Dr. Arnim Zola : HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize was that if you tried to take that freedom, they resist. The war taught us much. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded, and I was recruited. The new HYDRA grew, a beautiful parasite inside S.H.I.E.L.D. For 70 years, HYDRA has been secretly feeding crises, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed.

Natasha Romanoff : That's impossible. S.H.I.E.L.D. would've stopped you.

Dr. Arnim Zola : Accidents will happen. HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, HYDRA's New World Order will arise. We won, Captain. Your death amounts to the same as your life, a zero sum! ... I wrote an algorithm ... The 21st century is a digital book. Zola's algorithm evaluates people's past to predict their future.-

Is this right? Would a world in chaos be the one most likely to hand itself over to authoritarians?

I think not. In times of chaos, you protect yourselves and your family. You don't trust authority, and you don't really care about any threats because you've seen shit that's almost as bad.

For a robust democracy to turn to authority, you don't need chaos, you need order. As the great economist Minsky said, Stability is Destabilizing. The more stability you have, the less margin of error people will leave for the dragon of chaos when it does wreck havoc. Everything has been engineered (or simply adaptively optimised) to a sigma or two of failure, and when events no longer take on a normal distribution the wheels of society all fall off at once.

Enter Coronavirus. A threat to 0.05% of the population (or whatever the CRF of the Wuhan Wheezer actually is, we still can't trust any data) is not a threat. 407,300 Americans (mostly young and fit) were killed in WWII and it barely even reached their shores, a couple of fat male geriatrics meeting the reaper a few months early is hardly a cause for concern in comparison. Yeah it's bad, but it's not really all that bad. But society just can't cope because we weren't ready for things to get even slightly uneasy.

Businesses are no longer piratical near-monopolies which can just live off the fat, they're lean, mean, cut-to-the-bone efficiency machines which can barely operate if their wagies take a piss-break. Politicians don't have ideas (unless they're crazy and ineffectual like Trump), they sit in party-run call centres calling up potential donors to buy ads to get an extra 1% of votes in the next election. Everything is about marginal advantages in a highly competitive market, which is the kind of society which simply can't survive a shake-up.

So what is next? I expect that Coronavirus won't be enough to really make society fail. We'll just squeak by, but it will be scaring enough for us to put in place measures to ensure that it can never happen again. The government will want to be able to obtain the complete location history of every individual to ensure that any future epidemics will be traced. And people will be willing to accept (even welcome) this intrusion. Hell, it will be an absolute win! Imagine all the joggers who will be caught breaking into houses! Imagine how easy it will be to trace drug deals! Just have everyone have their mobile phone act as a snitch to the authorities, and like the Mark of Cain (DID Q PREDICT THIS?) demand that everyone have the snitch app installed or they're just not trustworthy. And why not install audio monitoring as a bonus, to prevent any MeToo atrocities occuring! It will all be for the best.

Life isn't a zero-sum game, but the margins are now efficient enough that disruptions have become intolerable. Which means that disruptions will be removed at all costs.

Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Go away now! (I stole this from some Youtuber)