Cusp of Chaos (Second Edition)

Excerpt from "Cusp of Chaos"

People are doing evil and discriminatory things to people in multiple settings across the planet. The old colonial powers gave up their empires in a very clumsy and dysfunctional process. They left behind a world of aberrant, almost idiosyncratic and frequently nonsensical multi-tribal nations with groups of people trapped together in national boundaries that too often make no functional sense and create situations where too many people in too many settings are at war with themselves.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created its own array of problematic and newly independent multi-tribal settings that are each also generating their own internal intergroup conflicts and divisions.

All of the internal conflicts in all of those troubled settings are creating floods of refugees — with more than 50 million people today in refugee situations. Those refugees — combined with a flood of economic immigrants who are seeking better economic status for themselves and their families — have created intergroup conflicts and intergroup stress points across a wide range of countries and settings.

Many countries that had been ethnically pure for centuries — like Austria and France — are finding themselves with major influxes of new people who have a different culture, a different ethnicity, and often very different belief systems.

Riots in London, Amsterdam, and Paris are happening far too often at purely ethnic levels — with all of the worst instinctive us/them behaviors and us/them intergroup thought processes fully activated in all of those settings. The religion of the new immigrants tends to be different than the religion of the original inhabitants in most of those settings. The people who are in a state of intergroup conflict in many of those settings believe that the conflicts they face are religious to a significant degree. That, unfortunately, tends to be a self-fulfilling and self-actualizing assessment, and religious leaders in some settings are now calling for the equivalent of holy wars.

We are seeing tribes at war in a wide number of settings who are making religion a major element in their intergroup hatred. The Shia tribes and the Sunni tribes and the Kurdish tribes all fight as tribes but ascribe religion linked motivations to their shedding of intertribal blood.

In our own country, we don’t have tribes at war with tribes, but we do have significant economic and educational differences between ethnic and racial groups that are causing real problems and we have levels of intergroup anger that emerge regularly with high levels of visibility when trigger events bring the negative intergroup energies in various settings to a situational boiling point for the settings where those events happen.