The next world
There’s a Russian academic going around saying the US is going to collapse by 2010, due to our current economic strains.
At some point, yeah, the US will go the way of the dodo. No nation, no empire, lasts forever. However, I certainly don’t think any collapse will happen within the next couple of years. But even if it does, I think the influence of America will last for a long time — after all, no one was aware at the time that the Roman Empire had truly fallen. It just seemed that it had merely evolved into new forms — but historical hindsight showed that it was indeed no more.
The next world won’t be about nations or national interests, it’ll be about super-commerce. Corporations will exceed all other interests. National laws and boundaries will be irrelevant, only so far as they serve the localized interests of the supercorporations.
Some might argue we already live in that world.
But increasingly, people — human beings — are irrelevant. All that matters is markets, and people are only “consumer units.” No one, certainly not our leaders, cares if individual people live or die, starve or are fed, only so far as sufficient numbers affect market forces. All that counts is decreasing the cost of production to maximize profits for the pigs at the top of the trough.
Being a human being in today’s world is not a good idea. It’s a bad move. Humanity is, by and large, a mistake nowadays. Perhaps it always was.
Today, we are at the mercy of corporate business. Yesterday, we were at the mercy of national power and military might. And the day before that we were at the mercy of feudal lords and plagues.
If there is a God, then surely the creation of humanity was a temper tantrum: we were created to give the deity something to perpetually punish and make miserable.
In the meantime, I’m going to McDonald’s for a Big Mac.
