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Modern Society as a Visual Image
by Brett Stevens
1. Cynical corporate leaders, who got to their position because they were both sociopathic and paranoid, fund the $1bn required to elect a President who is sensible enough to appeal to both lobbies. Proles and middle classes seem to think this will work, but the rich are too busy soliciting bribes.
2. Because social problems are rife, a paramilitary police force is required. Each time crime rages out of control, The People demand more. Proles and middle classes seem to think this will work, but the rich are busy in gated communities with private security.
3. The empowered electorate watch television, seeing shadows on the wall of a cave, and presume that what they see is absolute truth. They feel empowered because they are able to take one of two general sides, the first being "winner take all" and the second being "if someone has something I don't, I deserve it, because I'm just as human as he is." Proles love this, middle classes are unsure, and urban hipsters and cosmopolitan underpaid "opinion worker" sophisticates think it's great. So do the rich, who don't generally watch TV because they have more interesting things to do.
4. For the same reason good people join police forces, good people join the military, in addition to the criminals and low performers shuffled in there to keep the numbers up. They find themselves fighting wars for the symbols seen on television, like democracy and freedom, when actually they're trying to sustain an overseas empire so other nation-states don't manage to clobber us. Proles and the middle classes seem to think this will work, and the rich keep their kids out of the goddamn Army.
5. The rest of the world sees only a wealthy nation, wealth they'd like to have, and so they adopt viewpoint B, which is "if someone has something I don't, I deserve it, because I'm just as human as he is." They wage guerrilla wars with little real success, but big success in the self-hating portions of the media, who manage to get people to cry over their losses but ignore their overall lack of success in stopping the process. Eventually, the nation will decay (see steps 1-4 and their unsustainability) and collapse into an environmental wasteland in which wander the generic, cultureless, low-IQ people left over when all the smart people have been driven insane. Proles and the middle classes are clueless, but the rich believe they'll prevail, and they will until the final spasms of revolution have them executed.
It's not America -- don't blame the Americans. It's modern society, that combination of liberal democracy and capitalism, which "empower" the individual, and a dogma of conquest in the name of moral right with the technological superiority to do it. This has happened in some form to every dying empire from Greece to the present day, and it's happening in Europe and Asia, too. It's a process, not an institution or a nation. The Americans got to it first but it's coming to you, wherever you are, and like all parasitic illusions, its ultimate outcome will be the reduction of the human species to angry apes with machetes. Fight modern society. Fight it hard.
Alternative?
Localization seems like the better alternative to having a globalized system of this nature. Better to have some fall here and there, some rise here and there, with minimal impact on the whole world, than to have an entire hemisphere deteriorate under globalization when its common system malfunctions.
Fight it hard...
I don't mean to come accross 'fatalistic', but, being a bit simplistic, hasn't most of human history involved the forces described in this article?
I.e: the elite who uses his/her position for selfish ends, the masses who are manipulated into doing the bidding of these 'elties', and the folk who get involved in community organisations because they want to do something in amongst all this mess, but who are simply needles in a big dog-eat-dog haystack... "bread and circuses"... since the beginning.
What's the alternative and how do you see it working, when most of history has been the platform for dog-eat-dog realism as oppsoed to the organic 'idealism' sometimse mentioned here? IF modern society crumbles due to overpopulation etc, won't the same base realism be the conduit for the oepration of the new human social arrangements that emerge?
corrupt elites
Selfish elites would be a large scale problem during history after the Neolithic Period, especially in the modern era, but most of the remainder, I.E. man's overall existence, was more interdependency struggling to survive. When a day's productivity only meant 0-3 days of calories, the resulting persistent lean times mader tougher, less readily selfish, more capable people. When production surplus from a settled, more technically advanced society's labor was channeled into materially pacifying the exhausted herd or rewarding the elites, trouble started.
Maybe the trick for beating corruption is to not allocate any labor productivity to extra material reward for laboring or for ruling, but to have reward instead take another form like warrior's honor, a craftsman's pride, favor of the gods, or whatever works best for a given culture and locale. Really, we just need to keep people off the couch, by stimulating the brain with reward-seeming input in non-corrupting form, so they will at least labor to feed themselves and occasionally produce a few geniouses to better inspire those who come after.
Let the Carrot be such a feel-good "spiritual" reward. Money for buying decadent comfort junk, which has the side effect of keeping unproductive sellers-of-junk in business, eventually turning them into evil elites, might just be a terrible idea after all. Let nature's own flogging, which is either hunger from laziness and loneliness from forced exile be the mighty Stick. It probably never needed to be much more complicated at our present evolutionary stage.