Poverty has really dug her bloody claws in since the millennium, heralding in a brutal new age of war, scarcity , hunger , and despair . The rash of doomsday cults that have cropped up shouldn't surprise anyone , religion has always been the sanctuary of the downtrodden and poor, Marx's opiate of the masses but New Mexico's own Messianic contender Michael Travesser hardly cuts it against the multitude of anonymous hypnotic drumbeat driven Ghost dancers of the sprawling townships, barrios and favellas of the world , their hallucinogenic fervour stems from the relentless crushing of the human spirit , they use spirituality as a general anaesthetic against poverty and the often unbearable weight of their moneyless being whereas Travesser simply plays God from the comfort of his private fiefdom of Strong City using a broadband connection. He is more Survivalist than Saviour, he has not embedded himself amongst the poor nor has he timed wider publicity around his Second Coming very well either , unless you think an omniscient being would have risked sharing headlines with  the long awaited release of Grand Theft Auto IV , a game in which, mimicking the culture, killing is all.

Liberty city or Baghdad take your pick, we know its all the same to the guys from Blackwater as  where imperialist politics, money, hi tech and state and corporate  paranoia coincide , life becomes just another game. 

Poverty has also spooked the rich into creating their own version of Survivalism, not for them the rugged Rambo lifestyle that some of the Blackwater clones seek to live up to, as their leading survivalist guru , former chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley Barton M Biggs lays his soul bear in his upmarket survivalist tome ' Wealth , War and Wisdom , he suggests that all right-minded people should "assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilised infrastructure".

The global food supply price mechanism could qualify as one such breakdown, only Mr biggs and his ilk have not had to cut back on what they eat . I also suspect  the 3ft thick reinforced concrete and steel doors of the ' right minded people' Club have probably already closed to people who are just struggling to get by ...

Biggs warns :

"The four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out every two generations, and they come in different disguises," he says. "We are due to see the horsemen again some time in the next 10 to 20 years – and the prudent person with wealth should take out an insurance policy against them."

This slightly overlooks the fact that when the horseman ride out they are usually in the employ of the rich or find it a lot easier to  trample the poor. 

And Biggs isn't just talking about white flight into gated communities as I suspect he realises that command and control over technology in a world of scarcity is going to see a real rift between the rich who'll be physically augmented by technology and live longer, healthier , better and more digitally enhanced lives and the rest of us whose main relationship with technology will be it keeping tabs on us.

Above all else poverty is divisive. What we need is a shared vision. Biggs represents a class of people who don't want to share their vision , wealth , wisdom or survival strategies with anyone who isnt like them.  In wealth, war and Wisdam Biggs is , consciously or otherwise, merely thinking aloud for his class for whom the growing number of tired, poor, huddled masses wishing to breathe free of poverty are becoming a serious  problem. 

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