Four Horsemen (2012) - Official Version

 

The economic collapse of 2008 scared us. But little has changed since then. This 2012 film explains in fine detail why and how the global society operating within a system of neoclassical economics is in grave peril. All for the sake of a relatively small percentage of the population which controls the means of production, transport and resource extraction. The banks are complicit but they are not driving the system. It is a complex and complete network of actors, institutions, unsustainable laws, practices and methods. 

A debt/credit cycle that is now a growing negative equation. Resources are in decline. Investment is no longer needed to be productive. Banking is a pyramid scheme. The rich have access to government support while the middle and working classes are forced to fend for themselves with welfare dismantled globally. The housing crisis -  which spiked in 2009 but is still ongoing -  is a well known example of how this system functions. 

The situation with the ecology of the planet and its limited resources is the frame to this crisis that has not (yet) ruptured completely. The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 identifies five major categories of threat to biodiversity: land and sea changes, pollution, species overexploitation, invasive species and disease, and climate change. The size of the problem is illustrated by the report’s data that suggests 23 percent of land is now degraded (for example, the Amazon rainforest has lost 17 percent of its area in the last 50 years), while agricultural-land use is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation. The oceans’ “dead zones” already encompass an area larger than the United Kingdom. A draft UN agreement envisages that in the next decade, at least one-third of the planet should be put under nature-conservation protection. This plan also includes targets for reducing the use of pesticides, cutting plastic waste, channeling some US$200 billion into developing countries and reducing harmful government subsidies by $500 billion per year.

If the global economic system is not dramatically reformed within the next decade the results will be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, if not the entire world's human population. There will be nowhere to go to avoid it. 

Ross Ashcroft's Four Horseman (2012) does a good job of examining the vast system that is the global economy. But on the micro and personal levels the film does not sufficiently question the ethics of wealth and accumulation. Innovation is seen as a ends in itself, rather than a focal point within the overall system of human society and how it relates to the limited resources of the planet. Four Horsemen uses a Christian ethic to justify wealth and a modernist interpretation of time to qualify a future that continues the exploitative motives of the present system but just with better rules (a 'salvation'). The film posits a capitalism managed better will be both sustainable and fair and that a two-party representative political system can still deliver the best for the majority of the population if we just get rid of lobbyists and money. I doubt these assumptions but unless action is taken to change these elements we will never know. Time is running out.