A Clash of Social Paradigms

Humanity is at a turning point in so many ways that it makes one's head spin. We are in desperate need of a major and collective paradigm shift. We have arrived at a point in history where we are full of ideas and hypotheses that for all our preparedness, we seem to be at a blind loss. Yet, act we must as the various opposing world views vie for expression and as the key to the future. This clash is not limited to, but includes the worsening health and potential death of the planet that is serious in the extreme. Otherwise, the clash of paradigms includes;

• Robots; the impact on the gainful employment concept, pulling one's self up by their bootstraps

• Opposition to welfarism, increase of leisure time and mass impoverishment

• War and peace

• Old ways of energy consumption versus the new emerging technologies

• Economics, money serving humanity or humanity serving money

• crypto-currency, control and biometrics

• Individualism versus collectivism

• Left, right, middle, muddle

• Division in the ranks of humanity; a divided house cannot stand

In about two years according to Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts, robots will be doing most jobs, leaving most of humanity without gainful employment and thrown into potential extreme poverty. Robots are already doing an increasing number of jobs, such as serving in restaurants, doing the driving of trains, trucks and buses. They have been working in assembly lines for decades. Some work as an interface between doctor and patient and some even perform surgeries. Soon they will be flying planes and become autonomous killing drones and go to war in battle fields in a world at perpetual war against terrorism. Definition of “terrorist” is also an expanding including even people who protest, petition and march for peace. Terrorists are food for killer drones and soon these will be buzzing the world seeking who they will sting, all without human intervention. Computers are everywhere and it was recently revealed, that today's “dumb” cars have a hundred million lines of code. Tomorrow, they will drive themselves and we will just go along for the ride. The overriding problem of anything that is run by AI, is that they can all be hacked from the outside and redirected to the will of the hacker. This is an increasing trend and will likely be epidemic in the year ahead. Today, as many of us use computers, we are besieged by adware, malware, ransomware, trojans, worms, spyware and likely all sorts of other things that few are aware of. These facts are now self evident and it appears to be possible that a hacker might be able to gather an instant army of robots to effect international world conquest.

Those whose jobs have not gone to “lazy immigrants” but robots, will suddenly find that they can't get gainful employment, which means that they will have no means of support unless they throw themselves on the mercy of the church, state, family and/or friends. They will have to learn to live by their wits outside of the existing economy as the world tends more and more to austerity. Pulling one's self up by their boot straps Ayn Rand style, is becoming increasingly difficult in a world of increasing competition and a shrinking resource base. Instead of winning the war on poverty, we see an escalating war against the poor. The media is filled with all kinds of political hacks who propose all kinds of solutions except a real paradigm change to fit an emerging model.

Every political grand stander running in an election anywhere for any position, will often condemn the unemployed, calling them lazy, that they need to get a job, even though the only jobs left are precarious, part time, temporary, low paying, dangerous and unhealthy. In a shrinking job market, even those with university and college degrees are having a hard time finding a real job. Many people find themselves in a situation of increasing leisure time, but they have no means to do anything except languish in poverty or struggle to obtain some means of living, such as digging through garbage, begging, stealing, fraud, bank robbing, protection racketeering, drug pushing, car jacking, prostituting of joining the military for a meal ticket, going abroad to help in genocidal pogroms. If they are more sophisticated, they may hack in order to obtain means of living and may even get hired by the state to hack international systems. In a world where robots will be doing most of the work, we are nowhere near ready to handle the tsunami of mounting impoverishment with our current attitudes. Meanwhile, the corporate welfare system has made sure that it gets sustaining benefits and entitlements, while those who invested in pension trusts with hared earned income are told they do not qualify to obtain their own trust back. This is a severely damaged perspective that will lead to ruin or revolution.

The current paradigm of profit requires that the world is in a state of perpetual war. Profitability also requires the existence of a condition of infinite expansion. In a finite world, this is impossible. The upper limit is the entire planetary ecosystem. Beyond this point, making a profit is impossible, unless this idea is expanded into outer space to spread among the stars. Thus, in the current period where space expansion is largely ruled out, war has been adopted for several reasons for making profit. The fact that many weapons are a one use item, means that there will always be a demand for more as long as the war continues. War also destroys infrastructure, creating a new market in the rubble of chaos. War is also a popular investment for bankers owing to huge loans at interest. In a saturated market where the possibility of expansion has been eliminated, war creates an opening for more expansion. Thus, in order to generate profit in a saturated market, where planned obsolescence is not an option, war provides the destructive force to allow the creation of more profit. War is currently engaging the researching, development and use of AI where robots will replace many a fighting battalion. This is thus one major paradigm to overcome in order to obtain a world of peace.

We have at our disposal, alternative forms of obtaining energy, some going back over a century, but we still are forced to use fossil fuels and nuclear energy. There are even emerging energy gathering means that are being held back. Old established means of business for profit stand in the way of emerging technologies that spell their own death, so they resist it by all means at their disposal including the destruction of ideas, patents and the murder of the inventors. A very notable example of this, was Nikola Tesla, who experimented and developed a working wireless system for transmitting electricity gathered from the radiant force in the cosmos, was ultimately blocked by J. P. Morgan, a tycoon and financier who went far to bring an end to this development toward free energy, as this represented a direct threat to his profitable system of electricity as a controlled substance, subject to fees and profiting. Teska's ideas still exist in the patent files and some of his technology is now in use, provided it does not interfere with the sacred cow of profit. Other forms of alternative energy generation are increasingly in use, but so far it represents a mere three percent of the total world energy production with 97 percent still tied up in fossil and nuclear fuels. Further, many alternative energy technologies have their own problems and limitations, working more like toys than tools. Many alternative energy devices require the use of fossil fuels in their production.

Money is a good idea if used without corruption, but it is now a mess of corruption beyond comprehension and belief replete with high interest for the masses, low interest for big banks inflation, devaluation, derivatives and the like. We now live in a world where money is god and everyone is serving money. Ideally, money should serve humanity, but in reality, most have wound up as debt slaves, particularly under the debt as money program of bank lending at variable interest. Money is that article that turns every item needed in order to live, a controlled substance, as illegal to obtain as street drugs if you take without the intermediary of cash or debit. As most folk need to work to get the required cash in order to obtain controlled substances like food, water, shelter, clothes, heat, transport and medicine, the lack of work means one has to either go without, or throw themselves at the mercy of everyone else for support. Welfare is a system that is usual solution, but one of shaming people for their unemployed condition and lack of getting cash for the necessities. Usually, the amount given is insufficient to provide everything, but then so are wages and payments from most jobs. This encourages indebtedness as a means to cope and survive that leads to ever worsening problems. When robots take over most jobs, this will swell the ranks of welfare recipients and hence a near total shaming of the victims of robotic displacement from jobs. These two paradigms are in a state of contradiction, especially as robots will create more leisure time when folks have to work longer hours just to stay financially afloat.

A very specific robot was developed in 2011, that is known as Bitcoin, which is the first crypto-currency. Many others followed in about two years. In late 2015, the large banks entered into the crypto-currency market with their own brand called Robobit. Robobit will end all other crypto-currencies as we now know them, and banker rules of service fees and interest will apply. The goal is to extend what the Sweden experiment started, and that is a world wide cashless society, closely monitored by the likes of an overseer like the National Security Agency (NSA). This has a number of implications under the current bootstrap paradigm. These are, the total lack of privacy such as exists with cash, the ability of third parties to adjust prices upward without counter controls, the ability of third parties to cut off income to specific folks for infractions such as protest, to confiscate wages for unpaid bills regardless of other consequences and controls. Suddenly, without cash, the poor will be unable to beg as everyone will be on the same cashless footing. As a society, we run the real risk of ending up in a dystopia.

One of the banes of the current period is the insistence of individualism, just so long as you go along with the majority. Collectivism is condemned as evil, hence anti-socialism and anti-communism, even though Christianity, that admired ideal has within it, a intense social program. In a long history of the bootstrap mentality where each individual is to lift themselves up without assistance, we now take it for granted that anyone who can't is somehow morally reprobate and needs shaming and correction. This ideal was and is promoted by Ayn Rand and here followers such as Milton Friedman, advocate absolute capitalism without controls. The problem with this concept as that it assumes limitless growth in a limited world. We suppose that a leap into space would allow for near infinite absolute capitalist expansion, but we are no where close to that and the physical planet is now in danger from over exploitation. You cannot infinitely expand in a limited world, or in other words, you can't taper a Ponzi scheme. Ruin lies at the end unless a major paradigm shift occurs toward sustainable collectivism at least in a limited sense. The argument against collectivism is that it stifles innovation, This is only partly true as capitalist competition and monopoly also stifles innovation! What is needed is a paradigm where the innovation of early capitalism is coupled with the levelling of collectivism. Under the present climate, this seems very unlikely.

Politics is a mess and most of it operates on prejudice, ignorance, hear-say, conjecture, lies, false promises, accusations and spectral evidence. Left, right, middle, almost all of it is a muddle. The main reason is that powerful money interests have total control over almost almost all politics. Powerful money interests have one goal and that is to crush competition and become the monopoly that controls the whole world as a company town boss controls a whole town. In order to overcome the political muddle, one of two routes is required to straighten out the mess. One is the bottom up approach that includes all the members of the world community. We have the resources to do it, but unfortnuately, mass knowledge is lacking as confusion, division and distraction reign supreme. The other is a hierarchical structure with a world boss who is also the government, military, bank and church; the ultimate in fascism. A house divided cannot stand and that is what the elite are aware of and promotes among the masses, division along every conceivable line in a war of each against all.

We live in an era where each individual is in a war of each against all others. This is really a frightening scenario that goes beyond the measure of words. It is the height of alienation and at the foundation of why so little real progress can be made.