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Articles written by Freydis |
Is America’s Socialism Only
for the Rich, or Everyone Else?
07.03.10 The Joker (of Batman fame) acts as a scarecrow;
and in the Obama Socialism poster (of Republican Party fame)
this scarecrow acts to frighten people away from something they
want so that the scarecrow owners can keep the goods for
themselves (socialism).
The battle in America today isn’t to determine if
we have socialism or don't have it, it’s to determine who gains
the spoils of government protection: will it be the citizen
majority, or the rich elite?
Even if the entire population is diving to extinction, driven
down by individual competition, natural selection will still
favor the most competitive individuals, right up the moment
when the last one dies. Natural selection can drive a
population to extinction, while constantly favoring, to the
bitter end, those competitive genes that are destined to be
the last to go extinct.
– Richard Dawkins
From Russia with
Money: The Evolution of Socialism into State Capitalism
30.11.06
& 11.07.09 One thing I have learned over the
years in reading news articles about Russia in the western mass
media is that almost everything they report is wrong. In fact
you can almost take whatever they say and invert it and you’ll
be pretty close to the truth on what is really happening in
Russia.
Case in point: the established myth in
the west is that President Vladimir Putin is continually
crushing democracy in Russia with his heavy hand of autocracy.
This assumption is widely accepted as fact by western audiences,
but upon closer inspection this is clearly a bogus criticism
since the vast majority of Russians support Putin, much more
than Americans support President W. Bush. Bush is actually far
guiltier of promoting anti-democratic policies than Putin, but
then that’s the purpose of vilifying foreign leaders – to
distract domestic attention away from legitimate national
problems.
Human rights and civil society
standards are weaker in Russia than they are in Western Europe,
and even in most of the United States, and that's a legitimate
criticism. But in order to be fair we have to put it into proper
context. Russia is just now emerging from decades of Soviet
Communist authoritarianism where political commissars and secret
police ruled with state sponsored terrorism over their own
people. Remember that not more than a few decades ago
authorities in the United States were using fire hoses and
attack dogs on protestors, and even today the current American
President has secret detention centers operating across the
globe in conjunction with notorious prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay Cuba that are officially outside of the law! Put
into proper perspective the United States has no platform to
legitimately criticize Russian society on standards of
democracy.
It’s also worth remembering that this
same western media loved Boris Yeltsin, even as the
Russian public hated him, because his administration was so
profoundly corrupt and because he willfully allowed the national
wealth of the Soviet Union to be siphoned off in rigged auctions
to just a few unsavory characters through insider
deals. The fact that most of these newly minted billionaires
were Jewish was practically never mentioned in the western media
but could not be ignored by the Russian public that wasn’t as
ignorant. This creates a schizophrenic interpretation of Russian
events that continues to this day.
Seven oligarchs controlled half of Russia's entire economy
during the Boris Yeltsin 1990s. Six of the seven were Jewish:
Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin.
Putin was swept into office
on public demand to take back control of his nation from these
robber-barons, and he did it by making an agreement with the
barons that as long as they stayed out of politics they could
keep their ill gotten wealth. Yet they still couldn't uphold their end of the
bargain so, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Abramovitch AKA
Boris Berezovsky, they were slapped down. Abromovitch fled the
country and Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man, went to prison.
Imagine that!
Many of the ‘Russians’ depicted in the
western mass media aren’t really ethnic Russians at all, but the
mass-media
can’t explain who they really are and what they really want. Putin’s real intention, and what Russia is really like, can’t be
elucidated to the western public because it would contradict all
the other lies and myths that are so important to perpetuating
the west’s establishment power structure. Consequently, the first thing to
remember about Russia is that things are rarely what they seem
to be.
About seven years ago when I
talked to people about Russia they would bring up the usual doom
and gloom about autocratic government policies and an unstable
economy. Agreed, things were definitely bleak for Russia, but I
was also quick to respond that Russia was actually one of the
best places to look for economic growth because, having hit the
bottom, they have nowhere else to go but up! And indeed that
has quite evidently been the case. A
continuing, but rarely reported story is the success of Russia
economically, politically, and even socially. One of the main
reasons that Russia’s success is downplayed and maligned in the
western media is the fact that Putin has used his brand of
‘state capitalism’ so successfully and if that same methodology
is adopted in other locations it would have very unpleasant
consequences for global capital and their continued ability to
plunder indiscriminately and with legal impunity.
Bankrupt a decade ago, Russia has a
growth rate triple that of the EU and is the second largest oil
producer after Saudi Arabia. But
Russia’s economic success is not simply due to the current
high price of crude oil. The Russian government has been
remarkably savvy in their financial planning, having raised
national gold and cash reserves to record levels and paid off
much of their foreign debt, particularly their debt to the IMF,
the pseudo-benevolent fund widely viewed as a political
tool of the American financial elite. Even more brilliant has
been Russia’s petro-prescience having very shrewdly maneuvered
around the global machinations of Dick Cheney and his oil
friends in the current administration of W. Bush. Putin has
shown that he can play hardball in response to the United
States’ maneuvers to monopolize petroleum resources in the
Middle East, i.e. Iraq, and Central Asia as shown by the Bush
administration's ulterior motives behind their War on Terrorism
and their no-holds barred effort to acquire basing rights in
Afghanistan and surrounding states to secure preferential
passage for petroleum and gas pipelines throughout that region.
In contrast to
the shrewd macroeconomic management in Putin's Russia, a
country that is replacing poverty with prosperity, is George W.
Bush's America. Bush, with the help of Congress, is burning
through $2,000,000,000 every week just to sustain his worldwide
'War on Terrorism'. White House aligned critics in America heap
scorn on Russia under Putin even as their own country replaces
prosperity with poverty.
So behind the scenes, behind all the
accusations and name calling, much of what’s really going on is
about money and power. Putin is reclaiming his nation’s natural
resources from the control of private individuals, in this case
billionaire oligarchs, and placing control back in the hands of
the federal government. This is in direct contradiction to the
mantra of global finance capitalism that strives to place all
wealth under private control and for the express benefit of
private individuals. This is high stakes stuff.
The philosophy of this unrestricted
capitalism was best encapsulated by Milton Friedman who stated
"So the question is, do corporate
executives, provided they stay within the law, have
responsibilities in their business activities other than to make
as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer
to that is, no, they do not."
Although Friedman and his economic belief system were once
lauded he’s now widely reviled as the architect of a
dysfunctional society based on greed, injustice, and
anti-social behavior, a society that demonstrated the apex of
its values with the Enron scandals. Not surprisingly, predatory
capitalism remains popular with the ultra-rich but it
nonetheless has no intellectual justification backing it up,
only the inertia of the past. So it’s no longer seen as a
solution but as a problem waiting for something to replace it
and this is why regulated state capitalism is so vilified by the
elite and their media mouth-pieces: it scares them to their
core. I think that state capitalism is the natural evolution
of socialism, it respects the profit motive of free-enterprise
but it also respects the needs of the public that socialism
addresses.
And now you get the picture. Now you
can see why the New York newspapers think Putin is a terrible
person and everything Russia is doing is evil. Venezuela is the
same story all over. Chavez is a popular, fairly elected leader
who
builds houses for the homeless and provides political
representation to people that have never had it for centuries
in his own country, while even providing heating oil to the poor
in the United States! Yet the Bush administration has nothing
but invective to describe him and his
populist state capitalism policies. What does that tell
you about the values of the people in power in the United States
today? To paraphrase the brave patriot Daniel Ellsberg, we
aren't on the wrong side, we are the wrong side.
The established storyline has it that
the ‘anti-free-market’ policies of Chavez and Putin are going to
drive their countries into the ground. Business’ will flee the
horribly onerous regulations imposed on them by rich-hating
dictators, and the miserable public will soon be jumping
form tall buildings in desperation as poverty and despair engulf
them! Yes indeed, according to the New York experts and the
White House and most of the western mass media Russia must be a
total disaster in the making.
Kind of funny then isn’t it that the
reality of Russia is quite the opposite? Yeah, turns out Russia,
or at least Moscow the cultural heart and brain of Russia, is
soaking in money. Skyscrapers and luxury apartments are
sprouting like mushrooms and the new rich struggle with the
difficult problem of determining what to spend all their money
on! The most expensive place in the world to live is Moscow and wealth inequality, not poverty per se, is becoming
the most serious problem. Putin’s domestic policies haven’t
scared off business. In fact foreign investors are busting down the door
to get into Russia and buy a piece of the action! But how would
the average American know any of this from the news fed
to them?
The narrow range of foreign news that
Americans receive is very disturbing at a time when so much of
the world, from India to South Korea to Russia, is so rapidly
advancing. America is becoming more and more a self-contained
bubble that believes its own lies and acts on the world stage
according to a false sense of reality. Where’s the world’s
tallest skyscraper being built? New York? Chicago? No, it’s in
Dubai, United Arab Emirates. How many American’s could find the UAE on a map? The American conception of Arab culture is shaped
almost entirely by the mass media so they conclude that all
Arabs are religious lunatics and suicide bombers and it doesn’t
make sense to them that they could be building towers and
hosting world class events like the 2006 Asia Games in
Doha, but it does make sense that America should be invading and
bombing them. Who profits from perpetuating that myth?
Despite all the
conflict, or perhaps because of it, I see many reasons to be
optimistic in the early part of the Twenty First century. George
W, Bush has power but he could hardly be less popular. Bush is
the face of unilateralist disasters, the man is a walking
talking advertisement for international cooperation. Off cameras
foreign leaders are already preparing for the fall of the Bush
administration and neo-con policies. The United States is in a
difficult position because as the dominant power that straddles
the globe they have only one way to go: down. Behind the scenes
America’s planners and elite realize the precariousness of their
situation and although they certainly cannot admit it to the
public, and perhaps not even to themselves, they know that their
war has already been lost and their Empire is in a mortal state
of decline. The American public won’t ever see it coming but
nonetheless they are about to learn some very difficult lessons
in the near future.
In comparison
Europe, because they lost their Empires and lost the wars, were
compelled to ask difficult questions about their beliefs and
assumptions and they were gradually transformed through this
process of introspection. Today when Europe shakes its head at
America’s violence and foolish policies forced on the world at
bayonet point they're criticizing from experience. Europeans no
longer believe that putting opponents in concentration camps and
secret dungeons to extract confessions makes for acceptable
state behavior. Russia gave up its imperial ambitions by choice,
perhaps the only instance of an Empire willfully shutting down,
and they learned from the experience. Most Russians no longer
believe that invading and occupying foreign countries, like
Afghanistan, is a viable means of extending national power and
prestige. The United Sates won World War II and so they never
had to ask any tough questions about themselves. Today they're
paying for it and tomorrow, after they've finally lost the
war, they'll be forced to question themselves. Hopefully
afterwards they'll be willing to join the rest of the world to
build a brighter future for everyone, instead of only for a
select few over the dead bodies of everyone else.
19.08.01 Equality is perhaps
the most risible of the popular hollow slogans.
Yet are we to gain equal poverty or equal slavery
under the righteousness of a democratic law?
Before you beg for equal rights it would be wise
to define who you're becoming equal to before your
unqualified request is granted. Are we seeking
equality with the best, the average, or the worst? And which
category will we actually be granted?! Beware the socialist
revolution long on hyperbole and short on details.
From Socialism to
Capitalism - A Cycle
04.04.03 Our contemporary
industrialized society is founded on hypocrisy,
and two elements of it are intelligence and
beauty. Here's why: we know that intelligence is
mostly inherited, rather than earned, but we're
then told that intelligence can be increased
through education. Yet this is blatantly
contradicted by the evidence which shows us that
educated people are not necessarily smarter
people, they've just jumped through the arbitrary
hoops established by cultural convention.
Intelligence is a very useful measure of personal
capability for a wide variety of tasks but,
despite this fact, in the United States companies can't use intelligence tests to hire people even
though that's the best means of determining
qualification - for any job! Why not? Because
it's "unfair"!
But even though IQ test are an illegal means of hiring that
hasn't stopped it from occurring. The names are changed and the
process is obfuscated to please authorities and social
convention but it still occurs, just less accurately and
consistently. So obviously certain loopholes exist, and with
good reason, because intelligence rating is so effective. After
all, education is really useless but intelligence is absolutely
not. Smart people will pick up the nuances of any job faster
than dumb ones and work better too. This is not rocket science,
people know this but society fears being regimented along lines
of intellect because most people are lukewarm intellects,
average at best, they fear losing to those better endowed than
them. Hence the creation of artificial boundaries such as making
IQ tests illegal for job hiring. Interestingly, the United
States military uses an IQ test for job placement; it has a
different name (ASVAB) but works in exactly that capacity. Few
complain because the median is so dumbed-down that only the
dullest fail, so it offends few and magnifies many.
Intelligence is a
sought after commodity and so is beauty, but
society treats the two attributes very
differently. Starting with intelligence, think of
the inveterate town fool or court jester or the
comic relief on any TV show or movie, what
purpose do they serve? It must have a universal
appeal given the long-lasted impression it has
left and the continued popularity across cultures.
People want to feel comfortable, they want to
feel superior, and the easiest way is to laugh at
someone more foolish and stupid than you.
It's crass, yes, but always popular.
Intelligence is an
estimable quality, just as beauty is, but
intelligence has a universal use that beauty does
not. What I mean is that intelligence will put
food on the table whereas beauty can't, at least
not directly. A smarter hunter will catch more
than a dumb one and a smarter leader will last
longer than a dumb one, for instance, but a
beautiful person must rely on the exploitation of
their subjective qualities in beauty through
others to gain what they need through indirect
means.
So although
intelligence has many limitations placed on its
public expression, beauty does not have as many
even though its desirability is often at equal
levels. The reason for this I think is that
beauty is something that can be altered or
enhanced as well as being (partly) a subjective
value as well, unlike intelligence which is
primarily objective in qualities while being
mostly genetic in origin and not something that
anyone can improve or alter significantly. Beauty
is socially acceptable as a ranking tool, as
feminists for instance have been vocal critics
of, because it can be changed through cosmetics,
surgery, perceptions, better lighting, as well as many other ways.
It's pretty tough to pretend to be much smarter
than one really is but not too tough to pretend
to be much more beautiful than one really is! So
even though beauty and intelligence are mostly
gifts, or curses, of genetics and not something
we can change they're treated very differently
in human society.
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The
normal self-interested mindset says: 'no
one should be better off than I am' |
Economist and
historian Karl Polanyi found that human nature
has a tendency to subvert 'free-market' Laissez
Faire economies by building legal restraints and
social protections. I think that this is solid
evidence in support of the contention here. In
addition to this we can see that all of human
society wherever it occurs has at least one
universal theme - that being that the public wants
to feel safe and they will create arbitrary,
artificial and seemingly specious rules just to
maintain that semblance of comfort. The
intelligent are limited so as not to make too
many feel lessened. Socialism is really the apex
of this theme in practice, a very clear-cut
system that tries to please as many as possible
while limiting the expression of the
entrepreneurs and motivated individualists.
My World
Even deeper than
this universal theme of social comfort-seeking is
the underlying principle that drives it; this is
universal self-interest. Every person is
fundamentally motivated by a self-interest above
that of others. We all live in a solipsistic
reality and indeed it cannot be any other way
because we are incapable of feeling what others
feel or knowing what other knows. We can guess, we
can surmise and craft fairly accurate hypothesis'
because after all most others react as we
ourselves would react in similar situations, but
still we can only enjoy the benefits that come to
us directly. Only the self can feel pleasure or
pain or any other sensation, but most importantly
pleasure because rewards are what drive most of
human behaviour. The reward in the case of
social comfort is that of being accepted, of
being with like members. We all feel
uncomfortable being with a group that is
obviously better than ourselves in looks or
intelligence because it's harder to relate and
communicate and it's tougher to be accepted.
Similarly we generally don't want to be around lame-brains
and ugly people because soon we start to take on
their less than desirable attributes, if just by
association, and the conversation and
understanding are limited as well.
Human society seeks
an equilibrium of conformity where those 'better
than us' can't be too much better in public, and
where we have just enough 'worse-than us' to laugh
at and feel superior to. It's a game of
perceptions to a large extent. It's human nature
to want what we don't have; those distant things always
look better because the lack of possession means a lack
of awareness for the flaws and negative aspects
that probably go along with it. Television and
popular media have warped this scale
significantly over the past fifty years but the
fundamental motivations remain the same. We all
want to be beautiful and intelligent but we don't
want anyone else to have more than we do! And in
a system where I don't perceive a fair chance of
getting either one than it's in my best interest
to promote a set of rules where no one else can
get intelligence or beauty of money or anything
else like that either.
The Socialist /
Capitalist cycle
But now you can
probably see where this leads. Two paths are evident, one is
socialistic - one of stagnation where most
everyone gets dragged down into the lower middle
category and those who try to better themselves
are shunned and met with disapproval by the
others. Significant levels of social hypocrisy and
outright lies within the culture are needed
in order to maintain this system though because
it's based on what people want not the way things
really are. People want equality but the world is
inherently un-egalitarian in nature.
The second path is
where the restrictions have been loosened either
through legislative revolution or social anomie
usually, and those with superior attributes are
allowed to succeed or fail according to their own
desires and motivations. But without a set of
rules for redistributing their success the system
quickly develops into one of haves and have-nots.
Anger and class-envy ensues and you know the rest
of the story.
| Remember:
Collective success always confers
individual benefit but individual success
does not necessarily translate into
collective benefit. |
Another more famous
Karl, who used the last name of Marx, saw history as
teleological and evolutionary; it all inexorably
progressed from a lower level to a more advanced
stage, and capitalism was more primitive than
socialism and the highest stage was of course
communism. Marx may have been an impressive
thinker but he still got it impressively wrong;
he misunderstood biological evolution and
erroneously used it as a framework for economic
and political history. There is no upward path in
this regard but rather a vacillation between two
states based on the singular and universal human
motivation for self-promotion. Political-economic
systems gradually switch between socialist and
capitalist models based upon the collective
perceptions of their populations. If they feel
that too many people are better off than they are
then they will demand government enact laws to
protect them, to limit the expression of coveted,
nontransferable attributes such as intelligence
or to a lesser but no less serious extent -
capital. And I mean capital in large quantities
which does not transfer well if at all, meaning
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer;
capital is sticky. Conversely if the public feels
too cloistered and limited within a stifling
milieu of conformity they will likely begin to
demand more freedom and ability to profit from
their own attributes and talents.
Of course the
cultural expressions will vary, different
language will be used to obfuscate these trends
and make them more palatable to the public, just
as always. But look at Eastern Europe long beaten
down under Cold-War/Iron Curtain Soviet rule,
heavily socialist rule I will add, to the point
that equality was pushed very long and hard onto
the populace. They indeed became similar, but only
in their poverty. Today many of these countries
have switched and embraced capitalism, once
restricted talents and energies are now free to
seek self-profit and personal advancement. And
around the cycle goes.
The durability of
the capitalist system resides in the fact that
people think they can make small, simple
adjustments or choices to defeat their
competition. And human behaviour is greatly influenced by competition - no one wants
to be worse off than their neighbor (competitor).
In the capitalist system they can switch from
Brand X to Brand Y and (seemingly) become more
happy, successful or beautiful, but once again
it's important to note that no one can buy more
intelligence.
It's not difficult
to predict where any given society is headed in
this cycle. Just look at the level of social
hypocrisy and double standards. If a society is
increasingly busy trying to make war look like
peace and obfuscate the obvious, then they're
headed towards the socialistic conformity end of
the spectrum. Conversely if a society it
generally less inclined to buy into the BS and
embraces a spirit of anomie then they're likely headed towards
the capitalistic side.
I regret using the terms
'capitalist' and 'socialist' because they're too closely
associated with economic models to most, but really I think
they're more than just economic systems because reflect
attitudes, large-scale social values and collective aspirations
as well. Lastly I want to emphasize that socialism is not a
singular edifice, some socialism works better than others - just
compare Swedish socialism to Soviet socialism; nevertheless the
details are different but the concepts and values remain the
same.
Free-Market Absurdity
For a quick but profound example
highlighting the fallacy of free-market righteousness, or the Ayn
Rand Objectivist types with a 'might is right' ideology, think
of Bill Gates who in his $100 million dollar compound consumes
so much water that nearby residents are forced to curtail
consumption. Local restaurants post notices, "Due to water crisis, customers will
not be given water to drink unless they ask." While Mr. Gates consumes 4.7
million gallons of water in a year.
It's absurd to think that the
average citizen and the mega-rich can be charged equal rates and
that both will have equal access to limited resources. If the
free-market was always right, if might is always right, than
entire towns full of productive people (and Microsoft customers)
would die of thirst while one billionaire lounges in a deck
chair sipping cognac and watching the fish frolic in his
artificial salmon stream.
An Army of
Communists
05.11.01 Americans often have
difficulty recognizing irony, perhaps because
they're surrounded by it and consequently inured
to it. The military ranks are generally
considered politically conservative, at least in
the sense that they have a higher proportion of
nationalistic sentiment even if they don't always
vote Republican, although most do. The point is
that the American military type is either
recruited to begin with, or indoctrinated with the
belief, that socialism is prima facie evil and
that communism is a Russian soldier with you in
his rifle sights - commie bastards! Yet the irony
is the fact that the American military, or for
the best example here I'll use the US Army, is
the most socialistic organization in America, by
far. Indeed, it's a communist organization that
would make Marx nostalgic if he were here to see
it; and if you laughed at that statement you
either don't know anything about practical
communism or you don't know anything about the
Army.
In the Army you get
paid the same amount of money whether you work or
not, every soldier has a skill, some are very
technical and costly to train, but whether you
actually do the job you trained for or not, and many don't, you get
the same pay. On paper, rank promotion is supposed
to be based on time in grade and quality of
record, but in reality it's either through
favoritism or more often a mechanical process
devoid of any qualitative decision making.
Except for
about highest ranks it doesn't matter
much anyway because the pay is abysmal. Much like
actual communism everyone gets paid but the
downside is the fact it's universally
substandard, truly a paragon of socialism right
there. But of course it goes much further because
in order to compensate for the lack of cash, the
costs of food and household items have to be
subsidized, hence the commissary (grocery store)
and the PX (most everything else), plus free or
reduced cost housing, much of which would
be considered section-8 in the regular world. And
everyone gets free medical care, but it's so sub-rate that unless you want to learn what 'malpractice'
means you avoid it like the plague. Then of
course we have the Generals and Colonels
which are the equal of the Kremlin or the Central
Committee members, chauffeured
around in limousines doing what they want when
they want to and making the big bucks.
The parallels
between the military and full-blown communist
society are legion, indeed it's a universe unto
itself. But does it work? Well sort of, but only
due to three factors, one it's a voluntary
communism because no one has to join, two because
it's extremely well funded communism since it can
siphon funds, meaning taxes, from the immensely
more productive 'free-market', and three the
military life is basically look busy and do as
little as possible anyway so the pressure to
accomplish anything is minimal. Still that's
making it overly complicated because the only
factor that successfully encourages individual
effort is the rank promotion incentive tied with
pay increase. So, in a limited way communism can
work but only if a relatively fair and pervasive
structure exists with which to summarily reward
personal effort with a desirable incentive,
usually meaning good old-fashioned money.
New Democracy
08.07.01 In an environment
where people have the freedom to define
themselves they by and large opt for the lowest
common denominator. If one looks at recent
history, even 200 years ago, power and wealth were
vested in the few and in comparison today is
truly the age of democracy. I think the flaw with
democracy is not the concept but the material
democracy is forced to work with. The flaw is the
character of the public, the demo in democracy.
They choose to be a mendacious mob rather than a
collection of cooperating intellects. To extend a
phrase from H.L. Mencken - the problem with
democracy is the public.
So, basically we have
two choices: either throw out democracy for a
superior pattern, or alter the quality
of the public, in other words raise the common
denominator to the level that it represents a
cooperative and rational element. The primary
need here is a method of improving
collective quality through media and role models.
In other words if instead of football stars and
mindless movie icons we supplanted them for
scientists, philosophers, and philanthropists then
the public would fall in tow; follow the leader.
Although this would
work to an extent, I surmise it's fundamentally
flawed because already the public has a choice to
read the supermarket tabloid or a science journal
and we already know which paper 99% pick. I mean,
when I talk to someone they invariably discuss
the latest Hollywood film and not quantum
computing, even though the second issue is far
more intriguing and multidimensional. In other
words, I think the mark has already been made,
people have already defined themselves and their
characters and they are undeniably (and will be
for the foreseeable future) nothing but a
boorish, self-centered, ego-driven mob. But
that's not necessarily a bad thing because mobs
are remarkably easy to direct if you have the
brains and the tools. It's a waste to throw out
the quality few with the rest of the hoi polloi.
The alternate then is to create a caste system,
an elitist model but once again were running
counter to the mob's first choice of 'democracy'.
The elite would be no less ego-driven but would
at least be less rash and more likely to weigh
action against consequence. This was roughly the intent
behind the United States Constitutional Republic
before it became a so-called democracy.
Clearly every person,
just like every group, has its flaws so the best
idea is to categorize, to best match ability
with task and that means specialization but
not necessarily lack of personal choice and the
more capable the person the more choice they will
have in finding their niche. But the positive aspect is that most people
already know what they like to do,
and what they do best, so a job doesn't have to be
mandated or dictated as long as reasonable
allowance is given for exploring possibilities
and transferring from one job to another.
For more
information on this topic read the Education page at Holology
The 'ideal' solution
is a pseudo-democracy wherein the boorish public
believes they are largely in charge because their
immediate needs are met fairly and quickly. Yet
simultaneously the social structure is advancing
the capable few from the mob upwards into
positions of law and policy and guiding the long
term health of the public meaning a chronic,
concerted effort to minimize degradation and
maximize elevation of society in mind and body.
Sort of what communism promises but never
delivers, so clearly the crux of the matter is
the mechanics of the socio-political structure.
To start with we
need a structure that will fairly and reasonably
match niche with individual and once in place
will maintain a steady, strong output - the
muscles the labor power.
Second a system to
integrate the specialized tasks of millions, the
muscles into a functional whole machine. This is
the nervous system, a set of linked
communications.
Third is a system to
plan and organize everything lest it become self-defeating
or wasteful. This is the mind or the executive
branch.
But I don't want the
executive deciding who goes where just like the
mind doesn't decide which skin cells will die in
the next 30 seconds or how many beats a second
the heart will pump. I don't want the executive
to be able to change the structure at all, merely
decide what the machine will do and with a built
in limit that it can never be self-destructive,
in other words the executive mind can not commit
suicide taking everyone else down with it. The
nervous system has to share the hurt, right?
Full employment: sad
but true that not everyone is employable for
various reasons both natural and artificial. The
admired aspects of full employment, characteristic
of some Communist and National Socialist regimes,
comes at the price of chronic wartime stance.
Any regime can attain the same miracle
with enough deficit financing and wasteful
production. Point - people will always be
unemployed, and the unemployed are trouble. This
is a perennial problem and I'll leave it for
later resolution suffice to say the idea is to
maximize usage of labor resources.
Redundant labor: So
fulfilling that previous maxim we come to another
issue, that of excess labor. In peacetime and
slow growth combined with automation we have too
many workers and not enough to do. The classic
trick is to dream up a goal, either a war or trip
to the moon or what have you, and allocate extra labor resources
to fulfill this goal. Growth is necessary, otherwise we'll have massive
unemployment and government will have to deficit spend to keep
them quiet, or face trouble. So the "goal"
is now once again up for later resolution. Rank
it this way 1) defeat enemies 2) if no enemy left
explore 3) public works 4) make a new enemy.
This is no master plan, it's barely
even a start but it's worth contemplating if for no other reason
than rationally determining what's right about it and what's
wrong - go for it.
08.07.01 The volunteering is
slavery credo promoted by Ayn Rand objectivists
and ideological relatives not only seems
counterintuitive but is corrosive to human
success, both individually and collectively, when
actualized. Humans are social creatures evolved
from primate clan structures and everything we
create is part of that interconnection, our
economy is participatory, our culture, the
benefits of civilization all are predicated upon
intense, consistent and durable multiparty
cooperation. So whether you like it or not, and
I'm sure at certain points we all have our
complaints with it, this cooperative structure is
unavoidable and an increasingly necessary aspect
of humanity. The answer isn't increased
separatism of individuals, we have enough
dissociated atoms already, rather the answer is
specialization, cooperation, and unification of collective
goals.
The state may hire
more police officers, spend billions on an ever
more elaborate judicial system, and build more
prisons, but all this has little effect. Such
policies merely mask the symptoms of a social
disease that, by rendering it more tolerable,
they only serve to perpetuate. As the global
economy marginalizes more people, this disease
can only worsen and spread to those areas of the
world that have succeeded in remaining unaffected. - Edward Goldsmith
Not only that but as
unemployment and underemployment spread, as the
ranks of the impoverished and disenfranchised
grow they will by necessity be forced into the
adversarial economies outside the formal system.
Regional cooperatives and community investing are
both increasingly palpable and accelerating in
pervasiveness. Globalization and its lackey
cousin, socialist government, has effectively
generated its own enemies.
Curing the disease of the present
has only made future disease more virulent and deadly.
Family Life isn't Profitable
14.08.00 Population expands
to fill the void
AND
Economic success stifles reproduction
THEREFORE
Populations plateau with the presence of economic
and social security-blankets for the middle class.
And while only a few
countries so far have declining populations,
already 61 countries, representing 44 percent of
the world's inhabitants, have below-replacement
fertility rates (fewer than 2.1 live births per
woman).
Europe's share of the world population, 20
percent in 1960 and already down to 13 percent,
will fall to around seven percent in 2050.
The problem with the expected population growth,
Jacques Vallin of the French Institute of
Demographic Studies notes, is that "most of
it will take place among the populations which
are least able to support it, namely poor and
developing countries."
Thus Africa will see its share of world
population increase to 20 percent in 2050,
compared with 13 percent at present and only nine
percent in 1960. Thus the HIV-AIDS pandemic,
despite its terrible toll, will cause scarcely a
dent in that continent's population curve.
So, in America, even
with the greatest economic boom ever, ironically
(non-immigrant) birth rates are flat or barely
above replacement level of 2.1 children per
family; and where would the average be without
the Mormons and the Catholics? Japan and Germany
even have campaigns to promote childbirth.
Everything is as good as it has ever been, so why
the decline in birth rates? The genetic need to
reproduce hasn't vanished but the sentiment has changed, 'now is just not the
right time to do it'.
Birth rates have
little to do with GDP but everything to do with
socialism, by that I mean that when wealth
trickles down to the masses a middle class is
created and a state run social security-blanket
is built, then birth rates fall. Why? Cultural factors
in heavily industrialized countries tend to
downplay the importance of family life often in
favor of social and economic success. In poorly
developed countries family and social structures
are much more rigid and conservative, they put
family life on a pedestal. Why? Because economic
success is virtually impossible for the majority
of the people, they have a subsistence, usually
agrarian lifestyle where even factory work only
yields a few cents a day in wages. Having more
children means more helping hands for chores as
well as a security blanket for old age in
countries that lack state run social security.
Work-life is secondary to family-life not so much
because these cultures favor it that way, but
because of the lack of opportunities for economic
success within the workplace.
Socialism acts like a drug,
altering the chemistry of the body politic.
Having found out that socialism has serious side-effects,
governments now are forced to administer
antidotes in order to keep that body alive, hence
the arrival of retrograde policies concerning
birth promotion and family. In the near future
other programs along these lines will emerge as
it becomes increasingly clear that the
industrialization of society has serious and
before unseen negative contra-indications both
economically and socially.
In a vision of
extreme irony ultimately government will be
attempting to have the conservative social
structures of family life alongside the modern
benefits of industry and middle class wealth. Japan has long tried to pay mothers and
families directly in efforts to boost population
without success. Even the extreme opposite example,
China's one child policy has done little to
balance the population growth, instead it has
created a bizarre male imbalance and a bloated
population of nearly one and a half billion
Chinese.
Why do we form
families at all? Fun? To extenuate our genetic
material? Does it really matter? What does matter is why
we don't have families anymore! Perhaps because
of the promotion of homosexuality, living costs,
ease of extra-marital sexual gratification,
social security-blanket, the need to be
successful and families just get in the way, man!
Exactly, now we see that the need for two wage
earners to have a house, a car, and so on has necessitated
sacrifice, usually a sacrifice of family life for
'survival' money. Our middle class standards, i.e.
what we want and think we need to be comfortable,
are at best static and at worst climbing
alongside technological advances. Just as it used
to be you only needed a horse, then a car, then
two cars and a TV, then a washer and dryer, then
a VCR, CD player and computer and ...
But
simultaneously wages haven't kept up with this demand growth. Credit
helps for a while, imports and cheap
foreign labor help, second jobs help, but
as long as the demand increases the
problem remains: how to get everything we
are told we need within a 40 hour work week
with wages flat-lined? Life should be
fun, enjoy life, buy this now! Unless
you're living in an isolated religious
community, like the Amish, you
can't avoid being sucked into this
mindset.
|
Achterdam, Holland:
socialism successfully regulates sexual energies
as a distraction from the increasingly overtaxed
and spiritually degraded lives of the populace. |
This is the interface between consumerism
and an unhealthy population. Two forces
act on people, one is the removal of work
and age-based needs for children and extended family -
economy and state. The
second is the attraction force of
consumerism which requires sacrifice of
family life for personal 'success' and
happiness - mass-media. Unless wages
increase to match the need to consume,
the cycle is both unsustainable and
biologically destructive.
Solution?
One option is for
government to take over the function of
population growth management. Visions of
Ceausescu's Cold War Romania come to mind;
overflowing orphanages and a social system
somewhere between purely perverted and simply
dysfunctional. But it needn't be that bad if the
economy is robust enough to absorb new workers
and support state run institutions for the care
of 'orphans' or more, accurately state property.
Some countries are already headed in this
direction (again?) With anonymous baby
abandonment stations such as in Germany. Now
instead of leaving the kid on somebody's doorstep
you can drop 'em off something like you would a beer bottle or a
pop can, except here you don't get any deposit money back.
Truly the dehumanization of life
within socialist regimes is astounding, but this is merely
carrying the logic to a near-term conclusion. If the state is
delegated the task of caring for the babies then they also will
be charged with education / indoctrination, health care, jobs
and everything else down the line and 'cradle to grave' takes on
a startling new meaning.
The other extreme is
to destroy the cycle, but this is very difficult
to do since it requires nothing short of a
complete re-focus of our collective modern
western values. Control by edict is foolish;
control by environment is sane. Laws are
capricious tenets mostly made for fools, only
social engineering is logical. To control the
people you have to control the environment. Some groups have
done this by opting out of the consumer system, I
mentioned the Amish before but that type of
lifestyle is not fun and it's not easy! As much
as I hate to say it I don't think a realistic
solution exists within the present legal confines.
Consumerism is bankrolled by human greed and
selfishness, very nearly a limitless resource.
Eventually the consumerist-socialist system will
experience severe turmoil from its own age imbalance, or
through the influx of immigrant culture clashes
brought in to solve labor shortages.
Real Altruism &
Wrecking the Bell Curve
18.11.99 & 09.07.09 Only a fractional
percentage of the population ever contributes
anything meaningful to scientific and
technological progress. 99% of the human
population is both unimaginative and subsistence-based both in mind and body. But this certain
minority strata of society manage to single-handedly
sustain our civilization by creating improved
resource extraction techniques and higher
efficiencies. Developments such as fertilizers
and pesticides have greatly increased crop yields, while new
drugs have increased life expectancy and allowed many people to live
that never would be able to otherwise. Revolutions in communication and
transportation technology have made
life both safer and faster.
It should seem
ironic that these scientists and researchers are
not highly paid individuals, nor are they held in
adulatory esteem by the general population.
Instead pro-sports players and movie-actors fill
that roll despite never contributing anything
lasting to civilization. Yet the
scientific strata continues to create and invent
on logarithmic scale making life easier and more
profitable for everyone else. Why do they do it?
Many of the benefits from their creativity will
not even be seen by themselves, and certainly if
they wanted money wouldnt a law degree or
an acting job be better? What they produce is
literally of invaluable benefit to the society
and the country, yet what they receive in return
is nothing more than another work-a-day wage and
maybe the personal rights to a patent or two if
the multi-national corporation they work for is generous
enough.
But if the majority
of the population is merely dead weight, the
ballast on the ship of civilization, why keep
them around? Or how much better would a
civilization be if it was composed entirely of
scientific inventors, researchers and geniuses?
The problem with this concept is that every
society has a hierarchical structure no matter
what quality of individuals compose it. In an all
genius grouping some geniuses would still end up
cleaning the restrooms and mopping the floors,
and if machines were invented to do all the dirty
work they would still be left doing some other
dirty task. Certainly technological change would
be increased significantly in such a society. But
if this is such a great idea (at least to the
geniuses) why do those same strata continue to
subsidize the lifestyles of the masses with their
contributions?
If the geniuses are
so smart why are they letting themselves get
screwed in this society? Whos
really smarter here in this parasitic
relationship, the masses who get scientific
advances for free or the scientists that give
them away for free? And what of the capitalists
fat-cat middlemen that make all the
profit from technological growth? After all, ones
wages merely reflect the minimum replacement cost
for that occupational skill. Perhaps the
scientists need to unionize? Yet it seems such
people are the least likely to collectivize.
If such a scenario
ever saw the light of day would it stifle
development by limiting investment monies? Or
stimulate research by giving more benefits to the
ones that actually create in the first place?
No one is really the hero in this
story; likewise real altruism is just elusive as ever.
Socialists spend so much effort ameliorating the ills of the
masses, yet most of their problems are self-created. The smart
man is hardly ever impoverished. Ignorance and lack of
intelligence go hand-in-hand with poverty, crime and social
friction.
Yet how altruistic is it when we've
boosted over-population, over-development, and pollution with
tactical technological answers? A classic example of this
paradox is the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. While saving a
few lives in the short term it is breeding super-diseases that
may be impossible to kill, rendering any original life rescues
insignificant in comparison to the damage inflicted by the
coming pandemics. Thermonuclear weapons along with biological or
chemical warfare are just a few more new ways to collectively
die.
These three strata are all corrupt.
Firstly the scientists are actively making long-term life much
more difficult, literally compounding problems into crises.
The capitalist middlemen making the bucks
facilitating research investments are even more
self-interested. Finally, while a minority of the
proletariat may be happier, their collective doom
is just as inevitable as their blind self-indulgence
and as palpable as their continued suffering. To
choose the scientific group over the others is
merely picking the lesser of three evils and to
single out one group would do a disservice to the
potential of the other two strata, after all not
all geniuses are born from well-educated parents.
The largest source
of friction, like always, is the allocation of
resources within the society. Now Im not
going to get into any Marxist diatribe here
because every realist should know by now that
life isnt perfect nor can it ever be. Our
technology is asymmetrically developing because
it is driven by economic (and sometimes military)
factors. Technology is primarily developed for
profit, the strategic social cost/benefit is
hardly every debated beforehand. Capitalism is
wonderfully effective at blindly producing neat
technological gizmos and making business faster and
more cost-effective, but terrible when it comes
to improving social harmony and cultural
edification. Consequently, our country turns into
yet another hemispherical system of haves and
have-nots, and the most valuable contributors fail
to regain even a small fraction of their
donations in wages or respect.
The quandary for the
21st century is the functional
association of these dissimilar elements into a
productive whole. Ultimately we need everyone: the scientist,
the laborer and yes, even the business administrator; what needs
to change is the present frictional and hierarchical
arrangement. But don’t fret dear reader, though this problem is
certainly a challenging one it is not without solution.
A Perspective of
Socialist Government
19.03.98 According to an online news story the French government is
subsidizing 'X-rated' movies in an ongoing effort
to control their AIDS epidemic. These movies will
be broadcast on pay-TV.
Evidently the movies will contain some kind of
AIDS prevention message, although that focus
seemed somewhat incidental. I mean, wow. To me
that seems like giving a drug addict free drugs
to control a drug habit! But I guess the
socialist governments do that too. This is either
complete insanity or brilliant behaviorist
manipulation. Unfortunately I don't have any
statistics to judge the effectiveness of these
programs, but I do have a pretty decent sense
of human nature. That perception tells me that
although these programs may appear to ameliorate
some social problems they don't fix the causes, and
that's still a failure.
Socialist government
just usurps personal responsibility. They give
out everything the masses want while using the
excuse that then it can be channeled properly and
controlled. That just makes the government part
of the problem. In the EU you get drugs if you're
an addict, porn, gambling, free medical care and
even a salary to remain unemployed. I call it
codependency - both sides need each other but
neither party gains in the long run.
The Americans put their money in
stocks while the Europeans put theirs in savings accounts,
metaphorically speaking. In Europe risk is unacceptable and I'm
sure their collective history plays a huge part in the
construction of this mentality. The odd part is that
the European people have no alternative to the
current system; after all why would anyone want
to give up free benefits? Especially for
ambiguous long-range goals. That's the insidious
nature of addiction and socialism. The European
people have reached the zenith of civilization
building, they have done what they do best and
it's slowly killing them!
I know that we
should be fixing our own problems before picking
apart others, but in the USA we don't even have a
plan. Everything here is based on money (and
cultural self-righteousness) so basically we just
meander from one tactical failure to another. My
bet is that the EU will be around long after the USA turns into
a northern version of Panama or Columbia, but that doesn't mean
that their system is biologically or morally healthy.
U$A Breakup / A Socialist
Revolution of Sorts
01.11.96 It's somewhat ironic
that Americans are so inactive that they commit self-execution
through obesity. The privilege of passive
lifestyles is of short duration - the real world
marches on regardless. My concern here is
that specific economic indicators reveal a change
in popular sentiment to the point where
revolutionary politics is possible. Political
change on a great scale seems inevitable in the
U$. The resistance to change is mostly due to the
sloth of the white middle class.
The white
bourgeoisie are the communist Serbians of the
old Yugoslavia. They control the sham government
and form a thin majority - just enough to stay in
power by the regular increase in group hand-outs.
Clinton and Dole are the "Titos",
crooks running a federal kleptocracy owing its
successes more to political inertia than economic
or ethnic reality. The democratic sham is all the
more sinister because, much like a lottery, it
appears that third or fourth alternatives exist
by which solutions are possible. I don't believe
that the electoral college, being all Republicans
or Democrats, is even capable of slave voting for
a third party. Has a non Democrat or
Republican ever taken a state in the past 100
years? Teddy Roosevelt perhaps, wasn't he an
independent?
America the country
of states has set itself up as a monolith in the
face of radical ethnic and racial demands for
change. The only answers ever proposed to solve
our dilemmas help Wall Street or increase hand-outs
to special interests including minority front
groups which subvert their own stated goals. The
U$ is a nation of special group interest politics-uncle
and Sam is Santa Claus!
At a certain point
the bourgeoisie will no longer wish to fund Uncle
Claus with their taxes to support the sham. When
a state returns less tax revenue than the Fed
gives to them in benefits, the Fed will likely be
glad to get rid of that sovereignty seeking
state, especially during a budget crisis. The
economics of profit are already leveraging the
states away from the Fed because the Feds
regulations are more expensive than the benefits
conferred on the states. The motor voter bill,
military base closures, immigration regulations,
affirmative action mandates, etc. I have a feeling
that state independence will come about before
economic conditions worsen to the point where
personal politics radicalizes.
Any political
futurist interested in reasonable and accurate
analysis should take California as the definitive
example. California is the litmus test, the
Bosnia of the U$. When California leaves the rest of the
union may go too like say Quebec in Canada. The
career of state governor Pete Wilson was a perpetual feud between federal and state;
he was continually battling the fed's imperialistic
legislation while wrestling maximum dollar
concessions usually in the form of disaster aid.
California will leave the union as soon as legal means
are found, and a will always finds a way. It may
well be that by that point the federal government
will be compliant seeing California as a liability
greater than its worth, it's not the 1980s asset
it once was. Clinton is no Lincoln and bloodshed
will not be involved. The reason is that Multi National Corporations can function just as well
if not better (fewer regulations) in a sovereign
California as in a Federal California. And a
sovereign California will run itself more cheaply; who
needs a massive military anymore, really who
needs any military anymore? Why would they
need any of the other countless federal
bureaucratic services - they don't because they
can all be done through commercial enterprises.
The states do all the work anymore anyway, the
welfare, the unemployment, the childcare etc. The
feds just pass out block grants of cash.
Eventually just like everything else in the U$ it
boils down to money.
Naturally the first
states seeking independence will be the ones that
receive the least federal money or have the
highest tax per federal grant ratio. Economic
recession could put impossible stresses on the
tax burden shifting plans of the government. And
eventually over-funding will outpace the tax base
creating budget crunches.
The latest trend of the federal
government is to tax more while simultaneously cutting benefits
to states and moving fiscal responsibilities over to them as
well. Right now most states have budget surpluses due to
positive economic trends but the problem is they spend
accordingly, meaning that once the good times end they will all
be in a big red hole. The feds want to increase their power and
it must come at the expense of the states, may the 10th
amendment be damned. This will eventually lead to serious
conflicts. With deficit and debt increasing in the near future
(despite what the Clinton appointed office of budget management
says) state dumping may be a prudent cost cutting measure, like
cutting the terminally ill from coverage.
Collective
success always confers individual benefit but
individual success does not necessarily translate
into collective benefit.
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