There are two competing views of the future. Social Darwinism, and Humanism. If you’re worth less than a Billion, or not a member of one of their dark think tanks, chances are you’re a humanist, or should be. There are billions of people on this Earth, and, one forecast suggests, it will hit 11 billion by 2100.
Too many people. Too few resources.
Global warming is a symptom. We all seem to want to yell and scream about “populism,” but, as I pointed out last week, it is a lie masking the Social Darwinist movement’s attempt at thinning the herd. As humanists, schooled in teachings of both religions and governments that value the worth of the individual, we may laugh at the Kool Aid crowd of the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus being so misguided, but we’re not paying attention to another big picture thing coming at us like a freight train:
We are increasingly less necessary to the capitalist process.
I wrote last month about how Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be claiming your jobs. Most of them, as many as 80%, many by mid century. If you think you’re safe because you have an education, you’re a doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, etc. Think again.
Cars and trucks are already automating. 6.1M jobs So is construction (1.4M jobs), and, if you’ve seen ads for those cool new robotic surgery devices improving outcomes, wait until they merge those robots with AI like IBM’s “Watson” systems. Millions of physicians from diagnosticians to surgeons, will be out of work.
Read the article and see how important you really are. Unless you are in a creative or intuitive job in the arts, graphic design, skilled (not surgical) nursing, psychology, etc. where AI and robotics will be useless, you will be joining the millions of unemployed.
Trump may be wrong about 99.99% of things, but one thing is patently clear that his team did get spot on. They tapped into the 45% of the working age people in the US who are permanently unemployed from the earlier rounds of automation in factories and in clerical. When people give up, the “jobs” number stops worrying about them. They are invisible, angry, hopeless, and will listen to practically anything, including the snake oil sales of Donald J. Trump and the Billionaire-backers of the “Freedom Caucus.”
So when you see House Republicans voting on a Healthcare bill that will strip insurance from millions of people, bring back pre-existing conditions, that is not freedom. That is democide.
They want you to die off, and pulling out subsidies for affordable health care, and social safety net items like Medicare and Social Security speed up the natural herd-thinning. Keeping the cost of medicine sky-high, or making cures for common illness in poorer countries, all reduce human populations.
The Far Right’s zeal at cheerleading carbon-based fuels and pushing propaganda to keep selling fossil fuels alive for another few decades, makes good sense in the herd thinning paradigm.
- Rising tides will flood coastal areas. 634M people live in coastal areas. Many will die;
- Storms will increase in intensity. As it is, 68,000 people a year lost their lives between 1994 and 2013, and 218M were affected by loss of housing, habitat, food supply after. Storms are a great natural killer that has us usually blaming God or “mother nature.” More storms, more death. Fewer people.
Wars are both profitable, and weed out more of the undesirables. Our billionaires don’t want solutions in the Middle East, Africa, etc. Conflict is not only a money-maker, but it gets bickering sects to do themselves in.
Which then ties in the whole anti-immigrant thing. The last thing Social Darwinists in the “developed” countries want is more refugees coming to their countries. They suck up resources, and they have lots of children, neither of which work when your plans will probably cause a major drought in the Northern Hemisphere that will knock out food for millions of people used to living with plenty.
In the Social Darwinist template for humanity, they come out as winners in any event, because nature has bestowed upon them the cunning, ruthlessness, and long-range patience to make billions. They’ll have the money for the ocean-front condos in Arkansas and Virginia
Humanists may be appalled by all of this, but, as we have seen, the Far Right funders have been able to take a handful of zealous Republicans, who represent 23% of the voting public and about 18% of voting age Americans, a few chains of television stations, and several billion dollars in advertising to turn slitting your own throat by helping them with your vote into a “freedom” movement.
Government isn’t the enemy. It is good. It is the real “wall” that, in response to billionaires abusing the workers and the middle class, legally allowed voices for those workers in unions, and created both a social safety net and a public health system that, in humanist theory, would care for all of us.
Where it has failed, some poor planning has been tweaked, but, more often, invariably there has been a Republican, bought and paid for by wealthy Social Darwinists, creating some financial hiccough, regulatory strip-tease, or other back-door that engineers systems to fail, not succeed.
Blame the government. Politically and socially marginalize the different, people of color, gender, etc., and then feed poor white Americans lots of mental kool aid to disengage (Everyone’s to blame) and disinterest (The whole political thing disgusts me) and you disenfranchise millions more.
The one thing that the billionaires patently do not want you worrying about is the machines, and the AI. They are a silver spooner’s wet dream: They don’t eat, sleep, form unions, need maternity leave, die and take their skills with them, need pensions, housing, etc. A little electricity, and maintenance that ultimately can be done by other robotics, and they lose the need for most of those pesky inferiors, and all of the pesky white-collar and medicals who service them.
Technology is inevitable, and can be good. Working together, we can address our population and climate problems. The Social Darwinist scenario is not the only way that a world can roll out.
Our votes are power, if we stop frittering them away by getting caught in the weeds of the daily outrages that the Far Right machines of the world keep spinning out, and focus on the bigger picture agenda that needs to get done.
Time is a-waisting, and time is not on our side.
At the moment, the humanist side of the political equation is drowning in a sea of trivia, from emails to Russian hacks, and missing the big picture. We’re disparately organizing in marches here and there, but we have a thousand banners to follow to their one.
Humanism is the banner. Social Darwinism is the enemy. Votes stop dollars to dinars. Organize and protest the big picture, and quit being chumped by Trump and the elites.