As every entrepreneur knows, the hardest part of any startup is raising funds. The global Bob Pritchard radio show tonite features Tony Drexel Smith the expert at raising funds for start ups and early stage businesses. For entrepreneurs, it is a do not miss. I never miss reading “Money Morning”. This is a particularly interesting viewpoint.
Democracy, communism, capitalism, socialism and fascism were the key ideologies that defined the wars of the 20th century. You can look back through history and point to ideology throughout every major conflict. War is fought over the different ideas those in power hold.
This is because as a species we are tribal. We’re hardwired to live in small groups that are intensely violent to other groups. In the past 100 or so years our ‘tribes’ have radically changed. The industrialization of the world has turned the tribe into a society. Groups that are much larger and much more advanced than anything we’ve ever seen before. People got along for the most part because there were still shared values.
As the world developed, particularly the Western world, we saw the rise of a new ideology. For the first time some people were becoming globalists. They are the first humans to distance themselves from a local, communal tribe. Instead the world is their tribe, all of humanity. The problem though is that globalists are almost entirely unique to the west. It is an ideology born from the wealth and stability of generations that have enjoyed the success we’ve built over the past 200 years.
Here’s the kicker though, this prosperity isn’t universal.
Yes, poverty and crime have been on the decline for decades now. But, that’s not how each of us experience the world on a day-to-day basis. We place an emphasis on events in the present. For each and every one of us, this ‘present’ can look wildly different . Not only for those outside of the Western world, but also within. Today we are seeing the ramifications of this disparity play out. A clash between ideologies that is leading to internal and external conflicts. The China–US trade war is one such example, but this is merely a byproduct of a much deeper moral crisis.
The real divide is the one we’re seeing in American politics. Or the protests we saw in France earlier this year. Or the riots we’re now seeing in Hong Kong. People are literally fighting over ideology. A split that has resulted from our extreme partisan politics. The gap between the left and the right has never been wider. Why? Because people are angry about the world.
It doesn’t matter which side you’re on either. I’m not trying to point out the blame on one side or the other. It is this ‘blame’ in general that is the issue.
There will be no war between nations because the conflict is within nations. The problem is that economic pressures are now compounding this divide. As the haves continue to hoard their riches, the have-nots grow angrier. Each of us just want our fair share. But, as the last great global recession taught us, the world isn’t always fair. Bankers across the world brought markets to their knees, threatened our wealth, safety and our sovereignty. And most got away with it scot-free. When we needed our politicians to step up, they failed us.
Unsurprisingly, this made us madder.
We watched the globalist dream implode, which incited the right to say enough was enough. And that inevitably irritated the Left who perceived this backlash as overstepping the mark. That has brought us to our current impasse.
Whatever happens it will be ugly. Tensions are far too high and the wounds of 2008 too fresh for it not to be. The question though isn’t just how, it’s who, or when. Power is more omni-present and dispersed thanks to things like the internet. It started with social media, making communication with anyone, anywhere easier than ever. This is just the first stage though.
Many predict that the banks will be next to fall, a great ‘unbundling’ as they are gradually picked apart by smaller, more modern competitors. Is this the start of our economic reordering. Both left and right, though they don’t see eye to eye, are sick of seeing this malpractice of money. Just like the people of the 1930s were sick of being downtrodden.The real bloodshed will be in the markets. It may start with the banks, but others will follow. An overhaul to rid ourselves of this dominance of wealth. ‘The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.’
At the end of the day, all the majority of us want, is a fair go.
Three guys walk into a bakery; an investment banker, a government employee, and a tea partier. The lady behind the counter puts out a dozen cookies. Wall Street pockets 11 and tells the tea partier the damn government worker is trying to steal his cookie