"Spindletop is an oil field located in the southern portion of Beaumont, Texas, in the United States. The Spindletop dome was derived from the Louann Salt evaporite layer of the Jurassic geologic period.[2] On January 10, 1901, a well at Spindletop struck oil ("came in"). The Spindletop gusher blew for 9 days at a rate estimated at 100,000 barrels (16,000 m3) of oil per day." -- Wikipedia, Spindletop - Wikipedia
Note in the image those tiny people in proportion to the gusher of oil, under pressure, which was released to the surface!
That's a lot of pressure. And we're sitting right on it and we seldom realize it.
I think the time has come to realize it.
Here's what's happening. In the so-called "developed nations" of the world there is now a very well documented "epidemic" (sometimes called "pandemic" of loneliness. Please type your search engine terms in now. Words: loneliness + epidemic / pandemic. That should provide you with all the evidence you will require to acknowledge that we're sitting atop a volcano, a pressurized system in which something could at any moment push up from the subterranean depths as a "black swan event" of extraordinarily powerful global proportions.
It just so happens that it is in the most so-called "developed" nations that this epidemic of loneliness is occurring -- places like the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK ... -- "first world" nations where the capitalist industrial system is in its outrageous full flowering. That is no coincidence. It is in these places that "the free market" and its ideological complex has hijacked essentially every aspect of our culture. Human needs, in such cultures, are forced underground and pressurized.
So what is happening in these places? What has been steadily happening in such places is that these are the places where the ideology and ethos of "the free market" have largely supplanted the communal sphere, thus replacing communities of mutuality, care, cooperation, sharing and giving with the opposites of all of these terms.
As Charles Eisenstein has pointed out many times in his speaking and writing, in the 'first world' we have a simply desperate and largely unmet need for community, which is to say belongingness with one another in communities of mutuality, care, cooperation, sharing, giving and non-hierarchical mutual empowerment of one another, etc. This happened in large part through a process of transforming all which was once a gift into a salable commodity in a market system of distribution of "wealth".
I now see this entire phenomenon through the lens of a social theory, in which it is understood that there has been a gradual disappearance of the communal sphere within a cultural ethos which fails to even acknowledge that such a thing as the communal sphere really already exists (in profoundly neglected and atrophied form in the 'developed world') and is necessary to human and more-than-human (interspecies) well-being.
The loneliness pandemic, in this frame, is best understood as a breakdown of the necessary functions of community, and the replacement of genuine local communities with essentially atomized selves and families living in near total isolation from one another -- which is a form of disempowerment which is causally symptomatic of what I call 'pseudo-democracy'.
Pseudo-democracy is a fake kind of democracy in which people are perpetually put into competitive, rather than cooperative, modes of relationship. In pseudo-democracy, 'democracy' is conceived as a system in which human beings are set into conflict because communities are conceived from the outset as places of contest within hierarchies of authority, power, and access to basic needs (material, economic, social, psychological and spiritual needs). The underlying ethos of pseudo-democracy proposes that human existence is a struggle against one's neighbors for hegemony, or power over others. This competition-based system of governance has become globalized, and essentially infects our local communities as a pandemic.
In pseudo-democracy, governance becomes government not of, by and for the people (with other species, ecosystems and the biosphere as our neighbors, friends and companions), but of, by and for those who can secure for themselves a higher rung on a hierarchy of pseudo-wealth (because real wealth is necessarily shared) and decision-making power which goes by the name of hegemony. Pseudo-democracy is, in this way, a pretense to actual democracy, in which, necessarily, wealth and power would be distributed centrifugally rather than centripetally. Only communities in which the members of the community care for and love one another would or could practice genuine democracy.
That is, genuine democracy is an expression not of competition, but of love for one another. No society, on any scale, where competition overwhelms and obviates loving mutuality within community could possibly express itself democratically. Thus the ethos and ideology of pseudo-democracy is false. It's an expression of basic ignorance as to what a democratic society would look like in practice.
There is a black swan on our horizon. It will most likely manifest either as brutally violent fascistic totalitarianism bursting from the depths ... or as a wave of lovingkindness manifest as genuine and cooperative, collaborative, non-hierarchical community-building and power-sharing empowerment with our neighbors.
It's up to us to plant the seeds for the future we desire. But the pressure cannot be any longer ignored. It will manifest as a rupture from our own depths. Something will be sprung forth, inevitably, from those pressures at depths.
Human needs cannot be ignored for long. And false, surrogate need 'satisfactions' offered by advertisers and politicians will not, and cannot, assuage our appetite for belonging and community.
This other comment is just bitching, really, spurred by something you said here. I was born at the end of '55, and my family were the only ones in our neighborhood without a TV. My mother refused to get one, until I was 12. I thanked her many times for this (not when I was a kid, but later). Likewise I refused to allow a TV into the home my kids grew up in, and they have thanked me for that. But now--my son has two kids, aged 6 and 3, and they have a TV, and each kid has a tablet. When I visit, they spend a fair amount of time tuned into inane little stories, with songs usually. The fake-child's-voice grates on me, and I mind very much that the kid culture of yesterday has been replaced by this commercial culture manufactured by adults. I don't object to the lessons imparted, but the fact that it's all imposed by adults, faceless adults who do it for a living. And this is what takes up quite a bit of today's kids' time. Add in that most kids even of my kids' generation had their time fully scripted by their parents, and that adults are spending an enormous percentage of their free time in artificial worlds or checking their phones every few minutes, and I think we see a part of the reason there has been no revolt--people aren't fully clear on the difference between THIS world, the only real world, and their various fantasy gaming worlds, and we've been led into competing identity-clusters, pumped up with emotion around us-good/them-bad, and it blocks any chance of the 99% working together to force change.
I question two of your theses. One, that ALL of us have a deep, intense longing for belonging. I think most of us do, and I agree that it's inchoate, that people don't recognize what they're feeling and it manifests in various, often destructive ways. But I think it's possible that sociopaths, who have inordinate power in the current society, may not have this need.
Secondly, the notion that we will shortly have a massive eruption of either heaven or hell, either we'll finally get it together to move as one out of the illusions that have us competing instead of cooperating, or we'll have a horrible fascist dystopia...that sounds like what I said for years and years, until I finally saw that IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. Things always continue getting both better and worse. I'm attracted to the binary, fork-in-the-road scenario but that doesn't make it real. The possibilities are there for an enormous variety of trajectories for humanity's path into the future. We can't predict it. We can reject some scenarios as implausible, but what WILL happen and when we can't predict. Caitlin Johnstone says people are waking up and getting enlightened. I sure don't see that--if anything I see less wisdom.