I often wonder about Job and his amazing resilience. I wonder how I would react if the calamities that afflicted him came upon me. To accumulate such great wealth, status, and comfort and have it all reduced to nothing in such quick fashion, and then have your loved ones taken away from you in such a devastating manner as he. It must have been crushing for him.
I wouldn’t have the resolve or fortitude of Job; I think few would. Yet today, we are all of us like Job. We stand on the very brink of everything we know and have come to accept as “normal” being forcefully changed in just a moment, and almost nobody seems to know it, or worse, care.
We all take everything for granted, even our precious loved ones. Even they can be taken away from us. Very soon, our world will be filled with men and women just like Job. People who have never known the pain of overwhelming and complete systemic loss. People who will very quickly be plunged into the most extreme circumstances of loss imaginable.
This is because our current global system is already effectively dead. Right now, we await the emergence of a new global order, a one-world system of governance and control that will leave no person untouched. Something serious has gone wrong with our current world order, and it now stands on the verge of total collapse.
This is no mere hyperbole either. There is a feeling, just a sense perhaps, that the masses are finally beginning to realize this, even if only at a subconscious level. There is a deep feeling of unease wherever one chooses to look; it permeates all our societies from the Middle East to Russia, from North America to South America, and throughout Western Europe. And with this volatility and unease, there is a tangible sense of societal failure, betrayal and even foreboding over what might yet be in the not too distant future. People and societies are increasingly on tenterhooks.
Stable world orders that last for prolonged periods of time are rare things indeed. Our current world order, now about 75 years old, arose from a period of intense convulsion and violence caused by the Second World War. Over a hundred million people died in the process of birthing our current world order. It is a truism of history that new world orders never arise out of calm but from the ruin of destruction and chaos.
Maintaining any kind of stable world order for any length of time requires skillful diplomacy and statecraft, as world orders are made and maintained; they do not just suddenly appear. If they are not maintained and managed effectively with creative diplomacy, with functioning national and transnational institutions to hold them up, and creative effective decision-making at just the right time to avert crisis, global systems eventually break down and fail.
This is where we stand today, on the very brink of collapse.
Our global system is breaking down and failing right before our eyes. Millions upon millions are still living their lives under the false daily presupposition that the way things are today is the way things will always be in the future, both for themselves and their children. This viewpoint could not be more wrong. Our current global system is fragmenting before our very eyes.
It is no feat of extraordinary prognostication to say such things either. All world orders come to an end eventually. It is an inevitability of all history. Ours will be no different. What is not in any way inevitable, though, is what comes in the wake of a collapsed world order. There is no guarantee that one world order will move seamlessly and peacefully into the next. What is more likely is that there will be another intense period of convulsion and violence before another world order is birthed. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are even now heading into another period of extreme chaos.
It strikes me as being highly unlikely that we will experience a period of peaceful transition into the next world order. In history, I can think of few such examples ever occurring.
Everything in our global system is linked and intertwined. And I do mean everything. The financial system, supply chains, transportation, food, oil production, the electrical grid, nuclear power… everything. When one system fails, it all fails; and the crash, if one is to occur in our global system, will not be a slow one as in previous world systemic crashes, like the Roman Empire that declined over a period of a century or more.
When our society crashes, it will be an epic fast crash.
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