Vault Co. talks here about hardening his Vault to protect from a Neutron Attack, which he thinks is a viable possibility. I am of the opinion this govermental cycle will end in economic collapse and general misery, sprinkled with smatterings of the violence of local savages who find they aren’t doing so well, but global war is not wholly off the table.
There is a tendency to think that war can’t happen, especially today in our dopamine soaked fantasy world. It is easy to look at the world stage, and then project your more reasoned psychology onto the rest of the world, concluding that a global war would never go down.
I knew a Narcissist very well, but I still find myself looking at the world stage and thinking, even if the economy melted down, I would never send our military to a far away land to die for fiat currency. I mean who would? Clearly we will all retreat into our isolated worlds, and leave each other alone as we struggled to survive.
But there are people who will start war, and they are known as Narcissists. They run most of our governments, and are very often the ones who make such decisions.
Now if I, personally, was the leader of China, and the US screwed me over on the money it borrowed, I would assess the situation, and say this was my own government’s fault for lending the money to such a reckless and stupid nation. I would compare the imaginary store of value in a fiat currency with the life of my nation’ soldiers, and say, “No War, No Way.”
But to a Narcissist, who has just seen the US defy him, the US would have made him look stupid, personally. The Narcissist is hyper-alert to the slightest hint of any disrespect, and will freak out in response to it. If a Chinese Narcissist leader demands the surrender of all of the United State’s Naval assets to pay off our debt, and the US President tells him to go screw, that Chinese Narcissist will see that as a personal affront, and not as a single step in a grander negotiation which will affect the lives of billions.
He might cloak what is coming in principle, and morals, and loyalty to nation, but deep down, he is going to be waging the war that will come for one reason. If he doesn’t wage the war it would mean spending the rest of his life reliving the moment when another leader told him to go screw, and he just took it – like a wimp and an idiot! The panic, the embarrassment, the humiliation, all committed to the historical record, could be viewed by future generations, for all of eternity. That would be horrific to him. That visceral panic would be repeated daily without end. For the Narcissist, it is an agony worse than death. It is like being Mike Wallace – either you down a fistfull of sleeping pills and a bottle of Bushmills, or you step up and avenge this evil effrontery with whatever means are necessary.
This threat of amygdala agony is why Hitler would crush a glass cyanide pill in his teeth (a pill which he had pretested for effectiveness on his own loyal German Shepherd, Blondi), as he simultaneously shot himself in the head. He would rather kill himself, kill his mistress/wife, and kill his dog and all her puppies, than remain alive, and surrender to American Forces, and endure the horror and panic of amygdala agony.
When you deal with someone, motivated by a part of their brain which they cannot control, and which can terrorize them into doing anything, you can get all sorts of weird behaviors. When a group of those individuals control entire nations and their militaries, you will get weird behaviors which kill millions of decent human beings. What they do isn’t debatable, or open to reason – it just happens.
Given that the US and China are on a collision course over debt, and given Narcissists are not uncommon in either of our governments, I would not assume anything, even a neutron attack, is out of the question. The real story which is to be written about these times, is the retreat of the common man from government, and his replacement with weird, odd human-like creatures which we know as Narcissists.
Of course if Vault-Co is also right about a simultaneous climate change due to diminishing solar activity, approximating a mini ice-age, then we are really in for a wild ride.
May you live in interesting times.