Oh, certainly if I was an ambitious politician or any kind of functionary of the current power structure I'd be very nervous; the future is going to be disjunct from the present in increasingly large ways. I don't think they're especially predictable ways.
I've been getting a lot of leadership election materials from the CPC; I don't really know where to put the line between incompetence and malice. For instance, the assertion that only the private sector produces and government consumes and this is why government must be small.
There's... well, the private sector never produces core innovations; the private sector can't do critically necessary things like establish a currency; stability of trade (from suppressing pirates on up); education; health care; the rule of law; and I'm sure I've forgotten some. (And that "enforceable contracts" and "the rule of law" might not be the same thing, at that.)
At some point, ignorance becomes willful; it's sort of a Ayn Rand/entrepreneurial virtue cosplay more than it's an engagement with an actual economy. (I'm skipping the possible remarks about the utility of austerity and the confusion between "taxes are too high" and "wages are too low".) There's certainly a very active refusal to engage with climate change.
So I think it's something a bit different from Harper's dead-eyed determination to impose an inability to get out of the resource trap, but I don't think it's a simple case of not being able to do anything you're not thinking about -- if wealth is virtue, the poor are not worth saving, and you can get a lot of flailing around before someone outright says that and there's general relief at the reduction in cognitive dissonance -- so much as it's a determination to stay in a particular cognitive box.
I mean, it is a scary future. But it's the future we've got.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-05-18 06:02 am (UTC)I've been getting a lot of leadership election materials from the CPC; I don't really know where to put the line between incompetence and malice. For instance, the assertion that only the private sector produces and government consumes and this is why government must be small.
There's... well, the private sector never produces core innovations; the private sector can't do critically necessary things like establish a currency; stability of trade (from suppressing pirates on up); education; health care; the rule of law; and I'm sure I've forgotten some. (And that "enforceable contracts" and "the rule of law" might not be the same thing, at that.)
At some point, ignorance becomes willful; it's sort of a Ayn Rand/entrepreneurial virtue cosplay more than it's an engagement with an actual economy. (I'm skipping the possible remarks about the utility of austerity and the confusion between "taxes are too high" and "wages are too low".) There's certainly a very active refusal to engage with climate change.
So I think it's something a bit different from Harper's dead-eyed determination to impose an inability to get out of the resource trap, but I don't think it's a simple case of not being able to do anything you're not thinking about -- if wealth is virtue, the poor are not worth saving, and you can get a lot of flailing around before someone outright says that and there's general relief at the reduction in cognitive dissonance -- so much as it's a determination to stay in a particular cognitive box.
I mean, it is a scary future. But it's the future we've got.