[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Locally that already takes place, Ruanda being a prime example. I recently have read an interesting analysis in a book about the genocide in ruanda, and understood that it has had very different reasons then what usually was reported. It was about populationpressure in extremely densed social environment, explosive social pressure due to the social order collapsing down to family levels, and simply not sufficient farming grounds available for all.

We know from animals experiments, that if you put too many rats into a cage, they start to attack, bite and kill each other, not only when food is lacking, but the stress is too much and turns them into zombies. That is what has happened in Ruanda. Other examples could be given, too.

So far such events are locally only. But in case of Africa and SE Asia, they could turn into wildfires including the whole continent. It could also affect the megacities in the rest of the world, which includes Western metropoles becoming ungovernable. In parts and some sectors, many huge cities in the West already are that: ungovernable. Rioting, anarchy, civil war looming under the horizon. Burning suburbs in Paris, racial riots in LA, war-like street fighting in Rio, and the police in Berlin no longer daring to enter certain sectors of the city anymore, are just the prelude. You can have as much high tech as you want, sooner or later the police is fighting in a lost post.

Think of it as the Rat Opera.

Bingo. And one could think of it as a very brutal and primitive form of Darwins law, survival of the fittest. Those who are able to slash and cut their way to the top will live, those who cannot, will die, and thus the cycle will begin again.
Primitive, but the basic things are.