Life is hard. It's a struggle.

We are in a chaotic universe and our solar system has carved out some form of order and progress out of an entropic existence.

The world is similarly chaotic and entropic, in which from time to time people and groups of people manage to carve out some form of order and progress.

This was America in the 50s and 60s. Even though the seeds of future problems were there - Vietnam, Nixon, Lee Harvey Oswald - almost all Americans focussed on the order and the progress - happy families, educational opportunities, plentiful food, time-saving and life-enhancing technologies.

Somebody should have been reminding them about the chaos and entropy at the gates. But nobody was. American politics was the politics of the smug. 'I'm alright Jack, pull up the ladder.'

As the rest of the world started to catch up - Japan, Korea, China, India, Mexico - chaos and entropy weren't waiting at the gates any more but marching through the heartlands.

Because nobody had warned the people at the bottom of the ladder about the chaos and entropy, and because the people at the top of the ladder were busy ensuring that the chaos and entropy didn't bother them, they were overwhelmed. Jobs lost, factories gone, societies crumbling, towns dying.

And the problem in America - and it's becoming a problem elsewhere - is that for 40 years some of the politicians just lied. 'We can fix this, just make sure those other guys don't get elected; you know, the guys telling you that this is something that can't be fixed but our country needs to adjust to new realities, horseshit like that. We'll fix it, we'll give shitloads of money to wealthy people and corporations and it will trickle down to you guys. We'll remove regulations so that smart people can find ways to move our economy into an extra gear by inventing ways of using money to make more money - and that will trickle down to you to. I promise; the economists have assured me it will happen. Would I lie to you? Here, just sign on the bottom there to authorise my personal helicopter for campaigning next year.'

Now these poor schmucks at the bottom of the ladder have found they are left holding the shitty end of the stick. They aren't that smart, as a group, because the smarter ones made it some way up the ladder in the last 40 years. So who do they blame? Not the people who made the promises they didn't keep, but the people who tried to warn them all along. 'This isn't sustainable, chickens will come home to roost, the money won't trickle down, your rivers will be poisoned and your grasslands will blow away and the coal will run out and people will turn to increasingly horrible ways of medicating themselves into uncaring.'

Make Everywhere Great Again.