Did anybody actually think our civilization was organized around science?
I didn’t. I thought the enlightenment was more of a move away from superstition and toward reason, but never once did I think it addressed capitalism. I also don’t remember ever thinking it was any sort of absolute movement. I mean shit, look around five minutes, we have never had a reason to think society is based on science. It’s based on competing human impulses, just so happens that greed is a heavyweight champ in that ring.
Depends on the science I guess. It’s more based off of macro-economics than it is environmentalism. Then companies throw in some micro economics to help finish off their enemies (working class competition).
Economics filled the void in society vacated by religion after the Enlightenment.
A mechanism of control, conjured by the ruling class, imposed indiscriminately upon the masses, protected from scrutiny, and justified by arbitrary, curated rules.
- Economists are its priests.
- Banks its churches.
- Finance its mythology.
- GDP its God.
“Feudal lords were the masters of feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself.”
-Roderic Day, Why Marxism?
Economics can be fixed if the rights of future generations are included in the cost of depleting natural resources.
Economics is a tool. All tools can become weapons when used in an incendiary way.
I’d like to live and participate in a society which has a robust and supportive economy, as opposed to an overbearing economy which treats society as an extractive resource.
the immediate needs of capital.*
Some nations get it. Angela Merkel is a physicist with a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, with her doctorate in energy engineering, was a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
I’m sure there are more, but those are the first two that come to mind.
Trump had his own university, so America should be fine
I think this is very true, but how do we organize a society around science? Science can tell us many important things, but it can’t necessarily tell us what we should value or what is moral. There are very intelligent, educated people trying to develop moral and ethical frameworks, using critical thinking and reasoning, but how do we ensure those frameworks become the basis for society? Even in a democracy, the people can choose to adopt those moral and ethical frameworks (assuming the people are even aware they exist), but they can also choose not to. Of course that’s true of any ruler, so I’m not saying that’s unique to democracy, but I’m just saying that democracy doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of rulers ruling unethically.
There’s technocracy, but for a technocracy to function, wouldn’t the technocrats need to have a fairly significant amount of power? I don’t necessarily think that technocracy is completely antithetical to democracy, but the technocrats would need the authority to override the people, whenever the people would try to implement some policy that was unscientific, making the technocrats, not the people, the ultimate authority.
The biggest shift that can be made is to limit the competitive aspects of Markets and push for cooperation, along a common plan and goal. Markets are useful at lower levels of development for rapidly building up productive forces, but to truly take a scientific approach humanity needs to be able to take master of production to fulfill its specific needs and ends, not just for profit.
This is why the older I get, the more cynical I become about democracy. People are easily frightened herd animals who often refuse to look past the surface level shiny veneer. It always devolves. Every single democracy in history falls prey to the populist who takes advantage of this human weakness.
The modern globalist system has left you out of the manufacturing job you expected to have? Are you frightened about your financial future and your children’s future? Here, I have a solution for you. We will build a wall and deport the brown people. It’s all their fault. Please ignore the man behind the curtain.
Instead of us having an educated populace that sees through the wool being pulled over their eyes, they instead put their heads in the sand and choose to full-send into whatever right-wing ideology is thrown their way. It happened before, it will happen again.
The superior system, I think, would look something like the Chinese although they are not perfect by any means.
What they do is in primary school, they test the children and see who has a strong aptitude. They take these children out of the normal class and groom them to be party leaders. These party leaders then eventually end up as the leaders in the future. China actually is a pseudo-democracy- it’s just that only party members get to vote. And there are actually over 2 million party members. But the difference there is that it’s more of a meritocracy. There is still nepotism and whatnot, but the leaders slowly rise up over time based on results.
Look at Xi Jinping for example
He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi province, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary. After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China’s coastal provinces. Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and was the first-ranking secretary of the Central Secretariat in October 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao’s presumed successor as paramount leader.
The way it works is you start in a lower spot and work your way up slowly over time. And he was actually destined for failure due to his father being a “traitor”
The son of Chinese communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father’s purge during the Cultural Revolution.
But his results ended up pushing him to the top anyway.
This sort of meritocratic technocratic society will always win out over our populist oligarchy. And to the doubters, consider that our system is not any less elitist.
Instead of testing children and grooming them for leadership, we do it based on last name and wealth. If your parents went to Harvard, you grow up with tutors and extracurriculars and all the support you could want. Then you are groomed for success by joining an Ivy League school, you join some sort of fraternity that presidents were a part of and you meet the future senators and CEOs.
It’s the same thing except instead of results and meritocracy- it’s more influenced by wealth and nepotism.
Of course I’m not claiming the Chinese system is somehow ideal, but I believe democracy is fatally flawed. Plato wrote about this in “The Republic” already countless years ago. Ironically, in his ideal Republic (which to be fair is sort of a dystopia) they actually groom capable children like the Chinese do for party leadership.
Maybe we can just develop generalized artificial intelligence and have it run our society for us. I’d have more faith in the AI than I do in our congress.
The COVID pandemic was the millionth example of this.
I dunno, having a society seems to be in capitals interest if you ask me.
Yes. Now that you know the rules you now know how to play the game. Happy investing everyone.
