(10-30-2018, 06:09 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I am pushing a theory that the classic T4T patten which held reasonably well during the Industrial Age and for th Anglo American civilization will not hold in the Information Age and for all civilizations. One cannot definitively prove or disprove the theory by demonstration yet. The time of the fourth turning has not ended, so we cannot count violent crisis conflicts during the Information Age. We can only watch the spiral of violence and say it has not increased. We can perhaps say why. Nukes and a greater faith in democracy and non-violence may have rendered crisis conflicts obsolete. If so, we will not see crisis conflicts as much or at all, but are more apt to see problems solved in the voting booth and during the 2T.
It may not. First, the Information Age implies that raw labor is far less reliable as a means of supporting oneself. Remember that Karl Marx said something that nobody can deny whatever one's class identity or position on the political chart: the proletarian has nothing to offer to a capitalist order, or indeed any economic system, except his toil. People of limited education and modest intelligence have nothing to offer but toil.
It may surprise people now, but Henry Ford's $5 a day pay was more valuable in real terms than is the current starting wage in a Ford plant today. That is a century later, and Ford was hiring as raw labor as he could get away with to man his assembly lines. The $5 a day wage got one more living space ... and no expensive commute to work. Maybe it is easier to meet basic human needs in America when there are 100 million people than when there are 350 million people.
Ford was a piece of work, but he paid enough that a worker did not have to consign his children to toil in a worse-paying sweatshop just to supplement the meager wages of his parents. His (and it was a very male environment) industrial laborer could have a non-working homemaker as a wife, which was good for keeping tabs on the kids.
But a century ago such things as automobiles, stoves, and refrigerators were still new, and were still being diffused to people who had never had one. Making such things was good for personal income above the level of starvation wages even if one was strictly labor.
Quote:Saying violence was required or common during the Industrial Age says noting about whether violence will be required or common during the Information Age. Violence was common, necessary to shift the power of the older elites and to implement the new morals, but that is irrelevant today.
True -- but most of our political models formed in the Industrial Age. Thus liberalism, fascism, Communism, and various expressions of Third World Socialism. Capitalism and industrialization developed together, and industrialism established both a desire for pure capitalism among sweatshop exploiters and the socialist dreamers (including Marxists) who believed that industrial production and distribution would be better left to people who had genuine empathy for workers. With industrial capitalism and Marxism-Leninism also came bureaucracy, which one can cynically describe as the sophisticated and civilized way to do crude and barbarous things to people who have no real choice in the economic order.
Information is not so benign as one might wish it were. It is normal human nature to seek a hero to solve the great problems of the time, and the same devices of information that can lead one to Martin Luther King can as easily lead one to Adolf Hitler. My ethical values lead me to a desire to promote Martin Luther King. Some people prefer the spiffy uniforms, the impressive pageantry, and the unification against enemies that Hitler offered and that King could never do. Many people find nothing scarier than equality with people that they have seen as pariahs either for being consigned to economic failure (Southern blacks) or being successful for seemingly all the wrong reasons (Jews, maybe the Chinese diaspora).
Most of us seek to impose some utopian dream from the Industrial Era upon a post-industrial world. Nothing says that such is any more effective than bringing the ways of a Renaissance Faire to the modern world except as a temporary sideshow.
Quote:If I am correct, the transition to the new values will occur in the voting booth. It almost occurred in 2016. If Hillary had won, if eventually the Congress had gone blue reliably, there would have been a blue victory, an end to the see saw. This did not happen. The see saw went red again, most emphatically. We agree that a longer term shift towards the blue must happen eventually. Among other issues, global warming and the spiral of racist rhetoric leading to an unacceptable lone nut increase in violence must be address and will be addressed. Eventually a shift in voting patterns will occur as more rural voters see this.
But people can vote in an Orban, an Erdogan, or... Trump. On the other side it can also bring about an Hugo Chavez or Robert Mugabe.
I am not convinced that Hillary Clinton would have put an end to the see-saw of American politics. Democrats were not going to get the House of Representatives back, and any gain in the Senate would be reversed decisively two years later. Things would be better, to be sure, but our nation still has scorpions in its soul and will need to exorcise them. The Hard Right is still well-organized and has access to the most reliable currency in politics -- cash for buying access to the marketplace of ideas by buying the marketplace itself.
America still has elite people devoid of conscience and empathy, contemptuous of the common man, but rapacious for money and having unlimited appetites for personal indulgence. To be sure there are rich people with conscience who might use their great wealth to endow charitable, educational, and research institutions; on the other side there are people who would love to establish the inequality characteristic of a pre-industrial, aristocratic order in America in which proximity to the elite through kinship is the sole means of personal success, with everyone else being sweated, starved, and humiliated -- and anyone challenging such will get treated like a leader of a slave revolt when the masters retake power. Spartacus or Nat Turner? Off the toil of helpless people is to come easy money for a hereditary elite, and the rest of humanity gets to be dazzled (if it is stupid or hollow enough) with the displays of opulent splendor and decadent indulgence available to people who see others as livestock at best and vermin at worst.
Quote:To my mind, it was not a coincidence that there was a switch to non-violence just as the nuke was invented and a trust in democracy achieved. Civil rights, gender rights, how the domino theory was implemented and the environment came suddenly alive. The lethal racism which was acceptable during the Jim Crow lynchings was suddenly not acceptable anymore. Militarism also faded. The habit of dominant western powers to start wars against other major powers at every opportunity faded. The Information Age caused profound shifts which followers of S&H have commonly ignored. Turnings are just held in more regard than ages here. Too much regard is held to the common patterns of the old age continuing on in the new.
Wise people find atomic, biological, and chemical weapons scary as flintlock rifles weren't. A film like Doctor Strangelove demonstrates what happens when people have technological ability but no discretion. Television cameras and a nationwide broadcasting system could show people as words alone could not do to demonstrate that democracy and Jim Crow practice were incompatible. Television also exposed how flawed a system America was fighting to protect in the Republic of Vietnam and how vulnerable American troops were in a country in which they were not welcome. Of course there was much more government control of the media during the Second World War, when the government decided what images of war Americans would get. We rarely got to see how vile Soviet behavior could be in conquered or even 'liberated' countries or how corrupt and despotic Chiang Kai-Shek was.
World War II was the last war for colonial empires, the war between colonial empires and would-be colonial empires to take over the empires of others or to turn independent countries into satellites. After World War II, colonial empires lost their romantic appeal to people who had lost many young lives and great resources to defend them. Peoples of the colonial empires realized that they did not need people in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Brussels, or Washington micromanaging things on their supposed behalf. Even keeping a puppet in power (like Reza Shah Pahlavi or Erich Honecker) was suspect.
People may be willing to risk their lives to stop fascist mass murder or, for that matter, some aggressive power turning farmers who own their own land into serfs. They do not want to die for giant corporations to enforce their will upon subjected peoples.
Quote:I am just wondering if the current blue tactics are wise. If the issues are going to be resolved without crisis level violence, why antagonize the voters needed? Why close the ears of the middle of the country? Why spew hate that walks right into their defenses, and cases them to lock down a rejection of the coasts? Why go crazy emotionally when all one needs is clear enough logic and self interest?
It is simply not productive.
The Red side has practically decided what is available to the Blue side. Clear logic? It might lead to such horrors as social democracy, abortion on demand, regulation of the sale and possession of firearms and ammunition, acceptance of homosexuality, and challenges to a plutocracy. It might challenge superstition, economic hierarchy, wars for profit, and severe inequality. The Right offers a secularized Calvinism in which people are damned to poverty and deprivation by an economic equivalent of predestination. In an economic order becoming increasingly aristocratic in character (and this applies to management as well as inherited ownership), self interest is a privilege for a self-serving, exclusive elite.
The Red side believes in the formality of democratic institutions, but wants those to work in a way that many of us don't want.
Struggles of any kind are unproductive until they give a clear win to one side. Then, and only then, do they seem to solve anything at all.
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.