Bleakness

The balance of life is very fragile. One minute, someone that you know well is here and next minute they are gone. We have all loved and lost and watched the mortal remains go through the rigmarole of funerals and interment or cremation. Human life in total hangs in the balance of an enormously complex structure that we call society.

The trouble is that the complexity is exponentially increasing and the biggest enemy of the machine is greed. There are those in society who are creaming off what they need regardless of the effect on the mechanism as a whole. Few people give real regard for the good of the whole and most are content to grab what they can while they can with scant thought for anything else.

Stock market crashes are artificial disasters brought about by extreme wealth wanting to become more extreme, the effects on their fiddling and tweaking can have consequences that are far reaching and devastating on the rest of the popluation, who have no control over the finances in their lives. Major financial crises could easily derail society as a whole; look at Zimbabwe with its galloping inflation; that country hovers on the edge of anarchy and unless something is done, catastophe is almost a certainty.

So many aspects of the modern world can easily break down and any one of them could precipitate the end of civilization. The electronic revolution has made us dependent upon computer technology and networks that are all so vulnerable to deliberate and/or accidental damage. Food supply is stretched to breaking point and while we now take for granted fully stocked supermarket shelves, that may not always be there. All it takes is a small climate change or a new virus to change all that in a very short space of time. HIV is not an infectious disease. What happens if it mutates into one that is? What happens if Ebola escapes from Zaire, and reaches a population centre?

Fuel is becoming very expensive and one day will run out. Who can imagine the powerful western states, sitting back and letting the OPEC countries hold them to ransom over the last drops?

We are living in a house of cards that is growing faster and faster, spreading in all directions. Sooner or later the wind will blow.