Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Jul 31, 2018 4:36 am
Greta wrote: ↑Tue Jul 31, 2018 3:03 am
Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Jul 31, 2018 1:26 amIt's a double-edged sword. Huxley's side may be sharper and more insidious; Orwell's blunter but more forceful and direct. Both collude toward the decline. As mentioned on the first page of this OP, "it's not an either/or situation". The only way that could happen is if a government attacks the citizenry as if it were a foreign invader forcing a sudden transition.
There are ever more signs of each coming into play. Domination from one side, suppression on the other - and enormous manipulation with each.
An older unemployed and unemployable friend told me that depressed jobless people are not permitted to cry in despair when being put through humiliating "job seeking" exercises in the Centrelink offices or they will be deemed to be troublemakers and issued with "demerits" that threaten their small social security benefits.
I'm thinking that is perhaps more Orwellian than Huxleyesque there (?) ... when "social security" is redesigned to push those deemed worthless towards suicide so as to implement cost savings.
I don't think it unrealistic to conclude that many, very many, will consider suicide an option when the pensions they expect to get are reduced to a trickle.
It's likely to cause a further leveling of the middle class which in turn will cause a massive amount of civil disobedience. To protect power and privilege under the guise of law I see government cracking down - with lethal force if necessary - against those who have the most to lose, namely the middle class which comprises the greatest segment of society historically having established its wealth. These people are the most dangerous when desperate since they're also among the most educated.
When it's no-longer possible to appease them feeling robbed of their contributions to public and private pension funds...especially the former, without repercussions to the powerful and wealthy, including unions, who to a great extent are responsible for the problems, massive uprisings will be its consequence and it's then that power and privilege will become the most centralized. The middle class can rarely compete with governments, the military might and technologies available to them.
There's more the story and hopefully it won't play out like this but human nature doesn't inspire much hope. In such cases the response by those in power have always been Orwellian and human rights cease to be a precondition of legitimate rule.
What I see is separation. If many millions are servicing a few hundred, what do they need the few hundred for? Meanwhile, the few are increasingly replacing people with machines then I can see a growing separation. There will be increased refusal to pay tax on the basis that the social contract has been broken, and new independent economies will operate via blockchain, or some other emergent technology.
So when the little people, as you note, start giving the top dogs trouble I can see them simply letting them go. They will have their machines by then. Big Brother let the Proles suit themselves and the Alphas and Betas allowed freedom on the Reservation. Let the "animals" roam free, so to speak. Awesome vision of the authors to see it coming.
In a sense we are returning to a dominant government situation akin to when religions ran societies; the common people increasingly have the choice between freedom or longevity.
We certainly know that a return to theocracies is not the answer, seeing the uniformly disastrous theocracies in the world today. The more religious a nation becomes, the the more poor and dysfunctional it becomes, with the US's rapid decline into madness and possible civil war a shining example.
Many see this as a "wicked problem", where no satisfactory solution is possible. I note this as even today, as authorities try to devise ways of stacking human abodes ever higher to cram everyone in, many people STILL deny that the world is overpopulated. I think they usually refer to how the world's human population could fit into Texas, or something like that.
I have a pretty big lounge room, and maybe fit over a hundred people in here. Trouble is, once they have all fit into the room - what then? It's an ugly situation. People want solutions but the only solution is fewer humans, and the path from here to there appears to be disturbing. Yet, it's just nature - too many critters, plenty gotta die, as has been the case locally for four billion years. Now it's global.
It's interesting that the level of populations needed for humanity to civilise and progress is beyond nature's capacity to support, and often beyond our own tolerances. Many will disagree, saying that if humans had only be fair minded and embraced equality, then there'd be enough for everybody. You might as well say that if humans were bonobos the world would be better. As things turn out, humans are neither bonobos nor especially fair minded, nor much keen on equality. Thus all
this.
I, probably like millions of others, have rather been expecting all today's crises to come to a head since the 1980s, although the growing level of cynicism and regressiveness took me by surprise. I thought we'd all be fighting the good fight for humanity and nature against the pressures of sustainability, but eventually be defeated by our sheer numbers, despite our best efforts.
LOL
Of course, precious little to alleviate environmental problems has been done thanks to the mother of all disinformation campaigns. With the help of fossil fuel buddies, Fox & Friends, the situation has largely been BAU, aside from extreme acceleration of wealth inequality, climate change impacts and accelerated resource depletion.
I thought we would at least try to do something about it. Maybe humans are more pragmatic than for which I gave them credit? It looks to me that people have simply figured that everything is screwed and too big to fix anyway so they might as well make hay while the Sun shines.
Meanwhile, theist politicians thirsting for the Apocalypse are actively working to accelerate divisions, and the old boys' support network means they retain unrepresentative numbers in governments everywhere. Neither Orwell nor Huxley picked the rather strange reversion to this rather perverted form of evangelic theism we see today. Ben Elton (with the advantage of recency) has perhaps captured that issue more than O & H.
The irony is that we still live in one of the best times to be alive in human history; there are still many good things we take for granted, even if they are being taken away from us at a fair clip. I'd still rather this lifestyle to that of the 19th century or before. Neither of us would have lasted too long during The Inquisition, I suspect
