I said:
I think that we are more likely headed back to the 60-hour workweek, 45-year lifespans for those who do the work, children back in the work force, and all-in-all, the sort of economic relationships that Karl Marx saw in capitalism in his time.
Originally Posted by
Zarathustra
That's how thing would be if the trends of the 3T continued uninterrupted, but we know that linear trends don't always continue.
Much so. Good cause exists to suggest that the American public no longer can support the catastrophic policies, economic and international, that Dubya stands for (Whoops! With his foot in his mouth most of the time?)
3T trends are calamities in the making, and they lead as a rule, in America, to a 4T. Weak, inattentive leadership becomes the norm during a 3T, and the only people well organized at the time are the well-heeled plutocrats who exploit the political trend by backing the most ruthless yet sold-out political figures. Nobody trusts anyone, and hedonism becomes an anodyne for philosophical distress. Inequality intensifies, public life decades, popular culture becomes depraved, and organized crime flourishes.
If one looks at the sort of leadership that America had late in a 3T (I know little about the pre-Revolutionary political scene, so I can say little about it, but I suspect that it wasn't very good) -- but when one looks at the likes of Pierce, Fillmore, Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge, and now Dubya, one would have to wonder how anyone could see Americans getting through bad times if one lived in those times. I can now understand how Dubya could win a near-majority of the popular vote in 2000: while Al Gore was warning us of global warming, Dubya gave us the indication that with him as President we could "party hearty".
... I have come to recognize that a 3T looks much like the Marxist stereotype of capitalism in its last stage of depravity, when more and more people are thrust into poverty. Wealth increasingly becomes concentrated, the rate of return on investment falls (look at General Motors today), and "players" take bigger risks. The few still rich turn the government into a de facto plutocracy, if not an outright tyranny. Business cracks the whip, but only pretends to give people the means with which to get sustenance. That situation creates the ultimate 4T -- a Socialist revolution in which workers overthrow the plutocrats and their flunkies. Maybe the workers overthrow their recent masters -- or the recent masters create a political Hell of outright slavery enforced, most likely, with either the cruel methods of the Middle Ages or with novel and even-more excruciating methods.
We are going to see a 4T here -- but no Socialist revolution. Ideally we let the speculators go under, which will be an easy choice for those who do public policy. Those speculators did little good for others when they held sway. We are likely to impose heavy taxes on those who make huge earned income, most of them having exploited monopoly power in a 3T.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
No holiday from reality
