06-14-2017, 08:08 PM
(06-14-2017, 05:08 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-14-2017, 02:22 PM)David Horn Wrote: I think the problem lies in the transition from the Industrial Age, that average people understand well, to the Post-industrial/Information Age that is best understood by the young and some of their more sophisticated elders. The neo-Luddites want their day ... again. Is this a vastly different scenario from the 19th century tranistion that lead to a disaterous 4T internacine struggle? The degree of anger is similar, and, much like then, the players are moving to their respective corners waiting for the fight to begin.
If it comes to that, how will it play out? It's not a matter of Region A fighting Region B this time. I fear it would be more chaos than revolt, and harder to quell. Take a peak at all the chaos in the middle east that emerged in much the same way. Let's hope cooler heads prevail, though a viable solution that works for all is a mystery to me.
I don't disagree with the gist of what your saying, but there are other plausible wrinkles. One might add post-scarcity to the Post-Industrial and Information Age labels for what comes after the Industrial Age. I know I've not a firm enough idea of what's coming to guess which might become the pertinent label.
We may face new forms of exploitation that ensure that most of us get nothing for the new economic paradigm. One way that I can imagine is that new elites find ways to collect easy money as a tax for living in the world that those elites believe that they own. We can be in thrall to loan-sharks, mobsters, profiteering landlords, Ayatollah-like religious leaders, and corrupt politicians capable of ensuring that they get extreme levels of profit and take away all the bounty. that might otherwise make life easy and rewarding. Dispute the role of such leaders, and you may be killed quickly or consigned to the mindless, grinding poverty of Orwell's 'Oceania'. You might get to live on welfare, but you will find a mindless world of fecal entertainment and of propaganda as news.
Quote:And while the developed world might be shifting out of the industrial - scarcity pattern, the Middle East and elsewhere is still trying to break free of the Agricultural pattern. They are still working with strongmen, tyrants, royalty with a major role for religion. They still lack some of the memes that have to be firmly believed for democracy and human rights to work well.
Just imagine how American life can be if the economic and political elites can impose Agricultural Age inequity and repression upon the rest of us? I can imagine new forms of slavery or at least serfdom simply as a threat to people who have even a small level of privilege, like formal education or a skilled trade. Question the right of loan sharks to sell any durable goods, and you will be consigned to a level of economic life characteristic of a sharecropper in the beginning of the 20th century. If you are a teacher or a preacher and you fail to laud the exploiters as benefactors then you may find out how hard life can be when you can no longer preach or teach. The worst exploiters, like the planters of the middle of the 19th century, insist that they are the benefactors of those that they exploit -- and to make sure that they are the best hope for the people that they cheat out of life, they make such people helpless and dependent. We may be shocked now with such arrogance, but we are not in their world. The attitude that exploiters are the benefactors is especially true with Idealist elites at their worst, like Donald Trump in our time or Theodore Bilbo in the last Crisis era. Nothing says that ideals can't be malign.
On the other side -- the more that people are familiar with the economic interests of Donald Trump and his class, the more hostile they are to his agenda. Approval ratings for Donald Trump are in the 20s in New York and New Jersey. California, where landlords are particularly rapacious and have an economic order that showers tax benefits upon them, shows similar levels of approval for President Trump.
Quote:Thus, we have two entirely different age of civilization level conflicts running at the same time. Could the Middle East and elsewhere skip the industrial age entirely, and jump directly to a post scarcity information age pattern? If the economics, market and raw materials are starting to work some sort of post industrial pattern, is the industrial pattern a viable option?
The prologue of A Tale of Two Cities seems apropos today, does it not? We stand on the brink of both the worst and the best: madness and reason, poverty and plenty, terror and hope, shame and glory, equity and injustice, cruelty and charity, tyranny and freedom, good dreams and monstrous nightmares... that is how things look in a 4T. Had Dickens been writing a sequel about the 1930s the cities might have been new York and Berlin.
Quote:Yes, this peace loving think it through and make the right choice hippy sympathizer can hope things don't blow up big time. On the other hand, the establishment elites of the industrial age seem determined to cling to the old pattern. I often think something is going to give. The old patterns just can't hold.
We are firefighters in a building about to undergo backdraft, and we know it. We cannot leave the burning building as we entered it, for the floor underneath us has lost its trustworthiness and burning beams can collapse above us at any minute. We must chip a hole in the structure to escape.
We cannot undo the collection of oily rags that the recent dwellers placed near the pilot light of a hot-water heater. We cannot grab the lighted cigarette from someone who fell asleep smoking or smoked in the presence of an oxygen tank.
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.