On failed states. How far the collapse of civilization has proceeded.
"As of January 2020, out of the 195 countries that make up our world, 65 are now fighting wars — that’s one out of three countries."
(From the article "Scholar Unpacks His 1995 Wager of Global Disaster in “The Collapse of 2020”, by David Todd, October 8th, 2020, on BookTrib)
"50 %, or almost 114 of all countries in the world, are failed countries, broken countries."
(source: Climate and Economy, November 2022)
My comment: See for confirmation the Wikipedia-article "List of countries by Fragile States Index")
"More than 50 of the poorest developing countries are in danger of defaulting on their debt and becoming effectively bankrupt unless the rich world offers urgent assistance, the head of the UN Development Programme has warned."
(From the article "‘More than 50 poor countries in danger of bankruptcy’ says UN official", by Fiona Harvey, 10 Nov 2022 in The Guardian)
My comment: It is as the cyber punk author William Gibson said in The Economist in December 4, 2003: “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
Or as the hippie philosopher Terence McKenna (1946 –2000) said, already before the year 2000 (just think how far the collapse of civilization had gone already then):
“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived.”
(Terence McKenna, from this page, quote nr. 62)
“We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.”
(McKenna from the same page, quote nr. 37)
