Tom Bacon

British public discourse is being overtaken by a batshit mad debate about mass prayer in public spaces - at the exact moment the global system is about to enter accelerated energy, economic and food collapse. It is being pushed into a tailspin by a bombing campaign launched by its fulcrum, which is unravelling the foundations of the global order. This didn't have to happen - the system would have chugged along and unravelled far more slowly. But this is a symptom of what happens when a civilisation moves into the third, near final stage of its life-cycle: the 'release' stage, when tremendous amounts of materials and energy are released as the system loses integrity and breaks down. We are moving through the eye of the needle. But our political leaders are caught up in mud-slinging about Muslims celebrating Ramadan in Trafalgar Square? This is the insanity phase of the fall. Many past empires went through this. For the Mayans it was ramping up blood sacrifices. For Rome, slightly closer to home, imperial elites devolved into a surreal mix of extreme decadence and systemic cruelty, where the pursuit of spectacle often replaced civic duty. Increasingly macabre public executions and massive, bloody arena games were used to beguile the public as much as they obsessed elites. The British empire was no exception. The closer it got to unravelling, the more the empire leaned into a "scientific" justification for its rule. This included phrenology (measuring skulls to "prove" racial hierarchy) and a belief that colonised people were "uncivilised" and required British "order," even as the empire oversaw catastrophic famines. The descent into madness can precede frightening outbreaks of violence as a crumbling system fails fast. Prevailing norms and values are rejected because the system itself and the organising logic that once held is no longer safe - it no longer holds. As conditions rapidly shift, that unravelling of the centre creates a vacuum. Into it, the extremes and fringes are often clung to. Old tribalistic ideas are picked up again, and grafted Frankenstein-style on to the remnants of a fragmenting political and cultural architecture. The thing about all this is that the madness has nothing to do with people's actual lives. It will not address the several hundred dollars per barrel of oil prices that will execute the global economy. It will not address the structural dependence on fossil fuel energy sources which, already experiencing declining energy returns, will become scarce for years due to a cratered regional Gulf petro-order. It will not address the overfinancialisation of the economy thanks to hedge funds and banks given excessive free reign, which combined with other systemic drivers has served to entrench poverty, widen inequalities to unprecedented levels while our infrastructure and public services and quality of life degrade. But no, we must continue to consume the spectacles on X, Meta, Insta, Netflix, whatever, while tuning in to listen to politicians rage-bait endlessly, channelling the best of the exclusionary fascist ideologies that tried but ultimately failed to run governments over the last century. Tommy Robinson is being outdone by voices in parliament. For a moment, stop and take a look at who is funding these politicians and pundits and thuggish agitators. Who is it that wants us to tear each other apart? Are they not the same billionaires and their asset managers and investment funds who, endlessly insatiable, want to feast on what remains? In this hallucinatory stage of the phase shift, insanity becomes the modus operandi. The irony being that if the Timothy's and Farage's of the world get their way, it will do nothing to help us - end freedom of religion and association, ban mass prayer, destroy investments in renewables while doubling down on dying fossil fuels, crush worker's rights and slaughter the NHS through ruthless privatisation, take Brexit to its final conclusion and dislocate the EU from within so that we can welcome in vulture American hypercapitalists and their allied Putin oligarchs with blood-drenched open arms.

We are going to be in for a rough ride folks. But Trump has triggered an inflection point, and there's no going back.