The observations within this post do not amount to a prediction. Sooner, they are a question, one that asks if this could be where we are heading, and if so - what must we do to ensure that we do not arrive there.
In part two of The Age of Heroes and Harlots, I asked the question; could the multibillion dollar sex trafficking industry be influencing the media, the public mindset, and society as a whole for the purposes of scaling the industry and maximising profits - just as the majority of legal industries do through lobbying and other means?
I doubt not that for most, such a question seems a difficult one to take seriously, and so in this part of the series I hope to lend some credence to my initial curiosity, by demonstrating why it is entirely possible that the world is soon to change in a manner that will be conducive to such an end.
If you were to ask the average person, living in a Western country, if they think it possible for their government to fall over the coming years, they would more than likely say "no way." We in the West have done a great job of convincing ourselves that because our countries are so developed, and so civilised, that such occurrences could never befall us, and are likelihoods only for the lesser developed countries in the third world.
Unfortunately for me, I have been unable to hold onto my faith in my government's stability for quite some time now, and my fears that things are soon to change for the worst seem to be validated on a daily if not hourly basis. It is not the ever increasing amount of hit movies and TV shows that have been cultivating anti-government sentiment in the masses over the past ten or more years, nor is it the controlled leaks of information that have enlightened us to the deep corruption within the heights of our governments or the many movements that have highlighted the abuses made by those in the highest echelons of centralised power in the West. It's not even the fact that the police have become a laughing stock and are often filmed being made fools of by a public that no longer fears them, or the blatant vigilantism that is all over the web showing us how the people have started to take things into their own hands. I can't even say that it's the glorification of rebellion in music and media or the growing anarchist sentiment that is spreading among the people like wildfire. And it perhaps ought to be, but it is not the delicate state of our financial system that seems ever-more likely to crash on a global scale as the years go on or the potentiality for the war we've allowed our governments to take to so many other countries to come back to haunt us in kind.
No. It's none of those things that make me question whether governments are soon to start falling in the West. It's all of them, when viewed in relationship to the biggest threat to governance as we know it - the blockchain.
The irony is that we've been led to idolise bitcoin and the blockchain at this point, and the aforementioned distaste for government, banking, and centralised power as a whole that has been drilled into our minds of late, is serving also to lead us towards the idea of decentralisation.
But how closely have we looked at this notion of decentralisation - and at anarcho-capitalism, which seems to be the label bestowed upon the means of governance that will follow the end of centralised power?
We don't need to conceptualise what a self-governing, decentralised community and economy would look like, for we have a perfect example of it right here - Steemit. We have seen a lot of abuse on Steemit, and we have also seen it coming from those with high levels of influence. We've also seen, that they have gotten away with it, because there is no centralised force out there, other than the blockchain protocols themselves, to govern their behaviour. The minnows on Steemit have been all but ineffective at policing the community, and so to think that in an anarcho-capitalistic society, where the corporations have been let off their leashes and no longer answer to a centralised government or rule of law, that things would be better.. is simply naive. What is far more likely to happen, is that rather than the corporations having to lobby or bribe their way towards minor changes in legislation that help them to maximise profits, they will simply propose the laws and use their influence to ensure that every thing they want implemented into the society they will be creating, gets approved.
Decentralisation may have been made to sound like a good thing, but I have seen what has happened to the little fish in this pond who have spoken too loudly; who have had their accounts hacked and their funds stolen; or who have for any other reason been wronged in a way they ought not to have been - they have had no one to turn to but the community for help, which often goes unnoticed or ignored.
But this is the world we are at this point begging for, blindly believing it will be better than what we have. But the problem has never been centralised power - it's simply been centralised power positions being held by unworthy occupants, and society is designed in such a way as to ensure that the least deserving rise to positions of power so that the corruption can continue.
Life still, may not be so bad when the transition to a decentralised, self-governance model under the blockchain has been implemented - but do you see a way to go from this to that smoothly? Because I do not - certainly not for every country. What seems more likely to me, is that the world will have to fall and hit rock bottom before we begin to rebuild it. How this will happen, if it does at all, I could not tell you. Perhaps we will be incited to rise up against our governments and tear them down. Maybe the global financial system will crash and the world will change very quickly for the worst when people lose faith in their governments. Perhaps war will land on our streets as a civil war breaks out between locals and immigrants. I really do not know. But, to think that it's impossible for the government to fall in your life time, would be a mistake. There are countless reasons why it could happen, and many out there right now are hoping for it while simultaneously holding the belief that it could never happen.
If governments do begin to fall in the West in the coming years, life is likely to look very different for a while. With no centralised police force or government health facilities, no public schools or public prisons, the people will be left to govern ourselves while we head towards the construction of a new world atop the blockchain. In the next part of this series, I will be speculating upon what a self-governing population may look like, and asking the question whether the recent superhero craze has been leading us towards policing ourselves all along.