The influence of geopolitical and global economic conditions on the fabric of domestic societies and on individual psychology is most frequently underestimated by civilian commentators, especially regarding Western “free and democratic” societies. The military, on the other hand, do not underestimate the importance of broad trade and economic factors on the very fabric of a society and on the psychology of its citizens, at least in targeted developing countries. This article has two main goals. The first is to demonstrate the large extent to which the global financial system determines national and regional reality in people’s lives and security, including in the USA itself and in the Western world in general, with an emphasis on the two main post-World-War-II transformations, which were initiated in 1971, following the cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, and in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.¹

Measured human consequences synchronous with the post-1991 acceleration of globalization, mainly affecting the lower-income classes, in the West, include: loss of welfare safety net, increase of number of single-parent families, threefold increase in rate of confrontational litigation in the courts, between parents and between individuals and with the state (“crisis in access to justice”), increased low-income household basic-need incidence (housing, health, safety, work, finance), increased rates of both suicide and suicide attempt, increased rate of opioid overdose (preceding the opioid epidemic of the 2010s), and increased rates of chronic asthma emergencies, and asthma prevalence, in both children and adults.