<As we begin our descent into the Kondratieff Winter (or, into an even deeper Elliott Winter) it is interesting to observe how theories begin to fill in with “meat”. Each player takes steps which are fully realistically dictated by their interests and needs, but the net result will be increasing isolationism and tension.>
This is just old time gloomster and doomster, "Let's all run up to the top of the mountain for the end of the world, the second coming and the rapture", fin de siecle, millennial omenous mysticism dressed up with a "scientific" veneer, using "waves", charts and stuff. It's Malthusian, Nostradamus nonsense, predicated on the idea that we are mindless zombies, in thrall to some supernatural forces made up of our actual selves.
In fact, we are responsive individuals who have big brains for the very specific purpose of thinking and doing something to fix up what's going wrong.
For example, the Malthusians were as wrong as could be and that was obvious a decade or two ago as women started having fewer and fewer babies thanks to contraception, one of the simple but most important inventions ever. Now that babies and children are leaving the culture of huge numbers of people, we could end up with a very rapid collapse in numbers. In the last couple of years, more people are starting to notice that.
Women have got brains. Not particularly good ones of course, but they are in good company there. With a spot of genetic engineering, they could be turbocharged to IQ150 average [with Google thrown in, even more could be done]. They consider their options and choose. They choose to not suffer Kondratieff Elliott Winter Waves. So do I. They have also chosen to have none, 1 or 2 children, which means a population implosion.
If we get chicken rabies rampant out of China, we could get an accelerated population implosion. Haemorraghic fevers like that which devastated Europe, reducing the population by a third, or half or something are interesting. According to Gwynne Dyer it wasn't bubonic plague and his reasoning makes sense to me.
While we are messing with a medievil Matrix of Malevolence, out of the east comes Asian-hosted chicken double pneumonia, or something, wiping out more Americans [and others] than Osama could dream of.
When you think about it, diseases are like commandoes, fighting on behalf of their hosts. The diseases can't kill off their hosts or they die out too. But the diseases can kill off competing humans which aren't effective hosts [because they don't have a balance of immunity to carry and help develop the disease].
So visitors from the hosting country are like a Trojan Horse, carrying the microscopic soldiers of the humans. On arrival, they infect the population, which reduces to a few who are semi-resistant to the disease, so are acceptable carriers for the disease. Then, the invading humans move in to the empty village and countryside and hey presto, the disease has successfully propagated itself and so have the humans in symbiotic genocide, without a shot being fired.
Swarms of Maoris died from European diseases. There wasn't much conflict between Maoris and the British, though there was a huge population implosion of Maoris after European contact.
AIDS is depopulating Africa because although there are a few genetically exceptional people there with AIDS resistant genes, there aren't enough to stop the destruction. The Western World, which doesn't have AIDS resistant genes either, has got a surrogate gene resistance = the ability to run a wealthy world which can fund AIDS stifling medical treatment.
I guess we haven't reached the end of history yet.
Meanwhile, I'm betting on people using their brains to figure out how to have peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, prosperity, fun and love, rather than Kondratieff Elliott Wave Winters, which sound like no fun at all.
Mqurice |
