An increasingly dangerous world

I’ve got a pretty bleak, albeit reductive, theory of global politics that I’m working from right now.

The key driver is climate change. We’re living in a world that will have fewer livable places and fewer resources. This will happen quickly.

Rather than co-operate to slow climate change and distribute resources intelligently to preserve life and ecosystems, there are a set of powerful people who see this as an opportunity to consolidate their power and influence.

Around those people are a set of other, relatively powerful people, who are either on board with consolidation or can be manipulated into supporting it.

Consolidation means acquiring land and resources. It also means manipulating people into believing that only some humans are worthy of having access to them. The others can be sacrificed or put to work. Hence, we get more war (land and resource acquisition), more nationalism / fascism (dehumanization of everyone but a defined in-group), and less democracy (disenfranchisement for all but a few groups).

The people who are most resistant to consolidation and manipulation are the young people who will have to live through the fallout from it. They are more likely to protest and organize for an inclusive, co-operative world.

The people who are most liable to go along with it are the people who always were on the side of dehumanization, those who want to take the opportunity to preserve a better life for themselves at the expense of others, and people who are not paying attention. They are not necessarily equally morally culpable, but they are participants nonetheless.

Those of us who are in opposition need to support the young people. We need to give them platforms, put our full support behind them, and more than anything else, listen to them, take their lead, and do what the activists and leaders among them ask us to do.

It’s not theoretical and it’s not purely in the land of the ideological. People will die at the hands of fascism, war, and climate change itself. Peace is worth struggling for. An inclusive world is worth putting ourselves on the line for. We need to be watchful for the power dynamics that seek to strip agency, power, resources, and importance from out-groups and consolidate them into a tiny few. It will become genuinely life or death.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.