Cultural Revolution. 1967
Empires fall when they lose balance, despite the accumulated scarcity or excess. Next time someone, even the President, comes out with the hogwash that we need more education or innovation you will know better. Let’s take the current recession as an example. China is overtaking the West propelled by the cheap labor, not by an educational advantage. It was only in the 60s and 70s when the Proletarian mob systematically slaughtered the educated class during the Cultural Revolution in the communist China. It takes more than a generation to recover from the catastrophe. Just imagine if the vast number of scientists and intellectuals in USA were killed or discredited between 1966 and 1976! Do you think a country can shrug it all off, just a mere 30 years later? Besides the most “educated elite” in America, in their infinite wisdom, outsourced the country. As a consequence only the low-skilled jobs at McDonald’s are in demand, while the experienced, skilled and educated middle class and creative class is no longer required. In fact the only sectors still holding the fort are the healthcare and education itself, in other words the hard to outsource professions (ala fast food). Also in demand are the computer engineers, the digital managers overseeing consolidation of wealth and facilitating the global flow of goods.
Furthermore the compulsory education is inverse to innovation. Ever heard of these college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, James Cameron, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., etc.? Even Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, are the products of Montessori (AKA the montessori mafia – wsj). Montessori system being a good example of the anti traditional top-down education.
But despite the educational credentials of the innovators one might still think that innovation is good for the economy, economy being the benefit of the broader populace. Take the Internet, the greatest innovation of the last decades, as an example. We now observe the inequality and consolidation of wealth. The Internet is the lubricant of outsourcing. China will never rise so rapidly without the networked logistics, the small business on the Main St. will not collapse so readily without the Amazon, the Wall St. and the Housing will not crash so violently without the sedative, interconnected, computational cruise control.
But there is as always the utopian promise of the better tomorrow, the cavalier and callous dismissal of the tragic human dislocations in both the industrial and the agricultural revolutions and the infantile and uninformed Luddite references. At this very moment there is the unprecedented crisis and the so-called innovation is the main contributing factor to the decline of the middle class and the associated human anguish. So when the next talking head pounces the panacea of education and innovation one wonders is he is a parrot, is he speaking on behalf of the economy or on behalf of his client, the plutocracy?
It stands to argue that during the fall of every empire the shift in the know-how occurs only after the shift in the economic reality. And it works both ways. For example the Chinese invented the gun powder but the seaworthy Europeans perfected the art of concurring islands and continents and shooting their way towards the golden age of colonialism.
Cultural Revolution. 1967
The popular fetish of education and innovation is a smokescreen to distract from the fact that this empire needs a very small number of the highly skilled nerds to run the server farms and a very large number of low skilled labor to run the pacific sweat shops or serve the food. This is the type of NBA propaganda trap for the millions of black teenagers, when the market can only support 50 NBA stars per graduating class. It’s no longer about education or innovation, perhaps it’s no longer about luck.
P.S. At the dawn for the information age one can rarely meet a person who is sober about the cost of the earlier Industrial revolution. The communist plague of the last century was a reaction to the humiliation and slavery of the workers huddled into the permanent inequality and the grim growth of the crime-ridden workforce camps in the metropolises. But there is a pattern actually, going all the way back to the archetypal Agricultural revolution described by Jared Diamond as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. Beware of the shadows, the internet dealt a decisive blow to the centralized ideological control and the power of the nation-states but it cast a very, very long shadow.
Photos taken by 蒋少武
A Post-Enlightenment Occupation
by Ben Atlas on 10.18.2011.11:55am · 0 comments
One of the primary complains about the Occupy is that the participants don’t have a coherent, clear message, they are infiltrated by the fringe elements – anarchist, hippies, etc. Lets dissect this on an individual and collective levels.
In the post-Freudian age one recognizes that the coherent message of the super-ego is just a mask hiding the primal forces. Indeed the anarchic impulse is one of the most powerful motivations of the modern man, hemmed into the mortal grip of the structured (post-agricultural) society, not to mention the hippie love. With the decline of religions, ideologies and the super powers, the indignation about the lack of coherence masks the self-flagellation for the very personal, painful and real loss of the paradise and the illusory clarity.
On a collective level again there is the realization that the laissez-faire capitalism is just a belief that came crashing on the heals of the collapse of the global socialism. Indeed the presiding US president exemplifies that chasm between the coherent and polished rhetoric of hope and the incoherent hopeless reality. By pointing the accusatory finger at the occupiers people try to prolong their hold on the remaining and tumbling mental encampment fenced off like a Poetmkin village with illusions, purpose, progress, coherence, clarity and order.