Injustice and inequality don’t cause wars,
But the awareness of them does.
Across the mighty rivers of Central Asia mighty dams are being thrown, stoking fears over the security of water supplies for the ever-increasing population, and causing India and Pakistan to shake nuclear weapons at each other.
In North Africa and the Middle East secular dictatorships are being replaced with Islamic democracies, while Israel’s political agenda is increasingly defined by Orthodox Jews, who nearby, semi-nuclear Iran does not even recognise as having the right to be there in the first place.
Across Europe an increasingly belligerent and querulous population balk at the Euro, the great leveller, robbing the parsimonious to pay the profligate and punishing everyone in the process.
The entire spectrum of America’s population, from indolent occutards through the record numbers of unemployed to rabid tea-party activists despair at a paralysed political system, a waning world brief, a seemingly hopeless economy, and, of course, each other.
The world over, failing and falling dictators, from Kim Jong Il to Hugo Chavez unsettle us over the countries they leave behind at least as much as strong and sophisticated dictators, like Putin and Ahmadinejad, do over the countries they continue to control.
Blame the dictators, blame the Chinese. Blame the bankers, blame the politicians. Blame immigration, blame emigration. Blame religion, blame the irreligious.
Gotta hate somebody
It seems everyone has someone to blame, someone to hate. And this is why I think these are the scariest times I’ve ever lived in. You see; inequality, oppression, suffering and poverty, however much socialists may dislike this fact, are nonetheless a fact of life. They are constant. They are ubiquitous. They are inherent in competitive evolution, in natural selection.
Having someone to blame for inequality, oppression, suffering and poverty, on the other hand, isn’t a constant. It isn’t ubiquitous. Having someone to blame heightens the sense of injustice. It breeds hate. And injustice and hate breed extremism. And once extremism takes hold, it can be very hard to stop.
Wars don’t need ideology, terrorism doesn’t need a religious brief. They just need a deeply rooted sense of discontent and a spark to fire them off.
Pressure cooker
Fortunately the brand of extremism I fear, the sort of extremism that gives rise to terrorism, civil war and world war, takes some time to cook up. It takes years for that sense of injustice to move on from chanting and banner waving, marching and protesting, to simmer and thicken in the souls of the people into something more malevolent and dangerous; to cause them to lay down their tambourines and take up their AK-47s.
The rise of Hitler and the foundations of World War II were built on the immoderate demands for full reparations by the victorious Allies in World War I. Throughout the 1920s the German economy and the German people were on their knees, but their sense of injustice and hate over this didn’t harden and mutate into nationalistic extremism until the 1930s. The Arab spring of 2011 took decades of oppression and suppression to bring about.
Praying to the God of Mean Reversion
So we live in dangerous times it seems to me. A lingering sense of injustice, coupled with someone to blame for that injustice, has historically provided the ripest conditions for extremism, terrorism and war. And a sense of injustice coupled with someone to blame for that injustice, seems to he the only thing uniting everyone on the planet right now.
But it isn’t yet a lingering sense of injustice, and Mean Reversion, the tendency for everything to trend back towards the norm over time, may yet save us all. But with the global economic malaise looking set to fester for some time to come, Mean Reversion’s day does not yet seem close at hand.
So Happy New Year then, for now at least. For this year if not perhaps for the next one, or the one after that, when for my money, all bets are off.