Is this the end of the west?

The west has had a long tumultuous run.

Rising slowly from the ashes of the Roman Empire and struggling to free itself from the viscus quagmire of Medieval Europe the once barbarous tribes, living in western europe, once romanised and civilised, embarked upon a disjointed yet strangely cohesive journey through renaissance, reformation and enlightenment.

The fruits of this epic journey led to our current world order, where for a couple of centuries this disjointed "Western Empire" whether colonial, imperial or democratic has ensnared and dominated the world scene to a greater or a lesser extent both culturally and economically.

By Bathtub Barracuda , CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

We live today in this globally connected and enmeshed world filled with myriads of links and dependencies of devilish complexity. All this is fueled by debt inflated, rampant spending and consumption. What happens when spending stops and the inflating ends?

Highly complex systems in nature, or man made, are discovered to devolve quite rapidly when significantly destabilised or equilibrium is broken. Right now we are witnessing such possible events of huge significance triggered by the panic around COVID -19.

Lockdown measures attempting to contain the spread of this pandemic are crippling entire industries. Travel, tourism, hospitality, entertainment, even bars are unlikely to emerge unscathed. In turn these industries support yet other industries and due to the enmeshed and global nature of the contemporary economic sphere these ripples continue to spread wider and wider.

Will these ripples become waves? become a tsunami? that capsizes and sinks the debt riddled, barely floating, viciously complex economic armada of the west?

I don't think it will be long before we know. This could unravel very quickly.