Soros also explains that the current crisis is worse than the 1929 crisis. He notes that the liberal economy imposed on the world during the period of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has failed and adds that the current crisis will not only have economic but also profound political consequences. The following points need to be underlined:1. The crisis is global; its socio-economic center is the US, and its philosophical and intellectual center is Europe.
2. This is the crisis of modernity.
3. It is a crisis caused by the inability to make sense of human mobility. A profound new human migration which the modern world is unable to understand is taking place.
Social scientists have not yet found a sufficient explanation of the significance of the third major human migration. Until now, there have been three major human migrations. The first is the shift from nomadic living to permanent settlements. The pains of this shift were felt all over the world. The second major human migration began with the industrial revolution. People from villages and rural areas migrated to the cities.
Now in the 21st century, people are moving from suburbs to city centers. Modernization, the concentration of industrial policies, the diminishing of agriculture, continuous ecological disasters, the increase of migration from the East to the West, the increase of political crimes and wars have triggered this third mobility. For example, after the US invaded Iraq, 4.5 million Iraqis were forced to move abroad, and about 2 million people live as refugees in their own country. In Bosnia, there are still 400,000 people waiting to return to their homes. In Chechnya, 400,000 people were displaced due to the war, and in Azerbaijan, 1 million people were displaced during the Montenegro war. In Afghanistan, 4.1 million people have been displaced and are living as refugees. In Sudan, 700,000 Eritreans are living as refugees.
According to the United Nations Population Division’s 2008 data, the world population is expected to reach 7 billion. Every day 200,000 people move to the cities. In 2008, 50 percent of the world population was living in cities. In the medium term, China and India are expected to comprise 40 percent of the world population. The migration to cities and to city centers poses the following problems.
1. Due to the injustice in income distribution, conflict will increase exponentially.
2. Ethnic conflict is expected to deepen and spread.
3. Marginal movements are increasingly gaining importance and marginal groups are occupying key places that are against general social morality.
4. The potential for violence in the center of cities will increase. However, violence will not be one-dimensional and predictable; rather it will manifest in different forms.
At the heart of the crisis, which appears economic, there lies a socio-political and demographic problem. In the first layer of the problem, there is the economy; in the lower layer, there are socio-political and demographic problems; and in the very bottom layer, there is moral, ontological and epistemological chaos. In other words, the crisis is in general terms existential and has evolved into an infectious illness that dropped into one civilization, and from there, spread to the entire world.
When we look past the socio-political layer and analyze the epistemological layer and the area that is more concerned with human existence, we see that a profound alienating process is in full force. In this period, human existence has lost meaning. Man exists with no purpose and no trust, and epistemologically, man has broken off from the center. Modernity was supposed to grant people freedom, trust and prosperity. That was the promise modernity gave to man, but it has failed to keep its three promises. Morally it has deviated from its axis. Socio-politically, people have been dragged into deep chaos.
One of the main reasons for this is that “growth” is still the dominant ideology. However, growth has actually reached its own physical and material limits. Physically and materially, the world cannot get any bigger. While additional growth leads to more consumption of resources and a higher urban population, more consumption of resources and a higher population leads to more growth. This is a vicious cycle. People cannot get out of this vicious cycle.
