Some amazing last-hurrahs for the Silent generation, along with Nancy Pelosi and (unless he is defeated or more likely the Senate goes Democratic) Mitch McConnell.
The amazing thing is that the Millennial Generation has been slow -- so far -- to achieve access in the Halls of Power, political, corporate, or in the non-profit sector. Could it be that our bureaucratized capitalism is so effective in retarding the rise of competent people in achieving prominence?
A Crisis Era can -- and almost certainly does -- break that. Compelling people to be extremely materialistic yet damned to fail at achieving their dreams is itself absurd. Despotic and dictatorial orders can suppress needful change until the order fails catastrophically as in military calamities or in revolutions. Our economic system has much going badly, and it can fail suddenly... and unlike the case in 2008 there might not be the means of saving entities "too big to fail". I can easily see such entities as "too big to preserve" in the event of their failure.
Know well: bureaucracy is not capitalism. Bureaucrats can be as exploitative as capitalists and even live like capitalists off rich salaries. It is enterprise, and not the concentration of wealth and power in a tiny elite, that defines capitalism. Feudalism could certainly concentrate wealth and power. Fascism had the concentration of wealth and power as an objective. Marxism-Leninism held that eliminating the entrepreneurs would jump-start economic development and free people from the exploitation of plutocratic masters, only to establish by default an administrative clique that became as rapacious as plutocrats and hereditary -- almost as if aristocratic -- in succession. After all, if one is a central planner and likes what one does one is obviously tempted to ensure that your children have the same opportunity as one and not be a laborer even if the official propaganda lionizes the proletariat!
The amazing thing is that the Millennial Generation has been slow -- so far -- to achieve access in the Halls of Power, political, corporate, or in the non-profit sector. Could it be that our bureaucratized capitalism is so effective in retarding the rise of competent people in achieving prominence?
A Crisis Era can -- and almost certainly does -- break that. Compelling people to be extremely materialistic yet damned to fail at achieving their dreams is itself absurd. Despotic and dictatorial orders can suppress needful change until the order fails catastrophically as in military calamities or in revolutions. Our economic system has much going badly, and it can fail suddenly... and unlike the case in 2008 there might not be the means of saving entities "too big to fail". I can easily see such entities as "too big to preserve" in the event of their failure.
Know well: bureaucracy is not capitalism. Bureaucrats can be as exploitative as capitalists and even live like capitalists off rich salaries. It is enterprise, and not the concentration of wealth and power in a tiny elite, that defines capitalism. Feudalism could certainly concentrate wealth and power. Fascism had the concentration of wealth and power as an objective. Marxism-Leninism held that eliminating the entrepreneurs would jump-start economic development and free people from the exploitation of plutocratic masters, only to establish by default an administrative clique that became as rapacious as plutocrats and hereditary -- almost as if aristocratic -- in succession. After all, if one is a central planner and likes what one does one is obviously tempted to ensure that your children have the same opportunity as one and not be a laborer even if the official propaganda lionizes the proletariat!
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.