Yes, sweet indulgences of ours :D Actually I don’t think it will be a dramatic fight for survival, or even WWIII, more a painful shedding of entrenched ideas. Sure I can see a potential for “local skirmishes” but I perceive them as a natural “cleansing.” E.g. die-hard uncorrectable nazis and Antifa will probably go extinct in an act of mutual destruction. It’s just a very primitive example, but I hope you get my point. Thus, where you say, “God’s like ‘Fuck it. Time for terror!’,” I see a natural event of a “system of higher order” balancing itself out. Pretty natural. Still, no matter how we frame it, the outcome is the same. If one takes a middle road without siding with any particular faction that has its opposition, one should (theoretically) stay relatively safe — let them have their meaningless fights. Then again, some fights are worth fighting. On the other hand, I could be wrong and maybe some global conflict breaks out, because, as I see it, we are all Westerners — there’s no corner in this world where people would not aspire to some form of “american dream”.

And yes, the solution is pretty simple:

We could cure COVID with a vaccine, and the economy with simple measures like Universal Basic Income and commonsense global resource distribution

I would just add that with commonsense global resource distribution, we would not need UBI (see my original piece ;)). I’m really convinced that economy as a codified/regulated exchange (quid pro quo) will die in the end either way, so why not help it a bit ;) I’m also not sure if that what remains could be called economy. Well, resource distribution is pretty fitting.

Maybe it will sound perverse, but I’m actually glad that we finally arrived at this point in time.