A Brief History of the Future

Ahead of the publication of Liberty Bound, this blog provides a very brief journey through the future to explain what goes wrong and how the world of Liberty Bound came to be.

So, let’s start with the present! We will push the all absorbing Coronavirus to one side. It has hogged quite enough column space and, with (washed) hands up, I confess to neglecting to factor in a global pandemic to bring about the collapse of civilisation. Actually, in truth, I didn’t want to exploit a singular catastrophe to explain away such an event. Although history may sometimes appear determined by a solitary occurrence, it is all rather more subtle, intertwined and relative. Your erupting hotspots, such as wars, revolutions and collapsing empires, take place at the confluence of many long-winding rivers that have built up dangerous currents over a long time and, as with the collapse of the Roman Empire, those alive at the time don’t always recognise the significance of what is occurring around them as the water carries them forward and under. (With this in mind, do watch out for what happens down-the-line to an already debt-ladened world as it borrows more to stabilise its economies during the Coronavirus lockdown, then borrows some more to stimulate its economies towards ‘recovery’ - that’s one mighty current flowing.)

Therefore, instead of the singular catastrophe, I threw in three ‘spatial’ disasters. Issues that build up over time, unnoticed or ignored until too late. There is global warming. Only yesterday we thought of it as a nightmare of the future, before we discovered the future had caught an earlier train and has already turned up at our door, with suitcases, to stay for a while and take all our food. Secondly, there is a world of finite resources and a world of 8 billion-plus consuming resources like never before. They will run out sometime and there isn’t such a thing as credit for these resources. And, finally, we have rising criminality. I wouldn’t say we were necessarily more poorly behaved than our ancestors. Societies, as a whole, value life more today. But your average medieval peasant, after a hard day labouring in the field, wasn’t joy-riding on his neighbour’s oxen, and, if they were, (love to hear from any archivist of such evidence) they kept their misdemeanours nice and local and received an ASBO or red-hot poker for their troubles from irked neighbours (they also had the local lord to do all the violent stuff to them under the cloak of legality). Today, crime comes far and wide to find you, and the flames of criminality thrive under the oxygen of mobility and access. The adage of it only needing one bad apple to ruin the basket takes on a new meaning when the bad apple can come to whoever’s basket it choses, down the road on its moped or via the internet.

Let us now do some arithmetic! Global warming + limited resources + rising crime and the fear of crime = bad news for civilisation. While the use of global resources increases global warming, the latter then ferments the limiting of resources, as we lose fertile land to rising sea levels and increasing temperatures. We’ll now add to the equation nation-states competing for those limited resources and peoples migrating en masse to find better lives. According to my calculator, that gives us conflict and social unrest (plus a few factors that get lost as I round up). Well, conflict’s never good on frugality or the environment, so we can do a bit of multiplication and times by 10 our global warming and limited resource integers. I also want to square our criminality and continue to do so every hundred years, because this is important in understanding why national governments collapse.

I will elaborate. Mankind is both social by nature and selfish. The social bit is actually driven by the selfish bit. All life is selfish: it’s how it survives! Compete to find the best partner to make the strongest offspring to perpetuate your genes. What most animals have worked out, is there’s a bit of leeway for swinging elbows to allow co-operation between the competitors, so providing support to nurture and perpetuate those precious genes. For example, some creatures run or swim in groups to improve their odds of not being the unlucky one eaten, while some hunters attack in packs to increase the chance of success. Civilisation is the greatest construct of this principle. Mankind came together, recognising the benefits it brought to the individual and their genes. Think of it as the first insurance scheme: dividend payments as hard fought for as any other since. However, when elements of that construct no longer appear to be offering the security and resources become rarer, then the individual will seek alternatives based on its ‘selfish’ survival instinct. For some, that will mean the purest form of selfishness: stealing. Swinging those elbows and hitting those competitors. For others, they will look to the familiar community oriented approach, swinging a collective elbow, but find this cohesion at a smaller, local scale.

So, after the world exhausts itself, centralised economies breakdown, law and order goes to rack and ruin, crime spins out of control and governments became more and more ineffective. Communities retreat in fear until there is a time when countries and governments are no more. All that remains are tiny communities living behind walls, clinging to the past, and bandits raiding and plundering in a world of anarchy.

The cruel hand of Mankind’s fate still has one card to deal though. Time continues to progress, contact and trade between communities become less and less, even the bandits vanish, unable to survive in a parched land, until only one community, fear and the walls remain. Welcome to Liberty Bound!