Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

As western political disintegration continues,
immigrants will arrive in increasing numbers, and
will exploit very well the opportunities that are on
offer. The ageing of western populations creates a
continuing need for new arrivals to support the
growing number of pensioners. While indigenous
populations waste their lives on the dole, these
latter-day barbarians (a term that should not be
regarded as pejorative) will be building their power
and influence as they infiltrate every corner of the
west’s civic life. The latest arrivals will be the least
easily assimilated and the most cynical in their
exploitation of what the west has to offer.

Today’s peaceful invasion of economic
migrants will prepare the ground for their kinfolk
back in the homeland. When the west has become
terminally feeble and defenceless, the only citizens
who retain any vigour and sense of purpose will be
those who have no allegiance to anything it stands
for. Yet the western countries will still be laden
with riches. This combination seems bound to be
irresistible. The final days of the present world
order are very likely to be marked by mass
movements of people out of the impoverished
lands. They will come from Africa to Spain, Italy
and Greece, thence northward; from the middle
east, across eastern Europe and perhaps Russia, to
Germany; from Mexico and across the Caribbean
from Brazil into North America. Moreover, these
people will not come peacefully. They will have
consulted no immigration official. They will bring
no passports. They will not be coming to work.
They will be seeking booty, and revenge for half a
millennium of humiliation.

The western nations have spread an enormous
amount of bad blood around the world in the
present era, interfering everywhere and imposing
their values with a degree of insensitivity that
future historians will truly wonder at. The dark age
may see the opportunity for old scores to be settled
and to be paid back not once but three times over,
as centuries of resentment are relieved in a few
intense years. When the plunderers arrive, they will
head first for the big cities, where the pickings are
richest and thickest on the ground. They will be
looking for everything from petrol to slaves and
precious metals.

Unplanned migration is already a problem in
the west. The number of people seeking political
asylum has increased dramatically in the last few
years. Between a third and a half have their
applications refused, but in Britain that still means
thousands being admitted every year.2890 In an
increasingly disordered world, one might expect
that the proportion of admissions should rise, since
claims of fleeing oppression will seem increasingly
just. Besides which, large numbers of asylum
seekers lose patience with the bureaucratic process
and go underground as illegal immigrants. In
Britain, at least 60,000 have thus evaded the
authorities in the past decade. Smuggling third
worlders into the rich countries is now a multi-
billion dollar criminal business.2891 Fishing vessels
carry them across the Mediterranean and truckers
speed them overland.2892 Bangladeshis, Iraqis and
Indians were recently found to be riding in to
Britain on freight trains going through the Channel
tunnel.2893 New laws, tougher rules and more
vigilant border controls may slow this tide, but they
will not halt it. The would-be immigrants are
extraordinarily determined. Five Ukrainian men
were recently intercepted trying to row across the
English Channel in a child’s inflatable dinghy.2894

Today, third worlders come surreptitiously
rather than bearing down on the rich countries in
their hordes because they perceive that the latter,
who not so long ago directly ruled the third world,
are well able to defend themselves. Today, they are
probably correct. However, with every decade, the
reality is changing and so eventually will the
perception. In Sierra Leone’s recent civil war,
teenage soldiers, both girls and boys, were required
to eat the organs and drink the blood of their
victims as a military initiation rite.2895 By contrast,
trainees at Britain’s school of naval gunnery were
being asked to shout ‘bang’ rather than fire real
ammunition, in a bid to contain costs.2896 It is
increasingly doubtful whether these western
youths, whose only taste of violence is in computer
games, will really be any match for the blood-
drinking, machete-wielding Africans in a serious,
face-to-face fight.

The Sierra Leone teenagers conduct military
actions that they call Operation No Living Thing
and Operation Pay Yourself (i.e. looting). How
long can it be before they start bringing these
‘operations’ to feebler and far more lucrative
Europe? Although they are seldom in western
thoughts, today’s underprivileged peoples are well-
informed of the richness of northern lands, of the
vulnerabilities of those lands, and of the existence
of others dissatisfied like themselves. They are
fully engaged in the world and they show an astute
understanding of how to operate within it. Ugandan
conmen posing as underprivileged schoolchildren
were recently found to be raking it in with begging
letters sent to prominent Britons.2897 Other scams
have originated in Nigeria. In 1999, refugees in
Tanzania were rioting because fleeing Kosovans
seemed to be receiving better rations than they
were.2898 Clearly these people know exactly what is
going on elsewhere – and they are not happy about
it.

In August 1998, Moroccan and Tunisian
asylum seekers who were being held on the Italian
island of Lampedusa destroyed their detention
centre in a night-long orgy of violence. For fifteen
days they had watched through barbed wire fencing
as western tourists sunned themselves on a nearby
beach, laughing and joking, enjoying good food
and copious quantities of wine and beer. Eventually
they could take no more and, with temperatures
touching 40 degrees, erupted in a spasm of riot and
arson.2899 This is a microcosm and a warning of
what the future holds in a world where large
numbers of hungry, brutalised, third world youths
are daily being televised the image of fat, spoilt
white people living it up at a party from which they
have been thoroughly excluded. The west’s present
insouciance may be thought breathtaking.

The neo-barbarian invaders of 2050 will leave
little clear record of their activity, for they will
destroy as they go. Future archaeologists will have
to guess at the horrors that might have occurred.
They will have to judge from the rubble, the signs
of burning, the apparent changes in racial mix of
local populations, and the abrupt silencing of a
once articulate and exuberant civilisation.

Humans yearn to be free, but that leaves them
insecure and yearning to be told ‘who they are’ and
‘where they are going’. Society may have become
secular but people in general have not. The demise
of traditional religion has left a gap in their lives,
though many may be unaware of it. Finding
themselves alone in confronting the mysteries of
life, people feel unaccountably dissatisfied. This
results in social pathologies like drug addiction,
which only leave people more desperate than
before. With nothing to push against, people’s
pleasures come to seem transient and valueless.

Hence, there is a huge innate need for spiritual
sustenance. As discohesion continues and the
spiritual and moral foundations of society become
increasingly fluid, this need will swell to huge
proportions. In the coming decades, spiritual issues
will loom much larger in people’s lives. However,
the spirituality of the descent will be immensely
diversified. Some of it will be an attempt to
recapture old legitimacies and the traditional
religion. Many people, though, having thoroughly
accepted the de-legitimisation of their own
traditions, will embrace alternative ones wholesale.
At the same time, there will be a mass of people
who continue to follow the secular life, self-
indulgent, heedless of spiritual questions, sated in
all material wants, but by no means contented.

The Roman Catholic church might meet a
spectacular downfall, perhaps even confirming the
twelfth century prophecy of St Malachy who
foresaw only two more popes after the present one.
However, though Christianity perishes, new sects
will grow like grass on its grave. These will
reinvent the Christian message, transforming it into
something almost unrecognisable, but possessing
new vigour. The old faiths will fade away, but
some new cults will mature into stable traditions
and may eventually spawn genuine religions.

The fragmented spirituality of the descent will
not be successful in satisfying people’s desire for
moral certainty, for they will be surrounded by a
jumble of alternative belief systems, all of which
challenge their own. It may be some comfort to
share values, attitudes and beliefs with the
members of a local cult, but it is far better when
one is in the company of millions – how proud and
how certain one can be then. A meeting of the local
Conservative party is not a Nuremburg rally. The
touch-line of a Sunday football match is not
Wembley stadium. In the same way, cult
membership is not the same as belonging to a
universal church. For all the religious revival of the
coming decades, therefore, people will be left
wanting. Spiritual experience will ring hollow. No
moral way will be restored. Troubled by an ache
they barely understand, these people will readily
rejoice as their godless and goal-less civilisation is
finally consumed by the flames.

Small businesses come and go all the time, and
they will continue to do so. However, one can also
expect to see the eventual failure even of giant
firms that supply momentum to the whole
economy. During the descent, such really big
names as General Motors, Nestlé and IBM will
begin to fall, and at an accelerating rate.

People are likely to take up hoarding, as the
economy of the high street becomes less
reliable.2839 Barter may emerge as a more common
feature of everyday life. This will be partly to avoid
taxes, and partly because money becomes less
useful when the economy is falling apart. People
may participate in two economies. One will be the
official money-based economy, in which
dependency is rife and goods and services are
difficult to obtain. The other will be an informal
economy, in which the official currency is just one
of several media of exchange. Here goods that are
virtually unobtainable by other means may still be
available. However, to operate successfully in this
economy, one will need the right set of contacts as
well as the right means of exchange.

The relation between different economic actors
is like the relation between the keystone and the
columns of an arch. If the keystone gives way, the
columns will fall in. On the other hand, if the
columns crumble, the keystone will drop. Either
way, the keystone and the other bricks will end up
in a heap of rubble, all reduced to the same level.

The collapse may therefore begin in the poor,
peripheral countries, where institutions are
weakest, but it will inevitably spread inwards to
reach Japan, American and Europe. In the western
Roman collapse, such an inrush of darkness took
more than half a century. The future collapse,
however, is likely to occur in a much shorter time,
owing to the speed of contemporary
communications. When south Asia or Africa
experience such anarchy and comprehensive
business failure that urban life is abandoned there,
a similar fate for the west may be only a decade
away.

A nuclear war that takes place in the next few
decades will probably be relatively controlled. It is
not clear how useful nuclear weapons will be in the
types of conflict likely to be encountered.2814 States
do not usually go on fighting when they are
convinced that it will bring them little advantage.
During the descent, limited nuclear exchanges
could soon lead to negotiations.

When the descent finally culminates in
collapse, disintegration will be extreme. One can
expect uncontrolled fighting and extreme
irresponsibility on behalf of the belligerents. This
period may be marked by a prolonged and massive
thermonuclear orgy, in which virtually every
remaining warhead will eventually be exploded. In
this case, the whole fabric of society may unravel.
With famine, disease and civil disorder, population
numbers are likely to fall precipitously over the
following decade. This could subsequently be seen
as the trigger for the dark age, confirming the
traditional vision of thermonuclear doomsday. In
reality, of course, it will have been the deep
historical trends that will have brought humanity to
this pass.

During the dark age itself, people will continue
to be very ready to use the nuclear option.
However, large warheads will be inappropriate for
the small-scale fighting of a thoroughly
disintegrated world, and people will probably not
have the expertise to make them anyway. They
may find other uses for nuclear materials.
Plutonium, for instance, is a deadly poison as well
as a nuclear fuel and explosive. A few kilograms
could wipe out the entire human race, if suitably
distributed. There are now tons of it on the earth,
and this supply will be around for a long time –
plutonium has a half life of 24,400 years. Such a
potent material could be a popular weapon in the
disordered and unstable conditions of the dark
age.2815

Terrible wars lie ahead. Just as the sailor-
suited boys of the Edwardian era were unwittingly
destined for the carnage of the battles at Ypres, so
today’s young children are fated to shed their blood
on the battlefields of the future. Only it will
probably be far worse. Nuclear wars could easily
kill many hundreds of millions. Nevertheless, after
the mushroom clouds have dissipated, the
incredibly resilient human race, which will still
number in the billions, will pick up the pieces and
carry on. People will have discovered that nuclear
war is survivable. They will then be ready for
another one. The dark age, in which no one has
either the knowledge or the resources to build a
nuclear arsenal, will be a merciful release.

Tom Mazanec wrote: Tue Feb 14, 2023 9:48 am Higgenbotham, is Marc Widdowson still alive? Have you anything from him since 2001?