Ah! Shades of Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR.
It's not easy, trying to understand the change going on around one at the present time. It's eerily dangerous and yet the destructive forces are not unleashed building up within many minds. People are seething, angry and frustrated. Time will tell how this anger will express itself, but the danger is that it will affect the youth, who do not know history and who will take matters into their own hands. The consequences will be the "smushing" of our fragile streams of independent thought and the foreshortening of our temporary period of democracy.
Finanical crisis! What is that? What just happened to the world economy? Who understands the political economy and sociology of what just happened, the irreversible bit, the bit that changes country topographies and the fortunes of large groups of people permanently? Why did it happen? Can it happen again? Can we trust our political leaders to correct the momentum of the financial changes that are now hitting everyone?
It's a double edged sword. The economy, I mean. On the one hand it promises so much and on the other there are conditions to it's working evenly. It never works fairly, but it should work evenly. I can voice the opinion that the workings of an economy is generally unfair. It is because every so often it follows a mind of it's own and takes away the vast amount of more evenly distributed wealth through hard work and technical progress and gives that wealth to a few who own key assets that produce very little wealth, but represent long term values.
The economy gives wealth to asset owners, a special group of asset owners normally, but occasionally a group that produces nothing other than the legalities of ownership. We have seen the social destruction in history before. did not understand it, and our predecessors came unstuck in revolution and violence. Yes, the cycle of history moving away from democracy to authoritarianism and power in the hands of a few. Yes! There is a cycle in the fortunes of man as Shakespeare wrote and we are but players on that great stage of social transformation.
Our world economy is being transformed by the consequences of American social change, the great striding forth of individualism that produced a strong cycle of political change, a great wind blowing democracy and then will blow centralism and control, as the fear and social pressures mount. What is happening is not a US-China process, but the effects of the great 2000 wind of US social change world wide. It is like a hurricane on hot seas that is sweeping the globe.
There is no real balance in a society or an economy, but rather numerous streams of processes of change, sometimes rapid and visible, and sometimes rapid and invisible. What we are presently experiencing is a mix of many very strong and very rapid powerful streams of change. We are seeing an attack on democracy unlike ever before.
Well, it would be more balanced to say that we never had so much democracy before. We never had so much technology racing away putting pressure on manufacturing processes. We never had so much pollution. So what can we make of it all? Do we see the emergence of anti-democratic forces and streams of negative social thought? What do you see around you? You are in the midst of an extraordinarily dangerous period of history, but you are sleepwalking through your chance to protect yourself!
We have large economies, many being poles apart in terms of their resources and social fabrics expreriencing rapid social and economic transformation. We have America, that great engine of technology creation chugging away happily and it's domestic finances in utter chaos. The world currency, the US dollar is still happily moving business along, but it is not business as usual. Why? Well, it is a world with too much unresolved debt and it is the outstanding debt that is mucking things up. By solving the debt crisis, we are engineering a reversal of democracy in that we are redistributing ownership of wealth way from the vast majority to the very few. This is a long term asset exchange driven economic transformation unlike the normal short term asset driven exchange economy that we are used to. That is why it's social consequences will be server and the pressures for bloodshed it will produce will be also so severe.
America is playing economics at the long end of it's asset portfolio and rather than build democracy when technology is pushing forward for democracy, it is building centralism and control of people. Anti-democratic forces constructed and given power through the rapid redistribution of legal wealth during the American melt down's refinancing operations threaten global security more than we see on the surface.
Our fragile democracies are based on a social contract of fairness. What we are seeing big time is an erosion of that social contract's validity.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
