Anirban Lahiri
The ink had barely dried on my last article when the second Latin American country in as many weeks was in the throes of violent unrest: enter Bolivia, exit Evo Morales. I had predicted that the unrest in Chile would catalyze a wave of riots in other LATAM countries into 2020 but even I was taken aback by how soon this actually materialized.
Sure, tensions had been simmering for a while under Morales' model of "oligarchic socialism" or "crony socialism" in a country with deep divisions and still haunted by the long shadow of the institution-less model of Spanish colonial rule that encompassed large swathes of South and Central America. But, this kind of discontent can simmer and has simmered for decades. The catalyst that led this simmering discontent to spill out onto the streets of La Paz was, in my view, the violent riots that engulfed Chile a few weeks earlier. In the digital age, people can find inspiration even from far-flung countries. This was why the Chinese authorities tightened their grip on the internet economy and social media in the wake of the Arab Spring -- it was less due to a knee-jerk realization of what could happen in a connected society of discontent and more a fear of the inspiration that Chinese youth might have drawn from the Facebook-fueled swell of mass unrest that swept up one Arab nation after another, domino style, albeit half-a-world away from China's glittering new cities.
I dare say that the youth of Santiago were inspired by their counterparts in Hong Kong. Different motivations but same root causes of anger: yawning gaps in income and a feeling of economic disenfranchisement. For all the ideological battle that the Hong Kong-PRC tensions are made out to be, the social fractures created by Hong Kong's massive and growing income inequality and the relentless rise in housing prices had taken the temperature to boiling point, well before the ill-fated extradition bill came about. The social fractures were the tinder, accumulated over multiple winters, just waiting for that spark to blaze into a giant inferno.
Speaking of infernos and other hot things, I see tectonic activity presenting a very useful conceptual framework for understanding what is going on with social unrest around the world. Have you ever noticed that news of a big earthquake somewhere in the world is often followed, with a not very long time lag, by reports of an earthquake somewhere else in the world, often far away? Some would say that this is a simple "selection bias" at play in the news -- when a big earthquake captures the popular imagination, the media latches on to all news of earthquakes that much more intently to pander to the masses and grab their eyeballs. While not a seismologist, I can confidently assert that this is just part of the explanation.
The truth is that this observed "clustering" of seismic activity is in part attributable to the fact that -- as most of us would have learnt in middle school geography class -- the earth's tectonic plates are but pieces of crust all floating on an ocean of red-hot magma. The underlying heat and energy radiating out from the earth's core drives constant movement in the tectonic plates, leading to sudden jolts as these plates grind past one another, releasing massive amounts of energy which manifest in the earth-shaking phenomenon that is an earthquake. Any weaknesses or "fault lines" in the earth's crust serve as potential outlets for this massive release of energy emanating from an underlying "transform boundary" or the region along which two neighboring tectonic plates interact with each other. However, because tectonic plates are giant masses of crust floating on the ocean of magma, when one edge of a plate brushes past another, the entire plate moves (being a rigid body) and the repercussions can be felt at the far end of the plate, thousands of miles away. Also, when you have a giant mosaic of moving jigsaw puzzle parts that have found "temporary equilibrium", a jolt somewhere in the mosaic can disrupt the temporary equilibrium and trigger nature's "self-organizing" quest for finding another temporary equilibrium. Hence, a massive earth quake in Japan, which lies on the Western edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire, can eventually trigger an earthquake in Chile, thousands of miles away in the South Eastern Pacific.
So what does all this geology have to do with social unrest?
I see the magma, the red-hot liquid underlying the earth's crust as analogous to all the underlying discontent that has been building over the years, fueled by capitalism-induced inequality, cronyism and the disruptive impacts of globalization. Large sections of society, across countries, have been left behind by these forces, leading to a gradual but steady welling-up of discontent and anger. The "fault lines" on the earth's crust and the tectonic plate boundaries underlying these fault lines are analogous to weaknesses or hairline cracks in the space-time of the social fabric. Why space-time? Because these weaknesses or fractures can be created by institutional weaknesses in different countries in a given snapshot in time or can simply be events in time that create transitory periods of weakness in an otherwise normal societal or institutional make-up. Hong Kong was an example of both -- a structural failure of institutions to stem the rise in economic inequality, with the takeover by China and the extradition bill being discrete events in time that created periods of fragility in the social fabric while also further incensing the already red-hot "magma" that was the underlying current of popular discontent. And finally, the inherent ability of energy to be transmitted across massive distances due to the mosaic-like arrangement of the tectonic plates is analogous to the inherent "inter-connectedness" of our digital world. Just like an earthquake in Japan can trigger a re-arrangement of the tectonic mosaic, causing an earthquake in far-away Chile, so too can a riot in Chile "transmit" energy and inspiration to the youth of Lebanon.
The key point in making this geological analogy is simple: the riots and public unrest we see springing up in seemingly random sequence in far-flung parts of the world are not actually all that random. Failed socioeconomic and political models have created an undercurrent of red-hot resentment that -- like magma -- is desperate to vent and find an outlet for all the underlying energy. Structurally weak governance institutions combined with transitory events that are disruptive in nature are the fault-lines through which the underlying heat energy finds expression somewhere, leading to a social dislocation, much like an earthquake or a massive volcanic eruption in some corner of the globe. Finally, social media and digital connectivity are the medium through which that dislocation is transmitted to another fault line in another far flung part of the world, much like a localized reconfiguration of inter-plate relationships in one part of the giant global interconnected tectonic mosaic triggers a rearrangement in other parts of the mosaic, in the quest for a new temporary equilibrium.
The sequence of events of social unrest in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile and -- lately Bolivia -- were not as random as they seem. Think earthquakes.
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