Here’s a tiny question. Does it feel a little bit like the end of the world these days? Go ahead and be honest. No one else is listening in. In your darker moments — do you wonder if, well, in some elemental sense, the world around us seems to be ending? Doesn’t something deep down in your gut whisper that to you? Mine does.

Hold on. Am I serious? You can be the judge of that. First, let’s talk about “the world.” What does that strange phrase really mean? We have to step far — far — outside ourselves to really understand it. And it doesn’t mean having to resort to outlandish doomsday scenarios, like pandemics or world wars. It just means more…of this. Now. What we’re already living in. A kind of bizarre, gruesome, hellish dystopia. The end of the world feels like now for a very good reason. A species (that’s us) fighting each other desperately for life — on a dying planet.

Imagine that aliens visited this planet. What would they see? Something like this. This planet was dying. Meanwhile, “the world” as the species that dominated it had become accustomed to thinking of it, looked something very much like this. About 10% of the world was rich, and that was mostly in an enclave in the North and West — Europe and America. Just 10%. Rich in the simple and minimal sense of: being able to provide for one’s basic needs. And even among that 10%, much of it had fallen into poverty — like Americans, who increasingly couldn’t provide for basic needs. Nevertheless, thanks to a long, long history of centuries of violence, slavery, hated, and subjugation, 10% of this world was vastly richer than the rest.

The other 90% of the world was still shatteringly poor. That was most of it: Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East, and so on. The majority of human beings in this world didn’t eat enough protein to meet the standards of a healthy Western diet. The majority of human beings lived on about $5 a day.

That was the world — in the simplest way. A rich 10%, a poor 90%, and an ultra rich 1% or 0.1%. And that ultra rich was increasingly the only people for whom life was really improving. They were becoming richer than kings of yore. But what about everyone else? Human beings were effectively three tribes on a dying planet. And soon enough, those three tribes, those three strata, would find themselves at each others’ throats, in a bitter, desperate fight for survival.

(So this world was really three worlds — that old first, second, third world distinction is still, to my mind, a good one. There are two ways to think about that. There’s the true first world, social democratic Europe. The weird second world of failed-state poor-rich countries, like America and Russia. And then there’s everyone else, more or less. Or — the broader, perhaps darker way. The first world: the 0.1% of the globe that’s ultra-rich. Then second, the still rich but increasingly desperate 10% of average Americans and Europeans, the middle classes in rich countries who are growing poor. And then the 90% who never became rich at all.)

Now, the way that this world works is this. The rich world and the poor world almost never meet. The people in the rich world live in relative comfort and peace and prosperity. They watch silly reality TV shows and internet porn and get boob jobs and aspire to perfect pecs while…90% of the world is still poor, half of it barely able to subsist at all, and most of it still abjectly so. The people of the rich world don’t devote their lives to, say, building a world that’s richer, fairer, and freer for all — mostly, they devote their lives to…not much…just triviality, narcissism, infantile pleasure.

The people in the rich world don’t care about the poor world — but why would they? Their lives suck, too. In very real ways. Apart from gentle and wise Europe, the people of the rich world are not really very happy people. They are cruel and careless and selfish ones, like Americans — incapable of empathy, love, grace, kindness. They watch each other’s kids die and shrug…they watch one another perish for lack of healthcare…so why would they care about…the world? They live empty lives, which is why they pile up possessions, to forever try and fill that hole in the soul with status and dominance and superiority. The secret they don’t know is that hole can only ever be filled by caring for the rest of the world, but they can’t do that, because to them vulnerability is weakness, and weakness is death.

(We’re aliens — remember. I’m not trying to judge you. Just to observe.)

So the two worlds barely ever meet. The people in the poor world are mostly trapped there. And the people in the rich world are quite happy that way. They don’t want the dirty filthy subhumans of Amazon or the Sindh or the Pampas anywhere near them — if they even know what those things are. They allow a few in, sure — the ones that fill gaps in their “labour markets”, doctors, engineers, and so on. But as a rule, the people of the rich world are happier exploiting the people of the poor one that knowing them, seeing them, talking to them…much less living beside them. They say they value democracy, which is living as equals — but that’s laughable: the people of the rich world have no desire whatsoever to treat the ones of the poor world as equals, only as things to be used and abused.

Hence, mostly, in this world, if you have the terrible misfortune to be born poor — you live and die that way. If you have the luck to be born rich — you live and die that way, too. Genetics, birth, circumstance — humanity’s long history of violence, hate, war, and oppression, is still everything. An African isn’t born a slave anymore — just dirt poor, and meant to stay that way. An India isn’t born a bonded laborer anymore — just desperately poor, and meant to stay that way.

If you were an alien, wouldn’t you see all that? And what would it say to you? Now. That was a lot. Maybe too much. But I want to be crystal clear about what I mean when I say: “the world is ending.” The world. This one. A place, which if aliens, visited, they’d say looked like this. 10% of the planet was rich, 90% was poor, and just the top 1%, or maybe 0.1%, of the richest 10% were enjoying better lives. Everyone else? They were under just pack animals under the yoke, more or less, of this system called “capitalism”, and it was collapsing by the day. And that collapse was what was driving this world mad, insane, furious, vengeful, suicidal, self-destructive.

(Now, you can skip this part — where I’ll go into detail — and go straight to the bolded section if you just want to get to the point.)

How so? Because it was causing five massive problems, problems so grave they were genuine existential threats to this thing this species called a “world”: climate change, mass extinction, economic stagnation, social inequality, and political extremism. That’s what’s ending. That world. The one where three classes, strata of humanity existed — the super rich, the merely rich, and the poor — who barely ever meet, and each is happy to exploit the one beneath it. You can see that ending happening already. Americans are poor people in a rich country. What stratum is that? It’s a new one: the merely rich who are collapsing to become part of the poor.

Hence, when I look at the world these days, I see a place where the “risk” of “civilizational collapse” are reaching a kind of tipping point. Where the surety of a kind of epic, grim, fatal collapse is being locked in by the day. I put “risk” in quotes because, well, it’s not much of a risk anymore, and “civilizational collapse” in quotes because it’s questionable whether civilized beings would act the way we’ve come to — but I’ll get to all that. Now, any charge of the world ending is surely — and quite reasonably — met with the old tale of Chicken Little. So: am I just saying “the sky is falling?” In the words that Americans, so puffed up with patriarchy and supremacy and violence love — am I being an “alarmist” and “hysterical”, like a fainting Victorian beauty? Is your gut?

The sky isn’t falling. Nope. Let’s do a quick reality check of what is happening. The sky isn’t falling — it’s burning away. The atmosphere has become so polluted that catastrophic climate change is now more or less an inevitability. Do you think that, for example, the world’s largest polluter, America’s ever seriously going to cut carbon emissions — versus just make more wars on countries for oil, which is what it’s done for a century or more now? I don’t. Sorry — I’m just trying to think clearly. Bombs are cheaper than…transforming an entire country’s way of life. The subhumans they fall on are easy never to see, too. So what about the world? What chance does it stand — if even the richest nation in history can’t clean up its act?

The sky isn’t falling, nope. But it didn’t take the sky falling to…begin killing off life as we know it on the planet, which is the only life we know of anywhere in the universe. I’m a reluctant humanist — if you ask me, “Hey Umair, what’s the most valuable thing in the universe”, I’d say: “life itself, because it only exists here, and we’ve searched far and wide, and found precisely no one else but us out there.” And yet we behave like beings of a kind of deep, profound, venomous hatred. The snakes bite in self-defense. We tear through life itself for no good reason other than to boast to each other how superior we are. Have you ever wondered what the purpose of extinguishing life on the planet was? I have — and I can’t find a good reason. A necessary one. I just see human beings caught in a system — American capitalism — which tells them they are worth nothing, so they must forever pile up needless things to feel anything at all. Bang! There go the insects, bees, fish, whales, tigers, elephants. What good were they, anyways, asks the capitalist, who “hunts” “big game” for ”sport” in his spare time?

The sky isn’t falling — sorry. And yet in every corner of the globe, fascism is resurgent. You can gild the lily as American pundits do, and call it all manner of bizarre evasions — from “ethnonationalism” to “populism.” And yet China’s put more than a million people in camps. India’s just made several million stateless. America, of course, has a proudly fascist head of state, supported by a coterie of literal fascists, who want an ethnically cleansed fatherland where the pure dominate the weak. Nope, say American pundits — just like Indian and Chinese ones — no fascism here!

The sky isn’t falling! Did the sky fall over Auschwitz? Did it collapse over Bergen-Belsen? Perhaps you see my point. Fascism is rising today, like a fatal tide, engulfing the world in ancient hatreds, American settler against hated native, Mexican, Latino, Hindu against Muslims, true Chinese versus inferior mixed-race. It’s never taken the sky to fall for the genocides to begin. The sun shone over Auschwitz, too.

Then there’s what you might call the implosion of the geopolitical order. There’s Britain — blaming all its problems not on the witless Tories who instituted austerity at the precise moment society needed massive investment, after the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s…but on gentle Europeans. Get those dirty subhumans out of here, cry the good people of…Scunthorpe. What masters of the world they are. Brexit mirrors Trumpism — both are epic temper tantrums of societies who still feel the world belongs to them, and threaten to withdraw, withhold, abuse, and whine, the moment that they can’t have the absolute power they feel entitled, like little narcissists, to. But that power is gone. It never existed at all — without savage, constant violence. Is the sky falling for the Brexiter who’s lost his job, career, savings…the Trumpist who’s family is in tatters because the tariffs have cost him what little had? Does the sky have to fall on a person for the life to fall apart?

But Brexit and Trumpism are mere shadows of geopolitical collapse. Take the bizarre relationship between Turkey and Syria and everyone else. The West regarded Turkey as a second class nation, no matter what it did, how it tried to modernize. So naturally the moment stagnation hit, a demagogue arose, on the backs of those feelings of frustration and rejection. Turkey turned into a hypernationalist supremacist authoritarian state — largely because the West wouldn’t accept it as an equal.

And then Syria imploded into a kind of bizarre, gruesome, horrific civil war. As Syria imploded, millions of people fled. To where? Through Turkey, to the EU, onwards into Canada, America…wherever they could, really. Today, Turkey uses Syria as a kind of weapon to intimidate the West with. Translation: a rejected society turned authoritarian, and used a collapsed one to exact revenge on those who scorned it.

Now, you might think: “So what? What do I care about Syrians and Turks? Man, I have my own problems!” Certainly you do. The reason you should care is this (apart from, well, they’re people too.) All the problems above? Climate change, mass extinction, fascism, stagnation? They’re going to collapse many, many more societies. And yet the world has been unable to cope with a few million Syrian refugees, or their closest equivalent on the other side of the world, Latin American ones. But that’s a mere trickle of what’s to come, my friends.

What happens when Calcutta and Bangkok and Karachi are too hot to live in? Maybe 50 million people live in those cities…alone. That’s more than ten times the number of Syrian refugees who…destabilized the West. What happens when all those people begin fleeing their burning cities? What happens when ten million climate refugees make their ways through the middle east, to Europe’s doorstep? When the Amazon has been slashed and burned…making swathes of central and south America largely unlivable…desolate wastes…and tens of millions arrive at America’s doorstep?

Well, what’s likely to happen is…another wave of fascism. Do you see how China — just like that, snap! — put a million people in camps? That’s what’s likely to happen in America and Europe, too, as climate change and mass extinction cause massive flows of human beings, fleeing from their cities on fire and their towns in flames. But it’s not just climate change that’s going to wreck the stable, simple world we’re used to — poor people over there please, rich people over here, and rarely do the two ever meet.

What happens Delhi and Karachi and Calcutta run out of water? Have you ever wondered? Well, one simple answer probably is: war. Likely nuclear war. And long before that happens, seeing it coming, those people are going to flee. So resource wars are yet another massive pressure that’s going to disrupt the stable, safe, simple world we’re used to.

That world is ending, my friends. It genuinely is the end of the world. In a profoundly and lethally real way. Not “the” world as in the only one. But a world which is the only one we’ve ever known.

Now, that was far too long. So let me try to crystallize my point.

The world that we’re inheriting is going to be a very different place than the one we’re used to. It’s not going to be one of three strata that barely every touch anymore — the ultra rich (Bill Gates), the merely rich (the average American), and the poor (everyone else on the globe). It’s going to be a world where, instead, these three strata collide in explosive, dramatic, fatal ways — finding themselves at each others’ throats.

That new, dystopian world is going to be marked by three implosive changes.

The stratum of merely rich is going to become increasingly poor. Why? Because we’re living on a dying planet. There isn’t going to be enough to go around. America already doesn’t have enough — money, freedom, time, decent jobs, and so on. Just zoom Americans living like poor people out. Increasingly the merely rich part of the world — the comfortably rich 10% — is going to become like the American middle class: trapped, downwardly mobile, declining, desperate, furious, out of chances, savings, opportunities.

The stratum of poor, at the same time, is going to start to be annihilated. By climate change and mass extinction — not to mention being in the middle of implosive capitalism and it’s enemies, like the poor Syrians were. No — not like a Hollywood movie, not all at once. Here and there, in terrible waves of suffering. There’s Delhi, running out of water, there’s Mumbai and Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, which become too hot to inhabit. Bang! As the stratum of poor faces annihilation, it’s going to flee desperately to the rich West and North, through the corridors of the east and south.

But the West and North, remember, are already going to be getting poorer. How do you think they’re likely to react to pulsing, pounding waves of migrants? Not in a friendly way. They are likely to react with defensiveness, violence, and rage.

Hence, the bottom two strata are about to collide in an epic way — the 90% of global poor, and the 10 of global rich, as living on a dying planet becomes more and more challenging every day now, and self-preservation takes hold over all else.

What about the top stratum? The 0.1% — the global super rich who became the ultra rich? The mere hundred-millionaires who became billionaires? Well, my friends, the ugly truth is that they are likely to laugh as the poor and formerly rich find themselves pitted against one another. They are going to become something very much like a new global aristocracy — or perhaps I should use the word “kakistocracy” , rule of the worst, since they are mostly tacky, cheesy, criminals of various kinds. And yet they will prevail — for the simple reason that while the first two strata fight each other desperately for basic resources, air, water, food, energy, jobs…they will profit immensely, and grow even richer. They will be something like new kings and lords and barons, able to buy entire regions and counties and states whole.

Now. All that’s a profoundly — truly — ugly vision. And yet I can’t help but see all that happening, almost inevitably. Unless.

You and I fight for the future of the thing we call civilization. The truth is it’s never been good enough, never fully worthy of the name. And it’s up to us to make it better. The sanest belief a thoughtful person can hold these days is that the world — all of it — must become transformatively fairer, freer, and wiser, if the difficult exercise of human civilization is to endure. The only way to fight the 0.1% laughing and ruling and becoming something very much like neofeudal overlords, as the 90% grimly, desperately battle the 10% for air, water, food, energy, jobs, shelter, subsistence…is for the 90% and 10% to ally and strip the 0.1% of the looted wealth and power they don’t deserve in the first place…and invest all that instead in themselves, each other, the planet, life on it, and democracy across it.

Re-read that sentence, because everything you need to know about the future is in it. Yes, really. Sorry if that sounds arrogant, I guess. But the truth is this. If the 90% and 10% can’t ally against the 0.1%…then they are both done, and the future is the global mega rich becoming neo-emperors…imagining stupidly, like Trumps, \]

that the ashes of a dead planet are worth more than gold. It’s time to get radical, my friends. The world is ending. Can we build a new one?

Umair

October 2019