collapse is on the way and its only a matter of how and when;

They may just opt out of the whole insane charade and stop paying the mountains of debt and stop trying to prop up the deranging pretense of middle-class snobbery.

Though many blame Donald Trump for dividing the nation, the nation was already disunited. Trump's election simply added day-glo paint to the lines that had long been hardening between disunited, disaffected camps.

As I've explained over the years, disunity is the systemic source of collapse-- not just of nations and empires but of enterprises and families. In other words, disunity is scale invariant: it breaks down marriages, family fortunes, partnerships, corporations, nations and empires with the same dynamics.

When challenges arise--and challenges always arise--the unified family, enterprise, nation or empire can make the shared sacrifices necessary to meet the crisis head-on, and not just survive, but as befits an anti-fragile system (as per Nassim Taleb's definition of anti-fragility), become stronger as a result of adapting to the crisis.

The family, enterprise, nation or empire fragmented by profound disunity is incapable of not just shared sacrifices but of a shared consensus on how to proceed against challenges such as famine, pandemic and economic depression.

It is the nature of human existence that shared sacrifice is the glue that binds disparate individuals and groups into a unified and thus powerful entity. In the early days of the Roman Republic and Empire, the wealthiest citizens were taxed heavily to raise the money needed to defend Rome or prosecute wars of conquest.

The patrician class served as officers in the army, and it was their duty to serve in the front lines, and in some cases (such as the horrendous defeat at Cannae) suffer higher combat death rates that common soldiers......read more.......