Perhaps the West is post-democratic. Its voters no longer articulate where they stand ideologically and why. Elections are no longer debates. Rather leaders are promoted and sold, and other brands are rubbished, and voters respond by either liking or disliking. Most western people live in the mass and social media – radio, TV, tabloids, Facebook, Twitter and the like. The time commitment is vast – say five plus hours a waking day. The characteristic responses are two. One is to like or dislike, a subjective act in which thinking is subordinated to an emoted response. It “affirms” the individual, but kills thoughtful debate. The second is passivity. The show will go on, and we, the masses, are the audience. All the world’s a theatre, and nearly all the men and women sit and look.

The others are running the show. Who are they? They are the rich. They do not want things to change, because their markets run the world and much of their money is untaxed. Banking, mass media, property, weapons, oil, computing, the web, big food, clothes, domestic, media will carry on. Especially since the time of Reagan, they chose the populist leaders who will be reliable – bailout bankers, keep share/property prices high, allow trade domination – and they got them. They have millions of middle-class supporters, looking at the Daily Mail. They are populist, like Ronnie, or more recently Trump and Boris, the political performers. They promised the poor, but gave to the rich. Donald was for the white underdog, but cut taxes massively for the rich. But the controlling network is far bigger, world-wide, and it includes China, Russia, India. Brazil and all the big world economic players. Money, now including new currencies, holds them together. Policy doesn’t change things, until there is big money in it. Other policies are side-lined and hit the wall. The redistribution of wealth and income is suppressed out of existence. Threats, like Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US, are liquidated. And so they rule, giving the masses their predetermined choices and entertaining them to death.

There are three slow trains coming. The first is global warming. The world’s rich are profligate with energy. They have suppressed acknowledging the crisis for three decades and now it will hit, sometimes rich and poor, but usually poor, and it will cost impoverishing the world with famine, fire, flooding and weather destruction. Then, the big world industry of militarism will produce its induced tensions and war, eating up resources, destroying, threatening and tribalizing, so that we continue to become the fighting planet. even producing the big war. Finally, world population, the young poor against the old rich, the press of resources, tribulations, the gradual exposure of the vast capitalist conspiracy will lead to irreconcilable confrontations. Trump’s people did not understand what they did, but they did it. Islamic terrorism has been created by the West, and will fuel great Middle East conflicts. Failed states, with rich rulers bedding money in the West, will tyrannize and fall all over the planet. How it will turn out is everybody’s business, and we do not know. But, very roughly, this sketches the scale of the problem and the failure. To acknowledge this is so, and that we can face our sins, is the first step.