Turning Points

The last post may have confused some readers since it moved too quickly from a focus on 

central and eastern europe to an expose of the western system - the basic argument being 

that it was “out of balance”.  It started by noting that few people had ever imagined that 

communism would collapse; that most writers had been exploring the opposite process - of 

capitalism giving way to socialism. 
The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communist regimes gave rise to the literature 

of transitology but it was 30 years before we got a full reckoning of its effect on both Eastern 

and Western societies in The Light that Failed – a reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen 

Holmes (2019) – a book which suggested that many of the new entrants to the European Union 

in 2004-07 were inflicted with an inferiority complex and the old members with hubris.

Jared Diamond's Upheaval – turning points for nations in crisis which came out the same year perhaps offers a better explanation in suggesting that countries have a variety of ways to respond to crisis - viz

1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis

2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something

3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be

solved

4. Getting material and financial help from other nations

5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems

6. Building national identity

7. Honest national self-appraisal

8. Historical experience of previous national crises

9. Dealing with national failure

10. Situation-specific national flexibility

11. National core values

12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Inasmuch as there's now a deep sense of crisis everywhere, it's helpful to use this framework t

to think about how societies should be responding to the present polycrises.
People shy away these days from prediction – it’s got a bad name for having so many 

failures to its name. The favoured option is scenarios (to which probabilities are attached) 

with four scenarios normally being on offer. So here goes for my scenarios for the future

• “Transhumanism” – being the name given to how AI will be extended to our human 

bodies. Here’s a helpful video about it

• Dystopia?

• Utopia – which is probably be a form of Socialism

• ??

NB

Diamond's book has received mixed reviews – this website collects them all

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/upheaval-turning-points-for-nations-in-crisis/

Books which ask what individual crises might tell us about national futures are rare. The only other one I know is Life – and how to survive it by Robin Skynner (psychiatrist) and John Cleese (1993)