Dickson Igwe. Photo: VINO

Yes. The chicken has come home to roost. And men and women everywhere were warned. They were told by the world’s greatest economists that the social and wealth inequalities that 30 years of Supply Sided Economic Thinking fostered, was simply UNSUSTAINABLE.

The greatest minds in global economics got it right. Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Thomas Picketty, are considered the most brilliant thinkers on economics today. Two of these men are Nobel Peace Prize winners. These men all sang from the same song sheet. They were in total harmony. They never missed a beat. For ten years, they warned that the gap between the 1% and the 90% in the developed west was growing into an unbridgeable chasm.  

However, the various solutions and remedies to bring about some correction in a glaring inequity, solutions such as increasing taxes on wealth, and spending on the social infrastructure, that these economists propagated, were ignored. Globalisation became a bullet train, without any driver and without direction. As long as it created enormous profits for the 1% the bullet train was allowed to hurtle down the track.

The Warriors of Globalisation, with their Arch Scribes Ex Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, spoke super eloquently of a New World Order that would negate prior economic history and social thinking, and actually point to the end of economics and society as we know it.

And they were armed with a powerful reasoning: the triumph of liberal democracy over Marxism, and the ubiquity of an even more liberal production oriented economics. This was a post 1970s intellectual culture driven by the Chicago School that ruled the roost from Seattle to Buenos Aires and from Beijing to Lagos.

Now, Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history. Fukuyama believed that philosophy from the earliest times, from Socrates and Plato, add the medieval thinkers, through to Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and the great thinkers of the 20th Century, were writing a single narrative. The natural order of science, thought, and action, according to Fukuyama, all pointed to a new land. This was a New World where all the variables in history and society would blend into one fixed point and one final place. 21^st Century Globalisation was the beginning of a New Nirvana.

This was the New Place where Technology took over from frail mankind. Better stated where men would become the observers of what they had created: the creation manifesting itself in a new and perfect world order. The new order would be one where capital driven by technology would negate the intervention of man in society. Instead machines would create a perfect world where the errors of men would no longer exist, thereby creating a truly perfect space for all mankind.

The preceding is the Globalist Perspective of world order. One World, for the globalist, is the natural outcome of social and physical science. Hence the social and wealth inequality created by globalisation was part of the natural evolution of events. These events would eventually harmonise and come to the desired perfection. What the globalist forgot was that man is not necessarily rational. Man is a very complex creature. He is very much unlike the machines he makes. He is flesh and bone. He is mind and emotion. He is love and hate. The globalist forgot that man is very unpredictable. Man is a simple animal.

Various forms of government and social and economic system have ruled the world from the first time man set foot on the planet. There has been anarchy, monarchy, feudalism, republicanism, democracy, fascism, and democracy. Then there are the variants of these: capitalism, communism, socialism, oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorship, and so on and so forth. And from the earliest times thinkers and philosophers have pondered on the nature of man and how best to direct his impulses and energies. What they have found is this: man is a mystery. Just when one great mind thinks that he has solved the question of man he gets a shock of some type. The unexpected happens. Like a complicated marriage, men are not easily fathomed.

Globalisation and Fukuyama’s End of History have not materialised. Instead BREXIT has sent the Purveyors of a globalised ideal into a state of shock. The rise of nationalism mixed with xenophobia and racism have given the Liberal Elites a severe wake up call.

Then there is another paradox. The great economists of the present age believed that wealth inequality would be addressed by a socialist type revolution. The mechanisms of governance would be taken over very democratically by socialist types who would in turn raise taxes on the 1% and create a more egalitarian world through fiscal and economic spending. Socialism blended very well with Fukuyama’s End of History Theme.

This would be a new world of heavily subsidised social services, such as free healthcare and free education for the working and middle classes; add social housing, social infrastructure, and a brand new and environmentally friendly environment driven by the Warriors of Climate Change from Davos. It would be a socialist El Dorado.

But wretched mankind frequently throws the intellectual and social elites that have ruled since Ancient Egypt a curve ball. Man has never been far from the cave despite 5000 years of written history. The world has always been a dystopian place. Or as the Bible puts it, the place of pessimism is frequently the wisest place to lay one’s weary head.

Yes. As the rich grew richer, the poor got angrier. This gross inequality took different forms in different places. In the west the working and middle classes grew disenchanted and miserable. In the Middle East Tyranny and mass poverty created the fanatical terrorist. Powerful nation states such as Russia and China became increasingly predatory. More paradoxically, the terrorist’s bomb, together with the outsourcing of work from developed to developing countries, and the super concentration of wealth in a handful of families, all worked together to end Fukuyama’s global ideal.

So today, instead of Fukuyama’s One World Heaven, Nirvana: the world is waking up to a new reality that existed from the earliest times. The New World Order has today given way to an Older World Paradigm of Disorder, with walls, fortresses, private guards, invading armies, refugees, xenophobia, conflict, terror, murderous lone wolves, and war.

Unsustainable inequality is the cause of a coming Global Disorder. The Great Revolution of 2016 is a throwback to a time the world was characterised by fortified empires and hateful ideologies. Why is this so? Well, one can attempt to take man out of the Stone Age, but one will never take the Stone Age out of man. The great irony of Fukuyama is that his Ideal World has turned into a rendition of the Apocalypse.

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