I have seen a fair number of persuasive podcasts recently - one cited in my recent post - which come to the same conclusion. They explain that the “rules based international order” relies on an interlocking web of formal and informal understandings which establish precisely what memes/narratives are permissible. The participants include, of course, nations and their entire, coordinated bureaucracies. These, in turn, finance many NGO’s and muscle social media companies which act as effector organs to censor deviations. This mechanism, in all likelihood, spells the end of anything like democracy where individuals possess meaningful agency. The new “our democracy”, instead, consists of a consensus of the correct organizations, not people.
At age 80, as I reflect over my life, my overriding sense is of betrayal. I was born in 1944 and was informed by the early post WWII optimism, where I truly saw the US as exceptional and the “last best hope”. That is certainly no longer true. The only question is how bad will it get? I also see the utter dependency of large populations upon technology (whose resiliency, we are learning, may be insufficient) and functional organization of supply chains (which depend on trust and goodwill of many human elements).
It has become apparent to me that these systems are much more fragile than I would like to think. Given the rising social breakdown apparent in most any day’s survey of news headlines, rolling failures of arrival of necessities to local shelves are easy to imagine. Even the arrival of fuel and drinking water (the topic of the OP) in my home can no longer be taken for granted. Many lives are immediately at stake as a result of the increasing chaos. It seems that such chaos may be the deliberate policy of numerous western states. Is it to accomplish complete dependency of everyone upon the state?