06-13-2022, 04:11 PM
1. "You will own nothing and you will be happy".
For the survival of a livable world, conspicuous consumption must shrink dramatically. That is obvious enough. Maybe we will all have some really-good portable computers that offer us most of our entertainment and enlightenment, supplanting analogues of fifty years ago (CRT-screen televisions,. movie projectors and reels of film, LP records, and dead-tree editions of books). So information and titillation appear as transitory data instead of physical software.
You will still need to own a laptop, have power to run it, and access to the Internet; this will require you to make payments. Paying for the right to listen to a recent movie release, trashy novel, or a song will have to be easy and seem trivial as a cost. Maybe you will be less prone than your grandparents to hoard "collectibles" such as Hummel or Precious Moments figurines or gaudy plates. People who thought that expensive bone china would be heirlooms might be aghast to find those as cast-offs at Goodwill along with LP's of Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, Patti Page, and huge amounts of music giving allusions to the faux-exotic world of Hawaii before jet travel -- and novelties like "Big Mouth Billy Bass", the singing fish that got stale almost as fast as fish in a refrigerator.
2. "You will rent everything and it will be delivered by drone". For all practical purposes, millions get their furniture and electronic goodies at rent-to-own places on rental-purchase plans that will be worthless (broken, obsolete, or unspeakably ugly) by the time that the contract is up. One does not get title for this gaudy, shabby stuff until it is worthless; it is overpriced even if one sees the difference between "90 days same-as-cash" deals as an alternative to paying loan-shark interest as an add-on. A huge stereo that offers a light show but dreadfully-low fidelity? I'm not listening to Mozart string quartets on that! Those rent-to-own places do not yet deliver by drone, and they are unlikely to do so.
You probably will rent movies and pop music, but you will buy stuff for multiple uses.
Drone technology allows people to get stuff that they see of lasting value without having to cart it over by car. With GPS, an internet retailer like Amazon or an internet-using retailer can potentially deliver a video disk, music CD's (people are still buying them, but not at stores), prescription medicine, spare parts, or even a crate of cat food by drone. The drone can generally avoid flying within the reach of people's heads and outstretched arms or vehicular traffic, dodge trees and power lines, and even deliver to a tenth-story balcony of a high-rise apartment.
Much of what we buy, like food and prescription medicines, is one-time purchase or a repeated purchase. We buy services, whether insurance or rights to access to media.
3. You will eat much less meat. Meat and seafood will become more expensive because more people will be the market. On the other side, if one is not entering a market with a burgeoning population of people adding meat to their diets (the Third World), then personal reduction in meat consumption may be "doctor's orders". Heavy consumption of meat is terribly unhealthy. I have gotten the indication that no more meat or fish than the mass of a deck of cards is wholly adequate. Such old staples as potatoes, rice, beans, and pasta really are good for us.
4. An occasional treat and not a staple. That connects clearly to meat and fish, which we should eat about as much of as ice cream cones or pie. (OK. anyone overindulging in those is hurting himself. Then of course come alcoholic beverages. I enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine, so it is not an issue of self-righteousness. Tobacco is not part of my life.
In general, as people become more learned they less seek the unalloyed, intense, but ephemeral delights that cost greatly and in excess can foul one's health, make one poor, and destroy one's reputation while making one an irredeemable bore. Loveless sex, drugs and drunkenness, mass low culture, sweets, impulse shopping, gambling, and 'cheap thrills' don't improve one as a person and do not connect one to community.
5. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. If we follow trends of population growth, then at least billion people will be KILLED by climate change directly through famines or indirectly through wars. We need to push zero population growth so that we don't over-stretch the holding capacity for our planet. Let's not forget the animals that are the second-and third-biggest consumers of food: dogs and cats. Spay and neuter, spay and neuter.
Russell Brand recalls (back to #1) that if the common man owns practically nothing, then who owns practically everything? Either the State (socialism) or plutocrats (shareholders, landlords, legal loan-sharks, the military-establishment complex, Big Oil, Big Retail, agribusiness... yes, Coca-Cola, Wal*Mart, Monsanto, Starbucks). Also Lockheed, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, Bank of America, Exxon-Mobil, Unilever, Shell, Warner, Toyota, Nestle, Siemens, Daewoo, and the New York Yankees... one cannot reasonably expect owners, bureaucratic elites, and their well-paid retainers to look out for any people other than themselves unless doing otherwise puts them at risk of such a calamity as thermonuclear war or a proletarian revolution. In all countries the effective rulers are becoming more distant from the common man and pay attention to the common man only to fleece him in commerce or delude him in politics.
Donald Trump is an extreme reflection of the divide between membership in an economic elite and the plight of the common man. Yes, he is pathology because he is intellectually hollow and on the borderline between narcissism and sociopathy. He is nothing but sybaritic indulgence and the inflation of a bruised ego. He attended a great college but seems to have learned nothing from his time there. Many 'mere' high-school graduates find themselves curious enough to watch PBS and read accessible non-fiction that can teach something. The Great Books approach to learning is an old and effective one even if it has its limitations... but someone who has read the Great Books and drawn some conclusions therefrom has achieved one of the old purposes of a college education, which is to improve the participant. (OK, I prefer Shakespeare on stage, and even Plato wrote his discourses practically as drama, and that may be the best way in which to address Plato -- yes, on the stage).
One can learn much from Shakespeare; one can learn nothing by consorting with high-priced hookers.
It could well be that rich and powerful people are finally discovering that someone like Donald Trump is someone too risky for either commercial or political leadership (he was never going to be cultural leadership!) To be sure, the real elites send their kids to elite boarding schools in which they are safely sequestered from the vileness of mass low culture. Then again, maybe farm families in the Midwest can sequester their kids from a lot. Cynical rap videos and farm chores do not go together.
Improving people by enriching their culture and expanding their mental universes has always paid off well in making a more livable world. If one really did get something from first-rate or even second-rate education, it could well be that one does not need to sleep with porn stars (and would be aghast at taking the risks involved) or possess a gold toilet.
Obviously I distrust the conjunction of great greed, sybaritic indulgence, and unconstrained power.
For the survival of a livable world, conspicuous consumption must shrink dramatically. That is obvious enough. Maybe we will all have some really-good portable computers that offer us most of our entertainment and enlightenment, supplanting analogues of fifty years ago (CRT-screen televisions,. movie projectors and reels of film, LP records, and dead-tree editions of books). So information and titillation appear as transitory data instead of physical software.
You will still need to own a laptop, have power to run it, and access to the Internet; this will require you to make payments. Paying for the right to listen to a recent movie release, trashy novel, or a song will have to be easy and seem trivial as a cost. Maybe you will be less prone than your grandparents to hoard "collectibles" such as Hummel or Precious Moments figurines or gaudy plates. People who thought that expensive bone china would be heirlooms might be aghast to find those as cast-offs at Goodwill along with LP's of Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, Patti Page, and huge amounts of music giving allusions to the faux-exotic world of Hawaii before jet travel -- and novelties like "Big Mouth Billy Bass", the singing fish that got stale almost as fast as fish in a refrigerator.
2. "You will rent everything and it will be delivered by drone". For all practical purposes, millions get their furniture and electronic goodies at rent-to-own places on rental-purchase plans that will be worthless (broken, obsolete, or unspeakably ugly) by the time that the contract is up. One does not get title for this gaudy, shabby stuff until it is worthless; it is overpriced even if one sees the difference between "90 days same-as-cash" deals as an alternative to paying loan-shark interest as an add-on. A huge stereo that offers a light show but dreadfully-low fidelity? I'm not listening to Mozart string quartets on that! Those rent-to-own places do not yet deliver by drone, and they are unlikely to do so.
You probably will rent movies and pop music, but you will buy stuff for multiple uses.
Drone technology allows people to get stuff that they see of lasting value without having to cart it over by car. With GPS, an internet retailer like Amazon or an internet-using retailer can potentially deliver a video disk, music CD's (people are still buying them, but not at stores), prescription medicine, spare parts, or even a crate of cat food by drone. The drone can generally avoid flying within the reach of people's heads and outstretched arms or vehicular traffic, dodge trees and power lines, and even deliver to a tenth-story balcony of a high-rise apartment.
Much of what we buy, like food and prescription medicines, is one-time purchase or a repeated purchase. We buy services, whether insurance or rights to access to media.
3. You will eat much less meat. Meat and seafood will become more expensive because more people will be the market. On the other side, if one is not entering a market with a burgeoning population of people adding meat to their diets (the Third World), then personal reduction in meat consumption may be "doctor's orders". Heavy consumption of meat is terribly unhealthy. I have gotten the indication that no more meat or fish than the mass of a deck of cards is wholly adequate. Such old staples as potatoes, rice, beans, and pasta really are good for us.
4. An occasional treat and not a staple. That connects clearly to meat and fish, which we should eat about as much of as ice cream cones or pie. (OK. anyone overindulging in those is hurting himself. Then of course come alcoholic beverages. I enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine, so it is not an issue of self-righteousness. Tobacco is not part of my life.
In general, as people become more learned they less seek the unalloyed, intense, but ephemeral delights that cost greatly and in excess can foul one's health, make one poor, and destroy one's reputation while making one an irredeemable bore. Loveless sex, drugs and drunkenness, mass low culture, sweets, impulse shopping, gambling, and 'cheap thrills' don't improve one as a person and do not connect one to community.
5. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. If we follow trends of population growth, then at least billion people will be KILLED by climate change directly through famines or indirectly through wars. We need to push zero population growth so that we don't over-stretch the holding capacity for our planet. Let's not forget the animals that are the second-and third-biggest consumers of food: dogs and cats. Spay and neuter, spay and neuter.
Russell Brand recalls (back to #1) that if the common man owns practically nothing, then who owns practically everything? Either the State (socialism) or plutocrats (shareholders, landlords, legal loan-sharks, the military-establishment complex, Big Oil, Big Retail, agribusiness... yes, Coca-Cola, Wal*Mart, Monsanto, Starbucks). Also Lockheed, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, Bank of America, Exxon-Mobil, Unilever, Shell, Warner, Toyota, Nestle, Siemens, Daewoo, and the New York Yankees... one cannot reasonably expect owners, bureaucratic elites, and their well-paid retainers to look out for any people other than themselves unless doing otherwise puts them at risk of such a calamity as thermonuclear war or a proletarian revolution. In all countries the effective rulers are becoming more distant from the common man and pay attention to the common man only to fleece him in commerce or delude him in politics.
Donald Trump is an extreme reflection of the divide between membership in an economic elite and the plight of the common man. Yes, he is pathology because he is intellectually hollow and on the borderline between narcissism and sociopathy. He is nothing but sybaritic indulgence and the inflation of a bruised ego. He attended a great college but seems to have learned nothing from his time there. Many 'mere' high-school graduates find themselves curious enough to watch PBS and read accessible non-fiction that can teach something. The Great Books approach to learning is an old and effective one even if it has its limitations... but someone who has read the Great Books and drawn some conclusions therefrom has achieved one of the old purposes of a college education, which is to improve the participant. (OK, I prefer Shakespeare on stage, and even Plato wrote his discourses practically as drama, and that may be the best way in which to address Plato -- yes, on the stage).
One can learn much from Shakespeare; one can learn nothing by consorting with high-priced hookers.
It could well be that rich and powerful people are finally discovering that someone like Donald Trump is someone too risky for either commercial or political leadership (he was never going to be cultural leadership!) To be sure, the real elites send their kids to elite boarding schools in which they are safely sequestered from the vileness of mass low culture. Then again, maybe farm families in the Midwest can sequester their kids from a lot. Cynical rap videos and farm chores do not go together.
Improving people by enriching their culture and expanding their mental universes has always paid off well in making a more livable world. If one really did get something from first-rate or even second-rate education, it could well be that one does not need to sleep with porn stars (and would be aghast at taking the risks involved) or possess a gold toilet.
Obviously I distrust the conjunction of great greed, sybaritic indulgence, and unconstrained power.
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.