08-02-2017, 08:26 PM
Wherever people are on the political spectrum, people lack patience. Maybe that patience weakened as the GI Generation, with its optimism about organizations both private and public, aged out of the workforce, executive suites, and elective office. We are divided between concerns for social justice on one side profit irrespective of human and environmental cost. It's easy to understand how to maximize profits: eliminate competition among economic elites, make sure that the common man must compete to keep his job, eviscerate unions if it is impossible to outlaw them, punish any effort at survival not approved by the elites, cut taxes for the elites, and make sure that hard work (even if mandatory) is ill-paid. For the latter the straw-man presents itself:
Suffer for MY holy greed, you expendable peon!
So far as I can tell that is what the worst of our economic elites want for us. If they get their way they can cull the population and reshape it into people who act and believe as demanded. The latter will force the needed patience until the system collapses in some war or economic calamity.
Say what you want of the last vestiges of feudalism in western Europe, but they took a long time to die. Not until the volcano in Laki, Iceland erupted in 1784 did a series of crop failures make this caricature of a way of normal life
![[Image: 220px-Troisordres.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Troisordres.jpg/220px-Troisordres.jpg)
become untenable. There are plenty of super-volcano events possible, including the Long Valley caldera to which most of the USA is downwind, let alone the potential eruption of a volcano under Yellowstone National Park.
Maybe Donald V of the American Empire, and of the House of Trump infamous for corruption, callousness, and cruelty, will be in charge a the time... need I show an image of what happened to Louis XVI? Find your own image of a guillotine. But that assumes that our democracy dies in this Crisis with the establishment of an absolute monarchy. That will be in time for the Crisis of 2100, probably as global warming ravages coastal populations.
Suffer for MY holy greed, you expendable peon!
So far as I can tell that is what the worst of our economic elites want for us. If they get their way they can cull the population and reshape it into people who act and believe as demanded. The latter will force the needed patience until the system collapses in some war or economic calamity.
Say what you want of the last vestiges of feudalism in western Europe, but they took a long time to die. Not until the volcano in Laki, Iceland erupted in 1784 did a series of crop failures make this caricature of a way of normal life
become untenable. There are plenty of super-volcano events possible, including the Long Valley caldera to which most of the USA is downwind, let alone the potential eruption of a volcano under Yellowstone National Park.
Maybe Donald V of the American Empire, and of the House of Trump infamous for corruption, callousness, and cruelty, will be in charge a the time... need I show an image of what happened to Louis XVI? Find your own image of a guillotine. But that assumes that our democracy dies in this Crisis with the establishment of an absolute monarchy. That will be in time for the Crisis of 2100, probably as global warming ravages coastal populations.
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.