Round One: The World Economic Forum vs. the Zombie Horde
The observations of H.G.Wells and George Orwell might be more prophesy than fiction.
One wonders if technology has the power to truly defeat the spear and the sword.
I've always wondered if the West's embrace of technology and the productivity it has wrought are some of the reasons for the decline in the American birthrate - we simply do not require as many people. Somewhat logically, that has also fueled the increase of the welfare state in the developed countries as this “excess” labor comes into being.
When we look back over human history, we find many reasons for population increases and decreases.
Until the Industrial Revolution, agrarian societies were the rule. Children were the basis for the family labor force and to survive, families were large due to the manual nature of labor tasks. Of course, rates of infant mortality, as well as that of childhood and adult mortality due to disease, were also factors – and absent effective prevention or curatives for those diseases, the only way to preserve the family labor unit was to have more children.
Before the days of the welfare state, population regulation was within the Malthusian provinces of war, natural disasters, and famine.
It is hard to think about in our times, but the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel is based largely on the practice of infanticide – often during famines, parents would take infants or young children into a forest and leave them to die to save themselves and their other children of working age.
But then came the Industrial Revolution. While it seemed to be a rapid change, and compared to other events in history it was, but it came at a time when everything was new and developing – new support technologies and new applications for those technologies were within the reach of almost all humans, learning to operate and maintain simple, brute force machines was something to which a majority of humans adapted – and if they couldn’t, there were still enough manual labor jobs for those who couldn’t make the jump.
Now, any industrial revolution is fare more complicated. It requires a different mindset. Knowledge of semiconductors and coding isn’t as common as knowing how to use shovels and axes. Most of us have no idea how things work inside those boxes that sit on our desks or inside the machines we operate. Technology has moved so fast that it is often more cost effective to toss the broken part in the refuse bin and just get a new circuit board or a completely new box.
No doubt such an industrial revolution has the potential to leave massive numbers of people behind.
Yuval Harari, an advisor to the World Economic Forum, believes that technology will allow the world to be fed, that technology will overcome most of the world’s problems in a new type of Industrial Revolution, one where the greatest problem will be what to do with excess humans “and how will they find meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless…”
Personally, I see the World Economic Forum as the equivalent of SPECTRE of the Bond films and Dr. Evil of the Austin Powers movies. They are evil in an intensely self-righteous way, of that there can be no doubt, but they are almost comedic in the “secret society” presentation of that evil.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous – because they are – and it doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing something that is coming over the horizon.
This has an all too familiar ring to it. We often use Orwell as a benchmark, perhaps too much to make an impact these days, but he did write more than just 1984 and Animal Farm. I’m going to reference his critique of James Burnham’s 1941 “The Managerial Revolution”. In it, Orwell wrote:
“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers.”
Orwell saw this coming over eighty years ago.
What Harari and the WEF are talking about is exactly what Orwell wrote about, a budding technocratic societal arrangement, reminiscent of the Morlock/Eloi society of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The Morlocks understood the mechanisms that kept the world turning and the Eloi were basically cattle. Wells described the Eloi as:
“…mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of.”
Harari noted that in his opinion, the excess “meaningless, worthless” people would be maintained and satiated by “…drugs and videogames.”
But Harari and the WEF seem to be missing something.
What if the “excess” people don’t want to be satiated with drugs and videogames? Being an Eloi does seem to have a significant downside.
And what about the areas of the world where technology isn't prevalent? What about the Muslim world where birthrates are rising? What about the largely undeveloped and underdeveloped continent of Africa? Will the people of these nations simply buy into the WEF’s globalist Morlock/Eloi scheme, or will they rise as a new conquering horde? Will the barbarians be at the Gates of Vienna once again?
Will the technocracy be faced with an overwhelming attack from what constitutes a zombie horde for which technology holds no answers?
Because those situations don’t typically work out well for the non-zombies in the movies.
We seem to be living in an age where the premises of dystopian movies and books are instruction manuals rather than simple entertainment.
The observations of H.G.Wells and George Orwell might be more prophesy than fiction.
Orwell was a socialist.
I just finished reading TOMMY ROBINSON: ENEMY OF THE STATE. The USA is following Great Britain and Canada into fascism and corporate impotence. It is unlikely that the current generations (and I include us Boomer geezers) have the balls to stand up to the Nazis in charge of the New World Order.
It brings to mind the great Rodney Dangerfield Joke: I feel like the guy that's half Italian and half Polish. I want to beat somebody up, but I can't figure out who.