David Betz on Coming Societal Collapse
Introduction: Browsing X a few days ago I came across a YouTube video from the New Culture Forum of David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King's College London, predicting civil war in The U.K. The video is 42m16s. I watched about the first half, then bailed out. I'm bookish, just not a video person. (My wife and I watch a movie every Saturday night. The family joke is that a movie must be really good if Dad's still awake halfway through it.)
Forward to this week. Monday March 24th I got an email from a friend alerting me to an audio podcast of Professor Betz talking to a different person on the same topic. My friend urged my attention to this second posting. He noted that Mark Steyn had already passed comment on it, calling it "the most important thing I linked to this week."
It's twice as long as the other — 1h29m05s — but my friend liked it so much he'd made a transcript in Microsoft Word, which he attached to his email. So now I could read what Professor Betz has to say!
I did. My friend is right, and so is Mark Steyn: It's worth the attention of any thoughtful person.
To assist in its circulation in the bookish nonvisual/nonaudio community I thought a web version might help, so I did one from my friend's transcript. You're welcome!
The Coming British Civil War — David Betz
Maiden Mother Matriarch Episode 124
Perry [00:00:00]: Hello and welcome to Maiden Mother Matriarch with me, Louise Perry. My guest today is David Betz. He's Professor of War Studies at King's College London. He's got a long history as an academic and as a government adviser, which he describes at the beginning of our conversation. And we spoke about something very disturbing — but also, I think, very pressing — which is the possibility of civil war in the West, and in particularly in Britain.
David and I both live in Britain, which is part of the reason for that focus; but also because, actually, the conditions for conflict in Britain are particularly shocking.
I decided not to paywall all this. It's freely available because I want people to listen to it and because I want listeners to share it with other people, because I think that this is important and I don't think we're talking about it enough. And I came away from this conversation convinced that this is really something that we should all be concerned about.
So yes, I mean, you can go to Louise Perry at substack.com. Do the usual plug, but the whole conversation is available on all podcast platforms on YouTube everywhere. It's going to be freely available to anyone who wants to listen to it.
So David: I wouldn't normally do this at the beginning of an episode, but given that we're going to talk about such serious matters, and I don't want to risk sounding like we are … I don't know: being cranky or alarmist or whatever, could you start by talking a bit about your academic background and your credentials in making these important, but I think quite shocking, claims about some of the risks we're facing right now?
Betz [00:01:51]: All right. So: my name's David Betz. I'm a Professor of War in the Modern World in the War Studies Department at King's College London. I've been employed there for coming on to 25 years now. My area of specialism is contemporary strategy.
My interest in this subject came relatively recently and somewhat surprisingly. I have a specific background in irregular warfare, propaganda, strategic communications; and I've been very involved in the discussions surrounding counterinsurgency and specific strategies and techniques in, let's call them, the expeditionary wars of the War on Terror.
So I've spent most of my professional life being concerned with irregular warfare; or fundamentally with the ways in which societies tear themselves apart and attempt, in various ways, to put themselves back together … Nearly all of that, and in which course, I've written extensively all kinds of academic work.
I've advised government (including the British government) multiple times on this subject area; but in, most pertinently, British Counterinsurgency Doctrine, the latest version, or the most up-to-date version of which, names me as an external contributor. So I've done a lot of a lot of work on the subject of societal failure and attempts to cure societies which have descended into civil war for one reason or another.
Most of that work, of course, has focused on countries other than our own (outside of the West). This is the default. The default setting of the academic and the practical study of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the West is the assumption that it is a subject which is pertinent to other countries. It's not a problem for well-governed, financially stable, domestically pacified, generally happy, wealthy, prosperous countries.
I began to think some years ago that that assumption was invalid. I began to recognize the problems which we were studying abroad as being increasingly prevalent, indeed increasingly typical, of our own societies.
This actually came to a head for me in the period after the Brexit vote during the parliamentary shenanigans over how to implement the people's decision on that matter (where the people were consulted on it as a very specific matter of the national will). And it appeared to my mind, as to many others, that the government was doing its best to subvert and otherwise avoid the implications of that decision, which clearly went against their own judgment about what was good for the country; or at any rate, good for themselves, good for the Establishment. So I began to write about that with an increasing concern.
As my apprehensions around the stability of the society increased, I became increasingly aware, or increasingly to see, the problems of the British state. And it must be said, not just the British state. But being here in Britain, I was very focused on that particular event as one which was increasingly impelling society towards some kind of civil conflict, some kind of rupture, between the people and the government over what might be described as the social contract, in most basic terms.
And I suggested that what the parliament was doing in that period was very dangerous. They were feeding a pre-existing perception that governments had failed in delivering on the social contract, and they were doing that in an increasingly obvious way.
I also began to write with a colleague about what seemed to us the character of the form of politics which had come to dominate Britain, but the Western world more generally. We can go into this in more detail, but it occurred to us that this was a form of politics which was post-national in its orientation; which was essentially Imperial in the way that it conceived of politics at the very high level: to be not about the aggregation of individual wants and desires in society, but about the community-level negotiation of the societal goods, essentially. Which is fundamentally how empires work. It's not how representative democracy — based on the kind of individual citizen concept — tends to operate.
From about that period I became more and more interested in the domestic scene as an arena of conflict that people in my field of strategic studies, broadly speaking, (or war studies more specifically) should pay more attention to. During that time, for reasons that are now perfectly obvious to anyone who reads a newspaper, the issues that seem to be arising or coming to a head or surfacing in a big way, at that point, have just metastasized and become more visible, more divisive, more profound, more dangerous.
I've been focused on the U.K. because that is the country in which I live and to which I feel the most affection and duty as a citizen; but I don't think this is a uniquely U.K. problem. It is one that is typical of the whole of the Western world at this point in its history.
That, in a nutshell, is my bona fides, essentially.
Perry [00:08:47]: I came across your writing —I think it was last summer during the riots in Britain — because I went searching for anyone who was writing about this possibility of really serious conflict within Western countries, including Britain. I'm sure you saw the Alex Garland film "Civil War" that came out last year.
Betz [00:09:12]: I actually didn't. I should. People advise me, you know, one way or another, that I should see it; but honestly, I haven't seen it.
Perry [00:09:25]: It's quite interesting. Well, the thing that I found interesting about it is, generally it's a good film, in the sense that it's got great cinematography and it's like thrilling to watch; but the thing that was sort of interesting about it is that the scenario that the film comes up with is very abstract. It doesn't actually highlight what the real division would be if there were an actual civil war in America, because I think everyone knows what that division would be.
And so, they didn't want to touch a sore spot, I suppose. And so, they came up with something very kind of fantastical which doesn't really make sense, like California and Texas secede. But then the rest of the United States doesn't, so why would it be California and Texas?
But anyway, I went looking for academic writing on this and I found the essay that you wrote called "Civil War Comes to the West" in, forgive me, what was the publication? Military Studies? Military Strategy?
Betz [00:10:17]: Military Strategy.
Perry [00:10:18]: And the thing that I had always thought, and I wonder if you could explain, why this is such a long-standing assumption that we're not only too rich as societies now to have civil wars, but that we're also too old, that we're also too fat? The countries in recent years that have seen this kind of conflict, like particularly countries in the Middle East, tend to be very youthful. They have youth bulges. Often, they have this over-supply of young aggressive men.
We don't look like that anymore. That's not what our societies look like in the modern, rich West. So, I think the assumption has long been that therefore we couldn't see the kind of conflict that these other youthful societies have seen.
Why do you think that that assumption is so baked in, and why do you think that it's wrong?
Betz [00:11:15]: Why do I think it's so baked in? I would struggle for a good answer, or an answer that is different from what almost anyone else would say.
There are certain kind of things that become conventional wisdom, and that are so frequently repeated that they just become kind of part of our mental architecture. And there is also a very strong normalcy bias in (the) human psyche, generally.
But there is a very strong normalcy bias within the British psyche; I would say probably, possibly, more substantially than others, that the British have a self-conception of themselves as essentially peaceful.
It is a society, it is a country which essentially invented (or feels that with some reason that it invented) the idea of good government. We haven't had the kind of revolutionary turmoil which has plagued our European neighbors from time to time (France particularly, even up until very recent times). So, by contrast, I think Britons conceive of themselves essentially as rather peaceable, well-governed, cool-headed folk.
And these ideals, these ideas too, or perhaps related ideas, you can see in scholarship. Scholars are people. They're embedded in a social milieu. They reflect those ideas.
But the literature has been very much focused on countries such as you described, which seem to be vulnerable on account of factors that maybe don't pertain so much. So, I think, in large part, I think it's a combination of normalcy bias and a long-standing self-conception.
Why do I think it's wrong? I think that there is a fracture in British national self-conception and material British reality. There are things that can be and are often said about the British national psyche, British national makeup, that are no longer true.
Firstly, most obviously, the starting point of this is, I think, that David Cameron was right when he said, well over ten years ago, that multiculturalism was a disaster for the country; that it was leading to a society that was ghettoized into competing communities that had little relation with each other. He was correct when he said that; and indeed, Angela Merkel, who six months previous had said exactly the same thing. They were both correct on that matter: the two most centrist politicians in European politics at the time; so hardly radical figures, although it would be radical of them to say that today. I don't imagine that David Cameron could be compelled to say those words again (for whatever reasons we can speculate on).
So, the society's self-conception is out of kilter with reality. It's a much more fractured society. It's one that has a much less secure connection to those aspects of its history that have made it the stable, well-governed, essentially more or less content society that it has been. And that's down to a number of factors. But principally it's down to the way we've educated ourselves now (for coming on two generations) on the validity of our various national myths; all of which now are either considered invalid; or indeed, to be disreputable or rather shameful.
So that doesn't work. And then, on top of that, there is the matter of relative economic decline. I'm a war studies professor, not an economist, but I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that, in terms of our economic underpinnings, the financialization of the economy is essentially running out of rope.
We're running out of the ability to borrow. Our rate of consumption exceeds our rate of production by a considerable measure that is not sustainable. And it will be very difficult under any conceivable government, but certainly under this government (which has essentially no intention — or capability rather — to return us to a kind of productive economic model) on account of energy policy, tax policy and many other things.
So, the bottom line is, we're considerably more fractured as a society. We're considerably more detached from our own history; or certainly from common appreciation of the validity and acceptability of that history. We're in a period of very serious, probably persistent, structural economic decline.
And if all of that were not bad enough, we have the increasingly frequent occurrence of individual and group acts which specifically target these divisions in our society with the intent of exacerbating and magnifying them.
Terrorism is one of those things, and has been much talked about for many years, so I needn't really go into that in in in great detail at the moment. But more importantly and much more corrosively are the industrial rape gang revelations which are ongoing; that have had the effect — which will increase and become even more apparent — of draining out whatever residual social capital existed in the first place.
I could go on, but essentially those would be the main points for me.
Perry [00:17:44]: Yes, I agree with you on the really important thing about industrial rape gangs, as you call them — Rotherham and other instances of these. I wrote a whole essay about this terminology issue. It's so difficult because people so often say "grooming gangs," right? And so "grooming gangs" is the term that is best understood; but it also really doesn't capture what's going on.
And one of the consequences of this phenomenon, I agree with you, is it really undermines government legitimacy, more so than other scandals you care to name: you know, Jimmy Savile, Catholic sex abuse, whatever. They don't undermine government legitimacy in the way that this one does because the widespread perception, not least among locals who've been particularly affected by these gangs, is that this was enabled by the state; and that the state has permitted this to happen to its own people and is continuing to do so.
That is a very wise perception, and frankly I think that it's true. I don't generally think that it's true because of malice per se. It's not a conspiracy theory, right? Like a conspiracy theory in the sense, you know, of a non-falsifiable conspiracy, right? That's not what I'm appealing to here. I think that it's mostly been done through negligence and stupidity and some false ideas that have taken hold within the elite class. Right? Nonetheless, the way that it is perceived is that the government has allowed this to happen.
Betz [00:19:19]: That's not my area of study, specifically. It just happens to be the major issue of the day. But the bottom line is, I argue primarily to my colleagues. I mean, I'm not really a public figure. I'm not out in the news making this point. I'm trying to speak to government and to my fellow scholars. But I strongly believe at this point that the main threat to the security and prosperity of the West generally, and the U.K. specifically now, is civil war, not external war.
And what I would want to stress is that this calculation on my part has been arrived at by analysis of the official British statistics on British social attitudes, on mainstream academic ideas about social capital, about societal cohesion and political stability; plus, long established, pretty standard theories of civil war causation.
British society is fundamentally explosively configured. And I've mentioned David Cameron having identified the main problem over a decade ago. Multiculturalism has drained the nation's social capital. It's encouraged factionalism and polarization, both of which are up massively, while the belief of people in pre-political loyalty has been shattered by the triumph of identity politics in our society.
So, as a result of which we see that nativist sentiments are increasingly manifested in a narrative of downgrading or displacement that is one of the most powerful causes of civil conflict.
The recent headlines surrounding the rape gangs or the murders of children, terrorism and the like, feed this narrative of downgrading absolutely perfectly. They align with that idea.
Perry [00:21:13]: When you say "downgrading," do you mean people's quality of life becoming worse?
Betz [00:21:18]: Downgrading is a concept in the civil wars literature. Let me go back a bit.
So, in the civil wars literature there is the idea that factionalism is a problem. So, a divided society is one that, all things being equal, ought to be prone to civil conflict; or we should worry about civil conflict in a factionalized society.
But what students of civil war have observed is that it's a little bit complicated. You can't just say very factionalized societies are very prone to civil war, because it turns out that the most factionalized societies are to some extent secure from civil war, because there is no single group which is sufficiently dominant to coordinate revolt on its own. So, if your country is broken up into ten or fifteen different factions, then it's very hard to get a mass movement going because you have to coordinate multiple factions to do so.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could say a country that is very homogeneous (i.e., unfractionated on an ethnic or cultural level) is less prone to civil conflict because it's easier to arrive at consensus positions, or easier to appeal to pre-political loyalty, as I said.
The danger area is in the middle where you have a previously dominant faction, or a previously dominant identity, that is losing its place in society; and that's precisely where we are now, where there is the potential for a mass movement. Which is essentially why most of the governments of the Western world (or the internal security forces of the Western world) evince terrible concern with white identity movements; because the problem there is not radicalization or extremism per se, it's that what might be called extreme ideas have mass potential within that community.
So "downgrading" is the technical term in the civil war causation literature that refers to a situation in which a formerly dominant social majority fears that it is in peril of losing that dominance; and that is considered to be a highly important factor in civil war causation.
What I was going to try to describe was what I think this will look like as it kicks off, and I think we can see elements of this now in general terms.
I think we can say that the coming civil war that I imagine will have initially the qualities of a Latin American dirty war; but that is going to metastasize pretty rapidly into a broader civil conflict that will have an essential rural versus urban dimension; that relates essentially to demographic patterns in the broader society.
The primary anti-status quo strategy of these involved will be to collapse the major cities through physical infrastructure attack, with a view to causing cascading crises in those cities; which will lead to systemic failure and a period of mass chaos, which they would hope to wait out in the relative security of the rural provinces.
What is all this in aid of? I think the primary aim, logically speaking (to listen to the kinds of discourse around these ideas) is to … I don't want to call it a strategic aim, because that implies a kind of directedness to this which it doesn't actually possess. I think it's more like a collective volcanic urge, which is to effect a retrograde change in the population demographic on a large scale and rapidly.
A secondary impulse, that is very clear in popular discourse now, is to punish our domestic elite for having failed willfully or simply negligently for this perceived failure to maintain the social contract.
In character, I think the conflict is probably going to echo the peasant revolts of the distant past more so than the progressive leftist revolutions of the previous century and a half. It's essentially a conservative reaction against the perceived elite alteration or elite betrayal (again a term that one hears a lot now) of the previously understood social rules of the game.
I'm surprised that we don't hear a lot more about the Boudican Revolt.
Perry [00:26:39]: Can I spell it out for non-British listeners? That Boudica's daughters were raped by Roman soldiers, and this was the precipitating event. The Rest is History actually did a very good series recently on Roman Britain, where they went through it, for anyone who wants to learn more about Boudica. And this was famously when London was burnt to the ground.
Betz [00:26:57]: There's a lot of things involved here, and maybe I could unpack a bit. I mean, I've used a bunch of terms in passing, and perhaps it would be worth just dwelling on what I mean by some of these things.
Perry [00:27:09]: Could I start by asking about Latin American dirty war, which you said might be the opening kind of episode?
Betz [00:27:16]: Dirty war is a term (again, it's a term in academic use) which was coined in order to describe the character of civil wars that were occurring in Latin America. Think of Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, places like this which had long-term endemic civil conflict. And it was brought in because it was clearly internal (i.e., civil) and it was conflictual. There were lots of deaths.
It's somewhat awkward to describe it. You know, using the term civil war in a context where people's image of civil war is the American Civil War, or something like that. You know: uniformed armies fighting each other essentially conventionally on a large scale using regular operations that could be represented on a map.
This was much more diffused within society. It was characterized by death squads; tit-for-tat assassination; kidnappings; targeting of political figures, media people (especially judges, lawyers and the like). Then governments responding to this in various ways, both overtly and covertly, but with increasingly repressive measures; or disappearing people, and so on.
So if you imagine a spectrum of civil war, and you imagine the American Civil War on one end of the scale (which is effectively a big conventional conflict within a society, which prior to the outbreak of the conflict was under one sovereign authority), then dirty war is on the other end of the spectrum. It doesn't have, you know, big conventional military operations, but there is endemic political violence of a relatively organized and systematic nature.
That's what a dirty war is. It's a variant of civil war which was typical of late 20th-century Latin America. You might apply this to parts of Europe even, in the 1970s and 80s, with aspects that looked a bit like that.
Perry [00:29:34]: Also, would you say "The Troubles" would be an example of that in Ireland?
Betz [00:29:38]: I think that The Troubles could be described as such, yes. It's slightly more of a stretch, but certainly in the sense of having a conflict which is violent, intense, long-term, but is somewhat under the surface and involves less big military movements that can be represented on the map, and more tit-for-tat intercommunal violence ranging from street muggings through rioting, kidnapping, assassination, and the like. So yeah, I think you could apply it to the troubles.
Perry [00:30:13]: Where we're at now in Britain — and also in France, which I know is another country that you're concerned about for the same reasons …; I mean, we want to focus on Britain, because we both live there, but we'll try and include France as well in this analysis —we're not there yet, right?
I mean, we've had 20 years of Islamic terrorism, and we've had some instances of nativist terrorism; not as many, and certainly a much lower death toll. But, for instance, the attack on the Finsbury Park mosque, or the assassination of Jo Cox, or examples like that.
And we've had the recent rioting that wouldn't, I would imagine, qualify. I mean, it's clearly evidence of factionalism and violence, but we wouldn't describe as a dirty war, I would guess.
Betz [00:30:59]: It's on the spectrum, but it's very far down. I would just say, all of those things are the warning signs, rather than the main event. To use a metaphor, it's the first bit of pain in your left arm, or something like that, suggesting maybe there's something wrong. Maybe there's something wrong with me, some indication of a bigger problem in your health; notably a sign of impending heart attack.
I would take them as signs of the direction of travel. The problem is that the issues which animated those particular attacks you mentioned were essentially low-level, and there didn't seem to be any larger organization to them. The issues which animated the people who did it haven't gone away. In fact, they've gotten considerably worse.
And simply put, the techniques of conducting such attacks, the techniques of how to split apart a society, where the weak points are, where the fracture points are; this is all well understood. I mean, 25 years, almost, after the declaration of the war on terror, we're all pretty familiar with how it works; and the tools required in order to perform these sorts of attacks are essentially lying around.
You don't need very much. In the case with the Finsbury Park, you need a panel van, you need a knife. The government's current efforts to make it more difficult to buy knives on the internet well, that's just insane. I mean, that's completely mad. I think everybody understands that that's simply deflection from the main issue.
Perry [00:33:00]: I don't think anyone is convinced by that because, until now, the government have done a moderately good job of deflecting nativist anger in some circumstances; but I think this idea of banning knives would have prevented Rudakubana is just …
Betz [00:33:17]: You know, like that they should go after Mountain Warehouse for selling a backpack to the Ariana Grande bombing? It's ludicrous, it's ridiculous on its face. Anybody who doesn't work at LBC recognizes this. This is just completely ludicrous.
But the problems of government are many. The main one … and I will say I don't really want to comment on specific government or specific figures because, to be honest, it isn't like this problem started with the election of Keir Starmer, of the Labour government. Everything important about what I'm saying has been brewing for decades. Our current government is pretty hapless, to put it most charitably. I mean, there are other ways to put it which would be less charitable; but let's just say hapless. It didn't start with them.
In the long term, the major problem of government is this destruction of legitimacy that we've been talking about, through a bunch of factors. Primarily the one which is most evident now, on account of recent events, is the failure to secure the country, the failure to secure its borders against what can only be described as a large-scale border raid, and the failure to protect children (the most vulnerable people in our society) from the most extraordinary and grotesque predation on a very large scale.
All of that compounded by the denial and the cover up of systemic failings and, it must be said, individual high-level culpability in government at all levels and in the police force. Plus, on top of that, the increasingly predatory wealth extraction policies that have to come in because they're simply running out of money, so they have to extract more and more from whoever seems to have any.
These policies are essentially punishing and immiserating the middle classes. At this point, of course, they've long since decimated the working classes.
On top of that, you've got the two-tier justice system; a highly politicized judiciary; increasingly partisan and, frankly, incompetent police service. You have, on top of that, if that's not enough, a high likelihood —on the current trajectory —of the creation by the government of martyrs; most likely, I think, to be the death in custody of one or more of the people incarcerated for what people perceive to be political reasons surrounding the reaction to Southport.
There's increasingly heavy-handed and intrusive policing, much of which now occurs on camera. So every time the police overreach — sometimes egregiously, almost always stupidly — it gets rapidly publicized. But I think of things like when Tommy Robinson was arrested for participating in one of the London counter-protests; you know, by was it 35 or 40 policemen who pepper-sprayed and the like? It's just an absurd overreaction to a situation.
One could give many examples of this kind of incompetent and heavy-handed policing that is just aggravating a perception in the British population (which after all, heretofore, has been immensely proud of its police force) and is now becoming convinced, essentially, that that the police force is untrustworthy.
On top of that, I think that the government is misunderstanding the social environment and the communications paradigm. All of this discussion about cracking down on Elon Musk and X is ridiculous. It seems these people don't understand that there is something called a VPN that exists, amongst other things.
The efforts to shut down social media are completely ridiculous and bound to fail, like people imagining in the 17th century during the pamphlet wars that they could somehow de-invent the printing press. It's just not going to happen. But efforts to do so, government efforts to crack down on social media, just serve to confirm people's belief that these are people who have the modus operandi of Big Brother, that there is a malign intent there.
Honestly, I think X and the like, broadly speaking, are probably, on balance, good for the government; in the sense that at least it provides some outlet for people to express their ideas in a way that there's strong potential that it defuses some political anger because people are able to feel a kind of individual sense of having at least expressed themselves.
The information is not going to go away, the feeling is not going to go away; and moreover, as I've said previously, all of this is occurring within the context of increasing economic dismay and, to some extent, an increasingly harsh geopolitical and strategic context.
Plus, it's not just Britain but every neighboring country, so it's hard to draw on allies. And on top of that, we have, I think, a massive competence deficit across the whole political economy, so it's a very tough situation.
Perry [00:39:38]: So, you spoke earlier about the possibility that you see of this becoming an urban-rural conflict where you have, I guess, rural nativist groups who are in opposition both to ethnic minorities — or some ethnic minorities — in the cities, and also to the government. I have two questions on that.
One is it's hard, at the moment, to imagine those kind of groups having the degree of organization necessary to be a really intimidating force. Because what we saw in the summer riots (contrary to what the government have said about misinformation from Russia being the key organizing principle) was local spontaneous violent reaction, with very little actually in the way of organization. That's a bit of a different thing from the sort of groups that you're imagining, which are much more competent and basically have much more human capital than the rioting that we saw in August.
So that's my first question really. Is there a precedent to this? Are there other examples that we could look at of these kind of groups forming covertly and this kind of rural-urban split which you imagine playing out in Britain and France?
Betz [00:40:58]: There are many precedents of urban-rural conflict and of rural-based peasant revolts. I'm not particularly looking for a strong historical precedent of what is going to happen. Everything is contextual.
The most important thing in any strategic calculation is understanding the current character, the current strategic context, and the current character of the conflict that you imagine occurring. In short, I think our context is different from the past now in some important ways, so I'm not really drawing so much on history.
For me, I think a really key thing is an idea that actually emerged about twenty years ago in American strategic thinking; and it's the idea of the feral city.
A feral city was an idea coined by an American strategic analyst which was published initially in in the Naval War College Review. It refers to a city that is essentially ungoverned yet in a range of ways has certain characteristics, including things like crumbling infrastructure, government bankruptcy, no-go zones, zones of negotiated police control (for example, the burgeoning of private security) … a whole range of facts — increasing, very prevalent corruption, and the like.
So, the argument was, at the time, that armed forces needed to be prepared in order to operate in these feral cities. That feral cities were going to be generators of insecurity in the international system, and so the big armies of the world —or the interventionist armies of the world, like that of the United States, Britain and a handful of its allies —should be aware of the development of this type of city at this point in human history.
At the time the article was written, the author's best example of a feral city was Mogadishu, Somalia, for completely obvious reasons. If you look at that paper now, and papers subsequently written developing the idea from the perspective of 2025, you will have to concede that a feral city is a fair description of a number of cities in the West, including several in the U.K. All of those things I've just mentioned — government corruption, no-go zones and negotiated police control — when you look at a range of Western cities now, including several in the U.K., they are on the ferality spectrum.
Perry [00:44:00]: Nowhere near as bad as Mogadishu.
Betz [00:44:04]: Not as bad as Mogadishu, but usually the way ferality is talked about in military doctrine, they use a simple typology of green, amber and red.
So green is a city that is well functioning, non-feral. Then amber is one where you see aspects of this. A number of cities are pretty unarguably in the amber state now. They're not red. They're not as bad as Mogadishu was in 2003 or may be still; but they are non-functioning according to the metrics laid out in that concept.
Another thing to add to this is the urban studies literature. The urban studies literature, for well over a generation now, has been warning of the intrinsic instability of the urban condition going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s; saying, look: the mega-city, the very large cities that have arisen in human history relatively recently (i.e., within the last century and a half) are actually intrinsically unstable.
They're all, when you think about it, an astonishing balancing act. That they hold together at all —one could go on about these problems. But in basic terms, consider that the most basic definition of a city is of essentially a community which is unable to generate (with its own resources, in its own territory) enough to feed itself.
And there are reasons why we concentrate people in this way. I needn't go into the very obvious part. Basically, it's about wealth generation and industry, so we concentrate in that way. But when you concentrate in that way, you have to have city support systems. The most basic one is food stuffs; but in a modern environment, you have to power them. You have to move goods in and out. In other words, cities have a life support system in the form of infrastructure which is located outside of the cities.
Now imagine a scenario where the current levels of polarization and factionalization in Britain have increased, which they seem bound to do. Let's say they've doubled or tripled. The perception arises — it doesn't need to be a mass perception, it only needs a relatively small number of people who truly believe this — to attack the infrastructure. This is my point. To get to the gist of it: that is the most logical strategy. And the one most talked about in the anti-status quo circles is one in which the infrastructure of the city is attacked with a view to causing the cities to collapse on their own.
Now bear in mind, a good deal of Britain's infrastructure is essentially unguarded, and it's almost impossible to guard, because it's spread all over the place. That doesn't matter in a normally-functioning society. You don't need to guard that stuff, because who would- attack it? But that's putting a lot of importance on this concept of normally functioning. If we move to abnormally-functioning, that stuff can be attacked because it's located in the rural areas or in the peri-urban areas.
Think of things like — well, I don't want to go into details because I don't want it to turn into a tactical manual — but you can think of the gas.
Just simply put, a really obvious one is the gas network. Gas is explosive. It is is its own bomb. Its location? It's a national grid. The Major Accident Hazard Ppipelines (that is their name, Major Accident Hazard Pipelines, so that hint is in their name there) are very easy to access. They're very big, their locations are publicly known. They have to be because of the danger of accidental explosion if you dig around them.
The electrical grid is very vulnerable. It doesn't take very much to take down an electrical pylon.
We could say much the same thing about transportation networks, and so on and so forth. Almost all of this infrastructure is openly mapped and everybody knows about it. The logic is to attack that.
In answer to your question, I think there are two real big advantages with that. Firstly, psychologically it's a lot easier to get people to attack stuff than it is to attack other people. So, in view of your point about the relative willingness of people to do things like a ramming attack, or setting off bombs: you may find that a quite small fraction of even the people who are very pissed off are prepared to contemplate that for a start. But they may very well be prepared to go and hit a gas pipeline or a gas compression station (of which there are a few and very important), or to knock over electrical pylons.
So people are psychologically more prepared to break stuff than they are to break people. But the strategic effect of breaking that sort of stuff can be cataclysmic. There is a very big force multiplication effect once you start doing this and the cities begin to fail.
You'll then begin to get things: population displacement, opportunistic rioting and crime on a large scale. Think back to the London Riots of 2011. You'll be having that on a much larger scale throughout the country, regularly — completely beyond the ability of the security services to manage — all in the midst of metastasizing economic crisis as the economy goes into toxic shock.
So you'll get population displacement and other things, which will increase the grievance, which will create further sectors of the population which are vulnerable to recruitment. And because they will have an immediate sense of loss and grievance to appeal to, they will have a perception of vulnerability which will increase their willingness to identify themselves in ways which previously they might not have done.
What I'm describing is a situation a bit like when you push a boulder from the top of a very high hill. Over the tipping point, the effects multiply as you go on. It's very hard to reverse.
The second point is about the numbers of people required to do this; and here I would suggest to go back to your point about The Troubles. For example, in the case of The Troubles, you had a fraction of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland which was radicalized (to use the contemporary jargon) and was to one degree or another supported within their larger conscience community.
And that was enough to sustain what, by the 1980s, was essentially the world's most professional terrorist force: which was in, terms of its technical capabilities, its organization, and so on, an organization which was capable of undertaking strategic terrorism throughout the whole of mainland Britain, including very large-scale attacks at the heart of the political and financial system. They were able literally to mortar-bomb 10 Downing Street and blow up good chunks of the financial district: two of the most heavily guarded places on Earth.
So, as a thought experiment, ask yourself: if a fraction of the population of Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s was able to sustain such an organization for a period of thirty (well, it continues today, but essentially The Troubles are generally agreed to be about thirty years), what could the English population do if it was equally animated by the idea that it was being displaced? Or even just partially animated?
You're talking then of a population of 50 million people. In other words, the potential muscle is there, the grievances are there and increasing, the tactics are well understood, the tools are broadly available because they're essentially dual use or civilian technologies, and the numbers of people required is actually quite small.
Moreover, you could start off by getting relatively small numbers of people who had somewhat ambivalent commitment to conduct attacks on stuff rather than people. That could have significant strategic impact; including precipitating broader conflict in which people would be rapidly more radicalized towards violence.
Perry [00:53:46]: Three examples of this spring to mind which I'd like your opinion on.
One is in Ireland. Returning to Ireland, the burning down of asylum hotels has been happening in Ireland quite a lot. I don't know if it's actually been reported in Britain. I mentioned this to my Mum recently. She had no idea. I think it's maybe not being in the paper as much I see it on Twitter and so on. My husband showed me an example of someone graffitiing a building site where an asylum hotel was being built, saying "Anyone seen working on this site will be shot." And this is in a country where that threat is taken seriously, given recent history.
So to some extent, we're already seeing that kind of infrastructure attack in Ireland, even though it's not on infrastructure you described, like gas and electricity; but it is still a kind of infrastructure.
The example that springs to mind in mainland Britain is the "Blade Runners," so-called: the groups who attack the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras.
This requires a little bit of background for non-Brits. Sadiq Khan, who is a very divisive mayor, has introduced a system in which you have to pay to drive into the center of London if you have certain types of vehicles. It's for environmental reasons. And one of the effects of ULEZ is that the people who are particularly likely to have to pay it are working-class Londoners who have been displaced by demographic change and now live outside of the borders and who drive into London with their trade vehicles in order to work.
So, builders, scaffolders, whatever, that group are particularly displeased by ULEZ. But also that group are particularly displeased by the wider demographic change in that basically the white working classes have been displaced from London. And they and a group called the Blade Runners have gone around attacking ULEZ infrastructure, and they've done it really successfully in the sense that they haven't been caught.
I think maybe there was one instance of one man being caught because he actually blew up a camera. So, he kind of went overboard. But generally what they're doing is, they're attacking it quite cleverly and in a way that evades detection.
A third example, if you forgive me, which springs to mind is —I don't know if you saw this, it was such a small news story, but it really caught my eye (because I've been reading your work) —about a cyber-attack on the national rail Wi-Fi. Did you read about this?
It was, like, six months ago (I can send you the article) where someone, who has yet to be caught — if he has been caught then I've not read about it because I've been keeping an eye on it — basically successfully hacked into The National Rail Wi-Fi so that everyone who was in a national rail station at the time and using the internet had a message pop up on their phone basically detailing examples of Islamic terror attacks.
It was a kind of anti-Islamist message; and, as far as I can tell, no one in a position of authority was able to work out who had done this, and they had suffered no consequences for it. And I wondered if it was a kind of show of strength that this person or people were capable of doing this to that kind of infrastructure.
All of which is to say, there are already examples of this kind of thing happening that maybe could scale.
Betz [00:57:09]: The latter one I hadn't read about, but will now. That's very intriguing.
For all of these, I think there is a very good term. It was coined by another American a few years ago now named John Robb, who is most famous for a blog called Global Guerrillas. But he wrote a book in the early 2000s essentially about future war in which he coined the term "system disruption." And all of these activities are essentially about system disruption. Their strategic impact is generated through disruption of the of the workings of a complex system that is vulnerable.
We have a fiscal system which is vulnerable for reasons I've described, and we've got a social system which is vulnerable also for reasons which I've described. The ULEZ guys I think are fascinating and I have been following very carefully. One day, I, or ideally someone else, will do a proper analysis.
Some of the most interesting ones are when —the guys who are repairing or installing cameras —they're interviewed or they're barracked by these groups. The way in which they talk about these people as betraying the working classes, betraying Britain, I think is very interesting because it's so political. That's so highly political, and much of it is actually pretty astute.
The other thing that I think is terribly important about ULEZ is that ULEZ is a highly connected camera system and so it is therefore exemplary of the surveillance state essentially. And here I think we can circle back to legitimacy.
Legitimacy is a is a tremendously important idea, but one that's highly under-theorized. You know, it's really difficult to define what people mean when they say "legitimacy." We talk about it — by "we" I mean people like me who have been looking at insurgency and counterinsurgency —we talk about legitimacy all the time, but definitions of it are quite complicated, because it's not just legality. The problem is it overlaps with legality but it's not exactly the same thing.
I tend to think of legitimacy as a kind of kind of magic that makes a government work. It is the key variable that determines whether your cost of government is high or low.
If you have high legitimacy then your cost of government is very low. People tend to do the correct thing voluntarily and your symbols of power are in fact powerful: so, coats of arms, flags, policemen's badges. These things have a kind of material power in a high legitimacy system because that magic is working.
When legitimacy collapses, then your government costs are very high. You have to police everything. You have to watch people because they won't do the right thing; and indeed, if people are really pissed off, as soon as they're unobserved they'll do the wrong thing. They'll do things to further cludge up the system because they're angry.
In the current context, I think that governments around the world have been persuaded by certain factors, and by certain people, (notably the tech sector) to believe that they can make up for the problems of cost of governance in a low legitimacy environment through technology — that surveillance is going to bring down the well-known increased costs of governing in a low legitimacy environment.
The problem there is the one that the ULEZ guys are really demonstrating: it is that the whole of the kind of electronic surveillance architecture has as its Achilles heel that you can break it. You can cut the cameras down; or —to my point, I think —once things get really serious, you switch off the electricity.
None of that is going to work if you can't power those systems; and at a certain point, I feel it is very likely — if not inevitable — that enough people are going to recognize this and they're going to start breaking the surveillance architecture on a rather large scale. And so, that that isn't just going to be cutting down ULEZ cameras in the dead of night (or actually they often do it in the middle of the day) but it is going to be rather larger than that.
So there's no way out for the government. Either they restore their perception of legitimacy somehow —that's going to be very difficult, that will take a generation to accomplish if they start today, which they show no sign of doing —or their costs of government are going to climb very substantially while their wealth goes down.
So you can work out the mathematics of this. We will be become a very much more heavily-policed society, which is very much poorer than it is, and there you go. Those are the conditions that give rise to rapid, potentially highly violent, social rupture.
Perry [01:02:43]: You mentioned earlier that you have advised the British government on insurgency, although in different nations; and that you have observed that, not only in Britain but in other countries, that the outsized response to nativist terrorism is indicative of governments being much more frightened of nativist terrorism because there are a lot more natives who could — you know, the absolute numbers are so much larger that the threat is much larger.
Does the government realize quite how likely this is? Is that why, for instance, the crackdown on the summer riots was so harsh? That there is a recognition that actually this is a tinder box? Or do you think that actually they don't really —maybe they instinctively fear kind of nativist politics —but they don't quite realize how dangerous a situation truly is?
Betz [01:03:40]: It is very perplexing … "perplexing" is not the word, it's dismaying for a person like me, who has been involved, as I said, in the study of counterinsurgency —in dialogue with government on this matter for twenty-plus years, it's dismaying the way in which the government reacts.
And there are lots of people —you know, I've had many interlocutors over that period of time who understand this very well —there are people in the British Army and in the security services who understand all of this extremely well. They have lived it. They've lived it, it's written down in their doctrine and it's taught in the staff colleges, and so on and so forth.
Then you look at the actions of the British government and it seems like they're following some kind of game plan for destroying legitimacy. Or perhaps I shouldn't use the expression "game plan" because that implies a directedness that I'm not sure is there. But certainly, if you want to create domestic turmoil in a society, then what the British government has been doing is almost textbook exactly what you would do. Okay? And that's according to our own written-down, doctrinal understanding of things.
So how to explain this disconnect (about the rather sophisticated, rather long-term, individual and institutional understanding of the causes of conflict in distant countries), with the way in which within the military, within the Ministry of Defense, within other parts of government, people understand this?
With the way our governments behave domestically, there is quite obviously a disconnect. And I can't explain what government is thinking in doing this. But empirically, it's just simply a statement of fact that they are doing the things that are leading us to civil conflict, according to our own well-established ideas about what causes civil conflict.
Perry [01:05:55]: You mentioned normalcy bias earlier. I agree that I think that's a very important factor. Like you, I have no idea what's going on in Keir Starmer's mind. But in thinking of people I know (in positions of influence) professionally — you remember when Musk, during the summer riots, tweeted "civil war is inevitable"? And that was treated by very many people in the British establishment as so preposterous that it ought to be criminalized almost; that it was this terrible thing to say and so ridiculous. And I must say, I read that tweet and I thought, yeah.
Betz [01:06:40]: You know, he's correct. I'm not Elon Musk, either. I mean, maybe lots of people say things that are correct by coincidence. Whether or not he's worked it out, the statement, as such, is correct.
The reaction of the British establishment, broadly defined —by which I mean not simply the British government, but in a larger sense of the larger British elite, which encompasses media, academia, probably substantial fractions of normally private enterprise also —I think there is a very strong normalcy bias in that sector.
This is super typical of revolutionary situations in which the establishment, the representatives of the status quo, fail to comprehend their peril. They overestimate their strengths. They underestimate the depth of animus towards them as it's brewing, sometimes in a very in a contemptuous way.
You hinted at this earlier when you talked about the older society — fatter, wealthier, so on and so forth. Truth of the matter is, I do think that there is a strong belief in the power of what the Romans were talking about when they talked about the political use of bread and circuses. You distract the population with cheap entertainments, and you meet their minimum welfare conditions; and as a result of this, you can essentially mollify the mass.
That isn't actually in practice quite true. But nonetheless, the belief in it by the status quo, I think, is pretty strong. In the contemporary context, I think there is a faith perhaps, or a wish, to see that potential to mollify the mass being delivered through cheap entertainments. In our case, you know, Netflix, Pornhub, narcotics, drugs (both prescription and non-prescription).
It's a highly medicated society. You know, a substantial fraction of the population is kept sane through anti-depressants. A substantial fraction of, specifically, our young boys and young men are kept docile through medication.
I don't doubt there's a hope that this can continue. I suspect that it cannot. I think that people are waking up, to use the predictable phrase. They're literally becoming woke, and they're thinking that this is a bad bargain. An iPhone and an endless diet of porn and cheap processed food and drugs is a very inferior substitute for actual freedom, actual individual agency, actual relationships with actual people.
And when they come to that realization, they're going to be very pissed.
Perry [01:09:57]: One of the factors … We've mentioned —France just in passing. Perhaps French anger is not as acute; but otherwise, basically everything that we're describing applies to France (and other countries to a lesser extent): the rural-urban divide, the vulnerability of infrastructure, all of this sort of stuff.
But one of the things that I think is a wild card in the British context —and I wonder what you think about it —is that British youngish professionals are able to emigrate more readily than people in other countries because so much of the world is Anglophone. And particularly if Trump — I mean, one of the most destructive things that Trump could do, if he really wanted to give Keir Starmer a bloody nose, would be to admit a lot more British professionals. Because currently it's quite difficult to get a green card to go to America.
But we already see —you know, we're losing doctors and nurses to Australia, we're losing entrepreneurs to Dubai. Lots in the paper this week about the fact that we're losing more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world at the moment. How do you think that that possibility of human capital flight becoming more acute would impact, or will impact, this coming conflict?
Could it be, to some extent, a pressure valve, in that the people —I mean, I know historically — and we're thinking again about the Peasants Revolt, right? Despite the name, The Peasants Revolt was not really led by peasants. It was actually led by frustrated members of the bourgeoisie. Or bourgeoisie is maybe the wrong word to describe that era, but these violent uprisings tend to be led by people who are actually quite educated but are also very frustrated.
Do you think to some extent that the emigration could actually be a pressure valve in that some of these very angry people might just leave? Or do you think that actually it might make matters worse because it means that the state coffers will run dry even more quickly because they're losing taxpayers? Or is this all just too hard to judge?
Betz [01:12:11]: On balance, it's not going to help. It's going to make matters worse, I would think. Fundamentally, I think it is —for the point you observed just at the end there —which is it will cause the financial distress of the government to accelerate.
The other issue, though, is I think that elite flight is always a potential. You're correct. So, for people like you and I —I mean, you'll obviously have detected that I don't have a British accent. I've lived here for thirty years, but I still have my Canadian accent. I've emigrated here and I've worked in half a dozen countries in the world, always on some kind of permit.
So there are people of the "anywhere class" who can move on if there's a place to move to. That's not really an option, though, that is broadly available to the "somewheres." Those people are rooted in their place, and their place is not one which practically they can detach from. And it's also one that that they don't want to —you know, there are people who are simply genuinely (and to their credit) emotionally and in every way connected to their place.
So I don't think we're in a period of history in which the revolutionary potential which exists in society can be relieved by large migration. What I don't think is going to happen is a 21st century of the Puritans basically picking up and moving en masse to some other place. Because, when it comes down to it that, some other place doesn't exist. There isn't some uninhabited hinterland of the world where you can go and create a New England because you were fed up or disappointed with the old England (unless we open up Antarctica or Mars, or whatever).
So I don't think that's going to work in in the same way. Secondly, as I said, if you're British, where are you going to go? Maybe America? Maybe with Trump, there's the potential that these forces —which are also very prevalent in the United States —can be resisted; although I'm not sure that's the case.
You know, honestly, when it comes down to it, I think that Trump is a classic American, country club, American sentimentalist. He wants to hold the country together. He's a very establishment figure. I hope for the best, but I wouldn't say that America represents now an island of security against what you might be fleeing here.
That might leave other places in the Anglosphere, like Australia or Canada. In case of the latter, I would simply point out that just over a year ago the Canadian government released a report of its own which warned of the potential over the next five years for civil conflict there. In that case, they reckoned —I'm paraphrasing the report — but, essentially, they reckoned that it was being caused by a mood of defeated expectation on the part of an increasingly structurally disenfranchised youth. And not to mention the fact that, demographically, Canada has all of the same problems as the U.K., but actually in some ways worse.
Australia: I'm not aware of any similar Australian report. New Zealand: you'd struggle to get into New Zealand because all the really wealthy people are buying that up, as they're …
Perry [01:15:58]: Building fallout shelters. Yeah, there isn't a likely pressure valve, just ever-dwindling tax take.
Okay, so if you were advising the British government in this instance, what could they do, what ought they to do immediately to try and head off the risk of this escalation?
Betz [01:16:25]: Well, in short, I don't think there's anything they can do.
That's not a good question for me to answer because I've come strongly to believe that there isn't really anything left to do. It's too far gone, and so you'd have to direct that to another smarter or more deluded person; but I'm past the point of thinking that we can avoid this.
What I do think is we should pursue a range of measures that are aimed at mitigating the damage. Essentially to approach it something like a civil defense issue, or how we approached the possibility of nuclear war. You would have to think through, I would suggest, things like seriously working out a plan for how to preserve cultural artifacts. Because as is well observed, a typical aspect of civil war is the destruction or the theft of cultural artifacts, icons, art objects, historical objects; both for strategic reasons, relating to the conflict itself (attacking the totems of your enemy is usually a deliberate part of strategic messaging) but also because those things can easily be turned into money (which is useful in its own right, but also which can be turned into arms).
So, I think measures to think through how that could be secured and protected with a view to minimizing the damage on our very deep, very glorious (it must be said) cultural heritage in the form of artifacts.
Another related set of plans should look at regional seats of government, with a view to working out how we might continue to deliver some of the most basic aspects of central governance in a situation where central government is essentially collapsed.
Again, there are historical examples of both of these things. Specifically, during the Second World War, but all through the Cold War, we had plans for the the preservation of artifacts and the protection of cultural objects.
During the Cold War we had a plan for the provision of government services in the case of nuclear conflict. They probably weren't very plausible, given the scale of nuclear conflict. (Which is, on a bright note, a much bigger problem than the one I'm describing, which is a big problem.) But compared to trying to extinguish multiple burning cities all simultaneously, in a situation of massive radioactive fallout, it's a rather good problem to have. So, I would think some thought about continued provision of some services of government.
And then thirdly, I think that the government needs seriously to review the security of our nuclear deterrent and other elements of essentially precursors of weapons of mass destruction, with a view to how they would be secured in cases of civil conflict.
The best example of this having been done in recent times is the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which the primary concern of most external governments was what was happening with the custody of all kinds of material that were in the possession of various Soviet institutions, in a context of the collapse of that state. And so, a lot of external and internal effort went into securing that stuff against its proliferation to bad actors.
Finally, one of the most apparent effects of civil conflict is it makes a country very vulnerable to foreign predation; in which case, when things go very badly here, it will mean that our ability to deal with the existing external threats (such as they may appear) will be very much diminished.
Roughly speaking, I would focus on those three things: protection of cultural artifacts, thinking out the provision of very basic government services to those areas of the country which can be secured, and thinking ahead now and preparing for a situation where we do need to secure assets that are potentially very dangerous if they proliferate into the wrong hands. They are secured now, but they're not secured against the kinds of internal turmoil that I've been describing.
Perry [01:21:06]: What should individuals do?
Betz [01:21:08]: They should be in good health for a start. They should be psychologically and physically prepared, so far as they are able to do so.
You know, think back to advice which was given during the Covid crisis: for example, around the desirable amount of resiliency that any given household should possess in terms of availability of food stuffs, water, the like. Those would all be wise things.
You should know your neighbors, and that is the most important thing. The most well-prepared individual still needs to sleep. The greatest source of security —at a point in which the normal providers of security disappear (i.e., the police) —so, the greatest source of security in a situation in which all of that has disappeared is going to be your immediate neighbors. So, you're going to want to be in on good terms with them; know who they are.
Well, it'd be a very awkward conversation if you knocked on your neighbor's door and said: "Hey neighbor, nice to meet you. Have you thought about a civil war preparation?" You may be a very agreeable and charismatic person, and be able to hold that conversation so off-the-bat; but it is probably not something you want to drop on people right away.
But generally speaking, I think being part of a community, having access to some sort of — well, let's call it a tribe —is a thing which is likely to make a very big difference in your ability to survive or continue to thrive.
Perry [01:22:45]: Would you recommend people move out of cities?
Betz [01:22:47]: Yes, I would certainly consider that possibility. I'm not suggesting everybody move off to the Lake District or the New Forest or something like that. It's not going to work. Having a sensible, critical, coldly realistic understanding of your local urban situation would be a good thing to have at this point.
You know, the proverbial shit has not hit the fan yet. Now is the time to consider these things, and to make a move, if you are able. But there are certain places, yes, I would suggest that you need to get out of (or getting out of which would be a good idea).
Perry [01:23:29]: Okay, one last question then. I need to let you go.
Can we make any educated guesses of that kind of time frame? I mean, I must say I've been surprised by how quickly things have degenerated just in the last twelve months — quicker than I would have thought, and I've been fairly pessimistic. What would you guess in terms of how things might change.?
Betz [01:23:49]: I'm glad you used the term "educated guess" because really that's all it is this. This isn't science.
I think five years. The Canadian government report, which I just mentioned, was out over five years, and I think that is a pretty good number. Probably the most widely read, and currently most widely cited, work on civil war causation is a book called How Civil Wars Start and How To Stop Them, which is very worthwhile readings by an American professor named Barbara Walter. And for those who are specifically interested in how to stop these things, I would ask Barbara Walter rather than me, for reasons that I just mentioned.
But in her book on the matter, she concludes (if I recall correctly) that in the countries where the conditions necessary for the outbreak of civil war are present, the actual likelihood of it breaking out in any given year is about four percent.
I'm more pessimistic than her. I think that the potential is higher. But if you were to go with her judgment, then you're looking at four percent a year. If the conditions don't change — which, as I said, I don't think there's any indication whatsoever from our current government that there is intention, or let alone ability, to change the conditions — then that's the statistic that one needs to encounter.
My best guess is that things are going to come to a head within five years, and it might be more rapid. Like, how many child murders, for example, can the country handle before it loses it? There's every reason to think that —on the basis of past events — that we'll see copycatting and more of this sort of thing.
If we can make it through the next five years without it happening, that would be a good sign. I think the rupture is going to come before then, on current trajectory.
Perry [01:25:52]: I really don't know what to say. I think I've decided from having this conversation — which I've gone … it's gone on longer than I normally do for the podcast — that I'm not going to paywall all this at all. I'll just leave this entirely public because I think that I've felt like I've been going slightly mad in recent months, and in worrying about this, and I don't think enough people are worrying about it.
Betz [01:26:17]: I think you're not alone in this. Since having written the paper, you know, I've had other people approach me, including people from government and in the security services, about the ideas.
Well, we'll see what happens after the podcast (which will have a somewhat bigger reach, I would guess). They've all come back to ask for more for more detail. But they're certainly not rejecting outright, because I think that most people … that's the problem; is that most people perceive that this problem exists. Most people now perceive that society — to be a bit loose about it — has gone off the rails.
Most people believe that politics has ceased to be able to solve problems. Most people believe that political parties are untrustworthy. Most people believe: so on and so forth. Many people don't say these things, well, for lots of reasons. Because they're not said in polite company. Many people don't say them because many people have the fear that to say a thing is to bring it into existence. To predict is to …
So, no doubt that I will get feedback criticizing this: but to predict a calamity is not to invite it. If I was a geologist and I was talking about a previously undetected volcano under southern England, or if we were talking about climate and rising sea levels, or something like that, the people giving these warnings would not be accused of wishing them to happen.
I'm a classic member of the establishment. I'm a homeowner, I'm a father, all of these things. I really do not want this to occur. But I also can't look away; or I can't not see what I see, for what it's worth.
Bottom line is, none of this is strictly really controversial, in terms of our understanding of reality and of how social systems function.
Perry [01:28:41]: All right, on that note, David, thank you so much.
Betz [01:28:45]: Thank you very much.