Two Gates of Hell and the Crisis in Ukraine as a Gateway to the Crisis of the Empire and Its System

Here is a usable kernel of insight that can be extracted from an old New York Time s commentary by Paul Krugman. I would be even willing to call it Krugman's law:

The rising inequality leads to financial crisis through unsustainable increase of debt bondage of the people. On the other side, the ruling oligarchs or plutocrats are becoming increasingly detached from reality, while this detachment from reality and the rest paradoxically gives them more power over the rest and, in their minds, also over reality.

At the same time, the ruling oligarchs are paying a lot for collecting every possible piece of intelligence and information on the rest, reality, and other oligarchs. Yet they are also paying a lot of money for cohorts of their flatterers and "courtiers who tell them what they want to hear." In this way, the ever sophisticated and ever massive power to dupe the rest becomes at one point counterbalanced by the plutocrats' self-love and their own delusions--and detachment from reality.

At this point, we then get all the ingredients for a social crisis, which, in some way, has been helped and even willed (though not entirely) by the oligarchs themselves. And given its gravity, the crisis leaves only two gates out--like the two gates out of Hell in Virgil's account of the Underworld in the Aeneid. And the two only exits left are either war or revolution. One of them is the true gate and the other is the gate of false dreams. The Empire always chooses the false exit.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/opinion/krugman-paranoia-of-the-plutocrats.html