Do you have "buyer's remorse" about adult life?

[pbrower2a]

(12-31-2016, 11:14 AM)Kate Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 12:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 01:16 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-11-2016, 11:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: At one time, any liberal arts degree was useful because it established that one could think coherently and communicate effectively. One had been exposed to the Great Questions of Existence. As such one could be a leader. One could adapt to many things.

Today one needs think only in narrow categories on behalf of organizations that prefer having interchangeable parts (people as if machines -- how dehumanizing!), that people think only of reward and punishment, that people live in fear of the Master Class, and that they do not challenge the status quo. Blind obedience, recognize of economic elites as people beyond judgment or criticism, and ideally support of reactionary politics well serve a grossly-inequitable social order. So one had to do something nasty to people? Dissolve your conscience with booze.

...Even if colleges all became technical  and vocational schools, there would be far too many graduates for the engineering and software-design people, lab technicians, and nurses.  

We need to rediscover the subtle delights of being truly human even at the cost of economic efficiency and rationality. Efficiency and rationality are not enough; a plantation of the Old South, a Gulag, or a fascist labor camp could be extremely efficient and rational while denying the qualities that make people human.

Agree but NOT to the point where it sacrifices economic efficiency and rationality. That is illogical. You want another crash go right ahead.

Short-term efficiency at the cost of human happiness, let alone the survival and health (mental as well as physical) of those who actually do the work, is suspect.

Our productive capacities are great enough that we do not need poverty -- and we do not need to drive people to physical exhaustion just to get productivity.  We are at the stage at which we cannot get more prosperity from more production of stuff. We do not need more junk for the landfill or even more clutter.

Sustainable happiness is the measure of a wholesome life.

I agree. It does not follow that this path must lead to financial strife. The fact is that crony capitalism only works for the 1%. It is not true capitalism, not a free market. Regulations that are put in place for people is seen as a detriment for business but regulation put in place to enhance one business over another is seen as being good for capitalism and markets when the reverse is true in both cases.

My preference is that capitalism be shrunken down to community size pieces. The Corporation, that suckling upon the government's teat should be drowned. They have grown so large to be called "to big to fail", to have seats in meetings of heads of nations. That is not conducive. Capitalism should be run as if people mattered. Thus the need for the people, the masses to have education in humanities.

A 4T will resolve much of the absurdity within institutions, including culture. But which way? At this point I can see a resolution in favor of extreme plutocracy, a high-tech feudalism or ultramodern fascism (as if there is any difference between the two) that restores the terms of employment characteristic of early capitalism -- mass poverty and brutal management -- but the sort of 'beauty'  for economic elites to which few of us can relate. The 'beauty' is garish excess.

The other is a world that has adjusted to the reality of productive capacities beyond the ability of people to consume what is produced. This is a world of much more leisure. The last Crisis gave Americans a 40-hour workweek as a norm and Social Security at 65 because working to exhaustion until one drops or dies in an industrial accident because one's reflexes have gotten too slow for a dangerous environment is no longer necessary.

Putative solutions in the middle will not succeed. Callow and cruel as Donald Trump is, he does have an intellectually-simple solution: return to the norms of early capitalism in which profit is the only objective of anyone, whether one enjoys the profit or suffers for it. Mike Pence has a simple solution for all the intellectual stresses that people have: a return to Protestant fundamentalism in which people suffer in This World for delights in the Next, denying intellectual modernity. I see that as the "Christian and Corporate State", a Protestant version of Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal. Nice place to visit on a holiday, but a place that one easily outgrows. A hint: if you wonder how France resolved the demographic stresses of two horrid World Wars, many Spaniards and Portuguese found their way to new lives in France  after the Second World War.

But reality is far more complex than simplistic propositions can solve. A solution that requires major reductions in living standards that puts profits first and still makes employment precarious is a raw deal -- and people have always rebelled against raw deals if they have no easy escape from the raw deals. Sure, we can have all the industrial jobs that we want if we return to the social norms and technologies of the 1920s. Does anyone want to go back into a time machine to the 1920s?