Narrowing the focus to breakdown of social structures: If the West had a motto, it would probably be "Anything is Possible." This is what we like to kid ourselves that we believe, but in practice what we usually mean by "anything" is a rather narrow conception of educational, financial, and lifestyle success.

It is interesting to compare this picture with India, where precisely anything is possible. Here wealth and poverty, order and chaos, life and death have achieved an other-worldly coexistence. India is a transfinite society that accepts everything and aims at nothing. The interesting thing is, from a great enough distance, the entire world "looks like India," with its privileged classes and its multitude of poor, its simultaneous booming and crashing.

Presumably, any effective international cooperation would only make this more apparent. In such a world, politics and war become little more than the private pastimes of ambitious individuals, as the vestiges of state apparatus etherealize into caste and cult.

The USA is zigzagging towards a common endpoint with Europe, and Europe is such a tired continent. I would be very surprised if even in a century from now Europe will be able to produce anything more violent and aggressive than harsh memos. Doing fine economically, but just can't be aroused to take up guns and pacify the world the same way Americans still can. Europe is the 60-year old that still can be a mean business man but feels too old to run around in the woods with a gun. America is maybe twenty years younger, to stay with this analogy, but nearer to the European predicament than is popularly thought.