10-05-2017, 06:23 PM
(10-04-2017, 09:45 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: There are varied visions of the failed future. The red distrust the government and anticipate a failed government policy. The blue distrusts the economic elites, and anticipate the problems of putting too much wealth in the hands of too few who care little for the many. The red can ignore problems which have not gone critical in the past. Some blue fear problems like global warming and a hypothetical post scarcity economy which haven't developed yet.
The other side, sometimes, has a point.
Judging from the past, a lot will be surprised by the future. If the problem is to be too great a production, is the answer to seek ever higher productivity?
As an alleged Whig, I do not anticipate perfection. You might take out one problem at a time though. For America, it has been Royalty, a land and people owning elite in the south, and robber barons too close to fascism. There are some who have not studied where man came from who allege we might return to Utopia. I'll leave that to the Marxist Leninist contingent. I anticipate going forward, not back. The answer lies with figuring out the post scarcity pattern, not daydreams of a past which never existed.
I do see the problem being an elite class wielding too much influence through both economic a political means. They have fooled the people by various means. A general distrust of the establishment by populists is a good sign. The readiness of the blue to fight the red and vice versa is less good.
The generational theory itself suggests that what one generation sees as an ideal, its kids will loathe. The Puritans thought that they were establishing a Heaven on Earth in Plymouth Colony, and their Cavalier kids wanted something more fun and material. It's usually the Reactive/Nomad generation who shows that the crusades and utopias of Idealists are terribly wrong, and Idealists who have trouble with the bland, materialist, and amoral world that the Civic generation sets up to the extent of falling for religious and political utopias.
As far as that goes, if the last act of Boomers should be Donald Trump and his cult, then I could see the Civic Millennial generation staging something analogous to the French Revolution. An economic order that dedicates itself to bleeding the masses for easy money for economic elites makes a revolution a near certainty in the wake of an economic meltdown, an ecological catastrophe (droughts, floods, plagues, crop failures), or military debacles. Just think of what went on in Russia as the whole social order imploded. Tsar Nicholas II would have been wise to surrender to the Central Powers when he had a chance.
Maybe Donald Trump is not the last act of my generation. Boomers born in the 'Fifties will still be in their sixties in the 2020s, and the ones that the corporate elites shut out might have some innovative and imaginative solutions to go with the principle that one did not dare show in corporate board rooms. But there is nothing like a Crisis Era to discredit recent dogma.
The other side often has a point. At the worst that could be the business end of a red-hot poker pointed at some delicate part of the human anatomy. It is easy to use straw-man constructions to vilify the Other Side, as with arguments that gay rights means the right to molest children. On the other hand, if God really does demand that we all suffer for economic elites that He favors above the entire remainder of Humanity so that we get to enjoy some insipid Paradise instead of enduring some eternal damnation, then I am extremely wrong. Arguments to force are the most fraudulent of all fallacies, but if one must choose between being logically and morally correct but dead, the heroic choice may ensure that the would-be hero can never do another heroic act).
I do not know how often I must repeat this, but the wonderful promise of a post-scarcity society comes with the potential of some harsh consequences. Entrenched elites will seek to use it as an excuse to consign others to gross poverty under harsh management so that those elites can extract as much of the productivity of a social order as is inhumanly possible. Elites incapable of feeling guilt or shame treat people badly as a strict rule. Maybe some of us will need to pick and choose such technologies, including productive methods, as we find compatible with our values. At which stage of industrial or even agrarian development does one wish to live?
Our technologies can numb us, as in Fahrenheit 451, or even enslave us as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We need ask ourselves whether we have the wisdom and moral compass necessary for keeping out technological wonders from becoming Frankenstein monsters.
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.