What is the value of the State?

[John Newman]

On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 01:49:03PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
> 
> 
> On 05/03/2017 03:27 PM, juan wrote:
> 
> > what's actually going on is that people with the same twisted 
> > desire for 'order' like you are embarked in the destruction or 
> > 'assimilation' of human invidivuals into some sort of 'meta 
> > organism'. Or perhaps the majority of people will be killed off 
> > when they can be replaced with machines and artificial 
> > 'intelligence'.
> > 
> > I would have disregard that sort of cheap sci-fi scenario a couple
> > of years ago, but now it's starting to look a lot more real...
> 
> The global Superstate scenario is "real" in the sense that many people
> actually seem to believe in it, approve of it and want to make it
> happen.  Such is the power of propaganda in the age of ubiquitous
> broadcast communications, moving whole societies into fantasy worlds
> designed to facilitate economic growth under a top-down command
> hierarchy.
> 
> The Superstate scenario is "real" in the metaphorical sense that the
> Internet, trans-national corporations and high speed long distance
> transport of materials and consumer goods have already turned Homo Sap
> into a meta-organism that behaves like a colonial fungus bent on
> consuming the world's resources as quickly and completely as possible.
> 
> But the prospect of world peace and prosperity under a benevolent
> global State is "not real at all" in the sense that the global
> industrial economy is locked into self-destructive feedback loops
> driven by perverse incentives.  Any Utopian plan that does not take
> the context of a global economic collapse and human population crash
> into account is a futile exercise in abstract speculation.
> 
> We are now inside the historical singularity:  A system where the
> exponential growth rate of change in human affairs (new discoveries,
> technologies, etc.) has advanced too far to permit reliable long range
> projections of future developments.  The rate of ongoing change is too
> high, creating too many hidden variables and too much turbulence.
> Under these conditions, even brute force solutions that seek to
> /impose/ predictable order via murder and terrorism on global scale
> will not yield reliable results.
> 
> The only things we can predict with much confidence today are that the
> better established laws of physics will remain intact, and that macro
> scale human motives and behaviors that have not changed over the last
> few thousand years will likely change slowly if at all.  Given these
> baseline factors, we /can/ predict, with some confidence, that we will
> be dropping out of the singularity soon:  Macro scale human demand for
> basic material commodities (including food) now exceeds the planet's
> carrying capacity; that demand is still growing, while the rate of
> resource exhaustion and human habitat destruction continues to accelerat
> e.
> 
> The Scientician faith and its Corporate Capitalist patrons tell us
> that technological "quick fix" solutions will be created when and as
> needed to keep the world as we know it intact.  Like all respectable
> apocalyptic prophesies, those of the Scienticians are likely to be
> reasonably accurate right up to the point where the Heavens open up
> and Bog and all his Holy Angels come down and fix everything for us:
> That part never happens.
> 
> I do not advise people to "give up" on anything but the status quo,
> and I do not predict the extinction of the human species.  We are the
> toughest weeds Nature ever made, capable of living on pack ice and
> hard rock desert using only Neolithic technology - and loving it.  I
> do suggest that those who are able to do so get to work devising
> practical solutions for survival and recovery to the best available
> New Normal.  The world's present rulers are hard at work on those
> problems right now, but their objectives center on worst case
> scenarios where retaining their present level of power is the primary
> objective, and everyone but themselves is expendable.  Pardon my
> language, but fuck those people.
> 
> :o)

It's gonna get shitty sometime in the 21st century for a lot of
people... as usual, I suspect the rich will scrape by just fine. For the
rest of us, it's hard to know what to do. Maybe humanity comes out the
other end with tech advanced enough (and populations reduced enough) to
be a true post-scarcity society... or, maybe about a million other far
more dystopian scenarios play out :P

Enjoy it while you got it.


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-- 
John 
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