Rise of Austria and Prussia: Guided Reading and Answers
Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural mural are aimlessly trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are sick simply at present—that'due south what usually happens in the temperate zone's wintertime, y'all know, when the latest respiratory viruses make their rounds. I grant merely as freely that hospitals are scrambling to keep upward—many of them have laid off up to half their staff as a event of vaccine mandates, after all, and they're being besieged past mobs of people who have been convinced by the media that ordinary cold symptoms hateful they're near to dice.
The effect is a collective frenzy being eagerly fed by a dandy many people. Of grade it'southward not surprising that the corporate media would button scare stories at full volume. Whoring out the news to sell advertising infinite is their stock in trade, and "if it bleeds, it leads" has taken precedence over responsible journalism since before at that place was responsible journalism. Even so, this isn't express to the media. A not bad many people seem remarkably eager to insist that the pandemic can't exist winding downwardly. In that eagerness I sense the approach of convulsive alter.
Granted, a case can exist made that in that location are applied if unmentionable reasons for this habit of sedulously cultivated panic. To brainstorm with, as Freddie deBoer has pointed out in a trenchant postal service, being terrified of the Covid virus has become a venue for status competition amongst members of the privileged classes. It's an one-time story, at least as old as that fine fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea." Just as the princess in the story showed her imperial status by beingness and so hypersensitive that she could experience a single dry pea nether vii mattresses, our current princesses—and princes, to be sure—brandish their status by insisting that they can contract a virus through seven face masks.
Some other reason to cling to the pandemic is a phenomenon I've discussed in previous posts. One of the unintended side furnishings of shutting downwardly the economic system in 2020 is that a bully many people plant themselves with aplenty time and solitude to reflect on their lives, and realized that their jobs are so miserably paid, and fabricated so intolerable by the humiliating little tyranny that passes for management in today'due south America, that it but wasn't worth going dorsum to work. A significant share of the US working classes responded to this reality past finding other ways to support themselves, with impacts that are notwithstanding ricocheting through the global economy.
The privileged classes have also seen a wave of resignations as a result of that gift of reflection, just that had another dimension as well. One of the ways America'south caste arrangement played into the pandemic was that most people in the privileged classes got to work from home, instead of being laid off or made to go into work directly through the crisis the way the working classes did. That showed a expert many people in the managerial class that they can exercise their jobs perfectly well without the poisonous part politics and mean-spirited authoritarianism of their workplaces. At present that the pandemic is winding downward, they're scrambling around for excuses to stay out of the part a little longer. The latest Covid variant is just another source of grist for that manufactory.
These are stiff forces, but I don't call back they explain the intensity of the terror, or the way that it's discrete itself from mere biological realities over the last two years. Watch the mode that the people who are shrieking about the Omicron variant fixate on case numbers and get out of their fashion to avert talking most how few people have been killed or made seriously ill by it. Lookout the fashion that these same people pounce, with something that looks unsettlingly like please, on any proposition that some other microbe is about to spring out of hiding and kill us all.
For that matter, the overreaction to the Covid-19 miracle is really rather odd, when you recall most it. If you subtract all the people who died with rather than of Covid-19 from the statistics, it's pretty clear that what we've dealt with is an ordinary respiratory epidemic like the 1958 and 1967 influenza outbreaks. Those had comparable fatality rates, and were dealt with by throwing the available resource into protecting the old and vulnerable—not by shutting down whole economies, shredding ceremonious rights, and shoving inadequately tested experimental drugs on entire populations. What we've seen over the last ii years doesn't look similar a constructive response to a pandemic. Information technology looks like the desperate gyrations of control freaks who are trying to avoid dealing with their fears past piling exorbitant demands on everyone effectually them.
Thus I'd like to suggest that something of the sort may be involved in the love affair between the managerial aristocracy and the Covid-19 virus. I think that information technology's a displacement activity.
If you know much about ethology—the report of animal beliefs—yous already know all near displacement activities. For those who don't have that groundwork, I'll summarize. Almost social species have ways to deal with aggression curt of killing each other. Spotter ii starlings who are upset at each other. They may suddenly start preening their feathers, or depict themselves up as though virtually to fight, or even peck suddenly and violently at some object also each other. Human beings do the aforementioned matter: watch an angry man scratch his caput in frustration, ball up his fists on his hips, or slam a fist down on a tabular array, rather than punch the daylights out of the person who's angered him. Those are deportation activities.
Anger isn't the only emotion that generates displacement activities in animals, or for that thing in humans. One of the more interesting details of human collective psychology is the way that fearfulness can drive even more elaborate displacement routines, peculiarly when in that location's zippo that tin can exist done about the actual reason for the fear. Consider the witch hunts that followed in the wake of the Black Expiry. For iii and a half centuries later on bubonic plague start swept through Europe, new outbreaks of the illness were a constant threat, and the medical knowledge of the time offered no effective ways of prevention or cure.
The result? Panic over evil witches became the displacement action du jour, and around 50 one thousand people were burnt or hanged equally a effect. (No, it wasn't nine 1000000, nor were they all women; the Neopagan movement, back in its heyday, competed heavily in the Oppression Olympics, with the usual collateral impairment to mere historical fact.) People couldn't do anything most the plague, merely they could burn down witches, and so they did. As soon as the bacterial ecology of Europe inverse and Yersinia pestis, the plague bacillus, died out in that location, the witch hunts promptly ground to a halt.
That was an farthermost example, merely and then the Black Death was an extreme state of affairs. Y. pestis wiped out a 3rd of the population of Europe in four short years during its outset outbreak, then came back a decade or and so afterward and took some other ten percent. Outbreaks followed every decade or two thereafter until the pandemic finally burned itself out in the belatedly seventeenth century. Staying sane in a state of affairs like that takes a herculean effort, and non many people managed it. Our current situation is much less desperate, and information technology has a curious feature: the deportation activities we're seeing this time around are near entirely restricted to the comfortable classes. Visit your nearest loftier-end grocery store, for example, and everybody's masked up; visit a dollar store in the downward-at-heels part of boondocks, and nobody worries about masks at all.
That last signal is the clue that makes sense of the whole puzzling miracle. Here in the United States, the professional and managerial classes have dominated industrial order for around ninety years now, since they replaced the capitalist classes at the summit of the pyramid of power in the wake of the Great Low. That's a proficient long run for a ruling degree. The capitalist grade they replaced seized power beyond the northern half of the state in the 1830s and so took over the national role of a previous elite, the plantation aristocracy, in the Civil War of 1861-1865. The plantation elite had a longer time on top, but agrarian feudalism is a more durable system than either industrial capitalism or managerial corporatism.
The reason these latter two systems are short-lived, in turn, is that they're predicated on change, while agrestal feudalism is predicated on stability. The industrial and managerial revolutions were both driven by the rise of a advised, energetic, impatient social class that wanted power and didn't care what it had to suspension to get it. Such classes have over when society has piled up a big excess of unsolved problems, and retain ability by solving some of those problems. If they could finish there, they'd be fine, only of grade they tin't. Committed to alter, and to specific kinds of change at that, they zoom straight past the point of diminishing returns and then the point of negative returns, until the policies that solved the old problems become the main source of new problems. The elite classes can't solve those because the policies in question have become central to their collective identity, and and then in due time, downward they get.
If you lot desire a useful perspective on the twilight years of a ruling class that's locked itself into this trap, early twentieth century literature is a fine place to starting time. In the waning years of industrial capitalism, the accelerating failures of the organisation were impossible to ignore but nobody in the comfy classes could permit themselves recollect of a style out of them. That'southward where yous get the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James, bright portrayals of the lives of the privileged as they circle the drain. Information technology took the Great Depression and a disastrous loss of prestige on the role of the backer class to fling open the door to novels such as Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, where the protagonist finishes the tale by doing the unthinkable, letting himself drop out of the comfy classes, and doing something useful with his life.
For me, at least, information technology's hard to read any of the literature of those years without getting a potent sense of déjà vu. The same autumnal sense of an era past its pull engagement, the same spectacle of people and institutions going through motions that stopped functioning a long time agone, the same plaintive voices wondering why the world merely doesn't seem to make sense whatsoever more—it's all nowadays and accounted for, the familiar backdrop for the last few decades of public life in the United States and a adept many other industrialized nations. The sole remaining questions are what combination of crises will topple the hapless ruling form from its position, and how soon that inevitable moment will arrive.
Yet admitting that the managerial grade has turned out to be incompetent at running societies is unthinkable, to members of that class. Information technology's not just a matter of status panic, either. The entire collective identity of our managerial aristocracy is founded on the idea that they're the experts, the smart kids, the people who actually know what'south what. They justify their grip on the levels of collective power by insisting that they and they alone can pb the world to a sparkly new hereafter. That's the theme of the slogans nether which they seized ability, and it remains the cadre of their ideology and their identity: "We tin make the world better!"
Key to that slogan and the hubris that unfolded from it was the twentieth century's supreme mirage, the belief that history is a straight line leading in a single management that tin be known in advance. The mythology of progress I've critiqued at length in a diversity of venues is simply 1 course that this delusion took; you tin can notice information technology equally oft in spirituality, spanning the notional space from Rudolf Steiner at the century'due south start to Ken Wilber at its end. Martin Luther King'south much-quoted claim that "the arc of history bends toward justice," for that thing, was fine rhetoric merely bad scholarship, since history isn't an arc and doesn't bend toward any destination. Rather, information technology's a landscape across which various groups of people wander in assorted directions, and generally end up non far from where they began.
That, in plough, defined the destiny of the managerial aristocracy. They strode boldly off toward Utopia, but to detect that it wasn't where they idea it was. The results of that quest are beingness counted out today in the coinage of total failure. From the economy to Afghanistan, from didactics to (ahem) public wellness, if y'all compare the statements of qualified experts to the facts on the ground, the experts generally end upwards looking like idiots. It doesn't aid that members of the managerial form are inevitably sheltered from the consequences of their mistakes, no matter how disastrously wrong those are or how many people get hurt every bit a result. That's why nowadays, when experts brand a claim, a very large number of people have the opposite view on principle. Worse still, those who practice this and ignore the experts very often plough out to exist right.
For the last six years now, appropriately, the failures of the managerial grade take go a massive political issue across much of the industrial globe. Britain's Brexit referendum and the 2016 Usa presidential election both marked important turning points in that process, as significant numbers of ordinary people decided that the experts didn't know what they were talking about and refused to vote as they were told. The various tantrums thrown past pundits, politicians, and self-anointed influencers since that time haven't accomplished much, aside from convincing even more than people to ignore the increasingly shrill demands of a failing elite.
That's sending waves of stark shuddering terror through the managerial aristocracy. If the sad masses terminate bending the knee and tugging their forelocks whenever i of their self-proclaimed betters mouths a cliché, afterwards all, how long will the authority of the managers last? That terror, in plow, gives rise to the displacement activities discussed to a higher place. Since it's impossible for them to admit to themselves that they've failed, much less that everyone else is aware that they've failed, they find other things on which they can focus their feelings of panic. The Covid virus is i of those. It wasn't the first and information technology doubtless won't be the last, but it's serving its purpose now, which is to allow members of the managerial class and its hangers-on in the media and the academy to distract themselves from the end of their era of ability.
The shockwaves of social transformation that are unfolding equally the managerial historic period winds up will give the states plenty to talk over in the years ahead. I thing I'd like to discuss here is the touch on those changes will have on the future. For the terminal century, the only time to come most people seemed able to imagine was the future the managerial class liked to portray—a world of titanic technologies, gargantuan bureaucracies, stark and sterile environments, and an countless parade of experts bringing on changes over which ordinary people had no say at all. "Science Explores, Engineering science Executes, Mankind Conforms"—the motto of the 1933 Chicago World'south Off-white—was for all applied purposes the battle cry of the managerial aristocracy.
That was i side of the narrative, of course. The other side was the horrible apocalyptic doom that was certain to swallow united states of america all if we didn't let the experts practise whatever they wanted. That was a constant chant in the mouths of the managerial class, incessantly varied in detail, never changing in its basic theme. As the era proceeded and life for people outside the comfortable classes became steadily more miserable, in turn, that horrible apocalyptic doom started losing its capacity to affright. The same thoughts that inspired a quarter of the U.s.a. workforce to quit their jobs last year led a smaller but still considerable number of people to make up one's mind that if the only affair they had to await frontwards to was the wretchedly antihuman future marketed past the managerial class, some kind of horrible apocalyptic doom started having a certain noticeable appeal.
You can measure just how dour the Tomorrowlands brandished by the managerial class have become by watching how enthusiastically the corporate media and its tame pundits rewrite the past to make it wait as bad equally possible. Enough of rhetoric has been deployed around the much-ballyhooed 1619 Project, for instance, but most of it's missed the central theme of that orgy of frantic cherrypicking and historical malpractice. The 1619 Project can best be described as a thousand effort to make the American past await bad, so the nowadays looks a petty less wretched by comparison. The mere fact that and then much effort had to be expended in that try shows just how utterly the managerial form has failed. May I country the obvious? This is non the behavior of a ruling class in control of its ain destiny.
The signal I want to stress here is that the grim Brutalist time to come to which people were expected to conform was never more than a delusion, and attempts to revive it in new forms—I'm thinking here especially of the Stalinist applesauce of Klaus Schwab's "Smashing Reset"—comport all the confidence of the proverbial three-dollar beak. It's not just that the resources needed to prop up that sort of system no longer exist, though of grade that'due south truthful, or that a good many of the core technologies that would be needed to brand it role either don't work or aren't cost-effective enough to bother with, though this is also truthful.
Even more of import is the fact that the social consensus needed to brand information technology happen doesn't be. Nor can that consensus be manufactured, because as well many people present assume equally a matter of course—and for very skillful reason—that the experts are wrong, and the consensus they're trying to push on the residuum of us is nonetheless another round of cerebral flatulence that won't work. Every bit a affair of practical experience, goverments do in fact exist by the consent of the governed, and then do ruling classes; that consent is not bad around usa every bit I write these words.
That opens upward a landscape of possibilities very few people take begun to explore nevertheless. The futures open to us, it turns out, aren't limited to a regimented bureaucratic Tomorrowland on the one hand, and a smoldering postapocalyptic wasteland on the other. What if it turns out that the landscape of 2200, say, looks more than like this?
The painting's titled Arrival and it'south past Charles Lee; you can discover more of his work here. Zilch in that epitome would exist impossible in a earth coping with sharp limits on energy and nonrenewable resources. A time to come society powered by biofuels and renewable energy sources won't have the kind of gaudily extravagant technologies we're used to, but information technology could very likely back up cities with some course of public transit, not to mention streets, schools, comfortable buildings, and an artful closer to Art Nouveau than to the crazed pursuit of ugliness for its ain sake that dominates today'south built environments.
History shows us that a social club need not have jetliners, server farms, skyscrapers, or spacecraft to provide its citizens with food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, instruction, and intellectual and cultural activities. (Nosotros've already seen that a gild can be fully stocked with the jetliners et al. and still exist miserably incompetent at providing these latter good things.) As the managerial aristocracy completes its fall from power and its dreary plastic daydream of Tomorrowland falls with it, we enter a space of possibility in which a much wider range of choices come within reach. With this in mind, I'll be revisiting some earlier themes of my blogging in the months ahead, and sketching out some of the possibilities I see before united states.
Tomorrowland has fallen. Off beyond its smoking ruins, there are better things waiting. Will you lot bring together me in the journey there?
Source: https://www.ecosophia.net/tomorrowland-has-fallen/
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