Re: SC16

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/05/14.html

What to expect when the dollar collapses.

Culture is all about mastery -- domination, imperialism, control, and restrictions on behaviour. It can be argued that we humans have three masters, fighting for control of us:

Micro-masters: The organisms that make up our bodies and which evolved our minds as a "feature-detection system" for their collective benefit. Stewart and Cohen argue that our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their (our bodies' organisms') information-processing system, not 'ours'. By the time 'we' have started to think what to do, our micro-masters have generally already made up 'our' minds.

Meta-masters: Our culture and society is constantly attempting to make us like everyone else, to conform to and believe what others believe, for the preservation of law and order of the society. In times of low stress, we tend to obey our micro-masters; as stress increases, these impulses are over-ruled by the rules of our meta-masters, in their perceived collective interest. Edward Hall, in his studies of experiments with rats, found that in periods of high stress, conflict, coercion and social hierarchy soar, as the group sacrifices the welfare of the whole for the survival of the elite. The alphas, with the complicity of the rest, hoard for themselves, so that at least a few can survive the crisis and perpetuate the species. It could be argued that modern civilization is a constant high-stress environment, which is why our human meta-masters now exert so much influence over us, and treat us so badly.

Macro-master: Gaia, the collective organism that is all life on Earth. If you buy the Gaia theory (as most scientists now do), there is a higher level of intelligence at work on our planet, a complex, adaptive, self-managed intelligence that recognizes the inter-dependence of all life on Earth and its ecosystems and therefore the need to balance our numbers and behaviours for the collective well-being of all. We were presumably once attuned to this intelligence and accepting of its wisdom, limiting our numbers and our destruction of other life accordingly. But other than a vague sense of biophilia, judging from our behaviour our awareness of this master has long vanished from human consciousness, or at least been effectively sublimated.
The argument about where 'free will' fits into this, if indeed we have any free will at all, is best left for another day.

So what happens when an economic depression hits? Suddenly the stress level is increased by an order of magnitude, the poor begin to fear for their very survival, and there is no longer any assurance that there is 'enough to go around', so the rich and powerful begin to hoard and to repress the poor and weak to ensure they do not rise up so there is not enough for anyone. Indeed, Berton asserts that the Great Depression could equally be called the Great Repression, so great was the physical, social and cultural clampdown on the masses, and the steadfast refusal to invest tax dollars or incur deficits to relieve the human misery of the time. That refusal, Berton says, was not deliberate cruelty, but rather ideological -- the economists of the time (Keynes was not yet in vogue) believed that government intervention and government spending in economic turndowns would worsen the situation, and the political wisdom was that giving people anything for free would make them lazy and unmotivated to work and lead to communism. It was neocon ideology, and it was ubiquitous among the ruling classes (and the political parties in their thrall) at that time, except for the extraordinary administration of FDR.

In fact, there were at the time three competing ideologies, all of them idealistic, and all espoused, more and more loudly as the crisis worsened, as the solution for the society's ills, by men (women were not taken seriously in politics in those days) who were both arrogant and ambitious -- laissez-faire neoconservatism, communism, and fascism. This toxic combination of qualities -- fanatic idealism, arrogance and ambition -- produced some of the most despotic, extreme and dangerous 'leaders' the world had ever known, swept into power on populist platforms that preyed on the utter desperation and learned helplessness of the people. When moderation seems inadequate and ineffectual to deal with extreme suffering, extremism flourishes.

Could this happen today, or are we more reasoned, better equipped, more suspicious of simplistic idealism and ideology? Is it already happening? Will the collapse of the dollar, precipitated by the staggering incompetence and fanatic, dim-witted ideology of the Bush regime, inevitably bring about the Fourth Turning? Or will our 21st century ingenuity, pragmatism, connectedness, collective wisdom, resilience, lead us to a quick and radical correction of the excesses that produce the coming Depression, and hence a rapid and relatively painless end to it? And is this all complicated by the fact that this time, unlike 1929, we are facing permanent, absolute ends to the critical resources on which our society relies for its existence?