A LOT of people I know just want to leave 2020, and go back to the way things were before. They want a return to the status quo of 2019 or perhaps even before that.
That’s not likely going to happen, and for the simple reason that global trends don’t point to the idea that things will get better. The opposite is true rather.
Small businesses are dying. Societies are cracking (partly due to the pandemic, partly due to other factors). The US is filled with low intensity conflict. There’s that gut feeling in the world that the system no longer works.
Furthermore, looking at the world’s condition, it is as though 2020 changed everything radically. The pandemic is the most obvious cause of these changes, but there are other changes that will take years if not decades to fully manifest.
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about AI (artificial intelligence), the political fractures in the US, debt-based economics and the growing opposition against globalization.
There are also strange suggestions among elite institutions, such as the World Economic Forum (calling for a “Great Reset”) and the International Monetary Fund (calling for Social Credit Scores), which to me, suggest that they are alarmed by certain trends or they wouldn’t recommend such measures. Powerful people usually don’t call for increasing control unless they perceive a threat.
So don’t expect things to get better at least on a global scale in 2021. Aside from a self-imposed economic recession (due to the pandemic), other factors are likely to emerge. This reminds me of what I wrote last year as I analyzed the situation going into 2020:
“It’s important to look at the march of history not as a series of gradual improvements (which is the neoliberal outlook) towards some ideal, but as an unpredictable force that no human ideology or policy can control.”
History is indeed unpredictable but it is unpredictable the way natural forces are unpredictable. It is unpredictable the way a storm or an earthquake is unpredictable – you can’t predict when it’s going to strike nor can you guess its details, but nature dictates that it’s going to happen sooner or later./PN
