I think the hatred of women that is central to Christianity gets brushed aside and forgotten much too easily. A true Christian leadership operating by Bible rules is not favourable to women’s rights.
I think there are a lot more women who would go along with it than men who wouldn’t. The women would go along with it because they’re “Good Christian Women,” and because they don’t see their own subjugation in those terms (see Muslim women who fully support their own oppression). I don’t think there would be a lot of men who wouldn’t go along with it, because taking away women’s rights doesn’t really affect them; it would be fairly easy for men to (wilfully or otherwise) just not see the consequences.
Yup, that’s how I see it, too. The rich are in charge, and they set things up so the rich get richer (and get more power) because they make the laws and the decisions. The poor get to vote, sure (the ones that bother), but that’s part of the Big Lie, in my opinion - people being distracted from what’s really going on by the illusion that voting makes a difference, that there is much difference between the two parties.
That’s a really good question; my initial response was, it will look an awful lot like it does now.Thinking about it more, the middle class will shrink even further (but never disappear, because people need to retain the illusion that they have a chance of getting somewhere if they work hard). The poor will increase greatly. The rich will get even richer. I don’t see a huge change. “Feudalism” sounds about right, actually, except the lords aren’t looking after the peasants except to exploit them.
You make a very good point here. I was proceeding from the fact that the government of Oceania was called IngSoc (as in English Socialism), but it occurs to me that it may have been a ‘War is Peace’ type of reversal. Thanks for being kind in your correction. I already feel a bit foolish for not catching that myself.
What do you mean by “subjugation” precisely? Banning abortion? Taking away women’s voting rights? Forbidding the education of women?
Except there are plenty of differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
I doubt it. Even with the craze for austerity in Europe, the basic skeleton of the welfare state is being retained both there and here in America. While income inequality is poised to get worse, most of the poor will have a minimum standard of living.
While I, for the most part, do not dispute your points, it does beg the question: what should we do now? Contacting my members of Congress has been relatively futile. They acknowledged my correspondence, but I have seen no indication that they have shifted their positions on the matters at hand. In fact, it is entirely possible that the only lasting effect of my communication was to put me either on a mailing list, or another more sinister one.
Does anyone here imagine political growth and change sprouting from the posts on a message board?
Don’t you think the concept of Emmanuel Goldstein on the screen and Two Minutes Hate cannot be fully mapped to infamous taped threats of Osama bin Laden?
I’ll just say that what Orwell has described is not a recipe but a natural course of action and signs of 1984 are available in every expansive Government that ends up with a vast amount of resources - both in terms of population and wealth.
The only solution I can suggest is to cut down all the big countries into more manageable pieces - having a no country over 100 million of people would be a good start for the world.
I agree with him, partly because I want to agree with him and can’t face the prospect of his being wrong, but also partly because I just watched the movie In the Loop, which made me feel very crabby about politicians, but which also led me to realize the film had absolutely no activist/idealist politicians in it, only lobbyist-moneymaker type politicians. And in reality, we have both kinds. And I realized it is plausible that the activist/idealist type can effectively keep the other guys in check at least to the extent that we’re not going to go down any really horrific totalitarian roads any time soon.
Excellent question. Right now, the middle class is being ground down and headed in the general direction of the lower class. At some point the economy will suffer severe dislocations as our large and prosperous middle class is responsible for our economic success (they’re the people who buy all the products and services that make the one percent so wealthy).
Also, automation will proceed apace, both in terms of software replacing skilled jobs, and automated systems replacing manual labor. Unemployment will do nothing but get higher, creating a large, restive class of poor, unemployed and unemployable people (see automation) who will live on a black market economy and commit a lot of crimes to survive, seeing as how Americans don’t like social safety nets. This will result in an increase in policing. We won’t need to bust pot smokers to keep our prisons full any more! So there’s that.
The American focus on self-reliance and drive, in the absence of useful work to do and no way to survive legally, will turn us into a nation of grifters and con artists who will make Nigerians look like staid and stodgy nine to fivers.
The wealthy oligarchs will control the government, with little or no concern for the welfare of most people, except as it affects them. The wealthy oligarchs will be pretty much above the law, unprosecutable no matter what their crimes (think HSBC) and the peasantry (what you call the middle class and the lower class in this system) will find themselves at odds with the government from childhood to adulthood, thanks to the school to prison pipeline.
Eventually we’ll a top of the line New World oligopoly, like many Latin American countries.
Barring social policy differences, which do matter, there’s the little fact that one party is actively trying its best to kill the economy. While the Democratic party is not currently doing anything to stop the continuing trends toward wealth consolidation, there is a meaningful difference between being on a course to near-complete wealth consolidation within half a century, and actively trying to get the nations economic structure to immediately implode, which would have far reaching consequences with no chance to avoid it. Gradual wealth consolidation you at least have a chance to avoid because it is gradual.
I disagree with you, because the party “in charge” doesn’t make a difference because they are not the ones setting the agenda - it’s the same rich, powerful people setting the agenda regardless of who the general public voted for. Keeping everyone arguing about the parties is part of the Big Lie - keep on looking at the puppets out front, and don’t think about who is pulling their strings.
I just watched this documentary on PBS, and it seemed very appropriate for this discussion - Surviving the New American Economy. It basically supports the theory that the US is well on its way to Dystopia - no matter how hard you work, you will never get ahead, because the system is set up in every way to hold you back.
If I didn’t know you were serious, I’d say this is a brilliant example of dystopian fiction’s habit of going from A to C and skipping all of the “how” found in B.
What does “ground down” mean? What does “severe dislocations” mean? How will automation replace “skilled jobs”? What happens to all of the wealthy folks who are huge charitable givers in your scenario? Are they mutated into oligarchs by some kind of zombie-like pathogen?
This is a good extrapolation of our times. It takes real issues and extends them along a line to a logical conclusion.
But it’s a fictional extrapolation. It’s a perfect example of the hypertropism I mentioned. All forces work themselves out linearly without opposition forces working to limit the outcome. It’s like extrapolations about the Future in the 1980s that assumed Communism would survive or in the 1990s that didn’t foresee an Internet or in the 2000s that didn’t include an Arab Spring. The industrial jobs that powered the 20th century are not coming back but that doesn’t mean that nothing will replace them. The economy is already beginning to shift to accommodate. As I said before, we are not living in really bad times. The Good Old Days you seem to be saying we’ve left weren’t considered Good while people lived through them. The past always seemed better and straightline extrapolations of the present were always horrors. (I can point to a 1903 book that extrapolated that robots were going to take all the jobs.) People never change (people are always idiots), but the future always does, and always positively. It will happen to you whether you like it or not.
This is America. There are no significant opposition forces to the wealthy.
Nor is there any reason to assume that something will. The idea that jobs lost to technology will always inevitably be replaced one-for-one by new ones is not a logical statement but a faith statement, a near-religious belief among some people.
Not that I’ve noticed; it seems to be shifting in the other direction, towards permanent joblessness for more and more people.
:rolleyes: Oh, please. That’s pure Myth of Progress stuff, the idea that history is a neat, one way climb upwards towards utopia.
Shrug. I’ve studied history and the idea of progress extensively. My considered opinion is that we live in a better world in virtually every way. We have far better medicine, unbelievably good social conditions, a decrease in poverty, and an average standard of living that we would have killed for when I was a kid, all without major warfare. This is true worldwide, with literally billions of people lifted out of poverty and nearly a billion entering the middle class, all in a world that was supposed to incapable of providing even minimal amounts of food to seven billion people. The world doesn’t need to be utopia. All that’s required is that it be measurably better than it used to be.
When was it ever better than now? Never. Give me a date and I’ll stomp it into the ground with tales of how horrifically awful it was then compared to now on a hundred different measures. Go and protest about things that are still awful. I approve. I want everything to continue getting better, especially for those not as fortunate as I happen to be right now. But you can’t tell me things were better in the past because I lived through them when I and lots of others weren’t so fortunate and I know you’re wrong not just from personal experience but from heavy research about the whole.