COVID-19 is the climax to this 4T

[Eric the Green]

(04-13-2020, 05:41 AM)Isoko Wrote: I think that Eric is fundamentally speaking living in the past. Eric has what I called a leftist messianic version of the future where everything is eventually going to be great and liberal. I would argue that this is further from the truth and that the liberalism of the past is going to heavily decline in the coming decades.

I agree with him though that gay marriage or abortion is not going to be overturned but I would say that people are going to become more centrist rather then right or left wing. People are fed up with the left and more sympathetic to the right these days yet not willing to go down the full conservative path either.

Even still, the whole idea of a globalist universalistic society is just that. A pure fantasy. It is about as realistic as the great technological age of flying cars that awaits us. Or the space colonies we are supposed to have anytime soon now. It just will not happen. At least for hundreds of years.

There will always be people. There will always be different ideas and ways of doing things. There will always be hatreds and paranoia. In fact I will make a solid prediction and say that the next major war will occur when civilisation gets bored again.

If you look at the dynamics of 1914, society became bored and wanted excitement. People actually celebrated not as hatred but as a change to the status quo. Right now people are still entertained but give it 100 years and when the current technology becomes the same old, they will start to dream of more fantastical destructive ways to elevate the boredom. As is history.

I would say I am living in the future.

But pessimism is not a bad point of view in predicting the future. I give you that. Humans are a fallible lot to say the least, and my favorite rock musician Pete Townshend, who called for action to be free, and said the revolution is here and you know it's right (posted elsewhere here), also said on the same album where he called for action that war is a scene changer, because people are bored with other peoples' lives. He also famously said, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So, I don't predict the end of wars either. I am not that optimistic, and in fact I am good at predicting the timing of wars. I have a long successful record at that.

But I do think the end of war is a hallmark of the sixties revolution. You can say I am stuck in the sixties, but what I see in history is sort of like what Marx saw, who said history is class struggle, and a dialectical process. As a student of cycles, I see cycles of revolution, and certain times like the sixties and the time of Marx circa 1848 were not just times of social disorder and attempted revolutions, but the start of a movement, and movements continue and change society; they don't just end with the calendar. We have seen this happen with both the democratic and the socialist movements, and we are seeing it with the sixties movement in the continued rise of the green new deal.

So, will the sixties movement end war? Probably not for a while, but it has put the idea squarely on the human agenda. War is in fact obsolete, accomplishes nothing anymore, and is dangerous because of the atomic bomb. Wars today must be small, and provide no benefits, and no excitement (how exciting are drone strikes? It's just another video game). So they will end, someday. I predict there will be an empowered UN developed next century that will be empowered to settle disputes and restrain rogues. I look upon world war I as the war which taught us that war is not exciting, but that it can destroy us. Indeed people thought it would be exciting, that it would end soon, and they marched off to war with flying colors, but it ended up being a war in which people sacrificed their lives in muddy trenches not for the racist, national rivalries they thought they were dying for, but for the world society which was then being born, and which would be governed by a descendant of the organization that the war created.

It was in fact a revolution too; destroying 4 great empires, and the next one that it spawned got rid of the colonial ones. That was rather ironic, because in fact the war was begun by the imperial aristocrats as a distraction from the revolutionary national and socialist movements that were rising up at that time and threatening their power. It is a favorite tactic of tyrants. But World War I was a great turning point; the end of the renaissance/enlightenment era of European world power and the beginning of a developing world civilization to take its place, with multiple power centers everywhere.

Tech dreams are often ridiculous fantasies, like flying cars (who wants to watch or listen to those things rattling around in the sky and crashing into each other and falling on us) or space colonies and colonies on Mars, etc. But it is a fantasy to think globalization will end. That is a utopian fantasy to return to the past. Globalization can't be stopped. People of all kinds can go anywhere and move anywhere now. The genetic pool will no longer be traceable in a decade or two. People will have to learn to live with differences as never before, because we can't even walk around the block now without meeting people different from us. The sixties movement said with Carole King that we are brothers and sisters under the skin and that peace in the valley will come. The race must still be run.





What a great song!