I published this essay 13 years ago, as the culmination of half a dozen years of consulting work with USG clients on emerging issues in global affairs. I’m sad that the dark vision I anticipated has largely come to pass, as playing by the rules has become widely seen as a sucker’s game, given that the rules are so rigged in favor of the plutocrats.

“The kaleidoscope proliferates opportunities for arbitrage and the defection of customers and foot soldiers alike to other governance spaces. The ultimate losers in all of this, of course, are the middle classes—the people who ‘play by the rules’ by going to school and getting traditional middle-class jobs whose chief virtue is stability. These sorts of people, who lack the ruthlessness to act as criminal insurgents or the resources to act as plutocratic insurgents, can only watch as institutions built over the course of the 20th century to ensure a high quality of life for a broad majority of citizens are progressively eroded. As the social bases of collective action crumble, individuals within the middle classes may increasingly face a choice: accept a progressive loss of social security and de facto social degradation, or join one of the two insurgencies."

The curse of Cassandra…