12-17-2016, 12:26 PM
(12-17-2016, 10:28 AM)Odin Wrote: Technology is advancing too quickly for people to culturally adapt. A big reason for the angst in rural America and in the Rust Belt is people simply being unable to comprehend automation and it's ultimate end-game. Americans are raised to believe that one must earn one's money through hard work, and that ever since WW2 we have been raised to expect a good-paying job to be our birthright, even for those people who are not capable of higher education.
Technological progress has usually gone hand-in-hand with improvement in living standards. But are those standards even relevant anymore? Most of us who are or have been middle-class have more stuff than we need. Do you have more than 100 discs of music and 100 videos? More than 100 books? You are a hoarder. That was a good business for churning a profit for some Big Business.
Quote:At the same time, a lot of these people are stuck where they are, their wealth is tied up in their houses and good luck trying to sell a house in a small rust belt town, nobody want to move to those places, which makes all the talking points about how they should just move downright tone-deaf and just increases the resentment against the "educated elites".
Such people are now house-poor... and they may fear losing their houses to taxes and the nursing home.
The fault with most small towns is that one must be tied to them from childhood to not feel alien in them. Human relations can be very complex in small towns as they could be in peasant villages. Because many people in small towns are descended from peasants many still think like peasants as would now be impossible in the Old Country.
Donald Trump has done well in exploiting mass resentment against intellectual elites who don't appreciate meat loaf at some restaurant that offers a simulacrum of a farm house, who consider reality TV a waste of time, consider NASCAR boring, enjoy reading but have no use for the schlock penned as right-wing guides to intellectual emptiness, and may like classical music. He acts like someone who got rich the only way that many working people can -- winning the Super-Duper Megabucks Lottery. Such people are gullible enough to fall for the euphemism 'comfort food' -- bland and unimaginative fare dense in calories and in heaping quantities.
But those intellectual 'elites' are only middle-class, and they hold lotteries in disdain because they understand the statistics.
Quote:Then mix this together with people having chronic pain as a result of a lifetime of blue collar work, which then leads these people to end up addicted to opioid painkillers.
Or having diabetes or being grotesquely obese (and effectively handicapped) because they love their sweets and fats too much to judge what those sweets and fats can do to them.
Something amazing -- I have been to art museums, auto museums, historical museums, air and space museums, science museums... and I notice the absence of certain types of people in all of them. Grotesquely-obese people. Maybe obesity correlates to a lack of curiosity. It's not that museums don't accommodate the handicapped well; I see people in wheelchairs, but not grotesquely-obese people in wheelchairs. Get grotesquely-obese and you will get handicapped. (Smokers? I can think of no museums that are smoker-friendly, but that also applies to most restaurants).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.