Disaster management as a new reality of the upcoming redivision of the world

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

War as a social institution performs several functions: culling unsustainable communities, redistributing assets, burning passionarity, initiating the work of "social elevators", "primary simplification" of management, and so on. Perhaps it would be more correct to say in the past tense - once the war performed these functions.

With the bankruptcy of overvalued Internet companies (the dot-com bubble), with the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11 of the same 2001, a general crisis of the global world order has been diagnosed. In 2008, this crisis acquired an economic component, in 2013–2014 - a military one, since the “policy of sanctions” is a form of economic blockade, that is, an instrument of the “war of Athena”.

The third world war has already died down

Between 2008 and 2013, Jeremy Rifkin formulated the ideologeme of overcoming the crisis through a transition to a new technological order and building a trans-industrial society after the post-industrial one.

The general features of this order were outlined in the fall of 2014:

• a producing economy instead of a consumption economy;
• post-global order of the world;
• deserted production and the dominance of artificial intelligence in industry;
• additive technologies;
• closed production cycles, efficient use of natural resources instead of nature protection;
• new management formats - semantic, ontological, etc.;
• digital economy, that is, total control of government structures over any transactions.

The construction of a trans-industrial society presupposes the solution of a number of technical problems, the creation of new and the destruction of old social institutions, the redistribution of assets in favor of the industries and organizations of the emerging technological order, a change in the balance of power between countries and military-political blocs.

Again, as in the third world war, there will be a political opera, where in the foreground the protagonist and the antagonist sing their arias, and in the background Troy is burning and the dead bury their dead.

Such tasks have always been accomplished through war.

World War I marked the transition from the age of steam and electricity to the age of aviation and internal combustion engines. It led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, the degradation of France and Germany, the loss of civilizational leadership by Great Britain and its capture by the United States of America. Russia withdrew from this war through a revolution, which allowed her to avoid the fate of the vanquished, not to take upon herself the sins of the victors and, albeit with territorial losses, to preserve the empire.

The Second World War, on the one hand, was an attempt (with unsuitable means) to "outplay" the First, on the other, a transition to the age of atomic energy, all-weather jet aircraft and space. Along the way, the "German project" was finally liquidated, the Japanese Empire was destroyed, Italy lost its acquisitions as a result of the previous war, England lost its political independence and turned into a satellite of the United States. America consolidated its global leadership, created a new kind of global organization based on logistics principles, and ended the war as a power that only possessed nuclear weapons.

But the Soviet Union also created a global organization of a new type - on the basis of Marxist ontology and communist ideology. A confrontation between the superpowers began.

Since both opponents possessed nuclear, and since the beginning of the 50s and thermonuclear weapons, the third world war was designed from the very beginning as a global nuclear one. It should be borne in mind that in this potential conflict, the United States had an advantage from the very beginning to the end: full parity was not achieved at all, relative parity was formed only by the end of the 70s. Prior to that, the strategic situation was seen as follows: the USSR can completely destroy the European allies of the United States, the United States can completely destroy the Soviet Union and survive, but it will incur unacceptable losses.

There were plenty of reasons for a real nuclear missile war, but its risks were perceived by the parties as unacceptable. In the early 1980s, Karl Sagan and Nikita Moiseev reacted creatively to the current military-political situation and developed the concept of "nuclear winter": a total climatic catastrophe caused by a global war.

The “nuclear winter” model was absolutely hermetic - it could be proved or refuted only by organizing such a global war. But the reasoning looked convincing enough for the world elites to finally accept the long-established fact: the third world war turned out to be cold. This is a blockade war that does not involve a clash of the main forces of the main opponents. Razu-

Of course, the passionarity of the parties was burnt in local conflicts on trifles. Of course, these conflicts slightly shifted the balance between the superpowers, but the content of the Cold War was not skirmishes in Vietnam, Angola or Afghanistan, but the struggle between Soviet geopolitics and American geoeconomics. Blockade and counter-blockade.

The Cold War dismantled the USSR, the socialist community, the world "leftist project". It resulted in the 5th technological order: globalization, consumption economy, service economy. And the indisputable military-political, economic, cultural leadership of the United States of America.

Thus, the third world war solved the problem of changing the technological order and the redistribution of assets between the old and new centers of power. The conflict between the superpowers was global in nature, but at the same time, from the generally accepted point of view, there was no war as such. There was a slow confrontation, a stifling blockade, informational impact and in the background of the common terrestrial theater stage - local clashes on the far periphery of the world in the form of familiar wars: with gunfire, bombing, destroyed cities and human corpses.

The war was different.

The Battle for Trans-Industrial Order: Global Civil

The collapse of the USSR gave rise to the concepts of "sustainable development" and "end of history", implemented in the format of globalization. From the very beginning it was clear that this was not for long and that a new stage in the struggle for the redivision of the world awaited us.

The first subtlety is that globalization has destroyed the traditional boom and bust cycles of the economy, described a century ago by Nikolai Kondratyev, which made it impossible for the coexistence (or, on the contrary, war) of competing world economies. Consequently, a new global conflict should be formed around technology-worlds. This identifies it, on the one hand, as a transition between technological paradigms, and on the other, as dismantling the consumer society and building a new producing economy.

The second subtlety is associated with the cyclical nature of American history: twenty years of instability, four to five years of conflict in the form of a civil or external war, 15 years of reconstruction and 40 years of sustainable development. Since the summer of 2001, the United States has entered a new cycle. In 2020, he must approach the crisis phase, which provokes a civil war in the hegemonic state, that is, a global civil war. Alternatively, the conflict can be broadcast outside, as was done in the early 40s, but this requires the creation of a strong external adversary.

This could have been done by destroying the globalization system. The Americans took the appropriate steps, but "world terrorism" was not drawn to the threat to the American way of life, despite all the PR provided to it.

Finally, the third subtlety lies in the peculiarities of the economy of the 5th order with its domination of financial technologies over production and management over business and common sense. As a result of many years of practice of transferring "dirty" industries abroad, the Americans have maximally strengthened their main competitor - China, at the same time giving it the status of a "workshop of the world" and, in addition, overloading their financial system with credit obligations, and the economic system with derivatives.

As a result, a macro-regional polycentric structure has somehow developed in the world. The United States of America remained the undisputed military and economic leader, but could not use its advantages within the framework of the globalization regime. China, on the other hand, has perfectly fit into the existing world order, eliminated a century-old lag and concentrated in its hands almost everything necessary for a new leap forward, excluding a few critical technologies that the United States held back for a failure, and the PRC was unable to reproduce. Russia "rose" in the hydrocarbon trade and began to claim its own design, and Europe for the first time in its many thousand-year history managed to create, if not a genuine unity, then at least a political union and "five freedoms of movement": people, goods, money, information, services. This immediately made the EU a conceptual competitor to the United States.

With all this, the military alliance between China and Russia, concluded in the past, if not the epoch before last, was not terminated, which in the long term created a confrontation between the first military power in the world and a coalition of the second and third powers. The world war took on quite understandable and familiar outlines, and in these conditions the importance of the EU armed forces increased sharply. Within the framework of NATO structures, they, of course, should have supported the United States, but NATO increasingly looked like a paper bureaucratic organization, and not a real military alliance.

The "policy of sanctions" of 2014-2016 and its subsequent transition to the "policy of blockade" did not solve the problems of the United States even in the event of the ideal completion of this blockade - for example, with a change in the political regime in the Russian Federation and the return of Crimea to Ukraine. It was imperative to include China in the orbit of the blockade, and the PRC stubbornly continued to act "within the framework of the rules" and did not give the necessary reason.

The local wars of 2011–2019 in Libya, Syria and a number of other countries demonstrated the technological superiority of NATO and the United States, but from an economic and political point of view, they turned out to be a failure. It became clear that just as the third world war did not become a semblance of the second, the new war would not turn out to be a combination of the "ice blockade" with local conflicts on the periphery.

Overall, between 2013 and 2020, a solution is slowly and painfully maturing in the world's elites. Its essence is that local wars have become economically unprofitable, that is, they have ceased to be an adequate tool for the redistribution of resources. A global war, not even the essence of it, is a saturating nuclear missile, according to the early ideas of the Third World War, or a large war with limited use of weapons of mass destruction, built rather in the logic of the Second, contains unacceptable risks. And worse, the big war partly made it possible to resolve the dispute between the powers for world leadership, but in the fundamentally new conditions that had arisen, it did not overcome economic problems either with debt, or with derivatives, or even with a bias of the economy towards consumption.

A “problem of scale” arose and was reflected: a limited war could not act as a “high-tech destructor of the economy” according to Alexander Nekless, while global war turned out to be too good a destructor - “there will be no stone unturned”. In the same way, a war, even on the scale of World War II, will not have any impact on the labor market under conditions of progressive robotization: billions of hands are released, and military losses are predicted within the first tens of millions - a difference of two orders of magnitude. A global exchange of nuclear strikes will probably solve the problem of extra workers, but too radically even for the modern world elites, who, by the way, may also suffer from such an exchange.

As a result, the opinion gradually crystallized that the war was no longer an adequate, albeit radical solution. It is either insufficient or redundant.

The outlines of a global battle

So there will be no war? Of course it will! But completely different.

Not the First - with infantry attacks against machine guns. Not the Second - with tank strikes and strategic bombing. Not the third - with the political and economic confrontation, blockade and subversive operations. All this, however, is also used - but as a background, not content.

At the level of states, the United States of America is the actor of a new war - and, moreover, the only one. The main task facing the United States is to reformat the national economy. We are talking at least about the leading position in the 6th technological order, and ideally about the transition to post-technological development. At the same time, America needs to rehabilitate its financial system, reallocate assets in favor of industrial capital and take out of the game, at least temporarily, China, Russia and the European Union that have come to think of themselves.

"Redistribution of assets" means a sharp weakening of the 5th technological order, that is, the confiscation of financial capital, primarily banking. This cannot be done without violent measures, so we are talking about a "correct" or "meaningful" civil war. A civil war in a hegemonic state, and even in a globalized world, will certainly become global. The Americans tried a “hot” civil war in the second cycle of their history (1861–1865); they have no particular desire to repeat this bloody experiment. Therefore, firstly, the civil war should be exported from the "city on the hill" to the world periphery, and secondly, the war itself should be as cold as possible.

We have a global cold civil war. And this, alas, is not the future of the world, this is its sad present. About five years ago, I read the report “Global Catastrophe as the Best Solution”. There, some of the above considerations were formulated and the conclusion was drawn that it is now more convenient to solve the global destruction of the economy not by war, but by a global catastrophe. Or in other words, global catastrophe is a modern form of war.

And the coronavirus epidemic begins first. First, with the help of the media, it is given all the features not even of the plague of the XIV century, but of a kind of almost otherworldly zombie apocalypse. And then an all-terrestrial catastrophe really happens. Paralysis of world trade routes, total closure of borders, general quarantine, fantastic "self-isolation regime" - all this destroys the world economy much faster and more efficiently than strategic bombing, submarine blockade or the atomic confrontation of superpowers in the previous great wars. Moreover, globalization has done its job and the economies of almost all states are excessively open.

And now, before our very eyes, economic ties are being broken. The length of technological chains is sharply reduced. In connection with the disruption of the sowing season, the phantom of hunger hangs over the world. The total gross product, a fall in which by a few percent was perceived by each country as a national tragedy, falls immediately by 15 percent, the forecast reaches 50 percent or more. Let me remind you that the limit for the Great Depression of 1929 was only about 30 percent of the decline in GDP.

Since people are deprived of the opportunity to earn money (this applies to small businesses, the self-employed and many others), their savings are consumed in the flames of quarantine. Almost all loans issued by banks to individuals become irrecoverable. So much for the reorganization of the economy, and the elimination of "financial bubbles", and most importantly - the flow of assets from banks to financial funds and from them partially to the industry of the new technological order.

The United States, of course, also suffers, but it has a plan of action, there is an understanding of the content of what is happening, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Everyone will pay, only they will enjoy the fruits. Perfect strategy, actually!

Where is the civil war? It will begin a little later, when the level of ruin that has befallen the country will finally be realized. And not so much by the masses as by the petty bourgeoisie, which was put under the knife by a war without war. And note, by the American financial elites, whose interests are expressed by the Clinton clan. Of course, they will start a war for lost property, burned money - for existence.

Spaces of fierce strife

The task of those elites who win the catastrophe will be to keep the war within the cold one. That is, to conduct it in the legal space, in semantics, in virtual and augmented realities. But it is impossible to completely ignore the real world, therefore, again, as in the third world war, there will be a political opera, where the protagonist and the antagonist sing their arias in the foreground, and Troy is burning in the background and the dead bury their dead.

Let's summarize. Previously, war was a social catastrophe. Today, a social catastrophe has become a war. Previously, they tried to present the civil war as a world war. Now the world war will be instituted as a civil war. But this war itself in the format of popular riots and anti-terrorist operations will only be a cover for the struggle in completely different spaces.

Let's list them. First of all, this is the legal space. The experience of the coronavirus has shown that all constitutional guarantees of citizens, and therefore all articles of laws based on these guarantees, are not worth the paper on which they were once printed. This applies to both international law and national laws. On the one hand, this means that the elites are going to rule by relying on brute force, that is, we are threatened by information fascism, medical fascism, or even ordinary fascism. On the other hand, power as the only instrument of power is short-lived. Sooner or later, the "right of the savannah" will be replaced by one or another form of legitimization. The "New Law" will determine the winners and losers in the global civil war.

Let's single out information law, media law, law operating in various virtual worlds as a separate line. Information protection. Information management. Information transformation.

The main thing is control over networks, network protocols, software shells and operating programs. Physical control over servers, data centers, network nodes and intermodal portals that link virtuality to reality.

Further, we will name the conceptual space and the semantic and ontological spaces associated with it. And, of course, linguistic space. In my opinion, the coronavirus media epidemic has dealt a blow not so much to the Chinese economy, although its long-term losses are predicted to be greater than to the rest of the participants in the game, but to the Chinese language, which gradually began to be perceived in the world as a competitor to English. So if the US achieves its goals in this war, there will be only one conceptual language on Earth - English.

Finally, only in the last place will the “war without war” cover the technological space, first of all, critical and closing technologies.

The armed forces in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, operating in an ordinary geographic space, of course, will also be used, but only for one purpose - to discourage the losing side from the desire to unauthorizedly turn the cold war into a hot one.

The war, for which Russia, as usual, is not ready, is not a problem of an uncertain future. It has been running for two months now. And in my opinion, in this war the enemy uses blitzkrieg tactics better than Hitler's generals did in 1941.

Sergey Pereslegin, futurologist