by Alph » Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:42 pm
Skyhook,
Let's talk unrest. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of unrest. Let's call one kind Whig unrest and the other kind bread unrest. Bread unrest is caused by a fundamental breakdown of civilization that is always due to external forces. Either the ruling class is messing everything up, the area has been conquered and pillaged, natural disasters or plague are destroying the civilization, or something else of the sort is going on. There is some bread unrest going on, but only some. (The Tea Party is bread unrest. The food riots in the Middle East were Bread unrest.) There used to be lots of Bread unrest movements, but people are mostly too rich to really face the sort of 'fight or flight' situation required to generate this in Western nations.
The other kind of unrest is Whig unrest. It is far more common today, in this age of plenty. The US counterculture movement was Whig unrest. The reign of terror in France was Whig unrest. Neither had anything to do with the incompetence of the local ruling class. (The US counterculture movement was rebelling against the most competent government regime ever to stand in all of history, an organization that was, through education and modernization, making profound advances in research and causing greater and more rapid productivity growth over a large area of the world than any group before or after ever has. And for all the glories of the storming of the Bastille for bread... there was no food because the revolutionaries had been burning down all the granaries.) This is political unrest generated for political purposes and not incompetence of government purposes, like the Summer of Love, Woodstock, and the Wisconsin Teacher's Union protests. These are all being generated, on purpose, by political agitators for political gain. They do not represent any actual suffering, but adopt the appearance of suffering for political purposes.
You can tell the difference by the results. Do they produce political policy while reducing goods or services or do they produce more goods and services while reducing political policy? Palestine is a permanent Whig unrest activity. It produces political policy and imports goods and services to consume doing so. Green agitation is Whig unrest. It produces political policy and consumes goods and services to do so. The overthrow of the USSR was Bread unrest. It produced goods or services and 'spent' (which is to say reduced) political policy. The Tea Party wants to reduce political policy to produce goods and services.
So, back to your point. Is the huge unrest a sign that the people running the world are evil? Yes. Is it a sign that they are incompetent? No. Quite the opposite. The Whig unrest serves their purposes, and their purposes are simple: Prevent unrest. Sounds odd, doesn't it? But it is their primary goal, because they are the people who lose when the revolution comes. In other words, those in power first seek to maintain their power. So the reason why Whig unrest happens is that, in short, it is 'socially acceptable revolutionary sentiment' that distracts people from carrying out any actually revolutionary activities. In other words, it is a fake unrest substitute in exactly the same fashion as a vaccine is a fake virus substitute. They're both the same to the body (or the body politic) except that one almost never makes you sick, and in any case certainly not as sick as the real thing. This is why today's advanced cultures have a permanent revolution going on through things like Democratic Elections. It is, though not without terrible costs, an extremely stabilizing force in the short run. If the college students were not so busy protesting the harsh treatment of Native American Women under our patriarchal culture and mean and nasty government, which is to say channeling their young adulthood into something trivial and actually pro-government, who knows what destructive sorts of real, non-approved Bread unrest style revolutionary sentiments they might start backing? Sure, your government becomes increasingly inefficient as it is pulled off into madness by each successive wave of tempered revolution. But the system is extraordinarily stable. And this is the choice that has been made because this is the choice that the people made and continue to make every single day.
Last edited by
Alph on Thu Mar 24, 2011 2:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Trends that can't continue, won't. But until then, they will.