a passage that seems relevant to modern times

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For there had been no foresight of these things. there had been no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable Dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these days was not really governed at all, in a sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent years. government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative,disputatious,unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the Court favourite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant Caste of Lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained Caste. Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages, and suspicious of every generosity. Government was as obstructive business of energetic factions, progress went outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

the world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will and propose as existed then the human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict and incoherent suffering. there was no scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible......

H G Wells "the last war"

written in 1914

all the best

Craig