Between a culture we never mastered and a future we only glimpse. This written in the context of the climate tsunami, inequality, automation, failure of governance to deal with these, the failure to understand geopolitcs, and the resulting catastrophe – and the hope for GardenWorld. email doug@dougcarmichael.com
At the critical moment when a volatile economy and widening classdisparities require a government responsive to popular needs, govern-ment has become increasingly unresponsive; and, conversely, when anaggressive state stands most in need of being restrained, democracyproved an ineffectual check. A public fearful of terrorist attacks andbewildered by a war based on deceit is unable to function as the rationalconscience of the American state, capable of checking the impulse toadventurismand the systematic evasion of constitutional constraints. Apolitics of dumbed-down public discourse and low voter turnout com-bines with a dynamic economy of stubborn inequalities to produce theparadox of a powerful state and a failing democracy.
How can economics not see that the political regime is the main product of the economy?
There is a kind of consensus among the people I read the most that the “elites”, the one percent and their professional support system (the universities, the bureaucracies, the professions) are responsible for creating a world that was comfortable for them and disastrous for the others, for community, for security. The depth of inequality (much worse in parts of the world we are not told about) and the deterioration of the environment (oceans for example) are the results of policies that fed the one percent and brought along what Miljovan Djilas called years ago The New Class
The writers he reviews such as Mishra, are challenging but scattered and muddled. He fails to deal with the more challenging writers, Kanth for his depth of anthropological examination of western culture, (and his dysfunctional anger).
And my current favorite Jeofff Mann. In his book In the long run we are all dead, a history of the eternal return of Keynes, an analysis of the fate of political thought (it disappeared under cultural pressure from the abstractions of the enlightenment). A short version at
with his challenging thoughts (much based on his ongoing analysis of Stiegler’s Automation.
My own view has been that climate change, automation, over population and governance failure come together to create a major crisis that will require the redeployment of early everyone. There is no job that is not complicit in environmental damage on the physical side or cultural and community damage on the social side.
People must stop doing what they are doing – but must also create or be given better things to do.
That is the emerging frontier – what to do and how to get there.
