Western civilisation is threatened by the cannibalistic phase of what economists call free riding (or rent seeking), and which the author characterises as the culture of cheating. This culture was the source of the social pathologies that caused the collapse of the civilisations of antiquity, and the Fall of Rome. Fred Harrison explains that the global house price peak in 2026 will provoke the Great Convergence of four existential crises - social, economic, climatic and demographic. That convergence will overwhelm governments and result in the collapse of western civilisation, and may even threaten the viability of humanity itself. But there is just enough time to mobilise people's understanding of the driving force behind this cataclysm, and to institute the financial reforms that would rebuild social resilience. The democracies, however, will have to overcome the continuing threat from Donald Trump - the arch rent seeker - and the policy paralysis that afflicts governance today. The Westminster model is interrogated to reveal how the aristocracy of old, who grabbed the commons and turned the peasants into hostages, produced a political system that is not fit to meet the needs of the 21st century. The author deconstructs the history of the Mother of Parliaments to lay bare the character of the power that inflicts poverty and premature death on millions of people in the rich nations. That politics, he claims, is guilty of the greatest crime against humanity.
