Who remembers president Truman?
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”
President Henry Truman.
And people wonder why I am such a history nerd.
Here is another quote. I think you’ve heard this one.
“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est” “Knowledge itself is power” -Sir Francis Bacon
“..Overt and apparent virtues bring forth praise; but there be secret and hidden virtues that bring forth fortune; certain deliveries of a man’s self, which have no name…” – Again Francis Bacon.
Today I was listening to NPR’s coverage of an economic forum dealing with the rising power of the Pacific Rim. One South American delegate was downright cheeky, making fun of the US and its policies and where it has landed us (justifiable arrogance, given that we cannot even follow the economic advice we badgered others over) though the Egyptian Arab delegate was more polite. Both had a real point, irrespective of whatever happens to America’s elite, the country itself, you and I, are on a non reversible economic decline.
My oh my..
And some around the world say “good riddance.” We Americans are not exactly liked by many people, today.
Jacques Attali’s prediction, almost 20 years ago, that in the early 2000s American workers will become rootless and mobile, looking for jobs around the world, as South Americans fill more of the traditional labor sector jobs, is certainly starting to come true.
At least for the knowledge worker class.
Chilling out at the Clifton UDF, BMK – friend, entrepreneur, man about town, and Black Nationalist thinker, made an interesting observation.
In the world today and the coming order race will not matter as much as access to capital. Sure, race still matters but not like it once did. Those pushing for a return to a strictly hierarchical racial ordering are pushing against history.
Today, and in the future, like never before, what will determine whether we are slaves or whether we are free will be our intelligence and ability to not only amass Capital and resources, but to successfully defend it against competing interests. In other words, Western society is about to become more explicitly “dog eat dog” than ever before.
Is it possible that with the waning of American economic power, and the increasing hollowness of our imperial dominance, and the rise of China in the East (say “howdy” to Gog and Magog on your way out the door) what we face in our country is an incipient rising feudal order in which the holders of knowledge and technocratic skill sets will be very well off, and the rest of us will be hamburger flippers, call girls, and petty criminals, or if fortunate, in the military.
Some of us will be hourly IT workers which, I’m sure you realize, pays less than some auto mechanic shops. But it will put us in the middle, between the people who sign our paychecks, and the people down the hall in our apartment complex who are 1st shift Wal-Mart cashiers, 2nd shift hamburger flippers, and moonlighting as call girls, street prostitutes, or strippers.
Then again, some IT techs will probably be moonlighting too. Wal-Mart is 24hrs you know…
There will be a larger role for “knowledge workers” – who in spite of skills and knowledge will be glorified paper pushers. They are distinct from post-graduate academic types and the knowledge elite who may or may not make much, before tenure, but do form a cultural elite. And in the private sector as scientific researchers, they do very comfortably. In other words, if you have any interest in biotech, get your graduate degrees in because biotech is today what computers were 25 years ago.
Look at things this way. The peoples of the West, America and Europe, had a chance to maintain Republican and democratic forms of social organization and predictably enough they sold them for a bill of goods forged on the back of a candy bar wrapper. The new order will not be a meritocracy, it will be a plutocracy.
And the apocryphal quote attributed to Ben Franklin, when once asked what was the best form a government; “a republic ma’am, if you can keep it..”
..If you can keep it…
Think about this phrase for a second. While it does not follow that I agree with him in full, but the quote is interesting to contemplate.
“It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” -Aldous Huxley, “The Ultimate Revolution”
Is it possible that the Anglo-American experiment in constitutional republics and/or democracy was an experiment knowingly doomed to failure?
Is it possible too, that democracy is the best means for a small dominant minority to centrally control a very large population?
I cannot prove this, but it is an interesting idea to contemplate.