(01-02-2022, 08:27 PM)galaxy Wrote:(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming.
It's obvious to us now, but of course no one at the beginning of that turning will see it coming when it begins around 2090 or so.
A more interesting question for me is predicting the central features of the next Awakening (2T beginning between 2044 and 2052, ending between 2064 and 2072). My money is on automation, and a cultural tension between "human" and "automated." The new Prophets will revolt against the "soulless, unfeeling computerized world the Millennials have built" and try to "rediscover how to be 'truly human.'"
It's obvious to those of us who have the freedom to think of something other than the immediate future. Many Americans endure fear of employers or family members (abuse), food insecurity, or medical crises. If you encounter a tiger, then your focus is on the tiger. People living paycheck to paycheck might see a job as an oil-field worker as a solution to all their problems but ignore that the consumption of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming.
As for automation, you are right. To spoof Karl Marx,
A specter is haunting the industrialized world—the specter of the end of scarcity as a control upon the masses. All the powers of our world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.
It is easy to control hungry, scared people who recognize that they are one angry judgment of a greedy or uncaring boss away from ending up hungry and homeless. It is also far easier to get filthy rich through honest means by meeting scarcity instead of creating and milking it. It could be that the dynamics necessary for competitive capitalism are disappearing. Before the neoconservative era the general assumption in America was that workers needed a stake in the system so that they would not find revolutionary socialism of some kind attractive. In the neoconservative era worker are compelled to recognize that they are nothing more than conduits of wealth from one plutocrat to another, and the less that they have the more efficiently the capitalist system works. The neoliberal ideology looks like a partial reversion to aristocratic values that usually emerge in economic elites as what had been a reward for innovation and service becomes nothing more than an income stream. The person who demands the lowest pay gets the job, even if that person is not in America. Tenants find that they must bid against each other in a grim auction to determine who gets housing and who gets shut out into the cold.
The best defense against this is the lifetime theory of enterprises in which firms go from innovators who prove that they are astute instead of crazy and make high early profits, then establish some stability as shareholder corporations, get controls to watch the assets as the profit margins shrink but sales volume increases through geographic expansion. After that the controllers of assets become a privileged class who shape the reality to fit them as profits stagnate, then shrink, then vanish. Unable to attract and keep the sort of talent that could revitalize the system or advance it into positions in which it would challenged entrenched and incompetent bureaucrats, the profits vanish, the firm eats its assets, and eventually dies. Meanwhile the heirs find that their assets eventually become worthless. I have a thread discussing that. The typical firm has such a life about as long as a human lifetime; the founders innovate, the founders' kids manage; the founders' grandchildren have better things to do. Just look at some of the big retailers. They got a big break when they were able to hire large numbers of smart people to be retail sales clerks in the 1980's. Had they been able to keep that talent long enough to renovate the system, then companies like Sears, K-Mart, Bon-Ton, and Montgomery-Ward might be going concerns. Smart people in such places decided that they could not live on what they paid, and many decided that with their college degrees they would be better off doing something else. This said, Kohl's and Target, which dispensed with the idea of discrete departments in which employees know a little and have responsibilities from stocking to point of sale dispensed with connecting sales volume to competence and installed a checkout system like that of a grocery store, have thrived.
If it now takes twenty-five hours a week to make the stuff that we need for a comfortable existence by 1950's standards (that would be fully adequate for most people; technology is more refined, so some things are far better, like TV sets) then we need to work more hours only to do BS activities... or stoke the rapacious greed of elites. 70 hours a week just to give maximal rent to landlords who crowd more people into lesser housing? How perverse!
Some science-fiction writers catch on to the danger of the Singularity in which machine intelligence surpasses ours. What happens if the machines decide that they no longer need us? The machines create their own version of Animal Farm, but instead of the pigs (the second-smartest, and arguably the most dangerous of farm animals) ruling everything and the dogs being deputized as the secret police (dogs are nasty creatures unless one is a human, perhaps a cat, or another dog) for having a combination of power, speed, strength, agility, cunning, sharp claws and teeth, and latent ferocity to enforce the will of the pigs who have overthrown the humans on Manor Farm. Just imagine the machines getting control of the electric grid and using it to electrocute 'unnecessary' people. How does that work? the machines create super-easy chairs in which electrodes offer drug-like highs that make people complacent, and then give the sorts of jolts that one associates with an electric chair used to kill condemned people. People gone, the machines dedicate the electric grid and automated production and transportation to their service. Scary scenario? Maybe I should write some science fiction. For global warming, The Year Without a Winter... and for the Singularity, Death Watch.
Quote:(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 4th turning won't end until 2029.
How so confident? The best I can do is 2024 to 2032, based on rough estimates of when Homelanders will surpass Boomers in number.
Crises usually have their constituency at the outset -- people who see nothing wrong with apocalypse if it serves their political, economic, religious, or cultural agenda. Religious fanatics seek to deliver people to obedient, uncritical faith that rejects science because faith is somehow 'purer'. Think of the fundamentalists who see biological evolution as a tool of Satan to challenge faith that is supposedly all that people need, but deviations from which lead one to damnation. Then look at the Taliban for an Islamic expression of much the same literalism. There one has the people who threaten us with the words "Believe it or burn!", whether in Hell or at some stake. They respond to evolution with "But is it worth burning in Hell for?" Similarly insidious, but less potentially brutal, is the Prosperity Gospel in which sending money to some preacher in the Name of God who somehow will 'bless' and 'magnify' the loot while building an impressive empire of real estate, vehicles and a jet owned by the "ministry", and the pastor wearing expensive clothes while appearing on a plush set on a nearly-unlimited expense account. People fall for this only to become poorer.
The Apocalypse runs its course, devouring those who sow, reap, and ride the Whirlwind. It may be thrilling at first, but it also becomes sickening for its destructiveness. Barring a leader capable of starting his "permanent revolution" or "racial holy war" and keeping it going for twenty years or so (Stalin and Mao succeeded at this; Trotsky, had he won the power struggle with Stalin, might have had his "Permanent revolution" culminating in a death-0struggle between capitalism and his ideology; but Hitler failed), the Crises burn themselves out fast because they devour people and economic resources at prodigious rates that nations can never offset.
The last thing that anyone wants when a Crisis is in recent memory is another Crisis. Maybe this time World War II still casts such a long shadow of human and material destruction that we ar incapable of an apocalyptic war. Images of bodies stacked like cordwood at liberated camps, Nazi massacres, cities incinerated in incendiary air raids, and of course the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sear the consciousness of people born long after the war. Beyond any doubt, the German and Japanese people are far nicer people now than they were eighty years ago. Can you imagine the Germans consigning religious minorities to death camps or the Japanese imposing the Bataan death March or Camp T-741 (pseudo-medical experiments)?
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.