nomadologique posted:

that or revolt will be sparked by climate change -> mass third world starvation, millions of refugees from war disease famine drought and rising sea levels

but probably not by first world wealth gap

even in the case of climate change, there's reasonable expectation that it will tear apart europe africa and asia without effecting the united states very much, because man it's hard to float a raft across the atlantic or pacific; we might see people coming from central and south america, but the impact won't be as bad and there's a fairly good chance that stability in the united states will cause callous indifference to the deaths of hundreds of millions or even billions of people abroad; we'll have our own famine and refugees, but our technological infrastructure and vast wealth will give us a good chance to negate a lot of destabilization; and once massive die-offs have happened and the earth can reequilibrate to a decimated population, former "first worlders" will just go right along truckin and exploitin like they always have in the past

at no point has some great disaster in human history convinced people not to be gigantic loving dickheads, and that won't change because of 21st century turmoil