System Failure: It Only Gets More Difficult from Here

What if Charlottesville and the dysfunction in Washington are not aberrations? What happens if the challenges facing society and governance only get more difficult for our current failing systems and leaders to tackle? Authoritarianism is on the rise. The threat of fascism is no longer mere hyperbole. There's a growing sense that profound trouble lies ahead and it increasingly feel unavoidable.

Disaster is, of course, avoidable. But avoidance requires awareness, leadership, and corrective action. The time for that action is now. Public discourse continues to be polluted by computational propaganda and disinformation manufactured at industrial scale. Economic disparity continues to grow. Unfathonable levels of technology-driven job scarcity loom on the very near horizon. Changes in medicine could promise cures for millions while ushuring in massive unforseen conseuqences. Western governments are struggling and states that should have failed continue to persist - and in some cases surge. And we didn't even get to climate change.

Andrew Trabulsi (entrepreneur, consultant, and co-editor of Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur joined me to explore these questions in episode 71. You won't find answers to all of these problems but perhaps you'll find it a useful exercise if you, like us, are trying to make sure that you view our current problem set through the proper lens.