The State of Things – and a word from Huxley.. Part 2..

“..there are of course many exceptions, for real skill will get its reward, but in the long run it is inevitable that the lower types of labor will have an exceedingly precarious life.

It is difficult to see how this condition can be maintained in the hard world of the future with its starving margins, and it is too be feared that all too often a fraction of humanity will have to live in a state which, whatever it may be called, will be indistinguishable from slavery.” – Charles Galton Darwin, “The Next Million Years

So where in all of this, is room for the Artists? The Thinkers? Creative workers, designers, visionaries?

It follows that now, as never before, knowledge and intellect convey power and agency. This includes knowledge of history.

For creative individuals who can master their medium – words, paint, stone, metal – and convey relevant messages through it, they may be able to find an audience.

But no one will toss a bone to you. Of course there is always the sell out option, produce creative work that appeals to elite interests, basically write, film, or paint what they want to support. This may not appeal to your vision.. serving clear financial interests through your art.

But while there is always room in society for art, for theater, poetry, these things will not be given to you. Artists and creative types must carve out a sphere for them. Government grants are not going to pay your rent, and may not even be available.

Whatever your vocation, the “dropping out” option may be tenable. With foreclosed houses and land available as low as $5,000 you can grab a piece. Which removes the headache of worrying about rent. Pay your property taxes and have a larger voice in your community, and maybe be able to grow some tomatoes. Buy a place, become a homebody, drop out of things and sustain yourself economically by needful cottage industries. Many people are doing this, right now.

In some markets homes are more affordable – perversely – than when they were giving away mortgages to anyone with a pulse. Stick a mirror under your nose, if it fogs then they shoved a no-money-down ARM mortgage at you.

Now is not the age for willful ignorance, hiding from what is in chat rooms, video games, porn, or TV. Now is the age to learn, and gain skills. And figure out a plan. We have no clear idea what the next 5 years will look like in the US

Willful ignorance and stupidity can make you servile, and fit only to serve the servants. And none can argue that in many ways the general public is more ignorant, in general, than in the previous century. Access to information via the Internet is not a cure. How many people use the Internet to watch Hulu, porn, and play games? Whatever its potential as a knowledge tool, few scratch the surface.

Few even want to.

With the decline of the West’s industrial sector there is no room in the coming order for traditional labor. Our factories closed and shipped overseas. This is by design, is anyone so naïve to believe that the architects of NAFTA has no clue of its effects on our land? For you Europeans, are you so naïve to think that the architects of the EU’s economic integration didn’t have a clear understanding of its effects? That the shuttering down of British industry a generation ago, and the massive unemployment that followed, was by accident?

Who benefits, follow the money.

Are any so partisan and stupid that they insist on finding excuses for their ideological mates in office, conservative or liberal, passing the blame to the opposite side?

“I bit my tongue and stood in line
With not much to believe in..”
-Shirley Mansion, Garbage, “Not my Idea”

Wake up. We were had, left wing and right wing both, long ago.

The evidence for this is manifest, obvious, manifold, and what is worse, you deep down inside realize this to be true, but simply do not want to admit it.

We are going to have to learn, you will have to learn, to learn. To cultivate your wits, or be eaten in the next two decades to come. Acquire skills that may be, and will be, in demand, and knowledge, now.

Never stop learning and acquiring new skills, learning how to do for yourself what you would previously have called a repairman or professional to do, at expense, with money you do not have. Skills enabling you to surf and navigate a shrinking job market while you assemble the capital you need to find and make opportunities that will make you more self-sufficient.

We are being eaten alive, it will be a slow eating of course, so slow you may not realize much of it until it is too late, but if you do realize it the slow pace gives us time to maneuver.

None of this is historically unprecedented. This has all happened before. The disorderly takedown of empires dot history’s pages.

“..I bought into what I was sold
And ended up with nothing
This is not my idea of a good time..”
-Shirley Mansion, Garbage, “Not my Idea”

I contend that much of the teeth gnashing over “HBD” and “racial realism” and “political correctness” on both the Left and Right alike, actually simply cloaks fears and hopes inherent in this dynamic. In other words, these are emotive topics representing hopes, and fears, not simply reason.

For elites and high ranking sub-elites, you have articulations of logical justifications for what they believe their rights and privileges should be.

For lower sub-elites – we the competent and hardworking middling classes who still actually buy into the past order, who still believe in it, you have fears over the slipping of what they thought was assured progress and ascendancy. A protest cry, when they see what they worked hard for, or thought they worked hard for, being snatched away.

Here is an ugly thing to consider. But you must consider it. It has perhaps not dawned on them that what they were allowed to acquire, as a reward for their hard work, was simply due to the fact that their role was historically necessary to accomplish certain tasks.

“..if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they’re living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps.” -Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

The middle classes look down on, and scorn, the working classes. In American society there is a degree of moral opprobrium attached to not attending college, to working blue collar jobs, to not being in the professional classes.

There is an unstated assumption that the professional classes are simply better. Superior to the proletariat – better in virtue and achievement from the working labor classes.

But the middle classes have mostly been proles – in function – for almost 2 decades. Not at the upper levels, but certainly at the middling levels. As a qualification College plays the role that High School played a generation ago.

In any case who, after all, who actually said that “you” or “I” were “good enough”?
Good enough for whom?

We cry, we did the right thing, we worked hard for this and that, and in some cases people have worked hard. But when you try to “do the right thing” by society, who actually defined what “the right thing” actually was?

The middle classes and working classes both can be seen as strata of one and the same slave class, after all whether we have salary or are hourly we work, we serve, we labor for, others. We may labor by pen and keyboard, or we may labor by wrench and ratchet, but we labor still.

No slave, no matter how valued and high ranking in the master’s home, is comfortable with the realization that his fate is tied to the fates of the slaves in the fields.

And no slave is comfortable with contemplating the fact of her slavery.

Among slaves in the future will be the well paid and valued technocratic management, those with skill sets, and the armies of unemployed laborers in a society in which labor no longer has the value it once did. There is value for some, the muscular, the fit, the ambitious and loyal, overseas…

What did elites do in the middle ages to keep surplus populations of serfs in check?

Petty wars between cousins and brothers. Between fiefdoms and fiefdoms. And as always…

The ever reliable crusade.

Think it over. Really. Think about it over your coffee today.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers…. The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley, author’s notes in Brave New World

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