Earth is about to learn that extremist ideologies and civilization are not compatible. Liberals will soon understand that tolerance of intolerance is not an option, and civilized people will be forced to react. It will not be pleasant.

The changes will come about through a constant stream of attacks against western and secular societies, and the primary ideology type will be that of religion—albeit with a political spin imparted.

The result

These attacks will become unbearable and will initiate the separation of society into three primary civilizations:

1. The Green Zone
2. The Orange Zone
3. The Red Zone

The Green Zone is where the wealth is. The technology. The jobs. It’s the best that civilization has to offer.

The Orange Zone is an area of the third-world that has been adopted by the UN or its equivalent as an improvement area. The UN will control it completely, and differences in religion, race, etc. will be strictly suppressed. Education will be mandatory, and it will be secular and based around similarities, not differences. The goal will be to eventually turn the Orange Zone into the Green Zone, or to move people from it to the Green Zone.

The Red Zone will make up most of the world, and will be the home for any society/country/civilization that insists on embracing racism, religious sectarianism, ethnic hatred, and rejection of science and secular ideals.

How it will happen

Here’s how this is materializing.

• There is currently a tension between conservatives and liberals in how to handle the existence of terror threats—specifically from Islamist groups. Liberals still currently serve as a sufficient counter-force against calls to outlaw/chastise/deport and otherwise remove the threat of violence against western/secular interests.
• Liberals are unaware of how radicalized many Islamists have become within their countries, especially in Europe. They’ve further underestimated how much sympathy exists for these extremists within the millions-strong moderate Muslim populations in western countries.
• Given this backdrop, attacks will soon increase against western targets. In all likelihood little actual damage will be done at least compared to a decent-sized hurricane that we accept with barely a glance. But the emotional response to attacks by Islamists in the United States and Europe will soon approach a force that liberals will not be able to control. Even more importantly, most liberals will come to agree with conservatives regarding the seriousness of the Islamist threat.
• This will happen at the same time that it’s becoming easier to hurt people. Technology is enabling the force multiplication of attacks to a frightening degree. Biological threats, chemical attacks, dirty nuclear attacks through proliferation, and even just $200 pipe bombs. Applied enough times, and with the sufficient amount of messaging, a feeling of fear and hatred will be created within the west that will be unprecedented in recent history.
• The result will be a feedback loop between actual Islamist terrorism, security responses and policies that go too far, and the increasing radicalization of previously moderate Muslims who now feel that the extremists were right when they said everyone was out to get them. Now all the Islamist terrorists have to do is keep attacking in order to feed the fire. With every new incident they see the west react more savagely, which in turn generates a new flow of recruits.
• This will rip our human civilization. We will see the stripping of citizenship of Muslim individuals and groups in western societies. We will see deportations. We will see camps like Guantanamo, but more of them and larger ones. And we will see unprecedented racism and hatred.
• This won’t just happen in the west. The rest of the world will be suffering as much if not more from its own sectarian issues. The Middle East is a giant mass of people who hate each other. From town to town, street to street, region to region, country to country, the only reason there hasn’t been more mass genocide there is because despotic rulers have stopped it from happening. The short-term path to peace in the Middle East, in other words, is to have more despotic leaders—not fewer. And the Middle East is just one example. Africa, Asia, and South America all have similar problems, with varying degrees of severity.
• The combination of all these factors, which will be happening simultaneously to varying degrees around the world, will mean that First World societies will be forced by public anger and activism to expel those who are understood to be responsible for the problems. This will be catastrophic from so many angles. Morally, logistically, legally. And it will only convert more moderate, good people into extremists.
• All this deportation and segregation of “problem populations” will result in a security state like we’ve never seen. The fear will be at peak levels. The hatred at peak levels. And anyone resembling the common threat will be treated as if they are part of the problem. Add to this the increased use of surveillance, drones, militarized remote controlled vehicles, and a dramatically more militarized police force. This is what the Green Zone(s) will look like. A small number of frightened people, full of hatred (some of which is understandable but often directed to the wrong people) who will do anything to keep the bad guys out of their perfect world.
• Green Zones will be located mostly in the west, and will be relatively racially homogeneous compared to the other zones. This will be due to a number of factors, including the distribution of wealth that exists even today that entices some groups more than others to rise against the system.
• Red Zones will make up most of the world, and they will be filled with failed states. This will include most of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America. The unifying factors in these will be 1) the presence of deeply held superstitious beliefs that lead to the population hating itself, and 2) the rejection of the liberal concepts of shared human struggle, commitment to oppose corruption, and the willingness for the wealthy to invest in the poor. Countries and societies and groups that fit both of these criteria will fail simply because these factors produce generations of people that are unwilling to agree upon and pursue common goals, and the result is inevitably conflict.
• So now we are 15 to 30 years from now, and some significant portion of the world is considered Red Zone. These are completely failed states where warlords and crime bosses have most of the power. Green Zone powers see these areas as a major threat, however, because they are the areas that generate, train, and empower terrorism. So Green Zone powers will have a massive security presence in the Red Zones—often in the form of drones or otherwise automated police forces—that enforce security. They will hunt and destroy any technologies that are deemed useful for terrorism, such as bio-labs, drones, bomb-making materials, etc. And they will do this will extreme measures given the support they have back home as a result of previous attacks in the Green Zones. It will not be uncommon to see entire city blocks leveled because a known cell was known to be operating there—despite hundreds or thousands of other people living there.
• Seeing that the world is mostly made up of failed states that are relentlessly policed by Green Zone authorities, the Green Zone governments will be morally compelled to act to improve the situation. We’re getting close to this today. The solution will be to go into failed states with massive nation-building forces. Tens of thousands of people. And the forces will stay not for weeks or months or years—but for decades. The criteria for the force entering the country or region will be that a complete rebuilding of society will occur. New schools. New factories. New jobs. But this will come with a loss of native culture. There will be re-education. A forcing of secular ideals, liberal values, and a message of common benefit across all people. In short, they’re going to educate the hate out of the people in that region and replace it with a more inclusive and progressive set of ideals. And that will be the price for being rescued from war, poverty, and abject suffering. But this will take decades, and the regions where this is happening will be called Orange Zones.
• Orange Zones will be full of people who still hate their neighbors, and who are still trying to kill them. It will also be full of people who hate the new rulers (the Green Zone authorities who are running the entire place, including the schools, the jobs, the housing, etc.). There will be a strong backlash against the Green Zone authorities because they will be stripping culture and beliefs and rituals from the population. Many of them will be illegal because they are tied to the sectarian hatred and violence that got the region into the current position. For this reason, the Orange Zones will be heavily policed just as the Green and Red zones are, and anyone not behaving will be ejected from the Orange Zones and placed in a Red Zone.

Summary

1. Existing failed states will continue to decline to the point of being little more than breeding locations for poverty and terrorism.
2. As those states fail, terrorism incidents in first world countries will increase dramatically. The terrorism will have a theme and goal (especially Islamist-based) that will unite first world populations against it.
3. As the security of Green Zones increases, and their sizes decrease, the size of red (untouchable) zones will increase.
4. Green Zone authorities will start aggressively purging Red Zones of people and technology that can be used to harm Green Zones.
5. This will be done in often horrific and morally treacherous ways, which will lead to even more recruitment into terrorist organizations which are now dedicated to destroying the Green Zones.
6. Seeing that Red Zones constitute most of the population, liberals will attempt to start saving people in the Red Zones by implementing Orange Zones, which are basically nation-building forces that control every aspect of a new country’s infrastructure, from education, to housing, to jobs. This re-education will prohibit teachings that can lead to sectarian violence like the kind that lead to their failed state.

I don’t want any of this to be true. I’d love to be wrong. And if there is something flawed in this model I’d be pleased to hear it.

But when I look at Syria, and Egypt, and much of Africa, and countless other locations, I see only suffering on top of suffering powered by old-world superstition. The terrorism that will flow from these regions is not compatible with long-term human civilization, so responses will be delivered in ways that we cannot even imagine today.

My advice?

Make sure you and the people you care about start in a Green Zone. And from there, try to figure out how to help the rest of the world get there as well.

One thing that I know for sure is that the first thing to go will be the notion that it’s ok to let states fail. That it’s ok to just mind your own business.

It’s not. Or at least it won’t be in the future. A failed state of millions of people is the equivalent of a radioactivity seeping into humanity’s water supply. If you don’t stop it, it will kill everyone and everything.

What we’re about to learn is that the planet is smaller than we thought it was, and that it’s everyone’s job to help everyone else. And the way we’re going to learn this lesson is not going to be pleasant.

Notes

1. One of the biggest challenges will be avoiding corruption in the Green Zone authorities. People who start off as benign philosopher kings could end up as invisible despots in the span of a few short years.
2. I’m fascinated with the idea of how to keep the good intentions of the Green Zone authorities intact. I have an idea for a novel where they create a secret organization within themselves who have the mission of killing those in power if they go astray. And they in turn have someone to do the same for them.