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Billionaire legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio said there is a rising risk of civil war due to the current state of events in the United States.
The founder of the world’s largest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates, Dalio made the statement in an article, “The Rising Risk Of Civil War: Following In The Footsteps Of History,” which he posted to LinkedIn.
“For reasons covered more completely in my book ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order,’ the US appears to be on a classic path toward some form of civil war,” Dalio said.
Simultaneous financial crises including inflation, “large wealth and value gaps,” and people’s increasing preference to fight over differing beliefs rather than compromise are all contributing to a climate in which civil war can erupt, according to Dalio.
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When you add the increasing strength of foreign powers, we are living in “an especially risky period,” Dalio wrote. “By most of the measures that I use, the current financial conditions and irreconcilable differences in desires and values are consistent with the ingredients leading to some form of civil war.
“We are seeing that they are leading to much greater amounts of populism/extremism and conflicts between the right and the left, which is classic. Both sides are fighting to win at all costs and are unwilling to compromise,” he continued.
“History shows us that when 1) extremists who will fight to win at all costs are in the majority and 2) respecting rule of law becomes of secondary importance to winning, internal conflicts reach the point of being self-reinforcing,” Dalio explained. “Moderates are eliminated and so is the ability to compromise, creating the fights to win that are civil wars. Actual developments are tracking that archetypical path.”
This isn’t the first time Ray Dalio has predicted a civil war. He also did so in 2019, 2020 and 2021 in separate essays addressing the state of U.S. society.
In 2019, Dialo penned an essay entitled “Why And How Capitalism Needs To Be Reformed.” In it, he spoke about his middle-class upbringing and how “flaws in American capitalism have created destructive and self-reinforcing gaps in education, social mobility, assets and income — and the result could be another revolution.”
He doubled down in 2020, writing about the “growing disorder” the U.S. is experiencing.
“The United States is at a tipping point in which it could go from manageable internal tension to revolution and/or civil war,” Dialo wrote in an article, “The Changing World Order.”
In 2021, Ray Dalio reiterated his stance in his book, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail.” In it, he said there was a 30-percent chance of civil war in America.
LinkedIn users weighed in. “At the risk of sounding like a simpleton, I am unsure of how a civil war (war between the citizens of a country) would actually formulate,” LinkedIn user Jeannine Everhart wrote.
“The US Civil War of 1860 was rather organized with a set of states binding together under central leadership and battling the centralized Federal Government,” Everhart added. “In this case, I do not imagine it would be the same. This seems more tribal with a ‘left’ clan vs a ‘right’ clan. Where is the leadership on either side? How would one know who is the ‘enemy’? I just do not see how (organizationally, logistically) such a thing would play out. What am I missing?”
LinkedIn user Dan Green also responded. “I see this dynamic happening in families and communities, in fact it occurs in most social settings, because it’s on a smaller scale I never really looked into it in this way. It can also be seen in organisations that are going through a life cycle. Patterns develop that might be able to be read. What I don’t quite get is why common sense abandons even so called intelligent people?”
Another respondent, Sally Martin, said she was more interested in how to prevent a civil war. “The question is. How do we avoid war? It is ‘we the people’ who are responsible at a grass roots level to implement change and work as one,” Martin wrote. “Ray you have the platform, resources and voice. Sharing information is the start, thank you. How do we organize for reform, unification and peace? Is there a road map for avoiding war?”
