THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

iot troops). The fighting lasted three days, and caused over Pound
120 million in property damage. The one point the residents and the
government officials agreed on was that the root cause of all the
mayhem was the high unemployment levels of the youth.
The French sociologist, Loic Wacquant, made a systematic study of
urban rioting in the developed world. The majority of urban rioters -
independently of the country involved - have a common profile: they
are formerly working-class youth which has given up on finding a
job in the brave new world of the Information Age.
Fear by the majority
The next step is an easy guess. How do most people react to
random acts of violence against property and people? Fear is the
answer.
Fear of what will depend on the interpretation given to the events,
and this will vary in turn with the location, age, origin, social
background, and nationality of the observer.
It ranges from fear of all young people, fear of punks, fear of ah
immigrants, fear of blacks in America, fear of Arabs in France, fear of
Turks in Germany, to fear of...(please fill in the blanks for your area).
Political polarisation
Fear is to politics what the ocean is to an island. It draws the
boundaries of the constituency, whom you want to exclude and
whom you want to attract.
This is why politicians everywhere tend to blame another country
whenever possible when there are particularly tough situations to
deal with. Nobody can vote for them there. But unemployment and