>>>As John Ryan said though- a tipping point will come- and it will be fun to watch.
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>I'm concerned. The last revolution was between people who had differences but basically respected each other. This time there are extremes, one of which perceives itself as rightful aristocracy with absolute disdain for the feeble masses, and the other that is fragmented but now needs only direction and opportunity to erupt. I don't want to be there when the proverbial hits the fan. It's worse than rioting: basically the veneer of civilization is rubbed off and what remains is savagery you'd never expect of your dentist neighbor. Ask Dragan. Still avoidable if people could find it in themselves to show respect and consideration for each other. Too much to expect, apparently.

Today's aristocracy doesn't have the responsibilities of the medieval ones. They don't really care if their people suffer and die, as they aren't relying on their people as defense force or their only source of income. Their people are random mercenaries - the staffers, the managers, the cubicle farm plants, the unnamed poor in China and elsewhere. They have accumulated enough money to have the power to replace these with any other random bunch of people (by shutting down their places of work, by moving their business to another county/state/country/continent). Most of all, they pretty much never see each other.

From the bits and pieces of life I see around myself, there are two tendencies. One is to make things more civilized - people being polite to each other more than before, keeping the public property far longer from being vandalized (I'm seeing fully functional phone booths for years now, while 20-30-40 years ago none would survive a month; public benches as well; even the kids' playground in my street was intact for years, now the swing is broken). The other trend is to be selfish - there are houses built where the street would exit to a main street, so fifty families have to drive around forever in each case; theft is ubiquitous; anyone above the plain clerk expects a bribe (including the traffic cops), the higher up the more; refugees from Syria et al, asylum seekers, are denied hospitality (the state provides, but the neighborhoods of the facilities are protesting and block them out - many had to sleep in the forest) by some and helped by others.

So it's a mixed bag. But with 99% watching TV and specially reality shows (and I guess they aren't any higher-brow here than elsewhere, the construction is the same) and getting their texts from there, and even the intellectual elites being broken along the many lines (those who think they can prosper within the system; those who think they can drill their hole into the system and stick a tap in it; those who wait for the government to do something for them; those who have given up any hope and live from day to day on just inertia or narcotics; the conspiracy theorists and practitioners; those who think that returning to church and tradition would cure everything; ditto for joining the EU; those who know the single cause of all the trouble...)... the masses are divided on each point on which they may otherwise have united. They may agree the system is bad and gone to worse, but the divisions begin as soon as the question of what exactly is wrong with it appears.

I've seen even bank apologists here, mostly among the young economists (probably thinking high of themselves for being so smart to understand how it works and not seeing through the game... or hoping to get their share of the spoils); I've seen staunch exterminators of conspiracy theorists (which means they must love the official version, in Serbia! - c'mon). I've seen people who'd just find any job and make a living - had my bunch of contractors over the house this summer and they were abuzz with solid labor and on the other side there are many who are just waiting for a job and mouthing complaints in the general direction of the government. And then there are the extreme right wing, borderline fascist parties on the margins. Small but vocal and finding some traction.

So the 99% are fractured, broken along many lines, and that part of the global mechanism works flawlessly. Even if the situation arises when it gets so bad that they overcome their differences, the seeds of discord have taken deep roots and will grow again after they eventually make a new system. Which is pretty much the goal of social engineering of the current powers, to make themselves presentable as not good at all but still better than the next bunch. So, as one of our ex-presidents said, "my reserve runs deeper than my hope".