Western World Readying For War?
Like an animal preparing to fight, the Western World appears to be making all the systemic changes, readying itself for military confrontation. But with whom?
When a mammal is healthy, fed and happy, it tends to spend its time in leisure, resting and enjoying life. Physiologically, the “constitutive” processes dominate: digestion, healing and growth. In times of plenty, animals will tend to procreate and populations rise.
Stress Response
When a mammal is preparing to fight, whether to defend or attack, the opposite changes. The digestive processes cease – food is no longer a priority – all resources are spared except for those most needed to survive the life threatening event. Blood flow is directed to muscles and the brain. Water is conserved, blood pressure rises and the blood’s clotting system is placed on alert to stave off any haemorrhage. The nervous system is activated so that heart rate rises, adrenaline release rises and catabolic processes dominate. Brain activity becomes very focused on problems of an immediate nature. As such, attention to detail is often lost as brain activity is prioritized for “fight mode”.
If you were a cell in the body, yet fortunate enough to understand physiology, you would be able to guess by the changes around you that a fight is on the cards. Chemical changes around you signal you to start conserving energy and take whatever food comes your way.
All of these processes begin before the fight has commenced.
Telltale Signs
If we look around the world, and were to assume that what is happening has some kind of ultimate, unified purpose, we can already go some way to guess where it is all heading. Using the physiological model, it can be surmised that the body, of which we are a part (in this case the Western world), is winding itself up for conflict. The economy has been thrown into “lean-mode”, such that all the cells (individuals) within it are encouraged to save, tighten belts and reduce expectations. Energy is conserved and resources are placed on standby for use in whatever sudden need may arise.
One of the things that has made wars difficult to wage is their incredibly large cost in terms of man-hours, fuel usage, logistic support. Much of the infrastructure of a war machine does not require soldiers to be combat-ready. It is largely supportive, but prior to the financial crisis, armed forces were complaining of recruit shortages and being overstretched. All this can be solved with unemployment. All those “idle cells” can be put to work for the war effort. Enticement is not a difficulty when there is a food shortage and those who are helping the war machine get fed, as well as their families. Such a situation is not out of the question.
No one yet is talking much about the possibility that we might all be at war, but if it did happen it would be as sudden as waking one morning to the sound of sirens and trucks mounted with loadspeakers heralding the messages of woe. By then, any time for preparation would be over and everyone would need to make do with what they have.
Other Possibilities
Of course, the “stress response” is found in a number of different conditions, particularly acute illness. If we took things at face value, as many are, we might be left with the feeling that the body is just taken with some kind of systemic illness that can be solved. Yet there is an important difference between the illness response and the fight response. In the fight response, the body is perfectly healthy beforehand and suddenly the signals are given. In illness, there tends to be a constitutional upset so that all the cells in the body find themselves unable to function efficiently. It may well be that our society is on the brink of cataclysmic collapse, that we are about to witness the dissolution of the United States of America and the bankruptcy of Europe and the United Kingdom. This may be the fastest death of a civilization in human history, without so much as a fight. It may, on the other hand, be the beginning of a revolution.
The Western world’s productivity is, in fact, extremely high (except perhaps that of the US whose manufacturing sector hardly exists anymore). There is no famine to blame for our economic problems, no disease, no energy bottleneck. The entire “crisis” is generated by bean-counters. The financial sector is totally superfluous to the tangible things that make the economy tick. This makes one quite suspicious as to the real motivations of our planetary leaders, who seem to be playing with the meaning and value of paper money such that quite soon, nobody will have any idea how much to charge for goods or how much they should pay.
If war is the indeed next big thing to come, perhaps following a revolution, then with whom? Perhaps the “enemy” is to be found in economies which seek to separate themselves from the US credit-based financial system, namely the Muslim world with its laws against usury and its trend towards adopting metals-based reserve currencies.
I am left to ask:
The Firing Squid 