German would-be world-reshaper
Klaus Schwab has been making waves via his World Economic Forum, on the subject of 'The Great Reset', allegedly an appropriate response to a panoply of global systemic problems though to me it looks more like another example of centralising power-seekers 'not wasting a crisis.' Sky News Australia's Rowan Dean gives Schwab and the WEF's motley crew a once-over here:
Back in 2017, Danish MP Ida Auken sketched a millenarian future of passive, possessionless citizenry:
In 2030:
'I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes...
'When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don't really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.'
Question: what exactly will you think about? Or create? Or develop? This velvet-lined dystopia is designed so that you will change nothing of any importance; the first priority of a successful revolution is to ensure that there will not be another one. Auken's tamed human says:
'Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.'
So, no dreams; they could get you into trouble.
With a certain brutal clarity, US-Mex billionaire Hugo Salinas Price has envisaged a different but parallel scenario: turning the clock back a century or more, to a time when even lowly suburban bank clerks like
Charles Pooter had domestic servants.
'If it were not for US government subsidies to unemployment, in the numerous ways in which they are offered, those in more comfortable circumstances in the US might be relieving poverty by taking on numbers of quasi-slaves into their households – to do the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, the gardening, the driving, the taking care of the children...
'If there weren’t so many rules that make hiring quasi-slaves for domestic work so expensive, no doubt a large number of unemployed Americans, amenable to accepting the facts of life, would find working in homes more agreeable than eating in food-kitchens...
'As the century wears on, realities will undoubtedly bring back slavery, at first in the very mild version of the present, but as life becomes harsher, out-and-out slavery will make its reappearance in the world. The imperatives of life will have their way: food, clothing and lodging in return for total obedience and work. This is an aspect of “Peak Prosperity” that has not been examined so far...
'The Democracy of Athens at the time of its greatness, when it became the impossible model for our times, consisted of all of 21,000 Athenians who were free citizens. It did not include 400,000 slaves of said democratic Athenians.
The French Revolution was a welter of blood, a suicidal revolt by middle-class lawyers against an elite that pushed its foreign war-making and demands for money too far; but the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to defeat Napoleon made history look as though it had a direction without swords and guillotines, a path towards increasing prosperity and individual freedom for the lower classes.
This accelerated with the century of super-cheap energy in the form of oil; and in the aftermath of two world wars, the massive transfers of wealth from the British Empire to the United States plus the yet-to-be-developed markets in the East made it possible to believe the Fred Flintstone model of civic life: a working-class (Americans would say 'middle class') man able to support his family on his industrial wage, own a car and a detached house in the suburbs, have evenings and weekends off, join a Rotarian-type club, go bowling and so on.
But then the rich and powerful sucked up the increases in wealth by giving away the economy to foreigners; and despite attempts to reverse the flow, much of the 're-onshored' production as occurs will be performed by robots and Artificial Intelligence - white-collar middle class, look out. And the Internet - Amazon etc - is breaking the retail-outlet ladder to self-employment and personal independence.
History is turning back from linear to cyclic: work, feed, breed. Chances are, your descendants will 'own nothing and be happy'; as a servant in a rich man's house, or a wage-slave in a multinational company. Money has allowed the emergence of emperors without lands to defend.
And yet, what happened to the rich Mayans? Where are they?
Spare us your old man's dreams, Herr Schwab.
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JD comments:
Three videos to see:
Chairman of the FMF Rule of Law Board of Advisors and a former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, Rex van Schalkwyk, delivers opening remarks at an FMF roundtable.
The Dystopian "Fourth Industrial Revolution" Will Be Very Different from the First One
https://youtu.be/VdhD1SN9vSA
The United Nations and the Origins of "The Great Reset"
https://youtu.be/RhFBzsEErvQ
The Mises Forum videos mention the influence of Bill and Melinda Gates in this urge to reshape everything but as I think I have pointed out on previous occasions those leading(?) the 4th industrial revolution and the great reset are not exactly great thinkers, they lack common sense.*
Here is an example of that from Melinda Gates -
"Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive."
https://www.aier.org/article/we-hadnt-really-thought-through-the-economic-impacts-melinda-gates/
That last sentence is a perfect example of 'pious stupidity' ( a phrase I found in the writings of Frithjof Schuon)
* * *
Common sense by the way is not as Einstein described it - 'Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.'
It is in fact a real philosophy espoused by Thomas Reid - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_common_sense_realism
4 comments:
As we suppress the middle class, away goes higher education in the technical subjects, and eventually all progress stalls. Then we go backwards, as stuff falls apart.
JD replies to "Paddington":
He is right but it is too late; STEM subjects were abandoned a long time ago. The Government's new White Paper, 'Powering our net zero future' is clear evidence of that, written by PPE graduates with 'net zero' understanding of the inevitable results of their proposals - zero electricity when we really need it.
For example; wind farms are described as having xx capacity. No, their capacity is actually nil. There is the provision for the generation of xx megawatts of electricity but only if the wind is blowing and only if the demand for electricity is there. And as I have said previously, a wind farm cannot provide the amount of energy that would be needed to build a wind farm in the first place.
As for hydrogen boilers in the home...... more ignorance from our 'leaders' Graf Zeppelin ring any bells?
Lockdowns do make sense. Most diseases will eventually be defeated by the body's defense mechanism, given a little help. The point of restrictions is not to overwhelm the medical systems by too many patients at once. The latter is now happening in the US, with disastrous results. A friend's sister and her husband came down with COVID-19 last week and had to go to Henderson hospital, just outside Las Vegas. They spent a day on gurneys in the hallway because there were no beds available.
In the latest news, Southern California does not have a single open ICU bed.
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