Democracy Is a Bad Thing Part Five "Social Group Dynamics

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Five    of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing     This is chapter “Social Group Dynamics”

 

 

(24)Remember that earlier we were speaking about how current science and trends today in academia have effectively blown up the hope and optimism we carried away from  the Age of Enlightenment.  From there we had had a vision of an inherently Good and Noble Humanity, but given a trial to prove itself  over the last few Centuries, well, it didn't pan out, did it?  That now effectively drops us back into the dark and foreboding Hobbsian Pure State of Nature, which would bring us full circle in our discussion, wouldn't it?

 

So, let's quickly brush up again on Hobbes.    Remember how all his individual men would be locked in a kind of battle with all others, well, looking back from the vantage point of what we know now, Hobbes' description was sort of a kind of philosophical political poetry.  The truth we know today  is more likely that people contend as members of distinct groups and more as factions than as individuals. It turns out that for the last several hundred thousand years Human Beings largely evolved in social groups of from 50 to a 150 individuals.  Yes, there were certainly men with ‘personal power’ but those with the most power would have friends, allies and partners. Also, since Human Beings evolved with Groups being the unitary objects of evolutionary forces, well, we could then infer that there is no evolutionary optimum ‘individual’ but that our Species evolved so that in every random group of from about 50 to 100 people there would be the optimum spectrum of necessary personality and capacity types required for what could be called a high functioning group.  It was natural selection aiming for the fittest Group.

 

Perhaps we need to delve a bit deeper into this theory that the biological predisposition of Human Beings would cause Social and Political Dynamics to be driven not by reason or even by individual self interests but by instinctive group driven social instincts which could then be cynically manipulated.   So let's look at some of the details here  just as we would have expected  others to have looked at these same issues before.

 

(25)What kind of Types are necessary to the Optimum Group we might ask.  It is a lot more complicated than just Leaders and Followers. The Leadership Cadre would be split up into Front Men and Functional Executives.  We know there are Narcissistic Types, right?  Why do we even need them?  Well, their High Opinion of themselves is very contagious and while Experts can smell the Bullcrap, normal people fall under it’s spell.  But that is what the Functional Executives are for, to supply the vigorous real world expertise that would actually fulfill the promises of leadership.   Then to flesh out the entire group, well, science has only scratched the surface in establishing the various niche specialized talents and abilities people have, but apparently broadly functioning groups that are the best constituted for survival need all sorts.

 

(26)But now let’s think of the social and political repercussions involved in Humanity’s propensity towards forming in 100 person groups.  One thing that studies show us is that apparently people only have enough built in mental slots to cover for just over about 100 names and faces.  The studies involved getting subjects to match names with faces using flash cards.  Go much above 100 and the people in the cards start looking alike.  Also, in psychology we hear a lot about people “projecting”.  This happens when people assign to some new person the characteristics of another person they’ve dealt with extensively before.

 

(27)It is crucially important in our discussion of Democracy to remember that in primitive evolutionary times that people lived their entire lifetimes out within one group and that mutual knowledge of each other must have ran very deep.  After such long acquaintance and over thousands of interactions these Group Members must have known organically what they could expect of each other.  That is probably one of the reasons why we are so dysfunctional today, because instead of feeling like we are a well integrated part of some collective Oneness, no, we are institutionally forced to live in small claustrophobic nuclear families, where a man’s nerves can only be frazzled from being penned with a female of the species and her brat kids, not exactly the broadest and most exciting of lives, is it?   Yes, I’m thinking that we must be longing for life back in the Primeval Group where we would seamlessly fit in and unquestionably belong.  Now, even when we are in groups, well,  they are always new ad hoc collections of strangers where it is rare that anybody ever seems to answer to our expectations and where we ourselves always seem to be misunderstood.  The only person we can trust is ourself, and just think how sick that is compared to our Evolutionary Norm where we were practically ‘one flesh one mind’ with a hundred other people.  Each one of us today is living in a Paradise Lost which we're anxiously trying to regain.

 

(28) So we could expect that our primitive instinctive longings would interpret the Democratic Ideal, as the propagandists present it,  as some kind of return to the original Garden of our Primordial Group.   And then our understandable disappointments with our present Social Conditions and Institutions would feed into attracting us more towards that Democratic Primordialism.   The cry would  always be "MORE Democracy can fix the problems that THIS Democracy has in fact dumped upon us".

 

The honest truth is that we can never re-achieve that bliss of oneness of being with the same small comprehensible group for a lifetime.  Well, no, not  unless some future comprehensibly authoritarian and very well organized regime organized people into such groups.  Is it possible? Yes?  I’m sure it could be very likely.

 

(29)But up till now we've only discussed what was good about the primitive primal groups from which we evolved.   It gets even more interesting discussing their darker side.  We need to ask ourselves what happens  when the Group by natural increase exceeds the optimum size?   Remember,  People don’t have the capacity to be inclusive beyond a certain point and I would suppose that from that point we would get the onset of Factionalism, and the Us vs Them dynamic.   There’s two ways things can go at that point.  In the first case there can be a crisis and the one Group subdivides, not evenly, but between Larger and Smaller, and the Small Group immediately goes for a hike and creates some distance between them.   The second way things can go is that there could be a life and death struggle between factions whereby the excess numbers are killed or banished.   This uglier and more brutal resolution might be caused by restrictions of territory where the group may already be boxed in between hostile groups who would attack if old promises were broken in regards to creeping expansionism. 

 

What we can note from archeological and anthropological data is that population levels at this stage of Human Development were never that high.  Also Primitive Peoples more often than not develop a Warrior Ethos which means that life and death fights must be expected as the norm. 

 

(30)Now think of our present Society.  All of us are tossed together with many times the top limit of 150 names and faces vying for our attention.  That would constantly be pushing us into Us Vs Them factionalism and Side Choosing, dividing up our acquiesces into Friends and Enemies.  Now think about what some Democratic Operatives could do with that.  That is great for Voter turn out and enthusiasm even while we can recognize how socially destructive these irrational and purely instinctive impulses can be. 

 

Then, again because we are so overwhelmed with names and faces,  we must constantly be projecting personalities onto people who may only have a few salient physical characteristics to remind us of those real people whom we either love or hate.  That means we can expect ourselves to behave at least partially irrationally with many people we encounter, and probably that the vast majority of our acquaintance aren't nearly what we think they are.  But this tendency towards constantly projecting can have a political application.   If studies show that people will predictably 'project' according to objectively discernable types, then it would be easy enough to simply talent scout for candidates with the optimum physical characteristics and after they are deterministically elected they can serve out their offices as shills for those who engineered their rise to power. 

 

Okay, In Our Next Video we discuss in more detail how the Promised Ideals of the Age of Enlightenment failed the Reality Test and what choices we have once Cynicism is staring us in the face.

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Democracy Is A Bad Thing Part Four "The Right To Riot"

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Four   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing     This is chapter “The Right to Riot”

 

 

(18)Oh, speaking of all those Eternal Inalienable Rights that had been minted new at the time, well, we hear a lot today in regards to "The Right of Peaceful Protest". Huh!? Well that is new... VERY new! There are no precedents for that in either American or World History.  It had been universally understood that when people collected together nursing grievances and vocalizing complaints that it would inevitably result in violent riots.   We're not blind!  We all know it typically plays out like that, right?   What we understand as the "Constitutional Right" to 'Peaceful' Protest is actually  a hodge-podge of the triple rights of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Association.  But one can Speak, Assemble and Associate in hired halls.  There is no explicit Constitutional Right for taking it to the Street.  For over 200 years no Court has ever questioned ordinary everyday Disturbing the Peace ordinances, or Loitering ordinances for that matter.    Also, any cultural political moves to justify or euphemize rioting came well over 50 years after the Constitution was written.  We have Henry David Thoreau who started with Civil Disobedience, but note, he said nothing about Disobedience being non-violent and with John Brown's Abolitionist Raid on Harper's Ferry, well, Thoreau had advocated for what would have been one of the worse Genocides in Human History, if only it had succeeded as planned, with the Blacks murdering every White in the South, all while Thoreau would safely ensconce himself in a Boston bunker.  With the Slave Revolts in Jamaica and Haiti the killing had only stopped at the Waters Edge.  Thoreau knew what he was suggesting, didn't he?   Yeah, I know, White People are Bad, but Violence Always Has Its Excuses, right?  Every Rioter must think so.  But my main point is that the characteristic "Peace before the Storm" that we see as prelude to any deadly riot really shouldn't count as 'peace', right?  Not if there always follows the Storm. 

 

(19)Then there was Gandhi with his non-violent resistance, frankly a  lawyer's trick.  Gandhi presided over some the most bloody riots of the 20th Century.  Gandhi may have himself been 'peaceful and non-violent', but everybody else showed up carrying pitchforks and torches.  His Rioters once massacred an entire police precinct, trapping the cops inside and then torching the place.

 

Yeah, here’s an interesting story: quite a while back during my World Travels  I was in India doing some Ashram Hopping and paying my respects to the different Gurus and I met this dignified but cheerful elderly man who was accompanied by a small entourage.  Somehow he was comfortably wealthy and relatively important. He introduced himself only as The Professor. Well, I must have been a favorite of his as he would send his people to fetch me for breakfast or lunch or some walk with “the Professor”.  Anyway, the Professor told me the story of "A Young Man" who had known Gandhi personally when they were both in Internment during the War.  As the story goes the Young Man endlessly fawned on Gandhi, worshiping him like a God, and Gandhi was increasingly annoyed with it, just wishing to be left alone.  Finally Gandhi couldn't take it any longer and burst out angrily "No! You got it all wrong!  I'm no Saint.  I'M A LAWYER!   Non-Violence was only a ploy to keep me from getting hanged! The charge of Sedition can only stick if I'm found to have been "INCITING VIOLENCE", so before each and every one of my Bloody Riots I had myself filmed before hundreds of witnesses talking piously about Peaceful Protest and Non-Violence.  And look!  Voila! I'm still alive!  My trick worked!"  Wow, what a story.  I had no doubt but that the young man had been himself.

 

(20)But, yeah, Gandhi became a big Rock N Roll Super Star and certainly the Establishment would wish to guilt the People into believing that they needed to be peaceful, just like Saintly Gandhi, during their riots and not break so much stuff,  and so the News Reels kept rolling.  They made documentaries that kids could watch on their new television sets.  And it all caught the attention of a young Martin Luther King.   Well, King took the Ideal of Non-Violence way past anything  Gandhi did with it because he was a Reverend and Gandhi had been a scum bag lawyer.  King's view was that non-violence was crucially necessary for two reasons:  any violence would provoke a hugely disproportionate reaction, getting a great many Blacks killed.  Secondly, he was aware of the numbers and that Blacks were actually a SMALL Minority, and so in order to ever arrive at any political change he would need to re-kindle the old Abolitionist White-Black Coalition, but in order to do that Blacks would have to present a very sympathetic picture, you know, an oppressed minority THAT DIDN'T SOMEHOW DESERVE TO BE OPPRESSED, and that is not the image they would be presenting if they were raping, looting and pillaging, right?    SO, King held seminars, teach ins, and saw that everybody would be drilled over and over again in the importance of non-violence, and having practice sessions where they would do their damnedest to try to provoke one another while remaining nonplussed, unruffled,  calm and serene.

 

(21)The Holy Grail they were seeking would be getting National TV coverage on the Evening Six O'clock News of being brutalized by White Police with themselves projecting an aura of noble innocence.  Finally one day during the Birmingham protests the evening edition of the New York Times came out and it showed a front page photo of a White Police Officer siccing a Police Dog on a young Black Man wearing a suit jacket and tie, well, King instantly dropped to his knees with tears in his eyes and prayed thanks to God. Saved at Last, Saved at Last, Thank God Almighty, Saved at Last. That was veritably the high water mark for Non-Violent Protest in all the History of the Humanity.  And it worked the way King had planned.  White sympathy for the Civil Right Movement skyrocketed and thus gave the Democratic Party the permission to run through the Civil Rights Laws.

 

(22)But notice, ever since the Days of King has ANYBODY ANYWHERE been trained, drilled and systematically conditioned to be Non-Violent?  No!  Even King in just a few short years  would live to see his ideas of non-violence being challenged, that while they got the Civil Rights Laws on the books there was no active enforcement and very little actually changed and so the younger Black Community Leaders thought it time to ramp up the pressure.   Then when King was killed, God Rest His Soul, well, America's cities burst into flames.  They tried to keep most of it out of the News so the Soviets wouldn't catch hold of it and play it up before the World.  Yeah, just talk to anybody who was alive and paying attention back then and you will find that they all thought that THEIR nearby City was the only one in flames and that they wondered at the time why it was only covered by their Local News and that Walter Cronkite thought that ordinary Man Bites Dog stories more important for the National feeds.   But, yeah,  only then, with clouds of acrid black smoke billowing over America’s cities,  did the Blacks get Affirmative Action which meant thousands of Government Jobs for Blacks who  could pass the Civil Service Exams.  And there was the Johnsonian War on Poverty that came with all those Welfare Checks that would later become so controversial, you know, once the fires were out and forgotten.  So we got a mixed message coming out of the Civil Rights Movement, didn't we?  We know both what we are supposed to do and we know what really works.  Jeez, however will we chose, right? 

 

(23) So, yeah, I believe the reason we hear so much of a Constitutional Right to Peaceful Protest, that actually isn't there, is because, again, the Unites States wishes to be able to impose an impossible moral standard on all the other Governments around the World in order to weaken and destabilize them.  It is THEY who must tolerate hundreds of thousands of rioters clogging the arteries of their economies and certainly and inevitably turning violent, bringing on either disastrous regime change or civil war.  But look at the USA where there are plenty of instances of the government violently suppressing protests.  Look at 1932 where the Army Bonus Marchers were very violently stomped out.  Yeah, it rebounded horribly on Hoover and may have been instrumental in losing the election for him to Roosevelt  but NOBODY at the time was talking about how he violated any "Constitutional Right to Peaceful Protest".

 

In our next Video, Part Five, we’ll discuss how Hobbes State of Nature has been updated with a new Theory on Human Evolution which sees it as Group Based and how success in the Politics of Democracy can only be as good as our understanding of Social Group Dynamics, the limitations they impose, and the possibilities for their manipulation.     

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Democracy a Bad Thing Part Three “Enlightenment Ends Enter Democracy”

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Three   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  This is Chapter “Enlightenment Ends Enter Democracy”

 

We discuss here the largely unspoken rule in Democracy that majorities can be too big, and that we need a lot of losers because they’re the ones we make pay all the bills.  

 

(11)That is where Democracy enters in. At first Universal Suffrage was the farthest thing from their minds.  At first they insisted on property qualifications.  The nascent Capitalists should have locked in their control of Government and obviated all hope for a Democratically installed Leftist government by insisting on Tax Proportional Voting.  Tax Proportional voting, in perfect terms, would be where the Electoral System would recognize as many Votes as  units of Tax Revenue they receive.   Your Tax Receipt would show how many votes you would be entitled to.    You would get whatever power you paid for, you know,  just like now but it would be upfront and above board and honestly administered.   Nothing would be fairer than that, right?  But the Business Class wanted only the Political Power while wishing to shift the Tax Burden to some other class.  

 

(12)So, yeah, the  way it works is all the factions in a Democracy wish to be part of a coalition large enough to win an election all with the understanding of maximizing their returns while minimizing their obligations.   They do not want to owe too much to too many.   That gives Democracy the appearance of a kind of abiding Intuitive Paradox.  We hear all the time about "Land Slides" and "Mandates" and this give us the impression that practically the entire electorate voted unanimously giving a general popular consent.  But then look at the actual numbers.   the Majority count might be a bit larger than 51% but that just means that somebody  miscalculated somewhere and now some superfluous interest group will be side by side  with all the other piglets sucking at the teets  instead of putting their backs to the oars  and helping to pay for everybody else's dance party.   Big Mandates are actually Big Messups.  This is why the Rule of Majority is so important.  Any faction or alliance of factions only needs to get 51% of the Vote to take over the Government.  Democracy is basically the Tyranny of the 51% over the 49.  Played out perfectly the 51% should derive all the benefits while the 49% pay all the bills.

 

(13) But, yeah, why were poor people ever even allowed to get into this game? Why did anybody ever think a Universal Franchise was a good idea?  Well, look at the Demographics during the 19th Century.  The French Physiocrats, you remember, the Economic School that thought all Wealth derived from the land, well, they at least looked correct in their thinking from the demographic perspective back then.  There were a great many independent farmers that had property enough to qualify to vote, but still the Businessmen were relatively few.  So the Business Community must have thought long and hard.  If the Poor People were brought into the franchise, well,  whose side would they vote for?  In language, culture  and manners the Wealthy Businessman was not much above his poor and miserable fellows.  Really, the only difference between a Successful Capitalist and a Miserable Worker, is that the one has on a new suit of cloths.  They could dress up in imitation of the Landed Wealth, but their vulgarity would always give them away.  Just read the Jane Austen Novels to see just how despised and held in contempt the Business Sector had been.   

 

Apparently the Nascent Capitalists thought to turn the Curse of their coarseness and ignorance  into a Blessing.  The Business Classes could fluently speak the language of the Ignorant, and the Aristocracy back then was still then much too proud to adapt by dumbing down as they would do today.   So, yes, back then when our Betters were still openly haughty and proud about it, the Capitalists were able to enjoy an early lead in corralling the vote of the gullible Working Classes.   We would see how important this dynamic was in the establishment of the Human Rights, where basically the idea of Freedom of Speech meant the freedom for the Business Class to publish newspapers and political tracks with which they could manipulate the marginally educated.  

 

(14)There was another reason why the Business Classes didn't have to worry over much in regards to Property Qualification in Voting, you know, that the Poor would rise up and vote as a block to take away their factories.  The reason for this is that it was soon found  that the Politics of Democracy would become contests between Political Parties, and that these Parties would be like private clubs with their membership being  restricted.  While there was no property qualification for voting, it was the exact opposite in regards to having influence in the Political Parties  where money was of primary importance.   Staff must be hired and offices leased for desk space and filing cabinets.  The Calculus involved in hitting exactly 51% of the Vote in order to maximize gains and minimize liabilities requires a great many clerks and consultants running around doing all that figuring and they all needed to be paid.   Marginally educated Workers could not do this kind of calculating for themselves, and they didn't have the money to pay for it to be done for them. 

 

(15) But, yes, even without their own Party, as Universal Suffrage became more of a thing, the Workers clout at the voting booths would give them more and more leverage.  You can imagine how the Political Parties must have seen this.  It would have appeared to them as opportunistic parasitic freeloading, with the Workers trying to hijack elections they weren't paying their fair share for.    Again, the whole point of Democracy, as it was practically understood,  is to derive benefits while shifting  the costs,  and so the Working Vote was always considered prohibitively expensive.  Again, despite what everybody SAYS the truth is that actually nobody really wants to win with Great Landslide Majorities, even if they would brag about them, because it is important to have a lot of Losers because it is the Losers who are expected to Pay all the Bills.  In a Democracy where everybody Wins, nobody Wins.

 

(16) But, okay, if you absolutely had to pander to the poor to get over that 51% hurdle, well, could there still be a way to not give them anything for their vote, you know, to cheat them so they might not notice?   Great minds would be tried in finding ways to have the poor vote without regard to their financial interests.  Up through the 19th Century the University Departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, and Cultural History were still in their infancy and so the politicians really did see Political Will almost entirely in terms of financial self interest and Class Interest.  We can see how dated is the thinking of many modern Leftists when we hear the way they still think "Class" is so central, parroting their idol Marx who was only ignorant because he came before all the New Disciplines flourished up in our Universities.  But our Modern Leftists are ignorant because they chose to actively ignore all the current state of the art scientifically derived Understandings of the Universe and our Human Condition. 

 

(17)But, yes,  the 20th Century brought New Knowledge and New Knowledge brought New Power.  the Working Class would lose much of its  economic leverage in terms of Economic Self Interest because it would be found that the Poor and Marginally Educated could be persuaded to surrender their votes for a variety of other far less expensive causes. Yes, the Great Unwashed Poor were in fact Human Beings and Human Beings really not much better than Animals and the less educated they were, the less religious they were, and the less well read they were, well, all of that would be putting them closer and closer to the Hobbsian Pure State of Nature, wouldn't it?   Well, what could Political Operatives do to manipulate men in this Natural State?  That is a question that opened up a veritable Pandora's Box.    

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Democracy a Bad Thing Part Two “The Age of Enlightenment”

 

Hi.  This is Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Two   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  This is Chapter “The Age of Enlightenment”

 

In this Episode we discuss the transformative elements in the 18^th Centuries Age of “Enlightenment”, the necessary prelude to the Industrial Revolution.   

 

(6)When we are thinking of why Europe left the protective shelter of Authoritarianism and allowed itself to be swept up by the chaos of Democracy, well, Europe had become a far different place in the span between 1650 and 1800.  Let's look at some of the forces that vectored into play.

 

To begin with there had been an interesting contemporary of Hobbes,  Rene Descartes, you know, the "I think therefore I am" guy, but that was just chitter chatter compared to his real earth-shaking contribution to World Civilization.  He was the one who developed the X and Y Graph that we draw coordinate number lines on to understand algebra and trigonometry.  Before Descartes and the "Cartesian" Graph no Mathematicians anywhere in the World could  "see" what the hell they were doing.  It was like working blind.  Descartes literally invented the Mathematical Drawing Board.  It was an innovation on the same scale as perhaps the invention of the Wheel or of Fire.   So, of course within a generation we had both Newton and Leibnitz inventing Calculus within five minutes of each other (with Newton using a dashing elegant notation while Leibnitz would do what  Germans always do, take what is already difficult and just make it even harder).   Once Mathematicians could SEE graphically what they were doing all sorts of mathematical truths became obviously axiomatic.  Mathematicians for the next two centuries would be pulling down all the Low Hanging Fruit that Descartes had revealed to the naked eye.   And because Math had become so much easier to comprehend and follow, more people began to study it.  It was the beginning of the move made by all European Universities from Classical Education towards more emphasis on Scientific Studies.    

 

(7) The new emphasis on Math and Science transformed the social and economic dynamics of Europe.  The vast increase in mathematical talent available to commerce, manufacturing, architecture and ship building  was the impetus for the Industrial Revolution.  Wealth and thus Power started coming into new hands.  Previously it was thought that all wealth was derived from the land.  Look up the Physiocratic School of Economic Theory.   Yeah, that is sort of how Feudalism and the Medieval Economies worked.  They did not have  any conception of Capitalist Growth Economics.  They didn't "grow" wealth, no, they lived off of it.  Every year the rents were exactly the same, but that was enough for them.   For 800 years in a row inflation across Western Europe was under 1% PER CENTURY.  Wealth and Power was synonymous with being a big Land Lord and that was to be an Aristocrat.   We had the Genteel Ethos where it was uncouth to ever speak of money and business.  They had servants to worry about that kind of stuff.  The Landed Aristocracy was comfortable being comfortable where the Capitalists remind me of ravenous wolves restlessly pacing back and forth, you know: the lean and hungry look of treachery.  So, who was happier?  Refined, contented and genteel Aristocrats, or scheming money grubbing predatory Capitalists?  We can't allow ourselves to believe the Capitalist's self serving narrative about having been "progress". Today it seems to be an Article of Faith with the Leftists that however bad Capitalism is, it was still a step above Feudalism.  But really?  The Capitalists tell us what to think and we just give them the usual "Yes Boss".  But just think about it.   We are presently advocating for a Sustainable No Growth Economy where people will be content with having enough.  Am I the only one who recognizes Feudalism in that?  We just need to Update Feudalism a bit, that's all. Check out my "Revolution From the Top" series. 

 

(8)Another factor in the transformation of the European Zeitgeist was the vast improvement in Ship Sail Rigging, keels and rudders.   These simple but profound innovations  allowed larger cargo carrying vessels to sail into the wind by tacking.  It meant that if any wind was blowing at all, despite its direction, Sailing Boats could go anywhere.  Historians are mind boggled that from the Ancient Egyptians, through the Phoenicians, through the Greeks and then the Romans and then the Venetians that none of those lunk headed idiots ever thought to try a few things and see what would work.  We are just talking about some incremental changes that should have seemed obvious.  Also, at some time or another, a tremendously significant innovation in ship design developed and it is so now-taken-for-granted that it is, well, unsearchable, but I do remember it from my readings somewhere, and that is The Enclosed Hull, you know, putting a deck up on top of the boat’s hallow cargo carrying area so that the water can’t get in.  Yes, for ages ships could be sunk by even just a  hard rain, or one wave slopping over the top.  So the widespread practice of enclosing the hull with an upper deck and incorporating even the crudest bilge pumps made for a new class of “Unsinkable” Ocean Going Vessels.  That meant that ships could wonder out from the relative safety of the ordinarily much smoother Mediterranean Sea onto the wider and rougher but far more rewarding Oceans.

 

Once the first models of these Unsinkable-Anywhere-Anytime boats  were built the World would never be the same again.   Screw the Industrial Revolution... we had a Boat Building Revolution, but then there was the Math Revolution too.  We really have a hard time with the European History of this period in settling the "Cart and the Horse" problem of what came first and what caused what.  We just know for certain that it was a very busy century and a half between  Hobbes to Hamilton. 

 

(9)Anyway, what this revolution in boat building did was allowed for the Oceanic sailing that lead to both the discovery of the New World and transferred the center for Sea Trade from the Mediterranean to the European Atlantic Ports.   The Dutch Lowlands with their port Cities became a major economic and commercial Power Center for about five minutes.   But the New Money People, from Business, Trade, Brewing and Manufacturing from all over Europe and Britain saw that the Dutch Businessmen were able to exert leverage on their Government.  That put new ideas for Conspiracy and Intrigue into all their heads.

 

One major factor that gave the Business Classes new leverage was Gun Powder, if you can follow a chain of reasoning.   You see, before Gun Powder the Order of Society was preserved by the maintenance of a Heavy Armored Cavalry manned and paid for by the Landed Aristocracy under the Coordination of the King, you know, Feudalism.  But the Aristocracy with their own Castles and so much force of arms in their own possession could be trouble too.  But after the 14th Century with Gun Powder the Kings were increasingly able to neutralize the power of their unruly Barons by hiring common musketeers on the cheap to blow holes through the Knights personal armor or use cannon to blow down their Castle Walls.  But the expense for all those campaigns was still coming entirely out of the King's own pocket.  Yeah, compared to equipping Armored Knights and Huge Specially Fed Battle Horses, ordinary men and guns were cheap, but it was an entirely new expense and there simply wasn't a traditional budget to cover for it.   And ordinarily the Aristocracy would help with the Kings’ expenses, paying for their Charters, but they would resent having to pay for their own suppression, right?   Oh, and then there were the Fleets with ever larger Battleships which were useless for cargo and only good for War, so they were a huge dead weight expense most of the time.  Yes, things were getting expensive for the Kings while the Aristocracy wasn't eager to help them out.   So the Kings had to go begging to the Businessmen.  And this would lead to their downfall.  

 

(10)Now the Business and Financial Classes did not understand that they could be their own worst enemies if they themselves became the engines for War, Competition  and Conflict.  Their rise would be an unique event in History, at least as far as they knew,  and they neither understood their own strengths nor their own weaknesses.  So they didn't see the general over all danger of overthrowing Strong Authoritarian Government and replacing it with their Shop Keeper's and Banker's brand of Anarchy.  Whoever thinks that factions of YOURSELF can be your own worst Enemy?   The Businessmen could have had it all, that is, in exchange for giving the Kings a percentage of their revenues, the Kings could have given them Monopoly Charters across all Trades and Industries.  They could have been setup as a Hereditary Aristocracy of Banking, Trade and Finance, backed and supported by the King’s force of arms, that is, men with guns so they wouldn’t have to rely for their protection on the Landed Aristocracy, whom they knew despised them.   Instead they decided to make enemies of both the  Kings and the Barons, going it alone, choosing to "Ride the Tiger" as they say in Asia, supposing that in the face of any crisis, of their own making or not, that they themselves would be the ones to be able to land on their feet and be the ones still left standing after all the dust settles.  Yeah, as a Class they did well enough, but look at the Families.  Here today and gone tomorrow.   The Capitalist Class is a pack of Cannibals.  They eat  each other. The Aristocracy came from the stocks of Ignorant and Cultureless Invading Barbarians but the generations would refine and acculturate them.  But the Capitalist are replaced with a fresh crop of coarse and ignorant Barbarians with each generation.  

 

 

We must also remember that this was the Post Reformation Period and the Protestants had substituted a predatory self serving Doctrine for the Social Morality that had come out of the Monasteries of the Dark Ages and  had brought Europe up to its peak of High Medieval development during the 11th and 12th Centuries (see my 11 Part Series Jesus the Jew Vs Christianity where I discuss this and a bunch of other stuff).  The Reformation drastically shifted European Moral Assumptions, and the tone of Capitalism would be deeply nihilistic, amoral and Barbarian. 

 

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Part One of Seven Part Series "Democracy Is A Bad Thing"

 Hi.  This is Leo Volont.   

This is    Part One   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  this chapter is “The Social Contract”

 

In this episode we discuss the Social Contract Theory Focusing on Thomas Hobbes and his very dark Natural State of Man and how Authoritarian Government can ride to the rescue.  We put Hobbes into his Social Political Context of the 17^th Century in which Authoritarianism proves just the thing they need to pave the way to the 18^th Century’s Age of Enlightenment where it all comes unravelled again.

 

You can read along from my Blog which you can find by searching leo volont blog.spot  or the name of my Blog is “Leo Volont Spirituality Dreams Religion, History, Politics, etc… “ and this title will be close to the top in the queue.  Note that the Number in my hat is the paragraph number you can use to find your place on my Blog.  It also helps me to keep this Video Shoot organized.

 

(1)When appraising Democracy as a system of Government we need to evaluate it in terms of how well it does the job of governing.  Then the problem arises where many people believe that government, that is, any system of government,  is inherently bad in proportion to its demonstrated ability and capacity to actually  govern.  They envision a continuum between Good and Evil and equate Freedom with the Good and they equate Evil  with any restriction of Freedom.  They can’t imagine anything else  besides government ever restricting their freedom and so all Evil is attributed to government.  They only have derogatory terms for effective government:  they call it “tyranny” and “dictatorship”.  If some Democracy somewhere does manage to get a large majority mandate then even there the typical “free Democracies” of the World sneer and accuse it of “authoritarianism”.   We get the ironic paradox whereby Democracy is considered ‘good’ in proportion to how badly it actually does the job of governing. Checks and Balances that lead to institutional paralysis are listed as Democracies primary virtues, but if the same Checks and Balances were found in private enterprise or even in the running of a charitable hospital they would be considered as the grossest inefficiencies, as wasteful as the vice of profligacy.   We get quotes like “Democracy is the worst form of government in the World except for all the others”, but, again, this shows the conservative private sector’s predisposition to assign degrees of Evil to government in proportion to how well and completely it can govern, and, yeap, that involves the government’s capacity to exercise control and to restrict private freedoms in order to maintain the Public Good.  You can't protect the sheep without cracking the whip on the wolves.

 

(2)Now, yes, I realize I will be fighting against a strong headwind of popular opinion if I attempt to present Authoritarian Government as Good, and list as Bad what it is that weakens effective Authoritarian Government, and that Democracy is therefore bad because it is horrible at actually doing what governments should be able to do.  But allow me to go ahead and try anyway.

 

So, okay, why is effective Government a good thing?

 

I don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ for any of this.  Theory of government has been thoroughly discussed and by better minds than my own.   A good place to start would be with a review of the Social Contract Theory of Government. What I remember from my readings of History is that Thomas Hobbes kicked off the debate with the publication of his book “Leviathan” in 1651.  But perhaps we can use a little review of 17th Century European History so that we can establish some kind of meaningful context for our discussion of the Social Contract Theory of Government.

 

(3)Yes, Hobbes was still writing as the English Civil War was still smoldering,  still erupting into flames once in a while.   Hobbes had been a Loyalist and advocated for absolute centralized government.  He didn't need to be especially imaginative or a very creative thinker.  He only had to keep his eyes and ears open.  Hobbes had  grown up as a contemporary to Louis the 13th of France and his very influential Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu who lead the way towards centralizing power in France and popularizing the idea of giving absolute power to the monarchs. 

 

But perhaps the biggest 'Rock Star' at the time had been Louis the 14th.  Hobbes would have known him as a still young King busy fighting the Fronde Civil wars, firstly to suppress his Parliament and secondly to put his Barons in their place.  Tired of constant civil conflict the people of France generally supported the King, presaging Hobbes' argument that the best guarantee for Peace is a strong central power.   France was then rising to the zenith of its power and influence and the English could hardly have failed to notice.  England’s own experiments with Parliamentarianism had lead to its Civil War and so Hobbes may have been impressed at the time by the contrast of English failure against French success.

 

(4)But with the 18th Century we would get what is referred to variously as the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment where the Social Contract Theory was extensively tinkered with. The Powers that Hobbes would give to Authority to protect the Peace and Order of Society,  the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment would claw  back bit by bit, clause by clause, until by the 19th Century we were all well on our way into the Age of Democracy that would bring in its wake all the ensuing Wars, Civil Wars and Revolutions economical, social and political that now leave the World on the brink of extinction.  

 

But, yeah, just to get it straight in our minds, let's look at the basic terms of Hobbes argument for Absolute Government?  His view was that in a pure state of nature each man could advance to the limits of his own personal power up to the point where he would be opposed by the powers of others, and it would be those kind of clashes between competing self interests that would create  a state of War of every man against all others.  Life under these conditions would be “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short”.  The remedy for such an abysmal state of affairs would be for all to agree to submit their claims and disputes to some absolute authority, whether that be a man or a council of men.

 

Given the Social and Political context at the time, with both Britain and the Continent plunged into wars and civil conflicts we can understand the general wish to make sacrifices for the sake of Peace Sweet Peace.  In addition to the Civil War in England the Continent was occupied with the Wars of the Spanish Succession and Germany in particular  had its raging 30 Year War and Peasants Rebellions.  So, yeah, the 17th Century was a huge mess and people were eager for remedies. An Authoritarian Crack Down would have been the answer to their prayers. 

 

(5)Well, it was like the Universe actually listened to Hobbes.  The Anarchism of the English Civil War was rejected and the Kings were Restored.  Europe, never completely quiet, was in a state of relative peace when compared to the chaos of the decades before, and French Hegemony created a bit of breathing room for everybody.  Well, you know how they say "Within Every Blessing there lies a Curse", well, the relative Peace made it seem like the World was really okay again.   Everybody was like "Why Did We Ever Think There Was A Problem?  That Thomas Hobbes Was So Dark and  Cynical, Wasn't He?"   So within two generation the Intellectual Elite and the Enlightenment Philosophers decided they could take Peace for granted, that Peace that had only been imposed upon them by Royal Authoritarianism.  Their Logic must have been something like 'The Umbrella keeps us so dry I guess we don't need the Umbrella anymore", but in this World of ours it’s always the Raining Season.   So, tear up the Social Contract and Up the Revolutions!

 

Part Two Coming Soon.  We will discuss the salient transformative elements in the 18^th Centuries Age of “Enlightenment” that were the  necessary preludes to the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Democracy

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Revolution From the Top see YouTube

Revolution From The Top

1. There are revolutions and then there are Revolutions.  Most Political Revolutions hardly dent their underlying Civilizations and their supporting infrastructures.  But the Invention of the Wheel was a Revolution.   Iron Smelting gave us the Iron Age: a Revolution that flipped the entire Ancient World.   Gun Powder, the Printing Press and the Steam Engine all rolled into one to give us the Industrial Revolution.  These major engines for infrastructural change led to the most powerful Globally universal Revolutions, where the character of Societies and Civilizations underwent profound changes, often as destructive as they were creative.    The next Revolution, which may even exceed the scale of most of these others, will be the Machine Intelligence and Robotics Revolution.

 2. Imagine all Human Managers and Workers being swapped out by utility fixtures. People will have nothing to do but to figure out what they really want  to do.  And this may only be 10 years away. We are only waiting on adequate proficiency levels in regards to Artificial Intelligence and Networked Parallel Processing Supercomputing.  Because most of the World’s public and private investments in research and development in AI are going into China, we should expect most of the World’s AI surprises to come out of China.

3.My guess is that some very big AI Robotics debuts will roll out in conjunction with  5G, which the promotional literatures say is custom designed for what they call IoT (the Internet of Things which basically means “Robotics”).  The critical factors that make 5G so pivotal are speed: it’s more than 100 times faster than what we got now, and it has near zero latency which means all the lag time issues disappear, which is a critical parameter for any robot that must react instantly to stimulus in real time, such as self-driving cars.  

4. And then if we can think of AI as having an “IQ”, well, that comes with computer data capacities coupled with high  speeds.   Look at it this way: a Mouse and a Man have the same speeds and effective “AI” Logic controlling the intelligence coming out of their brains.  The only difference is Capacity: Men are smarter because their brains are bigger.  And remember that Moore’s Law hasn’t slowed down (that is: computer speeds doubling and memory prices halving every year and a half), and now we have multicore parallel processing that can  multiply up those effective speeds just by designing in more cores into the basic chips.  

5. Now, from the Worker’s perspective, we are worried most about the Robots taking our jobs.  But perhaps the more significant side of the Revolution will be in the domains of Management and Planning. You see, with large enough truly representative fields of data and sufficient capacities of supercomputer power, we’ll arrive at what we can call Data Rich Supercomputer Predictive Modelling Systems.  Such a Predictive Modelling System will know in specific detail, to a specified uncertainty,  how Society and the Economy will work, down to the mechanical level of plotting all the interactions and behaviors of and between all the various effective and dependent variables.  And then, if supported by enough Economic clout,  the System would be able to manipulate the effective variables in order to change both Society and the Economy depending on whatever the System Parameters call for.

6. Okay, once the technology is in place, then the repercussions will come quickly enough: accurate predictive modelling will decrease the risk of corporations that use it, so they can reduce their profit margins, effectively putting their competition out of business.  Also, larger more inclusive and detailed data fields predict better than small, and so there will be a push for companies to merger and consolidate their proprietary data for mutual advantage, or the smaller corporations might lobby for a One Network for All Data, and that would basically include all companies and Banks within the same predictive model.  But, yes, even if the companies themselves don’t merger, in order to take advantage of economies of scale, the trend will be towards data sharing and the creation of a One Data Network across all Capitalism.

7. Now what we need to understand most about Predictive Modelling, especially in business applications, is that it will always be right, or right enough,  and any suggestions to the contrary will be wrong.  By the time we get to this point, the Business World will have compared a thousand ways how Predictive Modelling would have succeeded where the best CEO’s and Wall Street Hedge Fund Gurus have failed.  To NOT follow a Data Rich Supercomputing Predictive Modelling Plan will seem foolishly irresponsible: a sheer dereliction of fiduciary responsibility.  We will see a trend in which all humans involved in business management will increasingly take the hands off approach. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  So in the not far future the World’s Economy will be on a kind of effective “autopilot”, being ‘flown’ by the Predictive Modeling Systems.  If you think of Socialism as a Planned Economy, then we will have Socialism, but it will be Socialism from the top and primarily for the top.    

8. Now, what about the Workers in this Bright New World?  Well, in the same way as the CEO’s and the Managers will come to appear as stupid and incompetent compared to the System, so the workers will be seen as incompetent and even as posing dangerous risks when compared to robots.  Remember that in a One Network System, anything one robot learns, they ALL learn.  Robots will get smarter, better, and safer every day, year in and year out.  But human Workers start out as blank slates:  They are trained, at sometimes great expense, to be merely adequate, and  even the best Workers will never arrive fully at what we would call ‘optimum state of the art’ performance,  and then they die or retire to be replaced by the next generation of blank slates. So nothing with Workers ever fundamentally improves.   Human limitations and frailties are baked into the cake.   Yes, now you think you might want to keep your job, but given the perspective we’ll all have in the next few years, you’ll realize that you yourself would not want a human to be performing a service for you, such as car repair, and you would not want a human made product, no, not if you could get it better and cheaper by a Robot.

9. But, yes, there is the big problem about not getting  paid anymore, and, yes, that will be very bad for us personally.  But maybe it will help to look at it philosophically, you know, from the viewpoint of Eternity, and recognize the truly Horizon Shattering Revolutionary aspect of it all:  that Human Beings for the first time in History will be freed from labor.    We know how Marx said “Workers of the World unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.  Well, this Freedom from Labor is really what it  means to be freed of our chains.   Marx’s Socialism would’ve only changed the sign on the workhouse door.  We’ll still just be Workers at everybody else’s beck and call.  Is THAT the life we want to live?  Do we need a pay check so badly that we’re willing to WORK for it?: to dig and scrape like dogs?   Do we have no Human Dignity?  Well, of course we do!  And we always had the intuition that selling our labor was uncomfortably similar to selling our sexual favors.  

10.  Our only regret will be that we’ll have no place in that Bright New Workerless World.  In prior Civilizations we might have been rescued by the Social Moral aesthetic sensitivities of any of the Higher Religions which would’ve imposed ‘sacred’ duties upon the Rich to foster the Poor, but the one thing that both Capitalists and vanguard Leftists both agree upon today is that there is no God and nothing’s sacred.  With no science-based strictly rational social-moral imperative to rescue the useless workers, the logic is grim and the outlook near hopeless.   

11. But, yes,  the first few generations for the Bright New World will probably be a rough patch.   The only people who are entitled  to move forward will be those with money, capital and assets.  Let’s call them the “Entitled”.   And it won’t be in the interest of the Entitled to pay into a tax regime to prop up the now useless and impoverished Workers.   And the Predictive Planning System would be in a huge bind because if it did provide for the allocation of wealth to the Unentitled, then wouldn’t the Unentitled feel secure enough to have children and then the problem would perpetuate itself to successive generations and never go away.    So I would have to think that the Predictive Modelling System would be looking for ways of winnowing the Workers out.    

12. I would suppose that the former workers might probably react to being winnowed out in all the wrong ways, that’s to say, in ways that the Predictive Modelling System would be deliberately manipulating them to follow.    For instance, many Workers were raised under a strong work ethic where they were conditioned to believe their self-esteem depended on having a good job; well, we already know how that’ll go, because we’ve seen it among vast numbers of unemployed in the Rust
Belt:  what will happen is we’ll have a great deal of opioid overdoses… actually thinly veiled suicides.  If the Predictive Modelling System is especially unsentimentally ‘cruel’, it could actually push a lot of media content  designed to emphasize the ‘dignity’ of work —that would be implying the humiliation that would attach to unemployment and dependency.   It would be a deliberate calculation to push the unemployed to despair and self-harm.  When you think about it, maybe the Rust Belt was just a rehearsal for the Big Show coming up.  

13. Then there is another demographic segment.  I would expect many of the Unentitled to contemplate their own Revolution, to either bust up the Robots so they can go back to work themselves,  or, where leveler heads prevail,  they could demand that all Capital be made Public, and that everybody share in the wealth.   That would seem reasonable and I would not argue against it, but my intuition is that the Rich would never go along with it.   

14. Now we should consider just how powerful the Top Billionaires and the Multinational Banks really are.  If the World’s Central Banks keep printing money at the rate they are now, then they will have about 100 Trillion Dollars to play with by the time they need it.   Even the United States military budget is still just counted in the Billions.  The Banks, with that much money, could build thousands of earth moving and heavy construction robots to build hundreds of fully robotic underground factories that could turn out every variety of robotic surveillance and weapons systems.  And because it’s all robotic from top to bottom, “nobody”, that is, no human being,  would know anything about it.  Even the Execs that load in the Guidance Parameters into their Planning System could subsequently be kept out of the details. The entire operation could be contained in perfect secrecy.  This would be revolutionary in itself, that for the first time in History, since Barbarian Kings wielded their own swords,  the Rich and the Powerful wouldn’t have to depend on poor people’s police or poor people’s armies any longer.  They could handle Security ‘in house’, and they wouldn’t need to contract out for Death Squads any longer.  When you consider all this, then how could we believe that Workers could ever hope to “demand” anything?

15. But, yeah, although it looks really futile to me, apparently a lot of Leftists are still optimistic about their chance for winning the Revolution because of their vast superiority in numbers: and they do outnumber the Billionaires by about 4 million to one.  But where do you even go to find a Billionaire to kill, who doesn’t live behind multiple layers of security and who could jump into a private helicopter to be whisked away to a private jet at a moment’s notice?  

16. The bitter truth of it is that a People’s Violent Revolution would just provide a rationale for a planned and coordinated super reaction. It is even likely that the Predictive Modelling System would even toss out some particularly stinging provocations so that the People will rise up in arms at a time and place most convenient for their annihilation.  They say that ‘History is written by the winners’.  Well, if the Unentitled Revolutionaries fire the first shot, and kill even one sacrificial Capitalist,  then the responsibility for their own destruction will be represented by History as resting on their own blood stained hands.

17. I suppose that the only way that a Non-Entitled person  might be able to manipulate and ‘play’ the Predictive Modelling System for any protection, would be to represent his or her self  as a complaisant docile low-threat, low maintenance, non-reproducer.  If we really want to survive perhaps the best route we could take would be to bring back something like Quasi-Religious Monastic Orders with vows of celibacy (really just not having children) and vows of poverty.   You know, in Medieval Europe and even in Asia where I’ve seen it personally, the Monasteries were not there for Religious fanatics but for illegitimate children that needed to be warehoused  somewhere, and for Criminals and overthrown Tyrants who sought asylum against an angry public, and for those who had irredeemably disgraced themselves and could no longer go back and face decent Society.  The remainder of their lives would be dedicated to using up the least amount of  resources, you know, by being vegetarians and fasting a lot,  and then by dying without leaving any human baggage behind. Even an Atheist can see the Beauty in that, right?  But, yes, Religion was traditionally found to make the Monastery’s protocols so much more emotionally and aesthetically palatable than if the starkly materialistic reality of their situation were explained to them.    So anyway, if we want to survive and finish out our natural days, and don’t want to intentionally “overdose”, or get shot down on our own barricades, then being a quasi-religious ascetic renunciate may be our ticket to see that Bright New World, at least from its margins.  

18. When you think about it, in dealing with the present Unentitled, such as ourselves,  the System will be able to develop the procedures it will need  for dealing with their own future Unentitled.  You know, the Rich have always been known for their gambling and spending beyond their  incomes.  Falling into poverty in the Future will still be a thing.  

19. Oh, another thing we need to keep in mind is that the Predictive Modelling System will not get hung up on being Ideologically consistent.  I say that because we can  imagine that in the First Wave of this Bright New Civilization, that many of the people collected to survive will be Unentitled Guests.  The Wealthiest People will always have their entourages, hanger-on’s, proteges and pets, and such people will certainly be taken into account, living on the tabs of their Patrons.   But what to do with them after their protectors die?  Is it off to the Monastery or will the System create a slot for such people?  Keep in mind that these people will have all been mixing socially, many of them ‘Pets’ who had been handpicked for their talents, charm, cordiality and grace, and so there may be many among the Entitled who really care about them. 

20. I suppose maybe the System might adopt some kind of Social Credit Quantification, like what the Chinese now have with their own Social Credit System.  Well, how could our Predictive Modelling System accurately assess a person’s social worth?  For this as well as for other reasons I suppose that the Predictive Modelling System will set up a Total Surveillance infrastructure.   Total Surveillance could be established as easily as just giving everybody their own Personal Assistant Robot that hears all, sees all and never sleeps.  From the crib the ‘Personal Assistant’ Robot could start out as a fluffy talking “Doggie” that would be able to be swapped out into larger and more mobile  robotics  bodies to keep up with the child as it grows.  A Boy and his Dog would keep no secrets from each other, and that intimacy between Person and Personal Assistant Device  would become a lifelong habit.   Nobody should  have too much in the way of privacy concerns as long as the Personal Assistant System is useful in a thousand ways but  remains sympathetic,  non-offensive and isn’t judgmental beyond any deal-breaking point.    With all that personal information available on everybody then the System will be able to infer quantifiably whom people like and whom they don’t.  If the Predictive Modelling System wants to keep the populous happy, then what better way than to salt the population with happy people.  So the Future might have a good many people who get by entirely on Social Credits.   Smile and the World of tomorrow will smile with you and upon you.  But if you go broke and everybody hates you, well, there’s always the Monastery.

21. Now let’s look at issues of Population.  Population will need to be limited.  My first thought was to set the line at about 300 Million which is what I heard the World was at the time of the Julius Caesar.  There seemed plenty enough people to keep the action going in every corner of the globe, and yet most the World then was still grasslands and forest.   But the Guiding Stones in Georgia use 500 Million.  Okay, why quibble, but we can assume that the Predictive Modelling System would crunch all the important variables, such as Global Warming and Resource Depletion,  and determine for itself  some optimum mean level for Population.  But what would it use as a mechanism to maintain Population around this optimum mean?   Well, my guess is that the System would ask for a certain value in Capital Security before a license could be issued for having a baby.  This Security could be made so steep as to discourage all but the Wealthiest from carelessly multiplying themselves.  Also, think of this Capital Security as a Trust Fund for the child.   If they set the Security Trust Fund at an appropriately high level then every child on earth could grow up with the confidence of being independently wealthy. Now wouldn’t that be cool?  

22. Oh, and what about Eugenics?  I don’t think we could discount the possibility that the Predictive Modelling System might occasionally play Eugenics Matchmaker, if certain exquisite young couples got together.   The Baby Security Trust Fund License Fee  could come out of the Social Credit Quantification Fund.   This would give them the mechanism for being able to precisely hold the World’s Population at the Golden Mean, by balancing the License Security Trust Fund Fee against the number of Social Credit Quantification Babies. That means that if the system anticipated underpopulation, it could still hold the Trust Funds at a high level and supply the population deficit with Social Credit ‘Love’ Babies.  

23. You know, it is entirely possible that the Predictive Modelling System might even take a stronger hand in Eugenics by actively pairing up ‘exquisite young couples’ who don’t even know each other yet.  How hard could it be for their ‘spontaneous’ meetings to be subtly arranged.  Remember that every Personal Assistant Robot is on the same network as all the others, and people will have been conditioned from birth to listen to these Personal Assistants, and the Central Network  Predictive Modelling System will have everybody’s very complete psychological profiles on file, and so the System will certainly be able to find ways to persuade and manipulate a couple of young people, and if need be all their friends,  into being at the same place at the same time for a love match meeting to occur.  Then, if the Predictive Modelling System is worth its salt,  the chosen two will fall in love at first sight and the future of the Human Race will be so much the better off for it.  

24. Okay, lastly, to answer the question: “Well, aren’t Revolutions about the poor rising up to slaughter the Rich to take over for themselves”?  Can it even BE a Revolution if it’s the Rich who win?   Well, yes, I do understand the common intuitions regarding all this.  Yes, “Up the Revolution”, but, well, we all really knew way down deep that we couldn’t really win this thing, right?  But, yes,  it was our Last Hope, and it was to be our Last Stand, and it should have been our final face saving ‘Going Out with a Bang’ Moment, but now I’m trying to take all that away, and certainly nobody likes it, and I can understand that.   But we shouldn’t be delusional.  I think we should know what’s out there in front of us.  It might help us face our doom if we thought there was some silver lining around that big foreboding dark cloud out there.  You know, I am not Rich myself, and so I have nothing to gain from this Revolution from the Top stuff, but with all the thinking that I could do, I couldn’t get past the idea that They ARE Entitled to their money.  Even most Workers believe in the sacredness of property, even when they have so little of it.   So Entitlement makes for a very handy selector, if you are wondering who should survive and who shouldn’t.  Just think that if we did win our violent revolution, well, who would get what and why?  Disputes and infighting would never stop until, again, we eventually decide once more upon the sacredness of property.  And then the race towards Inequality would begin all over again.

25. And then think of the tragedy in regards to our Enemies the Rich if we should win. We would be killing off a relatively small  demographic of mostly healthy, happy, cultured and educated people who would’ve been able to sit lightly and unobtrusively on the face of the Earth, and we’d be replacing them with what?: would we really want to scourge the World with a veritable cancer of Billions of us: a huge redundancy of twisted, angry and hateful Revolutionaries primed to make our own lives as miserable as possible with Purity Contests and this New Puritanism that’s taken hold everywhere.   And if we were lucky enough to capture the economies intact, then in order to satisfy the overwhelming democratic  demand to the make all of us 7 Billion People even just moderately prosperous, to make our lives just barely endurable, then we’d have to crank up the economic engines well past any level they’d ever been before, while the Capitalists were maintaining a Scarcity Economy,  and  Global Warming would spin way out past all the tipping points and it would bring on the true End of the World.   

26. So we need to forget about our own miseries.  We can’t let ourselves stand in the way of the best of all possible futures for Humanity and for Planet Earth too.  Just picture this: if we let THEM win, then every little boy and girl will get a pony on their 9th birthday.  As they grow up there will be Balls and the dancing will go on until dawn.  Friends will always be available for  excursions and adventures, or even just pleasure tours, because nobody will ever be busy at work again.  Everybody will be secure and everybody will happily belong to some group or another, because  the Predictive Modelling System will see to it.   It will be the top of Maslow’s Mountain of Self Actualization. Historians 50 million years from now will see this as the First True Civilization and their calendars will date from it.  Yeah, sorry we won’t get to be a part of it, but we can try to not to be too much in its way.