Calgary, July 2022
Some time ago I wrote two essays expressing my opinion about the current world. I was very pessimistic and used a quote from my favorite book, The Dictator’s handbook, by Bruce de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: “Politics, like all life, is about individuals, each motivated to do what is good for them, not what is good for others.” For dictators that means they can do whatever they want, there is nobody to stop them. Russian president Putin is a prime example of that. The leaders in democracies, on the other hand, are supposed to respect the will of the people, because the leaders want to be re-elected. US claims to be the leading democracy of the world where the government serves the population, but it is hard to believe. In 2016 Trump became a president, even though Hillary Clinton gained almost 2.9 million more popular votes. In summer 2022, US supreme court made three important decisions: It took away the women’s right for abortion, even though 61% of the Americans supports it and only 37% wants abortions to be prohibited. Then the court passed a law enabling anybody to carry a concealed weapon, even though 60% of Americans want stricter gun laws, and there is an epidemy of mass shootings in US. The third law the US supreme court passed limits the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, although the climate change is a direct threat to the world ecosystem. None of those decisions represent the will of the people.
Why do they do it? US supreme court consists of three Democratic and six Republican judges, and many people, including myself, believe that the six republicans are preparing the background for the hard-core right-wing autocracy. They expect that in the 2024 election Trump or somebody like him will win. If that happens, the power of democratic institutions will be replace by the demand for the loyalty to the leader. This way the three world powers, Russia, China, and US, will have similar political system, just like George Orwell described it in his novel 1984. Two of them, China and US, will be on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum: communism and right-wing autocracy. This will undoubtedly cause conflicts and with no opposition, the temptation for the leaders to start the war will be great. They know that wars always make leaders popular. Maybe the international business community, which certainly wouldn’t want the war, will become strong enough to force the leaders to use logic instead of satisfying their own egos, but this certainly didn’t happen in Russia. It is hard to say to which extend the business community can influence the leaders of China and US.
There is another scenario which could develop: The climate change will initiate mass migration which the rich countries wouldn’t be able to absorb. The anti-immigrant violence will escalate causing stagnation of the economy, and the life becomes a fight for survival. In this scenario the population of the Earth drops, the contamination of the environment decreases, and the ecosystem recovers. New civilization will rise, and two thousand years from now archeologists will marvel about the ancient world which left so much plastic garbage behind. I don’t know if this is an optimistic or pessimistic scenario, but it would confirm the old wisdom that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”