11-23-2017, 02:43 AM
(11-22-2017, 11:55 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-22-2017, 12:34 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: It's an interesting question, but the problem is that the phrase
"first world country" is purely political.
Is China a "first world country"? They're the second largest economy
in the world, but they claim, for political reasons, that they're an
"underdeveloped country," so that they can continue to blame the
United States for every problem in the world. Is India a "first world
country"? Is Russia?
So I'll give you a useful working definition of "first world country":
A first world country is one whose political development has advanced
to the point where all the issues involving tribes and ethnic groups
in its population have been resolved to the point where they no longer
have tribal or ethnic crisis civil wars.
I don't think that's a very useful definition of "first world"; economic development would be better. With a more useful economic definition, whether or not China is a first world country now, they were certainly not at the time of their last crisis war.
Except for rural poverty, China seems to have the odd combination of an advanced economy but a backward political order. That is an anomalous condition, the sort of contradiction that Hegel would recognize for having a need of resolution.
Quote:It may be a useful definition of some other demarcation, perhaps between politically primitive and politically advanced. However, the Russian Civil War wasn't tribal or ethnic, and yet their subsequent history was marked with bloody crackdowns and purges.
Which
1. the sociopathic personalities of Lenin and Stalin made bloody crackdowns and purges a certainty, and
2. ignores the nationalist struggles to escape centralized rule from Moscow. Let us remember that the Moldovans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Finns succeeded in seceding from Russia. The Ukrainians and peoples from the Transcaucasus region and Central Asia were not so successful, The Whites would have nothing of any splintering of the Russian Empire that they intended to restore. Lenin firmly believed that in the chaos at the end of World War I, that world revolution would create one world socialist republic in which Soviet Russia would be primus inter pares.
3. Social classes formed blocks of people analogous to 'tribes', as Russia was, by 1917, a classic example of a failed state. Masrxist explanations of how capitalism worked applied very well to Russia.
Quote:One thing that might be needed for a first world economy is a free market economy. In that case the causality might go the other way: ethnic, tribal, or political crackdowns would tend to prevent or erode a free market as economic actors pandered to the people in power rather than putting their own interests first.
Is a free market economy the result of progress or something from which a consumer society forms? Of course, there is no modern example of a pure free-market economy. A capitalist order can be a brutal taskmaster, and pure plutocracy is no democracy. I can easily imagine a capitalist order in which 95% of the people are obliged to suffer for a minuscule fraction of the public. I see ominous trends in American politics, and the perverse personality of Donald Trump is a symptom and not a cause.
Economic elites which deem their own gain, indulgence, and power as social priorities imply that those elites have become intensely selfish and demanding. Such was the norm of medieval times. The melding of elitist economics with Bolshevik ruthlessness constitutes fascism, typically a perversion of democratic processes into a command order. Of course the pathology developed slowly in America, with lobbyists becoming the real power in the legislative branch, and with anti-intellectualism becoming an indelible part of the political culture. People may want to believe, as Isaac Asimov described the anti-intellectual, that "my ignorance is as good as your science". Never mind that science has given us bigger crop yields and labor-saving machinery that make the consumer gadgets into trivialities by contrast. It may be possible that the political divide in America is not so much between rich and poor as it is between those who respect the mind and those who think the mind a haven for heresy and debauchery.
Quote:As far as I can tell, though, the crackdowns aren't particularly limited to the awakening period. I'm not sure they really fit into a generational theory.
Maybe Awakening-era crackdowns indicate that the leadership that has recently been micro-managing everything has become desperate to preserve its command-and-control ways. I think of the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
There was no shortage of right-wing rhetoric in America calling for a crackdown against the people who challenged the post-WWII consensus of cultural conformity and mindless consumerism. Such went practically nowhere.
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.
