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Alex Lo

I was never into R.E.M. – always been more of a David Bowie and Queen fan – but loved the title of one of their hits, you know that one, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”.
That’s also why I love reading the Bible. Christians have always been obsessed with the End, and now, the science of chaos and complexity seems to be jumping in on the act. Or at least according to one scientist, and quite a few of his scientific collaborators.
Maybe science and religion are not in conflict after all.
A prominent scientist’s warning
Peter Turchin, a population biologist and complexity theorist, last year published a fascinating book simply titled, End Times.
The subtitle of his book spells out his basic idea: “Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration.”
As the dominant civilisation for centuries, the West may be doomed, and so perhaps may be dragging down the rest of the world. News headlines today offer plenty of intuitive evidence for Turchin’s thesis.
He is far from being the first person to suggest history goes through cycles, and civilisations and societies rise and fall according to semi-predictable patterns. Arguably, the first historians in world literature were motivated by what they experienced as patterns of decline, disintegration and collapse in societies and cultures around them.
What Turchin and his collaborators – professional anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – do claim is that they have crunched the numbers from Really Big Data collected from over 10,000 years, from ancient Egypt to modern Manhattan, and have come up with some conclusions about what religious types might call the Apocalypse.
Via computer and mathematical modelling, they claim to detect “an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century”, and that they can be predicted.
After an integrative phase, a society enters a disintegrative phase, during which it experiences intensifying internal conflicts, crises and eventual collapse. However, a disintegrative period can continue for a long time. Technically, the Roman empire, if Edward Gibbon was correct, took a millennium to go from terminal patient to seriously dead corpse.
It was much quicker for the British Empire and presumably, will be for the American empire.
Turchin and Co are clearly fans of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as they claim the United States was in an integrative phase between 1930 and 1980, but entered the disintegrative period thereafter, during which the ruling and ideological elites dismantled “the pillars on which the post-war prosperity era was based”. Neoliberalism, anyone?
One key ingredient of disintegration is what Turchin calls a “wealth pump”, a system to transfer wealth to the rich and powerful from the poor and ordinary, and a disguised ideology to justify it.
Some of us would just call it legalised theft. Or, as a new article on the Common Dreams website puts it, “The Forbes Billionaires List ‘is essentially an annual calculation of how much of the wealth created by the global economy is captured by a tiny caste of oligarchs rather than being used to benefit humanity as a whole.’”
There are now 2,781 billionaires around the world – with the most and richest concentrated in the US – with combined assets of US$14.2 trillion, exceeding the gross domestic product (GDP) of every country in the world except the US and China.
The flipside of the “wealth pump” is popular immiseration, an increasingly common phenomenon in advanced OECD economies. After a post-war period in Western societies of relative wealth for all or at least most, we are back to rising mass pauperisation as described by Karl Marx in Capital.
The main recent problem with a modern or postmodern empire, as Turchin sees it, is that it produces more elite aspirants than actual elite members. The whole point of elitism, after all, is not to share wealth and power.
A case in point: the latest military funding from the Joe Biden administration’s new budget totals well over US$1 trillion, just for one year.
As the Northampton, Massachusetts-based National Priorities Project puts it: “For far less than the US$21 trillion spent on militarism in the 20 years after 9/11, the US could allocate enough funds to do ALL of the following”:

US$4.5 trillion to fully decarbonise the US electric grid


US$2.3 trillion to create 5 million jobs at US$15 per hour with benefits and cost-of-living adjustments for 10 years


US$1.7 trillion to erase student debt


US$449 billion to continue the extended Child Tax Credit for another 10 years


US$200 billion to guarantee free preschool for every three-and four-year-old for 10 years, and raise teachers’ pay

But no, there are the mouths of billionaires, powerful politicians, Wall Street bankers and death-dealing military contractors to feed – and the history’s most awesome global empire to maintain. Now you know why Washington desperately needs to drum up “the China threat”.
But these elites also lay the seeds of their society’s own decline and fall, according to Turchin.
As productivity and the economic pie shrink, frustrated elite aspirants – for example, PhDs who can’t make ends meet – become sources of anger, grievance and discontent. The staff at my Toronto neighbourhood Starbucks collectively hold more university degrees than my entire family, even counting extended relatives.
Some elitist malcontents end up joining the poor and disappearing middle class, creating a countermovement, much like the support base for Donald Trump, to foment widespread social unrest and even violence.
But it’s not just the US or the Republican Party. You find similar far-right, even borderline fascist, movements as represented by rising populist political parties across Europe, according to Havard Dataverse and ParlGov Dataverse as compiled by the University of Bremen in Germany. These include: the Fidesz, Jobbik and MHM in Hungary; the Fdl, Lega, and Fl in Italy; the PiS, Kukiz and Konfederacja in Poland; the FPO in Austria; the PVV, FVD and BBB in the Netherlands; the Sweden Democrats in Sweden; the National Front in France; the UKIP and Brexit Party in Britain; the Chega in Portugal; AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain.
The ongoing farmers’ protests across Europe, which for some reason have been terribly under- and misreported in the mainstream Western media, are a case in point. They represent a direct continentwide challenge to the political legitimacy of Brussels and the entire European Union project.
US defence turns up heat on China as it increases budget in Indo-Pacific
Certainly the idea of civil war is now firmly in the American zeitgeist. Famous director Alex Garland’s likely blockbuster, creatively named Civil War and starring Kirsten Dunst, is coming out this month, and there is the likely re-election of Trump come November.
Is The Donald the Antichrist? Think about it, he makes a better candidate for that than most.
The Bible foretold
It’s not for nothing that many American Christian fundamentalists love to quote these biblical passages. Clearly, they prefer the bloodthirsty and genocidal Yahweh over loving hippie Jesus.
Ezekiel 36:24 on the (re-) birth of Israel: “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.”
And the lesser-known Zechariah 12:2-3, on Israel becoming a pariah among all the nations: “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.
“And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.”
Maybe those fundamentalists are right after all about what they like to call the Rapture. It’s not for nothing that most of them are rabidly pro-Zionist and also pro-Trump. Considering Israel’s external and domestic conduct, it looks a lot like we are approaching end times as the Bible has prophesied. Certainly Israel’s biggest backer, the US, has been doing its best to help bring it about.
The Israeli Air Force carried out a strike this week which destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and assassinated a senior commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
If you are not scared by it, imagine what you might think if Iran bombed a US consulate in Israel or an Israeli consulate in Egypt. The third world war?
As a learned correspondent has commented, “It is difficult to explain this attack otherwise than as an Israeli effort to cross an Iranian red line and ignite a wider regional war which would distract attention from Gaza, potentially drag the United States into even more direct involvement in Israel’s war against its neighbours and give Israel an excuse and opportunity to use its nuclear weapons against Iran.”
The Israelis apparently call their nuclear deterrent strategy “the Samson option”, if famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is right in his 1991 book of the same name.
The idea is that when push comes to shove, the country’s undeclared nuclear weapons would scare off everyone, and if need be, drag down everyone with them, hence the reference to the biblical figure.
The way things are going, we may be getting there soon.
American evangelists, rejoice and prepare for Rapture!


Gaza Humanitarian Foundation says 2 US aid workers hurt in grenade attack

Supporters of Palestine Action arrested in London following terror ban

3 mayors arrested in opposition crackdown in southern Turkey

Think Trump ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear programme? Don’t be so sure

Middle East

The end of the world is nigh (and I don’t feel fine)

Palestinians inspect the damage at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital after the Israeli military withdrew from the complex housing the hospital on April 1, 2024. Photo: AFP

China is in America’s sights as US defence increases its budget for Indo-Pacific deterrence

The US is zeroing in on China in its latest Defence Department budget request, as it has increased planned spending in the Indo-Pacific. Photo: Canadian Armed Forces

The Pentagon, home to the US Defence Department, has requested increased budget for deterrence against China. Photo: Reuters

Israel-Gaza war after 6 months – what are the issues now?

Destruction left by an Israeli air and ground offensive near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Photo: AP

The site of the Nova festival, where people were killed and kidnapped during the October 7 attack by Hamas gunmen. Photo: Reuters

Humanitarian aid being airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City. Photo: AP

A Palestinian child suffering from malnutrition. Photo: Reuters

A Palestinian boy looks at a drone in the sky in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah. Photo: AFP

Opinion

From America to the Middle East, the Bible and a famous scientist predict end times are here


From America to the Middle East, the Bible and a famous scientist predict end times are here.


My Take

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

My Take | The end of the world is nigh (and I don’t feel fine)

From America to the Middle East, the Bible and a famous scientist predict end times are here