Charles Hugh Smith and SLL both believe the world is coming into to a chaotic period the likes of which it hasn’t seen for many centuries. From Smith at oftwominds.com:
As the chart below on ‘how systems collapse’ illustrates, the loss of stabilizing buffers goes unnoticed until the entire structure collapses under its own weight.
Disruptive extremes of weather: check
Rising geopolitical tensions with no diplomatic resolution: check
Multiplying scarcities in essential commodities: check
Domestic disorder accelerates as extreme positions harden into irreconcilable conflicts: check
Welcome to the 21st century sequel of the catastrophic 1600s, an extended period of mutually reinforcing crises that overturned regimes and empires from England to China and triggered unremitting misery across much of the human populace. (Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century is a riveting overview of this complex era.)
What can we learn from the catastrophic 1600s? Leading the list: humans don’t respond well to scarcities. They get crotchety, argumentative, and prone to finding ways to become disagreeable rather than agreeable. Their derangement deepens as they form self-reinforcing echo-chambers of the like-minded, and the source of their misfortune shifts from fate to equally fixated human opponents.
