(09-13-2019, 08:22 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 13-Sep-2019 World View: Food and real estate
(09-12-2019, 06:35 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > John -- food is rarely the problem in America. It is real
> estate.
I agree that almost no one starves to death in America, but there's a
very big difference between being able to pay for groceries versus
eating in a soup kitchen. Food and real estate are two sides of the
same coin. Similarly, there's a very big difference between being
able to pay the rent for your own apartment versus living in a
homeless shelter. In another country, where people are living in mud
huts, perhaps real estate isn't a big problem, but people might still
be starving. The core problem, as in the 1930s, is that there's less
and less money in the world, which means that more people around the
world can't afford groceries, rent, medicines, etc., which leads to an
increase in suicide.
The quantity of money is no problem unless one has concern about the stability of prices and the desirability of the currency. Zimbabwe under the late Robert Muck-up-all-things was rich in digits on its currency, if nothing else.
I have been using SNAP due to a low income from disability payments, and you have seen my story. Hunger will not be a problem, but I can imagine being priced into the street as soon after my brother and his girlfriend sell off the house. Being stuck in extreme cold or heat will kill even faster than starvation (heat at the least through thirst). Where food is cheap, the elites prefer that people die of means other than starvation which is just too offensive for even the cruelest sensibilities.
The fault is that the USA is basically about as pure a plutocracy as it has ever been, and plutocracy is ultimately ruin for all but those in the economic elite. Eventually the plutocrats find people expendable, and they prefer that people who can't find meaning in life after they are no longer able to find delight in the table scraps or find some other basic need unmet die off. Suicide, heatstroke, freezing to death, being killed in strong-arm robberies, or dying for lack of medical care is just the same. Starvation in a country that has a surplus of food is just too ugly and blatant. There are quieter, more private ways in which to die.
America's economic elites are no better (and I speak of landlords, tycoons, and the executive nomenklatura) are no more moral than prior elites. They are not quite as bad as those elites such as the Nazi and Stalinist elites who murder people with gas or bullets, but in that respect they are little better the convicts who might say things like "I am a murderer/arsonist/rapist -- but at least I am not a child molester". They are little better than one elite in American history -- the slave-owning planters who presented themselves as the best thing that ever happened to the African-Americans that they literally owned. As much as we wish, we cannot fully escape a part of the American heritage that we like to pretend has no further relevance. War? War is extremely profitable for the suppliers of armaments and for those who get provisions to the dreary barracks.
The elites profiteer, no matter what the system, by treating others badly even if those elites dangle the promises of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, unimaginable prosperity because the state owns the productive assets, miracles of technology and entrepreneurialism, the wonders of themselves that will somehow waft some great benefiots onto others, or the proceeds of victimizing the model minorities of the times. Asian-Americans are much analogous to what Jews were in Germany before 1933.
Having been in pre-suicidal situations of economic ruin, I have stated at times that I hated life -- and people do not commit suicide unless they hate the life that they then see ahead of themselves. If they hate their lives enough, people might simply quit taking medicines upon which they depend for survival or tuning off the heat or closing the windows in extreme weather, which are ways of committing suicide without hanging, shooting, or poisoning oneself and making it blatant.
But even without suicide, one sees a consistent pattern in which the elderly seem to get more conservative in their politics. People who have a stake in the system, even if that is little more than the ability to enjoy life with means readily at their disposal, reach old age. Poor people are more likely to die before they get old for many reasons. People with a stake in the system are more likely to be politically conservative. That people have religious strictures against overt suicide (it is called Selbstmord in German, literally "murder of the self") may not keep them from forgetting to take their pills or inject medicine -- or to use opiates first to numb the pain of life only to take too many.
People who see meaning in life do not kill themselves. They do what they can to see grandchildren participate in coming-of-age rituals (quinceanero, bar mitzvah, graduation) as vicarious delight. Maybe part of a good life is taking delight in the successes of others. But if those successes are frustrated (coming of age means an initiation into a criminal gang, getting 25-to-life for armed robbery, getting strung out on drugs, having an abortion) then maybe life is factually anything but precious.
In truly bad times (the latter part of a 3T is truly awful for people not in the economic elite, and a 4T in which the economic and administrative elites exploit all others to the fullest for their own selfish gain and indulgence), life is precious for far fewer people. At times, someone in ill health or in destitution (or fear of destitution) can conclude, even rationally, that life does not merit the struggle. Hardly anyone believes it wonderful to suffer for people to whom they have no bonds, as in a pure plutocracy in which the Master Class see workers as livestock at best and vermin at worst. It is the increasing depravity of every prior 3T and the one that we recently created that makes the severity of a 4T a near-certainty. Whether the 4T culminates in a muddle (American Civil War) triumph that enshrines new and sustainable institutions (American Revolution and Constitutional Crisis, Great Depression and Second World War for the US, Franco-Prussian War in Germany), exhaustion of the old order (Britain and the Soviet Union after the Second World War), obliteration of the 4T leadership with the establishment of a new and more viable order (Germany, Italy, and Japan in the last Crisis Era; France after the Franco-Prussian War), or replacement of one bad system with another (China after its last completed Crisis, most of central and Balkan Europe) or perhaps one flawed order with another flawed order (Spain after its Civil War, decolonization of South Asia and Indonesia) depends to no small extent upon the ability of the 4T leadership to reject the depravity of the latter part of the 3T.
Whatever their means of getting rich, the elites wax fattest when others live miserably. Inequality in results and opportunity is the problem in America. Poverty stings most severely in the crassly-materialist, atomizing, spiritually-dead 3T; if the elites maintain the culture of a crassly-materialist, atomizing, spiritually-dead 3T they will only lengthen and worsen the 4T. Maybe at the worst those elites can profiteer from war and press-ganging subjected people into near-slavery... but war is itself a costly enterprise that requires deficit spending on the grandest scale possible.
If we want general solutions to the mess that we are in, then we will need a culture that celebrates life irrespective of social class and involuntary distinctions. We will need an economy that works for the peasant as well as for the big landlord, the factory worker as well as the tycoon, and the borrower as well as the lender. The low glass ceilings in bureaucratic organizations in recent years will require major reform of those organizations or their dissolution. Maybe when 'class' is more an expression of culture (motorcycles and sailboats are similarly expensive) than of indulgence and power on the one side and destitution despite toil on the other side.
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.
