3.8. emergence of A new world order The day, when international transactions will be paid for with a new world currency, will be recognized in history as the day a new multilateral world order will have succeeded to bury the short uni-polar reign of the American empire. This new multilateral world order will have East-Asia as its core and Beijing will act as its center of gravity.
The present post addresses the following:
4.1. community versus empire
4.2. Western prospects
4.3. Western Modernity is out, what comes next ?
4.3. Western Modernity is out, what comes next ?
____________
Nothing new here. It is just the continuation of the natural evolution of Modernity. The last 200 years were indeed nothing else than an aberration due to an accident of history that occurred a few hundred years earlier (1).
What I mean to say is that the rise of the reason that is at work within capital and its worldview of Modernity, in Western Europe in the aftermath of the crusades, was an accident of history. The compliance of Western Europeans to the reason of capital rapidly procured them a technological advantage that, so at least they thought, gave them a free pass to impose their dualism and exceptionalism “me = good versus the other = evil” (2) on the rest of the world. What resulted was a complete destabilization of all forms of traditional societies. For Richard Moser, in the territory of what is now the USA, this free pass in the minds of white Europeans developed into a lasting culture :
What I mean to say is that the rise of the reason that is at work within capital and its worldview of Modernity, in Western Europe in the aftermath of the crusades, was an accident of history. The compliance of Western Europeans to the reason of capital rapidly procured them a technological advantage that, so at least they thought, gave them a free pass to impose their dualism and exceptionalism “me = good versus the other = evil” (2) on the rest of the world. What resulted was a complete destabilization of all forms of traditional societies. For Richard Moser, in the territory of what is now the USA, this free pass in the minds of white Europeans developed into a lasting culture :
Exceptionalism was not a free-floating idea but was forged into a lasting culture by the frontier wars aimed at the elimination or assimilation of native people and the conquest of land. America’s frontier history produced a lasting mythology that popularized empire and white settler culture while cloaking their many contradictions. (3)
However despicable and totalitarian the encroachment of Europe on the rest of the world might have been the fact of the matter is that, their way of encroaching on the world, through capital and Modernity, were extremely successful and the speed of this success was such that traditional societies had no time to adapt. As a result their traditional systems of governance were destabilized and many of their societal arrangements collapsed. Most traditional societies disappeared from the face of the earth and unknown millions starved to dead. The estimates vary greatly depending largely on the researchers’ ideological a-priory. For the Americas the estimates, of the number of indigenous people who were killed or who perished as a result of the European invasion, vary from 10 to 100,000,000. Whatever the reality might have been it just shows the truly totalitarian nature of the European dualistic axiom upon which is build the Western view of how a Western individual fits in reality “me = good vs the other = evil”.
All traditional societies were destabilized at the contact of Modernity but not all of them disappeared. China, India and a few other mostly in Asia survived. But some 2 centuries, after the West had successfully imposed its hegemony over the whole world, the rest of the world is awakening. With the present shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world away from the US, toward East-Asia, China is indeed re-assuming its historical normality.
Source: “Statistics on World Population, GDP and per Capita GDP, 1-2006” by Angus Maddison, University of Groeningen. Via “The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph”. Derek Thompson. The Atlantic. 2012-06-19. This graph was actualized by laodan.
As I mentioned earlier “The present 7th shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world is very special. The last 6 shifts were internal to the Western world. This last one drives the center of gravity of the economy world outside of the Western world”.
The very fact, that this last shift drives the center of gravity of the economy-world outside of the western world, is going to fire an outbreak of rage in Western minds. This outbreak of rage will be relatively short lived but it will be extremely vicious. One can already sense this viciousness in the air of our times. The evolution of the Western commentary on China, over the last 5 years, reflects a crescendo in nastiness that bodes ill about the possibility to have a reasoned conversation about what will really be going on during the next coming years. But the ideological viciousness will eventually come down at the contact of the principle of reality that pushes down Western standards of living.
This is the context in which I write. I can’t make the stuff of this contextual madness disappear as per magic. It is like the whole Western world had sunk into the madness of the psyche’s underworld. In this kind of reality, to get a chance to grasp the dynamic of the transformation that is occurring in the governance-world, one has to stay out of the brouhaha and cultivate a quiet and cool (cold) mind.
Free will is largely an illusion. Our axioms of civilization and our worldviews are driving the course of individual thinking. To really comprehend the transformations that we are going through a little effort is thus in order. But what is for certain already is that the Western and Chinese comprehension are diverging radically as I laid out in “A growing disconnect between East and West” (4).
In such an extreme climate passions are easily running overboard and the minds tend to flock behind loud populist slogans. The last time humanity witnessed such a climate was in between the first and second world wars. Are we bound to the same kind of insanity again ?
As I mentioned earlier “The present 7th shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world is very special. The last 6 shifts were internal to the Western world. This last one drives the center of gravity of the economy world outside of the Western world”.
The very fact, that this last shift drives the center of gravity of the economy-world outside of the western world, is going to fire an outbreak of rage in Western minds. This outbreak of rage will be relatively short lived but it will be extremely vicious. One can already sense this viciousness in the air of our times. The evolution of the Western commentary on China, over the last 5 years, reflects a crescendo in nastiness that bodes ill about the possibility to have a reasoned conversation about what will really be going on during the next coming years. But the ideological viciousness will eventually come down at the contact of the principle of reality that pushes down Western standards of living.
This is the context in which I write. I can’t make the stuff of this contextual madness disappear as per magic. It is like the whole Western world had sunk into the madness of the psyche’s underworld. In this kind of reality, to get a chance to grasp the dynamic of the transformation that is occurring in the governance-world, one has to stay out of the brouhaha and cultivate a quiet and cool (cold) mind.
Free will is largely an illusion. Our axioms of civilization and our worldviews are driving the course of individual thinking. To really comprehend the transformations that we are going through a little effort is thus in order. But what is for certain already is that the Western and Chinese comprehension are diverging radically as I laid out in “A growing disconnect between East and West” (4).
In such an extreme climate passions are easily running overboard and the minds tend to flock behind loud populist slogans. The last time humanity witnessed such a climate was in between the first and second world wars. Are we bound to the same kind of insanity again ?
4.1. community versus empire
The entire internal development of the West has been driven since its inception by power domination over the rest of the world and its economic exchanges were thus concentrated on taking (imperialism, colonialism) and giving was never a part of the Western equation. This is in stark contrast to the internal development of China which was always internally driven and so its relations with the outside were strictly motivated by its search for win-win economic exchanges that added something to the daily well-being of its population.
Let’s unpack this summary statement.
By all accounts before Modernity Western Europe was in a very primitive stage of development while China was a refined and technologically advanced society-civilization that dwarfed the economic might of all other nations. That being said China nevertheless stayed out of the business of other countries.
Early-Modernity exploded the horizons of Western Europeans to the richness of the world around them. In a first stage, called “merchant capitalism” in Western history books, Western Europe plundered the world and killed untold millions. Centuries of plunder exploded the mass of money in circulation back home which increased :
• the internal consumption of the elites and propelled a construction boom of mansions and palaces that in turn unleashed a wave of social envy that bolstered a new economic dynamism
• the productions of luxury goods at the attention of the elites, that resulted from large scale capital investments by the French state, set the stage for later industrial productions in a monetarist Britain that deemed the outflow of capital to pay for imported goods to be unbearable to its internal economy.
Early-Modernity was a breaking point in the history of Western Europe. Over the span of centuries the plunder of the rest of the world normalized into long distance trade. And long distance trade opened the minds of the merchants, and the investors in their “voyages of discoveries”, to the reason that is at work within capital. The chain of causality, that fostered the awareness and then the idolatry of the reason that is at work within capital, was so long that its successful unfolding could have been nothing else than an accident of history. An accident that launched capitalism, the most successful economic system in history, and its new quasi-worldview of Modernity that acted like a rupture with its past Christian worldview.
In contrast once China finally grasped, the economic firing power that is contained in “the reason that is at work within capital”, it rapidly grabbed what it thought was useful for its internal development while reverting to its traditional culture as a means to strengthen its societal cohesion. In plain spoken language China internalized the elements of capitalism and Modernity that it found useful for its traditional societal system. And in that sense the country must be seen as having absorbed Modernity in its cultural continuum instead of having being absorbed by capitalism and Modernity as what had been predicted by Western intellectuals and politicians.
Unfortunately Westerners are not familiar with the axiomatic categories of civilizations like ‘dualism versus polarism’, ‘good versus evil’, ‘continuity versus rupture’ and other. And in their ignorance they want to impose on China what they think is the universality of their own more advanced model of society (5). Trump and his team of amateur negotiators come to mind who recently wanted to impose – a change in China’s laws and, – the overseeing of China’s governance system by a team of American controllers. China answered this dumb presumption by diplomatically stating that they would not resume further trade negotiations with the US before it becomes respectful. The answer of a wise grand-mother to a wildly presumptuous adolescent …
Chinese continuity versus Western rupture are axioms of civilizations that navigate in different mental planes. No surprise then that their views about “the otherness of the other” are so far apart. It all starts with their core axiom : dualism in the West versus polarities in China. I wrote the following about these core axioms in post 3 of the present series (6) :
The axioms of civilizations shape general behavioral traits among the citizens living within the boundaries of a civilizational space. And such behavioral traits remain a constant during the whole of the historical span of that civilization. What interests me here is to pinpoint how the axioms of the Western civilization that originated in Europe shape in the minds of the citizens of a geographically extended Europe :
- the perception of a ‘behavioral otherness’ by the Chinese
- the perception that this “otherness’ is somehow evil
- the perception that the West has to correct that evil or to annihilate it.
In the Western Christian civilization “the otherness of the other” qualifies him as dangerous and evil. I have indicated earlier that, for 1000 to 1500 years, Westerners have thought of themselves as being on the side of god and as such they also thought that they were on the side of good. After such a long time-span these ideas forced themselves as an automatism in the minds. No surprise then that the Western individual subconscious mind views the otherness of “the other” as being a sign of his evil nature and as such they think that he does not deserve to be treated humanely. This was the justification for past Western plundering and for mass killing and enslavement. And this same mental chain continues to act as a subconscious justification in the present for the belief in the exceptionalism and universalism of Western values and practices.
There is no such a thing in the Chinese approach to “the otherness of the other”. Their country is very large and the vast majority of its population is united in sharing the same axioms of civilization and the same worldview. The country is also inhabited by minorities who communicate in different languages, believe in different grand narratives, and behave along the lines of different traditions. So the Chinese, since as long as their memory remembers, have accepted “the otherness of the other” as something natural. Their understanding of their nation as a result of “Tian Xia”, or “all under heaven”, goes back to the transition between tribal societies and the stabilization of their power societies into the Chinese empire. Over such a long span of time it goes without saying that they have subconsciously internalized a few habits like :
• viewing their nation as a territory populated by different groups of individuals who unite in following a common fatherly wise-man who has the obligation to supply them peace with the outside and societal stability internally
• viewing the rest of the world as a territory populated by groups of individuals speaking different languages, adhering to different grand narratives, and living according to different traditions. Having been accustomed internally to such differences encountering them externally did not bother them any bit.
Being driven by the internal working of their vast country the Chinese value their relations with the rest of the world as an accessory that eventually may complement their internal activities. Relations with the outside were thus always limited to exchanges of goods and ideas. What is remarkable, but a little known fact, is that these exchanges were systemically organized by outsiders since the earliest of times. Towards the West, for example along the Silk Road, they were organized by Kushan and Sogdian merchants who came to China offering horses for silk. This somehow indicates that – for one the Chinese are satisfied with the internal potential of their country and feel thus no need to go search for more outside, – secondly they are open to the ideas and goods of outsiders if those can enrich the internal life of their nation.
But these national traits came under stress when Western encroachments over the last centuries destabilized their system of governance and waves of small pockets of individuals emigrated fleeing the resulting misery at home. These waves of emigration were the source of the large Chinese communities presently inhabiting the countries bordering the South-China Sea where they continue to cultivate their ancestral traditional Chinese culture.
The Chinese acceptance of “the otherness of the other”, and their industrious purveying for their families’ daily lives under the guidance of a fatherly wise-man, depicts a national community that is in no need to exchange goods and ideas with outsiders but that, in all pragmatism, will not refuse such exchanges if they can enrich their local circumstances.
Nowadays something new is starting to arise which should have a direct impact on how the world will govern its affairs in the future. I mean that the Chinese willingness to grab from Modernity and capitalism, all the elements that help to restore the greatness of the Chinese nation, has deepened China’s contact with the rest of the world as never before in its entire history.
The depth of this encounter, and the awareness by its governing elite about the multiple side-effects of Modernity, are resulting presently in a rising new awareness in China about the fact that humanity is a community of nations that share a common destiny. There is no way to overstate the importance of this new reality. The leading actors at the core of the Chinese governance system believe that the human species faces a dire need of collaboration if it is to counter its present predicament.
This new awareness, of being part of a species that is distributed among a community of nations, deepens China’s resoluteness to do the right thing to counter the side-effects of Modernity. But this Chinese vision of the future of humanity as a community of nations certainly stands in stark contrast with the view of the West that can’t seem to distance itself from the perception that humanity is driven by a ferocious competition between nations that want to impose their hegemony over the est of the world.
Sensing that its economic centrality is slipping away the West is now wildly accusing China of all the nasty hegemonic behaviors that have been its own behaviors over the past centuries. In matter of fact the West is now experiencing a nervous breakdown and acts like a gangster who tries to bully the rest of the world into submission. But to the rational observer its words and actions make no longer any sense.
Humanity is presently confronted with two clear choices of geo-political futures :
There is no such a thing in the Chinese approach to “the otherness of the other”. Their country is very large and the vast majority of its population is united in sharing the same axioms of civilization and the same worldview. The country is also inhabited by minorities who communicate in different languages, believe in different grand narratives, and behave along the lines of different traditions. So the Chinese, since as long as their memory remembers, have accepted “the otherness of the other” as something natural. Their understanding of their nation as a result of “Tian Xia”, or “all under heaven”, goes back to the transition between tribal societies and the stabilization of their power societies into the Chinese empire. Over such a long span of time it goes without saying that they have subconsciously internalized a few habits like :
• viewing their nation as a territory populated by different groups of individuals who unite in following a common fatherly wise-man who has the obligation to supply them peace with the outside and societal stability internally
• viewing the rest of the world as a territory populated by groups of individuals speaking different languages, adhering to different grand narratives, and living according to different traditions. Having been accustomed internally to such differences encountering them externally did not bother them any bit.
Being driven by the internal working of their vast country the Chinese value their relations with the rest of the world as an accessory that eventually may complement their internal activities. Relations with the outside were thus always limited to exchanges of goods and ideas. What is remarkable, but a little known fact, is that these exchanges were systemically organized by outsiders since the earliest of times. Towards the West, for example along the Silk Road, they were organized by Kushan and Sogdian merchants who came to China offering horses for silk. This somehow indicates that – for one the Chinese are satisfied with the internal potential of their country and feel thus no need to go search for more outside, – secondly they are open to the ideas and goods of outsiders if those can enrich the internal life of their nation.
But these national traits came under stress when Western encroachments over the last centuries destabilized their system of governance and waves of small pockets of individuals emigrated fleeing the resulting misery at home. These waves of emigration were the source of the large Chinese communities presently inhabiting the countries bordering the South-China Sea where they continue to cultivate their ancestral traditional Chinese culture.
The Chinese acceptance of “the otherness of the other”, and their industrious purveying for their families’ daily lives under the guidance of a fatherly wise-man, depicts a national community that is in no need to exchange goods and ideas with outsiders but that, in all pragmatism, will not refuse such exchanges if they can enrich their local circumstances.
Nowadays something new is starting to arise which should have a direct impact on how the world will govern its affairs in the future. I mean that the Chinese willingness to grab from Modernity and capitalism, all the elements that help to restore the greatness of the Chinese nation, has deepened China’s contact with the rest of the world as never before in its entire history.
The depth of this encounter, and the awareness by its governing elite about the multiple side-effects of Modernity, are resulting presently in a rising new awareness in China about the fact that humanity is a community of nations that share a common destiny. There is no way to overstate the importance of this new reality. The leading actors at the core of the Chinese governance system believe that the human species faces a dire need of collaboration if it is to counter its present predicament.
This new awareness, of being part of a species that is distributed among a community of nations, deepens China’s resoluteness to do the right thing to counter the side-effects of Modernity. But this Chinese vision of the future of humanity as a community of nations certainly stands in stark contrast with the view of the West that can’t seem to distance itself from the perception that humanity is driven by a ferocious competition between nations that want to impose their hegemony over the est of the world.
Sensing that its economic centrality is slipping away the West is now wildly accusing China of all the nasty hegemonic behaviors that have been its own behaviors over the past centuries. In matter of fact the West is now experiencing a nervous breakdown and acts like a gangster who tries to bully the rest of the world into submission. But to the rational observer its words and actions make no longer any sense.
Humanity is presently confronted with two clear choices of geo-political futures :
- or lay down, shut-up, and acquiesce to the will of a brutal and violent Western master
- or participate as equals in a concert of nations that freely execute the symphony of humanity.
In reality that choice has already sunken in the past. The shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia is a “fait accompli” and this fundamentally changes the parameters of national governance. No rational nation would want to corner itself out of the growing future economic, scientific, and technological potential of China and of East-Asia.
4.2. Western prospects
Freaked out by its own nervous breakdown the US is now throwing Trump tantrums here and there. But whatever the noise this changes nothing to the big picture. Western big capital holders have their feet firmly planted on the ground and nothing can distract them from the feast of vast new profits to be generated for a long time to come in China and East-Asia. Their Western political servants will thus very soon be brought back to their senses and forced to obey their orders to cooperate with China.
This brings me to address the speculation of some commentators who affirm that there is a conflict presently brewing between two factions among Western big capital holders: those who invest nationally and those who invest internationally. First of all is there such a conflict and secondly is there a possibility that the internationalist wing could lose this fight which would bring down globalization ?
Not for an instant do I think that there is a real conflict here. The balance of power between the internationalist and the nationalist wings among Western big capital holders is in reality so skewed in favor of the international that the nationalist wing has no real impact in the debates. The returns on national investment pale indeed in comparison with the returns on international investments. The nature of capitalism being the maximization of profits the outcome of this conflict is a given.
Brexit and Trump are nothing else than media driven shows to distract people’s minds from the real action that is taking place in their national systems of governance :
1. Capital holders know better than anyone else that the West has lost the advantage in production for a long time to come and perhaps even for ever. Service industries, by definition, address the needs of producers of real goods. In an environment where significant production investments are out of the question the prospects of service industries are very bleak indeed.
2. this rarity of capital investment in the West does not bode well for Western labor. New positions are not going to open in any significant number in the foreseeable future. Automation and Artificial Intelligence furthermore promise to soon replace high percentages of human labor with robots.
3. consumer economies, as a matter of fact, depend on the purchasing power of their national populations. And with the prospect of labor incomes continuing to go south Western consumerism is in a quandary. It is thus only natural that in the eyes of big capital holders Western nations are no match any longer. Today the dream investment is in the emerging consumer market of China. Tomorrow the dream investment will be in the emerging consumer market of India and South-East Asian nations. And after tomorrow the dream will be to invest in the African emerging markets …
4. with productions down Western economies experience stagnating or decreasing national revenues and so the increasing consumer demand over the last few years has been financed solely by debt. But with falling revenues over-indebted consumers are reaching peek debt and so Western national consumer markets will inevitably very soon be on a path of decline …
5. Western consumer societies were made possible by increasing incomes that lifted whole populations out of poverty and into a middle-class status. For various reasons this social reality is now falling apart and is not going to be resuscitated any time soon. It appears rather distressingly evident that Western workers are losing their societal "raison d'être". Does this mean they are destined to be discarded soon in the trash bin of their societies ?
All this shows that capital is not going to be invested in any significant amount within the national shores of Western countries within the predictable future. And so the nationalist wing among capital holders is no more than a useful fiction that is being exploited for propaganda reasons only. The fact is that Western systems of governance nowadays are managing the long descent of their societies as best as they can and propaganda is one of the last tools at their disposal to keep their population in line. Hope is the new hopium and, to open the minds to dreams, drugs that were so ferociously repressed until very recently are now being legalized … But we better remember that once propaganda fails systems of governance have still one last tool at their disposal: brute force. That’s when these systems will transform into totalitarian machines.
Western intellectual servants, and clients alike, portray China as being governed by such a machine. But this is only a propagandist portrayal to smear a country competitor that flat-out beats the west at its own game. Western elites want at all costs to avoid that their citizens start to be tempted by China’s model of governance. The easiest way to avoid that is by portraying China as a scapegoat for the Western loss. The hope is that the scapegoating will distract people’s anger for all the ills at home. But It could also be that Western citizens start to ask how come Chinese citizens are having it so much better than them …
Whatever the bellicose rhetoric coming out of the West the fact of the matter is that people in China experience a degree of freedom that I think was never really attained in the West. But to make justice to this subject would need thousand more words. Suffice to say that I’m a European who has lived in the US for 10 years and who now lives in China since over 20 years. What I’m talking about is my personal experience of the Chinese life that I live on a daily base and how I perceive the differences with living in the west. I understand that my views run counter to the propaganda of Western Elites but the facts are the facts. And in matter of fact the totalitarian machines that are slowly being put in place in the West have nothing to do with China’s system of governance.
The US has already a militarized police and it kills its citizens without restraint and what what is worth without visibly any legal recourse.
In the United States, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average, a number that’s close to the yearly totals for other wealthy nations (7).
National comparisons of “incarceration Rates per 100,000 population” give furthermore a striking example of the extremely high level of repression in the US (8).
“Incarceration Rates” and “fatal shootings by the police” sketch a realist picture of the level of authoritarianism being exercised presently in the USA. And I’m afraid that in the years to come this picture will document a rather drastically deteriorating situation. The reasons for this deterioration are multiple but the Western societal atomization, that was pushed down the throats of Western societies by postmodernism, is certainly the most impactful. The repercussions of societal atomization are the core reason for the strengthening of control in the West.
But totalitarianism is no panacea for the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world away from the West. Its national economies are bound to be reset soon at a more truthful level of reality. And the truth is that Western economies have lost most of their clothes. Some soon will appear completely naked with no place to hide. And freedom then will not weigh much any longer in the conversation.
4.3. Western Modernity is out, what comes next ?
The reset of national economies, in the wake of the completion of the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world toward East-Asia, will be brutal. The world will suddenly appear to be another place and nations, as well as individuals, will have to adapt to this new reality.
Wanting to give a detailed picture of this new reality would be presumptuous. We speak indeed about the future. But the following elements are nevertheless already baked in the cake :
1. imperial US unilateralism will be out of the picture. The dollar will soon lose its function as a reserve currency and international payments for trade activities shall be realized with an international currency under the umbrella of the IMF or, if the nations of the world can’t overcome their disagreements, a new institution will be created specifically for that. This process is not something that Western big capital holders, and the financial institutions in their control, can continue to master. China and its followers will never agree to continue being captive of a new currency that is managed by financial institutions owned by Western big capital holders. That’s why this matter will take some time to be settled.
2. a community of free nations will be executing as equals the symphony of humanity with China as a conductor. And all, small or large, will have the same rights and obligations as the other members of the ensemble; no more and no less. A new form of freedom will emerge out of this principle of equality between nations. And this new form of freedom will extend in the domain of individual freedom where it definitely will eclipse the formalist and treacherous Western notion of freedom between un-equals …
3. the relations between nations and the activities of supranational institutions shall be conducted in accord with International Law. To avoid a repeat of the anarchy, that resulted from the gangster behavior of some countries’ during the last decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21th century, strict penalties will have to be imposed on any illegal behavior. I personally hope that some sort of trial will take place in the same vain as the Nuremberg trials. Those responsible, for the massacres and collective punishments exacted by the West, have to be brought to justice. This is not a matter of winner’s revenge. It is a matter of regrowing societal cohesion in a climate of equanimity. In the midst of the chaos resulting from the great reset of the economy-world Western societies, in particular, will need to rediscover a balanced state of mind. And this can only be achieved by sanctioning those who bear the highest responsibilities for the popular suffering of the last decades.
4. the power of nations over their internal affairs will be re-instated and will be respected. But supranational institutions will be given to manage some fields of competences that were until now the domain of national states. I have more particularly in mind the competences to counter the numerous side-effects of Modernity that equally affect all the citizens of the world. Present international institutions will need to be overhauled or new ones will need to be created from scratch.
5. the damages from the multiple side-effects of Modernity and their great convergence will be felt ever more painfully and the community of nations will be forced to spend more and more time and resources into remedies. But the damages will nevertheless continue to intensify and, after they pass some threshold in intensity, nations and individuals will feel that they are on their own …
The reset of the economy-world I’m talking about is not something hypothetical. The facts that have already been established on the ground make it a matter of absolute certainty. What is not certain is how it will unfold. Too much hot air has filled the national economic systems. I mean debts have been contracted wildly that for a big part will never be repaid simply because the resources are in-existent. A reset of national financial realities will thus inevitably occur willingly or unwillingly. In the most probable scenario a global financial crash will push the world into a new great depression. The outcome of such a depression will undoubtedly reset nations on new ground that will better reflecting their true economic and financial realities. But what I have in mind more generally is that in the aftermaths of such an economic and financial reset the world will need to organize a new institutional start and that can only be resolved through negotiation between nations.
In conclusion along the years to come human activity in the field of the governance-world will inevitably concentrate on the following 2 aspects :
• national economic and financial realities will be reset to better reflect the truth of their situation
• nations will have to negotiate a new institutional set-up to manage the new balance of power that will inevitably result from : – the economic and financial reset and, – the shift to East-Asia of the center of gravity of the economy-world.
But this re-balancing of the governance-world is not going to be a panacea. As I mentioned in 5 here above “after passing some threshold of damage from the multiple side-effects of Modernity nations and individuals will feel that they are on their own”. What comes after is societal collapse and this is the subject I will address in the next chapter.
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Notes
1. Modernity as an accident of history : see “Organic art manifesto. 2. how did Modernity emerge in Europe”
2. See “What’s going on here ? (3) 2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions”
3. "The Empire Is Running Out of War Stories. Or is it? Will American Exceptionalism Rise Again?" Richard Mosler. Counterpunch. 2019-10-11.
4. “A growing disconnect between East and West”
5. Western belief in the universality of Modernity, democracy, human rights, capitalism, free markets, individualism, private property, and so on.
6. See "2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions”
7. “What the data say about police shootings” by Lynne Peeples. Nature, 2019-09-04. The graph “looking for explanations” is from the same source.
8. Table by laodan. Sources:
• Incarceration populations and rates from World Prison Brief
• total population figures for 2018 from World Population Review
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