ACA Repeal/Replace: Progressives Face Moral Dilemma

[Bob Butler 54]

Kinser.

Tired of all the cut pasting.  Responding ad-hoc.

Just reviewing one short view on the four basic patterns of human culture.  Each period had distinctly different methods for energy, weapons, ways of sharing information and styles of government.

• Hunter Gatherer: human muscle, wood and stone human muscle, memory and verbal, tribal rule.
  
• Agricultural: animal muscle, metal human muscle, written language, hereditary empire.
  
• Industrial: fossil fuel & steam, chemical, printed language, evolving towards democracy.
  
• Information:  ?, weapons of mass destruction and insurgency, computer network, ? 
  

I feel it too soon to call what the mature Information Age pattern might be.  It seems clear we’ll have to wean off fossil eventually, but to what?  I suspect direct vote computer democracy will be necessary to bypass the influence of the elites, but those committed to the status quo try hard to make that seem unworkable.  So far there hasn’t been movement in that direction worth mentioning.  If the pendulum keeps swinging, eventually direct vote networked might be tried in earnest.

I can’t succinctly articulate why agricultural age peasants never got to vote, but intuitively, yes, that is part of the agricultural pattern.

Yes, the printing press was very important.  However, if military and agricultural means of acquiring wealth and power continued to dominate manufacturing, I don’t know that the printing press alone would have triggered a new wave of civilization.  That’s an irrelevant question, though.  The same sort of technology that created the printing press created enough new sources of wealth to weaken the influence of old nobility.  A lot of it was the new class of elites (Robber Barons) needing to replace the old (nobility).

For some reason, you end up aligned with ruling elite classes.  You favored the Marxist elite ruling class, and now Trump’s robber barons.  You fight for privilege rather than equality.  I don’t see the quest for equality as complete in the West.  This might be a crucial place where we aren’t going to agree.  I will continue to advocate for the races, cultures and genders who are being kept in their place.  You seem fond enough of your privilege to continue to cling.

I’m very curious as to what will become in the next 2T.  Like your mother, I don’t really anticipate seeing it.  By that time, I don’t think it will be possible to deny global warming.  I expect a strong element of environmental ideals and activism, and a great deal of anger directed at the earlier generations who denied denied denied, who took zero to weak actions.  I am not sure we will have a regeneracy, crisis and high.  We might go straight from a 3T stagnant pendulum to an awakening feeling.  I anticipate a distrust of corporations, a distrust of representative democracy that becomes a servant of the elites, and strong environmental concerns.

Representative democracy did wonderful things during the transition to the Industrial patterns, but if the government doesn’t become more responsive and united, direct vote democracy might be seen as necessary.

While the next generation of blue prophets won’t be twins of the 1960s hippies, if they look around and see a ruined planet and dysfunctional elite serving government, they might easily be just as angry as the hippies and just as demanding of change.

But that is still just over the horizon.  As my magic eight ball is fond of saying, “Answer Hazy, Try Again Later”.