As Western or even Global society waxes in a more Bestial direction we have to expect heightened opposition and exclusion. If faithful, we should be feeling it even now – even in liberal countries that supposedly are tolerant and don't persecute Christians. They may not execute us in the public square but soft persecution exists and there's a lot of pressure. I'm not speaking of the sort of things one might hear Evangelicals talk about on FOX – struggles over cake baking, cross necklaces, or workers forced to work on Sunday. They're actually part of it in most cases as they support the corporate control of workplace culture, selective censorship, and the economic system that puts profits over people.
I'm speaking of everything from compulsory education laws, to conscription, jury duty, and a host of economic pressures and restrictions that force one to operate on a certain level and with certain assumptions, or pay not just a social price in terms of exclusion from the middle class and much of mainstream life, but with it a set of dangers – made all the more poignant and pressing if you have minor children.
Rich Western bourgeois Evangelicals and Confessionalists mock calls for reform and a need to embrace the poor. "We're all rich," they insist as a means to side-step the issue. But it needs to be pointed out that in countries like the United States you're only allowed to be so poor before you're simply forced into either homelessness or dependence on welfare - or your kids are removed. It's true we don't live in shacks and huts, but we're not allowed to either. And the welfare option continues to grow more difficult and this is by design.
Obviously in other places the persecution is more acute and in some cases extreme and perilous. And yet in many cases it is misrepresented by Christian activists and media operatives. I don't in any way mean to downplay the suffering of Christians in Africa and Asia, but be careful - the many 'ministries' associated with reporting these events are corrupt and often manipulative and selective in their reporting. And there is a growing tendency to confuse political activism and punishment with persecution. They are not the same thing.
Dystopia is knocking at the gates and the architects of the Bestial system are concerned and trying to construct mechanisms that allow them to control and govern society. New Testament Christians are not libertarians – governance (as maddening as it can be at times) is better than a lack thereof. In reality there's no such thing because contrary to the libertarian fantasy, that void will be immediately filled by some other entity – a warlord, criminal syndicate, state, or profit-driven corporation. Take your pick.
My concerns don't cast me into the anti-government category. Rather I worry about states building an apparatus that could quickly morph into not just an authoritarian mode but a totalitarian one. And here's the sad reality as the world careens from one crisis to another, if people are destitute, hungry, or in desperate fear to walk down the street due to crime, violence, and chaos – they will happily submit to an authoritarian state that can remedy these situations and provide security, something most people cherish far more than freedom. Or to put it another way, there is no freedom or investment in an absence of security - only uncertainty and fear.
The world is already in a desperate contest for resources and despite Right-wing denials and spin, the population of the world is pushing the envelope. Statistics and arguments put forward by corrupt and often stupid Christian activists about how many people can fit in Texas are meaningless. The questions aren't about acreage but about resources, water, soil, fuel, energy, and unsustainable lifestyles – whether it be middle class energy hogs in the West or pastoralists and farmers in the Sahel and other areas of the world facing desertification or simply lacking (or losing) the water resources to sustain the populations.
Robert Kaplan wrote The Coming Anarchy in 1994 in which he predicted a coming chaos, especially outside of the Western world. His solution as expressed in his other writings and projects is that the West should intervene in the more chaotic parts of the world and manage them. The end result was a kind of Neo-Imperialism masquerading as humanitarianism – or by some more cynical readings a re-casting of the White Man's Burden. The real function is to create an order akin to the movie Elysium in which the 'haves' seal themselves off from the 'have nots' and are willing to use military force in order to maintain this model. And the 'haves' under the aegis (or cover) of humanitarianism move in to take the resources of the world underclass. It's a kind of Neo-liberal fascism – very evil in fact, and yet it's a model that continues to resonate with many power brokers and strategists. Pessimistic and cynical perhaps, but the rosy picture that was being painted in the 1990's simply has not borne out and Kaplan knew this - arguing that the Cold War would seem stable and even desirable when compared with what was to come. Morally bankrupt, he was nevertheless not altogether wrong.
The world is broken – far more than the average person realizes. And worse, the prospects for the coming generation are not good – even dire. Such predictions have been made for a long time and I remember as young man giving speeches utterly denouncing and mocking the Environmental movement. It was easy to do by simply utilizing past predictions and demonstrating how by the 1980's and 1990's they had failed to get it right.
Environmental questions and the tempo of change are debatable. Climate Change is real – you'd have to be blind to deny it. The question is what's driving it – a point that can still be debated as are the proposed solutions. Personally I think many of them are too little too late, and many more are cases of missing the forest for the trees.
To me the real statistics that are telling and hint of unimagined difficulty in the next generation are found in the realm of population. It doesn't matter if you think Climate Change is merely a natural and cyclical phenomenon. It's happening and with current populations - there is a storm brewing in many parts of the world. There will be significant trouble even in the Western world. It may be that the West can afford to house the displaced, but the costs will be great, not just for housing but to bail out and rescue the banking and insurance industry in the aftermath of storms, floods, and other natural disasters.
For starters consider that the US population has doubled since 1950 and anyone who is even middle-aged can certainly 'feel' or 'sense' the growth just when visiting urban centres. My soon-to-be wife lived in Washington DC back in the mid-1990's - when we visit now we are overwhelmed by the growth. It's palpable, even striking. While in some areas (like where I live in rural Pennsylvania) the population is declining, in most of the country its growing and substantially, and yet what's happening in the US is nothing compared to the sweeping and even radical changes taking places in other parts of the world.
Look at Nigeria for example, a country that does receive some media attention due to the constant unrest and for Christians – the growing levels of persecution. As I've long argued, the Right wants to frame these conflicts in terms of religious persecution and the clash of civilisations while secular analysts focus on growing populations, stretched resources, and the shrinking availability of land. The latter is primary, but as tensions flare other motivations can pile on and grant justification for action and violence. The role of the Western powers also must be factored in as the US and its allies have waged a so-called War on Terror which is often not about terrorism at all but it has nevertheless in many cases targeted regions with heavy Muslim populations. Christianity (right or wrong) is associated with these powers and thus when other tensions flare, if the opponents are Christian in some capacity, this increases the hostility and the drive for vengeance as (right or wrong) these poor Nigerian Christians are associated with the violence, power, manipulation, and corruption of the Western powers. It's a mess but this only touches the tip of the iceberg.
Roughly speaking Nigeria is a large country about the size of Washington, Oregon, and California combined. That's easy to visualize.
The combined population of these US states is about 51 million people and as many know Eastern Oregon and Washington, and even parts of California are sparsely populated while other areas are extremely concentrated with dense population centres. In California at least with its 39 or 40 million people - it's hard to escape the crowd. I remember hiking in the woods of Southern California back in the 1980's and rarely being out of sight or range of other people. I can only imagine how much worse it is now. I think of this often as I hike in Pennsylvania and often go hours and many miles without encountering anyone. And Pennsylvania is only a fraction of the size of California and still has the fifth largest population.
Nigeria's population was 37 million in 1950. Today, Nigeria has over 230 million people. Compare that to the 51 million of the aforementioned West Coast states. The US population has doubled in the same period (1950-present), but Nigeria's has grown seven-fold and in just the 18 years between 1990 and 2007 it increased by 57 million. That's staggering. That's almost the entire population of Italy in less than a generation.
Now if that isn't shocking enough consider this number – that same 225 million Nigerians (living in the same area as California, Oregon, and Washington's 51 million) is projected to be 411 million by 2050 – passing the entire projected population of the United States.
It simply doesn't work. The math doesn't work. There's not enough land, water, and resources and that's the case even now as the sub-Saharan populations clash with the cultures of the Sahel – the fact that so many developing world countries possess contrived borders doesn't help matters – yet another legacy of colonialism.
This is why there's fighting in Nigeria between pastoralists and agriculturalists. This is why a city like Lagos has grown from a population of a few hundred thousand in 1950 to being a mega-city of more than 16-20 million today - no one is quite sure of the actual numbers. This is why there's fighting in the Niger Delta, and why groups like Boko Haram flourish and continue to gain followers. This is why hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing, trying to find their way to someplace secure, a place where they can earn money to send home and get their relatives out. There's no future there and many realize it and Nigeria is not alone. It's merely an extreme example. Sudan for example might be the size of Alaska but with arable land around the size of Texas and rapidly shrinking due to desertification, the population of 50 million struggles to survive. In twenty-five years that population is projected to be 85 million. Do you think the wars are terrible now? What kind of suffering and refugee crisis will take place by then?
Western leaders know these numbers but they're rarely discussed because the potential solutions are so politically controversial. And under the guise of humanitarianism, Mediterranean governments on the African side are bribed to restrict these refugees even while EU militaries (and Frontex) seek to stop them from coming – under cover of fighting human trafficking and the like. For the people of Nigeria and those on the refugee trail, dystopia has already arrived and so many thousands have died – and no one cares.
These realities play a part in the discussion over the state and its seeking of control. Contrary to some perceptions, the architects of the Bestial order are not all malicious in intent. Some are but in many cases the reality emerges and as lost people they see no other viable solutions than to implement authoritarian rule.
Consider Indonesia with its population of 275 million – projected to be over 320 million by 2050. The nation is comprised of thousands of islands but some face crushing population densities – Java for example has twice the density of a place like New Jersey, a state in which the Philadelphia and New York metropolitan areas effectively overlap.
Pakistan likewise has faced a seven-fold population growth in the period since 1950 and now has a population of over 240 million with 367 million projected by 2050. That's basically the current population of the United States living in an area the size of New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada – a country with desperate resource problems, increasingly terrible floods, and in other areas, often the threat of drought.
Arizona and Nevada face severe water problems too but the population of these three states is a combined 12 million versus Pakistan's 242 million.
The entire world is faced with growing problems surrounding resources, the challenges of mega-cities, not to mention the inevitability of future pandemics, and wars.
Am I advocating birth control, sterilization, abortion, and childlessness? Some view these as solutions.
No, but I understand why the lost world is pursuing these models. In the West it's often a case of decadence. In the developing world it's about averting famine, catastrophe, and war.
Either way the chaos is coming and the developed countries are not going to be able to seal themselves off – and in reality as capitalist consumers they cannot exist without these countries and their resources, nor are they willing to allow their rivals to get control of them.
It's very ironic to me and I thought about it the other day when Hal Lindsey died. When he wrote The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970, he talked about overpopulation and the environment as being signs of pending societal collapse and calamity. Today it wouldn't be tolerated. He'd be labeled as 'woke'.