/@umairh?p=934b7192153b
