07-18-2017, 12:26 PM
(07-18-2017, 11:39 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(07-17-2017, 10:16 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We may shift to that, but in our saeculum, scarity economics still rules the roost, and has recently taken over the country. The unravelling memes in power in the last (and current) 40 years period have seen to it that whatever prosperity may happen in a dawning information or green age is not distributed equally or fairly, but captured by the elites who run the system for their own benefit and wealth. So we are in an industrial age crisis this cycle, because it may be a crisis in which a transition to an information age saeculum takes place. That is, IF the progressive side wins because the millennials will have stepped up to the plate, as they haven't done yet.
The reason the saeculum cycles are less firm in other countries is that they have gradually blended with the anglo-american one, as the new world culture has developed. Other Western countries were already running almost parallel, since The West was a common culture going back millennia. Sometimes, when people forget or ignore that we are one world civilization now, as of the last 120 years or so, this confuses peoples' view of the cycles.
It's a structural "feature" (bug?) not a "Progressive" vs "Conservative" (or Left vs Right) issue. The system designs we inherited from the "Industrial" Era are ill fitted to the emerging state of play. We do see instances of alternative means such as crowd sourcing and crowd funding ... these means are outside of traditional "Capitalism," "State Capitalism," "Democratic Socialism" and the Totalitarian renditions of "Communism" and "Socialism." These instances of alternative means give us hints of what is to come, even while the outlines are still shrouded in thick fog.
"crowd sourcing" and "crowd funding" seems a non-sequitur. As I see it, the lingering industrial era is expressed by the lingering regression of the conservative, right-wing powers. The progressive/left side must win if we are to emerge from the industrial era with the foundations of the future intact. Once such a victory occurs, and only then, I agree there will be systems that take us beyond the traditional distinctions.
I see these as new age and green in nature, and will transcend the current battles between individual freedom and collective responsibility. In the ecological view there is mutual inter-dependence in all living things. In the new age spiritual view, there is more than political power to develop and consider in systems design and maintenance, but also the human, creative and consciousness aspects of personal and social fulfillment to consider. Information systems will continue to streamline and make less physical and more integral and world-connected our operations and interactions.
We can't get to these levels in our politics, however, until we go beyond and defeat the right-wing "free market ideological" resistance based on industrial capitalist greed and agricultural-age superstition. Totalitarian collectivist systems are also not fit for the new systems and lifestyles to come. If this victory over these relics of the past does not occur, then we remain stuck in the industrial age in our politics and in our other retrograde institutions. As General MacArthur said, there is no substitute for victory.