Many said that 11 September 2001 was a watershed year. People believed that the world would change and that we would be plunged into WWIII.

Others began stockpiling food and weapons, in the belief that anarchy was to descend like a cloud over the civilised West. But the world carried on in blissful ignorance. Capitalism continued to flourish and we continued about our daily lives – like ants in a hive.

Slowly but surely, a time bomb was ticking down to financial implosion. The banks knew about it. The monetary funds knew about it, as did the central banks, fund managers, mortgage sellers. They all knew about it. They just decided not to tell us.

Then came Autumn 2008. The crash that no one was expecting. Entire savings were lost… one country (Iceland) went bankrupt, banks were left without liquidity and the politicians wailed. They told us how everything was to blame for the financial crisis apart from themselves and the banks. In reality, it was the fudging of books by politicians, the reluctance of others (particularly in the EU) to check up on the state of affairs and the prevailing mentality of flogging the horse till it keeled over and died that got us where we are today.

Capitalism is a very clever system. It manipulates people (workers, business owners – the whole lot) into working almost slavishly to increase productivity. We have steered clear of Continental wars for about six decades now, and even this is due to capitalism.

What is the use of picking a fight with someone in a bid to start a war when you can divert all the efforts and productivity of a nation (indeed a continent) into appealing to humankind’s materialistic nature?

Rather than channel money and energy into wars, we are bent into continuously increasing production, earnings and consumption. We truly have become a hive race. Humans didn’t use to be like this.

We used to look after our resources. We used to allow them to replenish because we knew we would need them again. Just look at us now. Our oceans are overfished, our lands are over-tilled, our people are overworked, no one really knows how much oil we have left, no one knows how long the ozone will hold out.

We have become like an alien race which we see in the Hollywood movies… hivers. We settle, we strip, we deplete… we move on. Except that we cannot move on. We live on this earth and we live in the system we live in. It is true and it extends all the way from sustainable banking to consumption, environmental damage, water table depletion… the list goes on and on. Oh yes, the world has changed; we just have not realised it yet. We will realise in 20 or 30 years. But in 50 years, we will be looked back on as the generation that ruined life on earth as we once knew it.