Convergence

I have no crystal ball nor am I clairvoyant, and the art of tea leaf reading I gladly leave to the professionals; I know not what the future has in store for us. Sometimes though, through extrapolating relatively recent developments in to the future as well as looking at historical precedents with similar developments, one can make an educated guess as to where we're headed as society; let's try that.

_{source: NASA Earth Observatory}

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, the reader follows centuries of history as it was predicted by Hari Seldon's theory of psychohistory; it combines history, sociology and mathematical statistics to predict the future of large populations. One of the most important premises of psychohistory is that the predictive power works only on large population and that the accuracy of these predictions grow with the size of the population it's used on. The Foundation novels are set in the far future when the human Galactic Empire contains millions of inhabited worlds with a total population that's counted in the quadrillions; the "Seldon Plan", which guides humanity through the fall of the original empire, the interregnum, and the establishment of a new Galactic Empire, could only be as effective as it is because of this enormous population, and it's stressed several times throughout the story that the science breaks down with small populations and becomes completely useless for predicting individual behaviors. We have something similar in our real, one planet world, called mathematical sociology.

We aren't going to be that sophisticated in this post; I just thought of it just now because I'm currently reading the sequels to Aasimov's original trilogy (highly recommended!) and thought you might find something of interest there to maybe explore further for yourself, dear reader. Without a crystal ball, tea leaves or psychohistory we can still make an educated guess though, and it must be said that our immediate collective future doesn't look all that bright. We're experiencing some kind of perfect storm where several key political sociological and economical developments converge in a way that's all but certain to cause us to descend in to a crisis without equal in all of history. It'll be the biggest crisis ever because for the first time it involves the entire world population, and for the first time, because of modern technology, we'll all be able to witness the effects on the other side of the planet as if it were right around the corner. The global pandemic, the resulting severe economical and financial crisis, the point of no return regarding climate change and the world wide explosion of racial tension that's built up over centuries, are all coming together in this moment in time; something's gotta to give, and it doesn't seem likely that we'll afterwards be able to simply return to life as we know it. Analogous to the Galactic Empire in Aasimov's masterpiece, it seems that the first capitalist world empire is about to fall...

There's no use closing our eyes or stick our heads in the sand; the signs are clearly visible for all of us to see. And no matter how we wish for a "return to normalcy", right now that doesn't seem very likely. We can find solace in the fact that the future isn't written and that even the Seldon Plan had its faults, but still, if I had to make a guess I'd say we're up for some crazy times ahead of us. Although I'm a Marxist and believe strongly in the benefits socialism can bring to society as a whole, I'd rather not see it come about as a result of a total and violent breakdown of that society. Reality doesn't care about my personal wishes though. Here's a short video with professor Richard Wolff talking about the convergence of several crises and how he thinks this might implode the current capitalist system; let's all hope we'll be able to weather this storm, and let's hope we all understand that we can only accomplish that by cooperating together, and not by individual action.

_{Wolff Responds: When Systems Implodes}

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