George Turner (1) (1916–1997)

"As I understand it, if I've followed the historical line correctly, they knew what was coming to them just as we know what is ahead of us. Yet they did nothing about it."
"They fell into destruction because they could do nothing about it; they had started a sequence which had to run its course in unbalancing the climate. Also, they were bound into a web of interlocking systems - finance, democratic government, what they called high-tech, defensive strategies, political bared teeth and maintenance of razor-edged status quo - which plunged them from crisis to crisis as each solved problem spawned a nest of new ones. There was the tale of a boy who jammed his finger in the leak in the dyke - I think it's still in the kindergarten primers. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the entire planet stood with its fingers plugging dykes of its own creation until the sea washed over their muddled status quo. Literally." She gestured. "It's all there for you to read."

I could not then articulate what I was beginning to perceive, that when the gap between the rich and the poor is vast and the middle ground the haunt of an endangered species, snobbery was a defence against terror. The Sweet had to believe in their superiority or admit that they tore their possessions from the fingers of the Swill.
And so we did.

The Third World (a concept whose meaning has been lost) had, before I was born, renounced indebtedness to the West (another dubious term) and driven money into a no-win situation wherein the Third World had to be shored up financially by the West because it was the West's profitable junk market. The idea of selling to people who bought with money lent by the seller lest the system collapse was more than idiotic; it was the final self-criticism of a system that could exist only by expansion and when expansion ceased for lack of markets must eat its own body.

This was only a part of what was happening to the world but was the most visibly urgent part. Wealth was in the hands of a few and governments were hunting down the sequestrators of wealth before they could hunt down the governments. The only strategy of power was to place the entire planetary population in the position of poor relations, fed on what could be salvaged from the necessities of armament equality and the maintenance of a crumbling technology in which research and development shrank as they became too costly. Once there had been a 'space program'!

Over this desperation presided a monstrous joke, the ravenous armament factories belching out weapons, which became obsolete on the very design screens and must be replaced in the moment of production... for a war nobody dared start for fear of nukes and an industry nobody dared stop.