by Doug Casey, International Man:

Eighty-four percent of millennials admit that they don’t know how to change a lightbulb. When asked what they do if one goes out, most either said that they call the landlord to fix it, or just accept having less light in future.

Readers of this publication will be savvy enough to know that a crisis of biblical proportions is on the way. It will begin as an economic crisis, but will quickly morph into a political and social crisis as well.

There can be no doubt that my generation (the baby boomers) have done more to create this crisis than any other. So, who will be the ones that will have to deal with the crisis, once it’s under way?

Well, that always falls to the young, strong, energetic segment of the population. The twenty-to-forty group would be the ones who would need to roll up their sleeves and bail out the sinking rowboat.

That means that, by the time we’re in crisis mode, the generation that will inherit the job of fixing the mammoth problem will be the millennials.

Uh-oh.

The “depression generation” were known for hard work and self-reliance. Their children – the boomers – were their spoiled children, who became the yuppies. They sought to live luxuriously, with a minimum of responsibility. The next generation – the millennials – have, so far, proven to be a generation that not only does not wish to take on responsibility, they are literally unable to do so.

With notable exceptions, it’s a generation of people who blindly expect that their parents, the government and perhaps the tooth fairy, have the full responsibility to take away all of their problems and inconveniences. This has reached the perverse degree that students at even the best universities have “safe spaces,” where no one may say anything that upsets them. Harvard now has rooms where students who are feeling stressed can play with Play-doh. Rules are established based not upon what is practical or workable, but on “How I feel at the moment.”

This is not just a generation that’s a bit spoiled and needs a shot of hard reality to aid their maturing process. This, tragically, is a generation that is simply unable to cope with responsibility of any kind – a generation that, literally does not know where to begin if a task as simple as changing a light bulb occurs.

Those from older generations tend to say, vaguely, “Well I suppose they’ll just have to grow up. If there’s a crisis, they’ll just have to get on with it.”

Well, no, unfortunately, neither the mindset nor the skillset exists for millennials to take on the job. At best they will fail to act. Just as they now accept darkness rather than figure out how to change a lightbulb, they’ll fail to roll up their sleeves to rebuild a working market during and after a crisis. But, at worst, they’ll have meltdowns, resorting to violence in the belief that, “This shouldn’t be happening to me!”

So, if this is the case, who, then, will be the saviours of the rather large portion of the world that will be self-destructing?

Well, historically, these developments tend to be generational, as described above. So, to understand how the crisis will play out, we might look at countries that are further along on the same curve. After all, boom and bust patterns are perennial; it’s just that, whilst one nation is in boom mode, there’s always another that’s is in bust mode.

France fell apart around 1800 and Russia did so around 1900. But we have a more recent example, right in the western hemisphere – Cuba.

In 1959, the Cuban government had become so corrupt and so oppressive that a small band of ne’er-do-wells was able to take over, with very little bloodshed.

Cubans from my generation were so pleased to have the fearsome Battista removed that they were prepared to accept whatever jury-rigged government the Castro brothers might dish up. Fidel Castro was no communist, but he quickly adopted communism when the Soviet Union agreed to pay him three times the going price for Cuban sugar, and they would take all he could produce.

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