And the VERY SERIOUS question is what other game will they be playing? If it doesn't contribute to GDP its a big problem. OnlyFans, theft, drug smuggling/manufacture, welfare, sitting in mom's basement, etc. Nobody is thinking about the macro-ramifications of pulling out of the "system". I'm not saying it isn't broken, what I am saying is that everyone is dependent on it, which is evidenced by their expectations and desires in their lives. Unless they are Buddhist monks.
This is not FAFO territory, this is a country stability issue, and those seeds are being sown.
I cannot in good conscience tell any young person to "work hard and participate in the system of this society, put in your dues and you'll get to advance in life and receive a reward" because I don't believe anything awaits young people except crippling austerity, debt, conscription, war, and being priced out of the housing market, being unable to start a family, and essentially being priced out of life. I cannot sell them on the American Dream (TM, copyright, patent pending) because the American Dream is basically a dystopian nightmare for most people.
I increasingly believe the world is at a point where there is so much bad blood, tension, and ongoing disputes, and the country is at a point with too much bad blood, tension, disputes, polarization, that we just need 5-10 years of a world war to air it all out, let it out, and allow some countries, administrations, governments, regimes, to fall by the wayside and fade into history.
The post-WW2 attempt to establish a neo-liberal world order based on "rules" which would outlaw war and prevent major international war, was simply misguided humanist globalism.
Humans have a nature that is marked by conflict and defined by struggle. It has been 79 years since a major western war, that being World War Two. The West has grown fat, decadent, docile, and complacent, and addicted to the idea of "endless quantity of life for the sake of life and sensory indulgences, living as long as possible to indulge more things."
Human civilization [perhaps even humanity itself] will not survive long without a world war. This is reflected in the horrifically low birth rates, every single Western nation is below replacement level. Almost all Asian nations [except Afghanistan and Pakistan] are below replacement level. South Korea recently hit a fertility rate of 0.68 and demographers have them on track to wind up with a population by 2100 that is 40% of what it presently stands at.
Somehow people reproduced [rampantly and rapidly] during the Mongol Conquests, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Second World War. Endless prolonged peace has allowed people to become docile, tame, and demoralized.
People need challenge, they need struggle, they need unifying events to help define their culture and civilization. Each generation needs some sort of struggle, ideally a struggle against an external force.
The USA needs either a civil war or a revolution and the world needs a world war, so that at the end of those tunnels we can sort out a lot of stuff and reboot certain things. The level of institutional structural damage done to Western nations and the third world underclasses imported into the heartlands of Western nations has been so severe that there is no peaceful way to gather at polling places and "vote" the nations out from under the problems. In some nations, such as France, the people will likely continue voting up until the day France is finally turned into a caliphate and there is no more voting. "If we just vote harder this time, it will all work out!" It won't work out.
