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Fatal Strategies And The Value Of Human Life
The current crisis of politics is unlike anything seen before. It hasn’t been brought about by chronic scarcity, economic devastation or depression. It has been driven by an undeniable realization that exploding wealth and prosperity has repeatedly failed to underwrite a decent, or even acceptable, life for a growing majority of people amidst the unrestrained accumulation of wealth of a shrinking minority. -- Read more from NOTES FROM DISGRACELAND and follow on Twitter
20.VI 2021
Civilizat
Nicely written. Not sure why but your article brought to mind Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’……….People have foresworn history…..social media has become the message…..mastery of which will dictate the future I’m afraid….which was exploited so well by you know who.
Instead of expanding human understanding the new media has narrowed it, made history into soundbites & clicks, misquoted phrases., revising it…..more young people care what a Kardashian is wearing than the morality of the president, or the difference between a vaccine and gene therapy.
The boomer experiment died on a grassy field at Kent State, hippies became bankers or joined a commune. Change is hard, corporations have done their best work, gambling, legal drugs, entertainments to placate the masses effectively, becoming soulless the natural course. But don’t take away my white supremacy!
I fear the planet is dying. It’s like watching paint dry. A little bit of life is lost every day. In a hundred years this ‘ Fatal Strategy ‘ won’t matter.
We need a new frontier, the rats are beginning to turn on each other as the cage gets more crowded.
To the moon Alice! Maybe Mars.
There’s I think a clear Way Forward. And it is a Old as Time but popularized at certain times of her history such as the period of the enlightenment. The antidote to this movement you write about is talking sharing of thoughts person on person. I fear for all its profound wisdom that this approach you take is just contributing to the problems we face.
While I agree with many of your points, you’re reliance of on the idea that entropy is disorder is not quite right. The idea that increasing entropy implies increasing disorder is perhaps the most frequently used and promulgated wrong assumption in all of science. Entropy change measures the dispersal of energy: how much energy is spread out in a particular process, or how widely spread out it becomes. It is not increasing disorder. See this for more complete discussion. Disorder—A Cracked Crutch for Supporting Entropy Discussions by Frank L. Lambert
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~korista/phys3300/disorder_cracked-crutch-for-entropy.pdf
Entropy and our creative attempts to neutralize entropy with the invention of money and property rights have played an immense role in the ever increasing inequality of wealth. In the natural world, hoarding energy over the very long term is not possible due to entropy. Energy spreads no matter how hard you try to contain it. The money you spend to maintain your life dissipates like energy, however surplus money (wealth) is not inherently subject to entropy, but entropy can be forced on wealth via inflation and taxes which dissipate the value of any unit of money. Property with property rights is also not subject to entropy. The net result is a situation where wealth can be hoarded and protected from dissipation. Surplus wealth may even have negative entropy properties. This leads to the wealthy staying wealthy and likely getting more wealthy.
On the flip side, the working population of the developed world has been exposed to a massive increase in monetary entropy through globalization, which turned closed systems into open systems and spread the income of workers from local workers to global workers.
The compounding factor is the changing shape of the economy in which the digital economy (financial and information) is growing much faster than the physical economy of manufacturing and services. The labor intensity (real energy expended) of the physical economy leads to money spreading (entropy happening) much more broadly, than in the digital economy.
The net effect is that workers in developed economies both make less money and have less opportunity to participate in growth.
These entropy related trends create a very unstable situation for democratic capitalism. The people who live off the proceeds of their work need a way out of this problem and will glom on to anyone who can give them logical set of people to blame and a path that seems to lead to a better sharing of the wealth (at least from their local perspective). Hence, the rise of a leader/party who espouses that we should blame the elite and the foreigners, and says the solution is to put “America First”.
I’m not sure what the solution is but it probably means we need to increase the entropy of wealth so that it naturally spreads more broadly.
I enjoyed the article. Not sure why your reductionism, when you write that “we cannot tell whether GOP politicians only act as morons or they are actual morons”. This sentence makes me believe that you want to give a pass to politicians who are identified with other, non-GOP political labels. Why “GOP politicians”? Isn’t it obvious that the same could be said about plenty of non-GOP politicians?
generally that might be true. Yet this article discussed the co-optation of the lost cause of white supremacy by one political party and that is the GOP.
Furthermore, all truly moronic statements in the recent past emanated from GOP pols: “California wildfires were caused by jewish space lasers” (Greene); “the BLM should tilt the earth or moon axis to fight climate change” (Gohmert) to name just two.
This is not supposed to be a partisan statement, it’s just that there is no comparable level of absurdity on the Democratic side.
I would quibble at your (apparent, to me, but perhaps a misunderstanding) depiction of the GOP as being Trump.
The GOP and the Democratic party are the American oligarchy.
Trump offended both titular sides of said oligarchy.
I would further note that the social radicalism of the Democratic party is what pushes non-adherents, as well as those ideologically divergent to start with, ever further down the path of radicalism.
The GOP in this sense hopes to capitalize on what Trump uncovered while still retaining their role as “right” or “conservative” distraction for the bulk of the American people.
Again, not that Trump is great or a good person, etc.
As you note – it doesn’t matter how flawed the subject is if said person keys in on what people ultimately care about.
I’ve been enjoying a visit from a band mate from my 70s rock band, Wolf. I am assuming that your posting name indicates that you were our #1 fan!
As per your point, the GOP was a conservative party until they adopted “the Southern Strategy.” Remember Willie Horton? Trump was the ultimate outcome.
As you hint, Trump is not old school GOP. He is a POPULIST. The GOP has just latched on for the ride. Throughout history, populism has mostly been a right wing phenomenon.
Populists are not necessarily business-friendly. Some Southern Strategy/Trump supporters in the GOP have started to wake up to that fact. I recall that one of the Koch brothers recently expressed remorse for funding the movement which ending up bringing us Trump. But the mainstream GOP only seems to care about keeping “the base” happy so they have gone all in on their messenger and savior.
Here is a the history of Trump’s political affiliations and who was serving as President of the United States of America at the times he switched parties:
1987 – registered Republican (Reagan)
1999 – Independent Party of New York (Clinton)
2001 – Democratic party ( Bush)
2009 – Republican party (Obama)
2011 – Independent (Obama)
2012 – Republican (Obama)
Last I read, he wants to establish his own party – The Patriot Party.
EmptyNester,
Agreed – Trump has historically been just another guy, part of the oligarchy.
However, I would note that he has benefited from – and clearly enjoys – being in the limelight.
Now he’s on the biggest stage in the world.
There is no going back from being POTUS and having 70M+ people vote for you to return as President.
Whatever your views on his motivations – good or bad, smart or dumb, some combination – I don’t see him giving up the stage either for personality/ego or financial reasons.
What made him so hated by the existing oligarchy is that he brought to the surface the selling out of Americans to multinational/foreign interests – through which American politicians and American government bureaucrats enriched themselves as much as the companies did.
While this isn’t the biggest problem, IMO, that we face as a nation and people, it is certainly top 5.
To me – the biggest single problem is health care.
So there are plenty of ways by which an aspiring party led by Trump could make the jump into replacing the Republicans (the Democrats are, ironically, much more entrenched due to their ideological lockstep).
Derek,
Sorry, no relation although I do enjoy a number of songs from bands with the name: Wolf. To the point of occasional karaoke…
To your point: political parties evolve over time.
The question is: will the Republican party evolve or are they so hardened that a Trumpian/populist party will have the opportunity of taking over its mantle?
From my viewpoint – the Republican party today has completely lost its lede. Large sectors of the monopolistic portions of the US economy (i.e. pharma, universities, lawyers, tech etc) have migrated to the Democrats. Finance, the biggest, pays off both/all sides. Republicans represent Big Business no more. Nor are they particularly representative of either the culturally conservative or fiscally conservative – after Bush and Trump.
They also have the opportunity to take the mantle of being the party of the 90% – Trump demonstrated conclusively that people of all areas, races, etc will vote for even him if they believe said candidate will at least attempt to protect, much less further, their interests.
Whether that happens or not, much less clear. There has always been an enormous anti-populist backlash in the US – Thomas Frank has written and spoken at length on the myriad ways by which the original Populists were taken down, and said Populists were amazingly well organized both intellectually and organizationally.
The choice before us is Brazilianization – the conversion of a formerly prosperous society into the 1st world equivalent of favelas and mansions, or a clawback of progressivism in the entire population sense as FDR did.