The 21st century will be the “wormwood century” for the masses. The trends are obvious. The rich will become richer and more influential. They will have access to very expensive biomedical technologies that enable them to live longer and healthier lives than the masses. Only the rich upper classes will be able to afford to give their children healthy food and supplements. Only they will be able to truly educate their children.
The wealthy at the core of the capitalist system, the United States, will become a caste. That caste will jealously guard the medical technologies that enable them to actively live for a century or two. They will protect their own, the other “immortals”.
Those below them will be permanently divided. For the first time in centuries they will be both mentally and physically weaker than their masters. Their lives will be miserable, left browsing a stultifying internet with only the basics of literacy. With eighty percent of them superfluous, they would only exist in return for handouts and favors from those above them. They will not be able to afford a real education. What use would they have for it anyways? The masters will manipulate the lower classes through sophisticated media, political, information, and psychological technologies. Advances in bio and nano technologies as well as neuroscience will enable the masters to create obedient servants, soldiers, and bodyguards.
The fate of the lower classes will also be bitter in the surviving “traditional” countries which lack science and industry. They will live in societies dominated by religious fundamentalists who reject “Western ways” out of “patriotism” while struggling to find bread and water. They will work hard to supply raw materials for the world’s elite. Their rulers will secretly enjoy many of the benefits available to those Western “devils”.
Ukraine too will find its place in that new world. It will become one of the poor and dying states. While confident in its Europeanness, it will be a dark place filled with madness and delusion. Money will be omnipotent, and the country will turn into a wilderness. Men will fight each other just for a few hundred dollars. In the end, it will be an ethnological zoo.
The new world order will feature castes and slavery. The United States will emerge as a Globalia which will be closely tied to Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of western Europe. A sea of collapsing countries will surround Globalia. That sea will be filled with unending low-tech wars, new tribal alliances, barbarism, and savagery. Hunger, thirst, and unending tribal warfare will thin out the masses. Even raw material exports won’t be able to sustain them. New energy efficient machines as well as nanotechnologies will reduce the demand for oil and natural gas. In the future, there will be three or four sellers of oil for every buyer, rather than now where the situation is inverted.
The “master race” will reign far beyond the reach of the savages below. They will build enclaves and protected estates free from the pollution which devastates the rest of the world. They will sail the oceans in floating cities. Who knows, at some point they might even inoculate themselves and the necessary part of humanity against genetically engineered viruses, then snuff out the rest of mankind.
What is next? The domination of the upper classes who will become a new master race as well as a revival of the slave trade. As in Asimov’s “The Currents of Space93”, squires will be selected from among the masses of Globalia’s subjects. They will be privileged over their countrymen and have access to some parts of the upper class. But in return, they will take a vow of celibacy. Generation after generation of the best of the subject peoples will die without children, ensuring that their gene pool declines.
Everyone else’s fate it to be part of the unthinking herd. The herd will idly consume the stupidities of television, the soporific entertainment, and the raving of clownish politicians. They will put every part of their life online - and those who do not will be reported to the authorities. They will be driven by envy, sadism, and conformity. Fads, media campaigns, and hysterias will occupy their lives. In the end, they will lose their ability to think for themselves.