08-12-2020, 09:24 AM
(08-11-2020, 09:20 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-11-2020, 04:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Question: how do the rules change when we leave the industrial age?
Hmm. I covered some of the major points just a few posts up. Again.
War become not cost effective. This became more true starting with the common use of the machine gun and especially with the invention of the nuke. It was actually Keynes that pointed out after World War I, that trying to profit out of war was a bad idea. The retaliatory terms of that ‘peace’ turned out to make the war be fought again. Thus, next time around they tried the Marshall Plan. That worked better.
The old policy was to reconcile with the defeated leadership and punish the common people or at least exploit them. The last time we tried (and usually executed) the gangster leaders of Germany and Japan and treated the people with kindness. It is far easier to occupy a country if your soldiers and administrators (senior officers) need not watch their backs. Maybe we could inculcate some guilt about what the wartime leaders did. That is just as well.
Quote:But the core was that nuclear war became not cost effective for the elites. They were in a position to lose much opportunity for profit should a crisis war start. Thus, they did not support government leaders apt to try to start a crisis war. The common man had a similar idea. They did not care to be incinerated either. Thus, the prospect of maybe becoming involved in a war of annihilation became as traumatizing as living memory of a preceding crisis war. You thus have a lack of trigger events by major powers that lead to crisis wars. This was obviously not true in the Industrial Age. Someone would always think they had a military advantage and start a conflict. If the culture had to change, it was taken for granted that you would have to fight a crisis war to do it.
Wars used to be waged with the idea of arranging for the defeated country to become a captive market and a supplier of raw materials and labor at sub-market rates good for higher profits in the metropole. But there would still be mineral mines, farm land, and of course toilers. If, of course, the land is full of fallout, then the tea from the plantations is undrinkable; if the people are wiped out, then there is nobody to buy the woolens unsuitable for a tropical climate. Figure that should American leadership imitate Hitler in aggressive cruelty, then those who promoted such cruelty will be on trial. So might be the people most easily seen as culpable for economic exploitation. Tycoons and executives have no desire to be on trial along with people responsible for the concentration camps or the secret police.
Quote:S&H and Generational Dynamics fails to take this change in the cost effectivity of war into account.
S&H underplay economics for calculation of costs; this said, pathological leaders either fail to assess the costs or grossly miscalculate the results of a war. It took about two and a half years for the Soviet Army to go from sealing off German attackers in Stalingrad to closing in on a Berlin bunker.
Quote:A second difference is that Gandhi and Martin Luther King proved non violence could transform the culture without a crisis war, and that awakenings though protest, non-violence and legislation could transform a culture. S&H could have seen that. They lived through the 1960s. They could have noted the difference between the religious revivals of the Industrial Age and the political protests and response by a progressive government could lead to a transforming awakening turning. They might have anticipated that the next awakening could be similar, but they didn’t.
Gandhi chose to wait until the British were exhausted from the war to make the definitive demand for Indian independence. MLK well knew how to use television against people who acted without conscience.
Quote:Another change is the insurgency and proxy war. In the Industrial Age it was common to win wars with people wearing uniforms, crewing artillery and having front lines. You get your army into the enemy capitol and you have won. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, another power would get weapons to angry locals who would make sure foreigners do not profit. Again, war became less profitable. Bush 43’s attempt at Neo colonialism failed, as I anticipate future attempts to use military force to make a profit will also fail. Thus, while man was bred to conflict, where a contest for resources and territory was bred into us during the hunter - gatherer time, man is slowly learning that it is not as easy to profit through conflict as it used to be. In other words, even the sole superpower has learned not to put a lot of boots on the ground. Again, a lack of triggers for major powers.
We still have images of bodies stacked like cord-wood and of cities incinerated in incendiary attacks. The victors end up having to rebuild the cities of the defeated, which isn't cheap. With nuclear fallout, stuff laced with cesium-137 and strontium 90 is worse than worthless.
Quote:Those three are the basic difference. In general, when you are mixing turnings, ages and civilizations, as a broad rule you should become suspect of inductive proofs of anything when you cross any of the three types of borders. By suspect, I don’t say anything you thought you learned from the Industrial Age will turn out to be false in the Information Age. Primarily, it means that a pattern which was observed back then has to be confirmed through observation in the later age, especially if nukes, proxy insurgent wars or computer networks are involved. What was true in the older time has to be confirmed in the new age.
What changes? In a post-industrial age, it will no longer be easy to make a big profit from meeting a shortage or a new market. Much of what is new in our economy is undercutting (competing where there is technological alternatives, such as perhaps cell phones instead of landlines) or gouging. The idea that someone is more prosperous for paying $4000 a month in 2020 for the same apartment available for $200 a month in 1970 is absurd. OK, it could have had some renovations and upgrades, but the square-footage is the same.
Then again -- COVID-19 has compelled people to work remotely. But what happens if working remotely means that one can work for a Manhattan employer from home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (well outside of the commuter range of NYC) instead of Paterson, New Jersey? Maybe one can cut one's living costs dramatically!
Quote:That hits you in the face as soon as you try to combine age and turning theory. Still, some are trying hard not to see age theory, and run S&H as if it is perfect, like there is no reason to update it. Many might see the contradictions and abandon S&H entirely. I would not go that far. Some of what S&H observed about the old days remains true now.
I sort of have to balance between the two.
Most of us recognize that multiple cycles and trends happen at once. Sarkar has his cycle of a succession of elites (warriors, then intellectuals, then entrepreneurs, then chaos, and then soldiers again). Toynbee has his pattern of the rise and fall of a civilization, with a Universal State eventually taking over a civilization and giving it a new stability through crushing conformity.... but in that conformity appears the crushing of initiative and innovation. Marx has his succession through feudal agrarian societies to capitalism to state-run socialism to communism.
At most I can synthesize, and I see America losing the characteristics of a pioneer society that made life economically easy for one in which only a select few can achieve anything that pays well (the demands for refinement get more intense, and most people find themselves failing before they get a chance and giving up the garage band for the opportunity to drive a truck or work in a food-processing plant), that scarcity in real estate promotes gouging so that whatever benefits arise from technological wizardry end up in the hands of landlords, that tycoons and executives are as ruthless and insensitive as ever but much more sophisticated in buying and controlling politicians than were their counterparts in the Gilded Age. As always humanistic values easy to see as morally noble run afoul of power and greed. I look at the forty years of politics beginning with the Reagan Revolution that culminated in the idea that many of our economic elites hold, that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it turns, indulges, or enforces a profit. If that makes our current tycoons and executives seem as immoral as slave-owning planters of the Agricultural Age -- then ask yourself what can stop elitews from becoming monstrously cruel.
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.
