The Event No-one Sees Coming

When pressures of the kind we have been describing build up, from what I have read they tend to release through an event.

The event comes in one of two shapes.

Sometimes it is small in itself, and out of all proportion to what it unleashes. A single act of violence. A particular death. A funeral that becomes something bigger than a funeral. Something that, in a calm time, would be absorbed and forgotten. In a pressured time, it becomes the thing around which everything reorganises.

Sometimes the event is itself large — a financial collapse somewhere important, a harvest failure, a war that starts somewhere far enough away that it seemed to be somebody else's problem. These events are not small. But they are, themselves, releases of other pressures, and they trigger further releases that would not have happened had the first pressure not released first.

I cannot tell you which kind will come first. Nobody can.

I also cannot tell you when. It may be soon. It may be decades away. What I have described may take ten years to unfold, or fifty, or more. The shape is the argument. The clock is not. If you are young, you will probably live through at least some of it. If you are old, you may not. Your children will.

Whatever the event turns out to be, and whenever it arrives, it will not, on its own, have caused what follows. The pressure was already loaded. The event is only the release. If this event had not happened, another one would have.

After the event, things that had been unsayable become common. Things that had been holding together stop holding. The polite fictions everyone was maintaining start to fall. The people who had been watching their words stop watching them, because too many others have stopped watching theirs.

And then the sorting, the money moving, the people moving, the state reaching for harder tools, will move quickly. Faster than anyone expected. Faster than most countries' institutions can handle.

I do not say this to frighten you. I say it so that, when it happens, you recognise it. The event is the match, not the fuel. The fuel has been there for a long time.

One more thing, before we walk into what tends to happen next. I am describing the shape I think is likeliest. Other shapes are possible. Sometimes pressures dissipate without a match. Sometimes the release is smaller than the pressure suggested. Sometimes the institutions that looked decrepit hold better than anyone expected, and the societies that looked brittle turn out to have depths nobody was counting. History does not always move in the direction the pressure suggests. I am telling you the shape I see, not the only shape. If what follows turns out to be smaller than the book describes, I will be glad, and I will have been, in this section at least, wrong in the direction that costs nobody anything.