When rich people say, "Put the wealthy in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into prosperity!" We answer, "We've tried plutocracy; it made everyone poorer - including, ultimately, the plutocrats! No, thank you, we don't believe in your utopian scheme." When priests say, "Put the righteous in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into virtue!" We answer, "We've tried theocracy; it led to the corruption of both the State and the Church. No, thank you, we don't believe in your utopian scheme." But for some reason when technocrats say, "Put credentialed experts in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into efficiency, prosperity, AND virtue!" For some reason too many people's well-honed skepticism goes absent, and far too many of us say, "We're listening! Tell us more about your utopian scheme!"
I don't think it should be even slightly surprising that people prefer their rulers to actually understand things. Take a look at congress and tell me we're not a kakistocracy.
We've reached the mix somewhere between 1984's surveillance and intentional malevolence, and Brazil's massive incompetent inefficiency and idiocracy of the state
The degeneracy and hedonism of Brave New World, the surveillance, doublethink, and ideological brainwashing of 1984, the anti-intellectualism of Fahrenheit 451, and the bloated, inefficient, incompetent kafkaesque bureaucracy of Brazil
"Every law, every tax, every mandate for the collective good is an implicit threat of violence." I have felt this for a long time so I am glad someone else recognized this strange bureaucratic bullying that can be far more nefarious than outright attacks and so mundane and underhanded many will never spot them or understand their nature.
RIP ZATHRAS; REIGN IN PREDATION ETERNAL. Like most, I was exposed to the anti- authoritarian parables in grade school, with Animal Farm and The Giver. Each were informative, but were a little too fantastic, as with 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and so on, to really hit home. It wasn't until I read EDEN, by Stanislaw Lem, that it all landed.
Excellent video essay! Really interesting how you compared 3 different books with slightly different perspectives on the same sort of totalitarian regime. You deserve more views!
My favorite dystopian novel is CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. Because it ends with Christ conquering the demonic totalitarians through sicing Merlin and a hungry bear on them.
I still a have a soft spot for the 1936 Things to Come. It is gallingly naïve in the later sections, but the first half still holds up as an engaging and sometimes unnerving piece of apocalyptic fiction. I've seen it described in some places as "NWO propaganda", their words not mine, but by today's standards its outright tame. Its an underrated film regardless of its politics, and a must see for fans of classic science fiction. It is almost a dystopian movie to the modern viewer, but really so is just about every piece of utopian fiction from a previous age. Its free on UA-cam so I recommend people check it out, but Criterion did a remaster too if the potato quality bothers you.
Definitely a must see. And I can almost see a modern world war dragging on for decades with neither side close enough to defeat to make them flip the table and go nuclear, but neither able to make any real progress either.
@@feralhistorian There is definitely something interesting to the idea of a blasted post-apoclayptic hellscape created not by a nuclear exchange, but by a prolonged conventional war that just ended up consuming everything around it.
@@feralhistorian The modern war would drag on specifically because of pussyfooting around in an attempt to convince the opponent that going nuclear would be worse. One can see echoes of this in the Ukrainian conflict, where more than once when the West promised $NEW_TOY to the Ukrainians the Russians pushed back with the claim that $NEW_TOY justifies a nuclear response. Okay, yeah, an extended conventional war _also_ provides more room for graft, and if you believe you're certain to win anyway, why not funnel some of those war appropriations into your own pocket?
I love your analysis and takes on 1984, so interesting to see it differentiated to We and things to come instead of brave new world, far more insightfull comparison. Using the prespective of the different authors on their real life experience with totalitarian systems to contrast the three books to each other was, at least to me, really insightfull. Your line in the Mad Max video about the Goverment beeing a an Egregore blew me away, gives such an interesting perspective on all sort of institutions and expresses an generally understood property of social structures in an language that makes it far more tangible. Your videos are great analysis on themselfs and i thourghly enjoy them, but sprinkeled throughout are individual thoguhts that not only enhance the video but really invite (the viewer) to apply them outside of the context of that particular video. I work an entry-mid level job in tech and sometimes when i grasp a new concept/method/framework whatever i sometimes have experiences where i have to take a step back and sit for 10 minuits because implications and possibilities of application of some information overwhelm me and there are moments in your videos where you reveal your thought process in a way that invokes a very similar response in me. Please keep creating these videos, they are gems. Is it possible to Support you on some plattform that accepts paypal ? i have problems getting Ko-Fi to accept any payment provider i use.( Sorry, am German, dont have a credit card)
Thanks, I appreciate it. There's plenty of new stuff in the works that will hopefully be as interesting, and I'm looking into some options for expanding the channel. It's been rather haphazard up to this point.
Incredibly thought provoking video! You’ve inspired me to read things I did not know even existed like “We”. “A medical operation to remove the imagination and make them good productive members of society”. That sounds like a PhD program in the sciences if you’re unlucky enough to work for narcissistic megalomaniac. But therein lies one of the issues with what the American university system has become. The only ones to “win” and get tenure are the ones with the right political tenacity and ambition. Academia has become a quest for power rather than a quest for knowledge. Modern academia rewards political prowess and intellectual mediocrity.
I read "1984" years ago. Have always remembered the line "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." || "...down to how long a bite of food should be chewed before swallowing." Humans aren't meant to live this way; soulless, mechanized, regimented. Never heard of "We."
I remember during the Apollo Moon missions, Ray Bradbury would write articles extoling space exploration, and he refer to _Things to Come_ as an earlier promotion of Manifest Destiny into the Universe. When I finally saw the thing as an adult, i was major league creeped out. I suppose I was inoculated by already reading CS Lewis Space/Ransom Trilogy, where the first two books ( _Out of the Silent Planet_ and _Perelandra_ ) explicitly presented the Wellsian rationale as one for ruthless progress over anyone who might get in the way, be it fellow humans or any aliens who might dare get in the way.
Its strange that this never dawned on Wells since he wrote about it himself, in his most famous work no less, The War of the Worlds. The Martians were very technocratic, highly advanced, but had evolved to such a state that they pigeonholed themselves and were ultimately defeated by simple disease. The Martians are also not in any way sympathetic, something even HP Lovecraft sometimes allowed with his advanced alien races.
as for me I grew up in the Philippines in the 70s and 80s during the Pro American Marcos dictatorship where you had military and police enforced curfews from 9 pm to 5 am. prohibitions on free speech, media just parroting the gov line that everything was OK, Philippines was producing bumper crops, the gov was building beneficial public works , everyone was happy, communism was bad(this was one of the few things I agreed with the PH gov at the time), our military strong and daily news had a lot on the body count, like a score card in sports , how many communist and Muslim seperatist guerillas died every day with the PH gov miltary getting low casualty scores. If you spoke out, you got arrested branded a communist then if your family did not pay up, imprisoned tortured possibly killed. (disappeared). then when the people finally kicked out the dictatorship and establizhed so called freedom, the PH was so chaotic, worserning economy corrupt high crime rates (like Russia in the 90s) that many just wanted the dictatorship to keep everything safe orderly and prosperous. That is why the son of the dictator won since Filipiinos wanted to go back to authritarian times, btw, after freedom happened you found out the dictatorship were a bunch of corrupt aholes who stole the country blind, and all their good news was fake. Yep that is why im in Canada since the 90s. (low crime rates, better opportunities, law and order. )
I think as a general rule, whenever the government insists that it's trying to protect us from something we need to be extremely suspicious. They always seem to end up being corrupt assholes in the end, don't they.
@@feralhistorian yep either power corrupts or the ruler was an ahole to begin with, power just made it worse. I remember there was the pro USA dictator of South korea in the 70s called Park Chung Hee, yep he rivalled Kim Jong Il in terms of authoritarianism, including giving the police powers to arrest people with long hair and give them military crew cuts on the spot. and he continued giving a speech even after his wife got shot in front of him and the body carted away. Built the foundations for South Korea industrilization and mega corps and current booming economy and South korea today is a stable rich democracy.
The whole point about violence is very significant, and it pays much to keep it in mind on your day to day transactions, I find. Rest in peace Zathras, claw on those clouds you couldn't reach in life.
the 1979 hokey movie Shape of Things to come, is quite amusing, yes you had Jack Palance playing the bad guy prancing around in Spandex. and a cape haha
I recently finished watching the first season of SILO on Apple TV +. It's based on the WOOL series of stories. I won't give away to much of the plot. However it represents a Dystopia that tries to be a Utopia... Ten Thousand people locked inside a 144 level habitat. They are told they have been robbed of their history and that the world outside is poison. Anyone asking to go outside, does so know they won't live long. Possession of relics or knowledge of the past is strictly controlled. The vast majority of the populace live, work, and ask few questions. But there are pockets of decent. In a weird way it reminded me of the MATRIX, minus the virtual reality and Machines controlling everything! Whatever our future holds, I hope we heed the advice of cautionary tales and avoid some of the nastier bits of these possible outcomes... But being generally stupid, we probably won't!
all hail zathras(did you get that name from Babylon 5?) yah I also had a natural anti authoritarian named Baguette. 19 years old when she passed ten year ago, I now have a 15 year old anti authoritarian by the name of Raven. (nothing to do with the highlander the tv show character or the comic character from Teen titans).
You could have thrown This Perfect Day into the mix as well. But I don't think that was ever filmed, and I do understand how having film clips makes production easier.
Sometimes I get the impression humans just dont care enough about our freedoms. We fight for it all the time but we never seem to want to maintain it once we have it and almost always eventually fall into some form of autocracy or similar systems. Right now American is all but becoming an Oligarchy despite screaming how free we are. Its strange because if we actually regularly voted and participated we have power to make serious changes at any given point. But we dont. Instead we have a number of rich families and individuals that influence politics and even own whole news services and social media outlets. They have more say in our laws than we do, but again only because we dont participate. Ive always wundered what sort of systems is truly ideal for the human mind and body because on some level i think we might be too lazy as a species to manually maintain our needs. There has to be a system we can develop that allows us the opportunities to create forfilling lives that isn't so easily corrupted by power and wealth. Thanks for another interesting video! They always get me thinking.
It seems natural to not worry about something that's working, which ends up letting little problems become serious ones. And yet we try to solve social problems with laws or systems. If a system doesn't work, we get cynical and hostile. If it does work, we neglect it until it doesn't anymore and the cycle repeats. Using the US as an example, we've gone from John Adams observing that our system works for a "moral and religious people" but is "wholly inadequate to the government of any other" to the present state of barely-masked oligarchy. Our elections have been more than half theater for a long time now and this time around one party isn't even bothering to pretend to listen to their voters. I'm skeptical that any kind of stable social system is possible, any generation born into peace and prosperity seems to get lazy about it and take it all as a given. But maybe instead of trying to build better systems we build a better culture that places more value on asking good questions than having simple answers. But to do that we'd first have to reclaim a level of personal freedom and responsibility that is probably only possible in the face of some massive state-crippling calamity. And yet despite the cynicism I remain strangely optimistic about the future.
Did John Maynard Keynes ever see a television commercial for an automobile? GDP: Grossly Distorted Propaganda NDP: Not Done Properly Don't the Laws of Physics affect the economy by the act of making things wear out? Marx used the word 'depreciation' 35 times in the first two volumes of his major work. But neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx ever saw a planned obsolescence economy. Net Domestic Product is GDP minus Depreciation There were 200,000,000 motor vehicles in the United States in 1994. Where did the depreciation go? If you examine the Net Domestic Product equation that Western economists do not talk about, you will find that Depreciation only applies to Capital Goods. Consumers are supposed to be stupid and charge up credit cards to buy junk designed to depreciate, thereby sabotaging themselves economically in the process of increasing GDP. Paying interest on depreciation is so rational. If you search Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations for "and account" you will find multiple instances of "read, write and account". He used the word 'education' Eighty Times. When did economists stop advocating for mandatory accounting/finance in the schools?
It's interesting you chose the film over book version of Things To Come because Things To Come actually is more a precursor to the grander Foundation by Asimov.The film follows through on characterization more then the book, which is more the way a technocrat would look at human 'insects.' Of course, both We and 1984 fail precisely because they are w/o good characters and devolved into industrial fables. Most people and critics look at Animal Farm as the far superior work to 1984 precisely because it is a fable, and makes no bones about it. Brave New World is also interesting in that It's the bleakest end with suicide as the only way out; not even allowing the state the victory, so to speak.
I went with the film mainly so I could use clips from it. This one already has too much of me reading stuff. And the film just seems so damn pleased with itself about the whole thing. I have a vague plan to revisit this topic from another angle, with Brave New World and some odd picks like The Master and Margarita as the scaffolding.
Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and current China also have variants of heavily managed state capitalism. The difference is that Vietnam as and China have non-democratic one party states.
Great video, but please don't use fake cyrillic in thumbnails. It's a nightmare for those of us who actually read and write in cyrillic. The first thing i read was "Sche thniygs to somye" followed by "perspectives oy Tesnyosrasu" It's like inducing a dyslexia in your viewers
You’d be a great narrator for audio books.
When rich people say, "Put the wealthy in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into prosperity!" We answer, "We've tried plutocracy; it made everyone poorer - including, ultimately, the plutocrats! No, thank you, we don't believe in your utopian scheme."
When priests say, "Put the righteous in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into virtue!" We answer, "We've tried theocracy; it led to the corruption of both the State and the Church. No, thank you, we don't believe in your utopian scheme."
But for some reason when technocrats say, "Put credentialed experts in charge of society! We are clearly the best choice to lead us all into efficiency, prosperity, AND virtue!" For some reason too many people's well-honed skepticism goes absent, and far too many of us say, "We're listening! Tell us more about your utopian scheme!"
And those "credentialed experts" can be wrong in ways that the layman could never kludge together.
It doesn't help at all that many of those technocrats are, in fact, priests and/or plutocrats in cheap costumes.
It's because we're currently a very technology-focused culture and scientism has basically replaced religion for a lot of people.
We should put the old, senile, and the mentally invalid in charge
I don't think it should be even slightly surprising that people prefer their rulers to actually understand things. Take a look at congress and tell me we're not a kakistocracy.
We've reached the mix somewhere between 1984's surveillance and intentional malevolence, and Brazil's massive incompetent inefficiency and idiocracy of the state
That's about the size of it . . .
great, thanks, the worst of both worlds.
@@peterhessedal8539 ....the very definition of a kakistocracy.
The degeneracy and hedonism of Brave New World, the surveillance, doublethink, and ideological brainwashing of 1984, the anti-intellectualism of Fahrenheit 451, and the bloated, inefficient, incompetent kafkaesque bureaucracy of Brazil
"Every law, every tax, every mandate for the collective good is an implicit threat of violence." I have felt this for a long time so I am glad someone else recognized this strange bureaucratic bullying that can be far more nefarious than outright attacks and so mundane and underhanded many will never spot them or understand their nature.
While I'm quite late to say this... My condolences to you on Zathras' passing. He/She was obviously The One.
The One who Was?
@@Robert_Douglass Nah. Just "The One". Even though, eventually, there will be 3 of them, which is REALLY confusing.
@@stevechudomelka7301No, no, Zathras and Zathras... are not *Zathras*.
RIP ZATHRAS; REIGN IN PREDATION ETERNAL.
Like most, I was exposed to the anti- authoritarian parables in grade school, with Animal Farm and The Giver. Each were informative, but were a little too fantastic, as with 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and so on, to really hit home. It wasn't until I read EDEN, by Stanislaw Lem, that it all landed.
Pun not intended
Excellent video essay! Really interesting how you compared 3 different books with slightly different perspectives on the same sort of totalitarian regime.
You deserve more views!
Incredible name for a cat ♡
My favorite dystopian novel is CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. Because it ends with Christ conquering the demonic totalitarians through sicing Merlin and a hungry bear on them.
Zathras understand...No, Zathras not understand, but Zathras do. Zathras good at doings, not understandings.
Was it ZATHras or was it zATHras, or was it zathRAS?
Thank you
I still a have a soft spot for the 1936 Things to Come. It is gallingly naïve in the later sections, but the first half still holds up as an engaging and sometimes unnerving piece of apocalyptic fiction. I've seen it described in some places as "NWO propaganda", their words not mine, but by today's standards its outright tame. Its an underrated film regardless of its politics, and a must see for fans of classic science fiction. It is almost a dystopian movie to the modern viewer, but really so is just about every piece of utopian fiction from a previous age. Its free on UA-cam so I recommend people check it out, but Criterion did a remaster too if the potato quality bothers you.
Definitely a must see. And I can almost see a modern world war dragging on for decades with neither side close enough to defeat to make them flip the table and go nuclear, but neither able to make any real progress either.
@@feralhistorian There is definitely something interesting to the idea of a blasted post-apoclayptic hellscape created not by a nuclear exchange, but by a prolonged conventional war that just ended up consuming everything around it.
@@feralhistorian The modern war would drag on specifically because of pussyfooting around in an attempt to convince the opponent that going nuclear would be worse. One can see echoes of this in the Ukrainian conflict, where more than once when the West promised $NEW_TOY to the Ukrainians the Russians pushed back with the claim that $NEW_TOY justifies a nuclear response.
Okay, yeah, an extended conventional war _also_ provides more room for graft, and if you believe you're certain to win anyway, why not funnel some of those war appropriations into your own pocket?
Liked and subscribed.
Really dig the way you think and speak. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.
I love your analysis and takes on 1984, so interesting to see it differentiated to We and things to come instead of brave new world, far more insightfull comparison. Using the prespective of the different authors on their real life experience with totalitarian systems to contrast the three books to each other was, at least to me, really insightfull.
Your line in the Mad Max video about the Goverment beeing a an Egregore blew me away, gives such an interesting perspective on all sort of institutions and expresses an generally understood property of social structures in an language that makes it far more tangible. Your videos are great analysis on themselfs and i thourghly enjoy them, but sprinkeled throughout are individual thoguhts that not only enhance the video but really invite (the viewer) to apply them outside of the context of that particular video.
I work an entry-mid level job in tech and sometimes when i grasp a new concept/method/framework whatever i sometimes have experiences where i have to take a step back and sit for 10 minuits because implications and possibilities of application of some information overwhelm me and there are moments in your videos where you reveal your thought process in a way that invokes a very similar response in me.
Please keep creating these videos, they are gems. Is it possible to Support you on some plattform that accepts paypal ? i have problems getting Ko-Fi to accept any payment provider i use.( Sorry, am German, dont have a credit card)
Thanks, I appreciate it. There's plenty of new stuff in the works that will hopefully be as interesting, and I'm looking into some options for expanding the channel. It's been rather haphazard up to this point.
Incredibly thought provoking video!
You’ve inspired me to read things I did not know even existed like “We”.
“A medical operation to remove the imagination and make them good productive members of society”. That sounds like a PhD program in the sciences if you’re unlucky enough to work for narcissistic megalomaniac.
But therein lies one of the issues with what the American university system has become. The only ones to “win” and get tenure are the ones with the right political tenacity and ambition. Academia has become a quest for power rather than a quest for knowledge. Modern academia rewards political prowess and intellectual mediocrity.
That was largely my experience in Academia. There were a few exceptions, but systemically it's lost its way.
I read "1984" years ago. Have always remembered the line "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." || "...down to how long a bite of food should be chewed before swallowing." Humans aren't meant to live this way; soulless, mechanized, regimented. Never heard of "We."
And Zathras was a pretty cat. ^_^ We recently "lost" our two strays (wandered off). The one was with us 3 years, 3 months.
I remember during the Apollo Moon missions, Ray Bradbury would write articles extoling space exploration, and he refer to _Things to Come_ as an earlier promotion of Manifest Destiny into the Universe. When I finally saw the thing as an adult, i was major league creeped out. I suppose I was inoculated by already reading CS Lewis Space/Ransom Trilogy, where the first two books ( _Out of the Silent Planet_ and _Perelandra_ ) explicitly presented the Wellsian rationale as one for ruthless progress over anyone who might get in the way, be it fellow humans or any aliens who might dare get in the way.
Its strange that this never dawned on Wells since he wrote about it himself, in his most famous work no less, The War of the Worlds. The Martians were very technocratic, highly advanced, but had evolved to such a state that they pigeonholed themselves and were ultimately defeated by simple disease. The Martians are also not in any way sympathetic, something even HP Lovecraft sometimes allowed with his advanced alien races.
happy to see that you are getting new subscribers. your channel deserves a larger following. keep up the good work.
as for me I grew up in the Philippines in the 70s and 80s during the Pro American Marcos dictatorship where you had military and police enforced curfews from 9 pm to 5 am. prohibitions on free speech, media just parroting the gov line that everything was OK, Philippines was producing bumper crops, the gov was building beneficial public works , everyone was happy, communism was bad(this was one of the few things I agreed with the PH gov at the time), our military strong and daily news had a lot on the body count, like a score card in sports , how many communist and Muslim seperatist guerillas died every day with the PH gov miltary getting low casualty scores. If you spoke out, you got arrested branded a communist then if your family did not pay up, imprisoned tortured possibly killed. (disappeared). then when the people finally kicked out the dictatorship and establizhed so called freedom, the PH was so chaotic, worserning economy corrupt high crime rates (like Russia in the 90s) that many just wanted the dictatorship to keep everything safe orderly and prosperous. That is why the son of the dictator won since Filipiinos wanted to go back to authritarian times, btw, after freedom happened you found out the dictatorship were a bunch of corrupt aholes who stole the country blind, and all their good news was fake. Yep that is why im in Canada since the 90s. (low crime rates, better opportunities, law and order. )
I think as a general rule, whenever the government insists that it's trying to protect us from something we need to be extremely suspicious. They always seem to end up being corrupt assholes in the end, don't they.
@@feralhistorian yep either power corrupts or the ruler was an ahole to begin with, power just made it worse. I remember there was the pro USA dictator of South korea in the 70s called Park Chung Hee, yep he rivalled Kim Jong Il in terms of authoritarianism, including giving the police powers to arrest people with long hair and give them military crew cuts on the spot. and he continued giving a speech even after his wife got shot in front of him and the body carted away. Built the foundations for South Korea industrilization and mega corps and current booming economy and South korea today is a stable rich democracy.
Ah yes, Park. The old "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard" scenario.
The whole point about violence is very significant, and it pays much to keep it in mind on your day to day transactions, I find.
Rest in peace Zathras, claw on those clouds you couldn't reach in life.
I would like to recommend the darkness at noon.
Do Total Recall and The Running man.
the 1979 hokey movie Shape of Things to come, is quite amusing, yes you had Jack Palance playing the bad guy prancing around in Spandex. and a cape haha
Looking it up just now, I don't think I ever saw that. Odd, given all the bad sci-fi I sat through at the time. I mean, Ice Pirates twice.
@@feralhistorian yep and I saw Space hunter adventures in the forbbiden zone 3 times another obscure sci fo 80s movie on bootleg betamax no less
RIP Zathras freedom fighter for kitties everywhere.
Damn man how is it you have so few subscribers?
I recently finished watching the first season of SILO on Apple TV +. It's based on the WOOL series of stories. I won't give away to much of the plot. However it represents a Dystopia that tries to be a Utopia... Ten Thousand people locked inside a 144 level habitat. They are told they have been robbed of their history and that the world outside is poison. Anyone asking to go outside, does so know they won't live long. Possession of relics or knowledge of the past is strictly controlled. The vast majority of the populace live, work, and ask few questions. But there are pockets of decent. In a weird way it reminded me of the MATRIX, minus the virtual reality and Machines controlling everything! Whatever our future holds, I hope we heed the advice of cautionary tales and avoid some of the nastier bits of these possible outcomes... But being generally stupid, we probably won't!
I have not seen Silo. I'll have to give it a look sometime.
all hail zathras(did you get that name from Babylon 5?) yah I also had a natural anti authoritarian named Baguette. 19 years old when she passed ten year ago, I now have a 15 year old anti authoritarian by the name of Raven. (nothing to do with the highlander the tv show character or the comic character from Teen titans).
Yes, a Bab5 reference. And whenever anyone asked what the other cats were named, the answer was a deadpan "Zathras."
You could have thrown This Perfect Day into the mix as well. But I don't think that was ever filmed, and I do understand how having film clips makes production easier.
RIP Zathras.
Sometimes I get the impression humans just dont care enough about our freedoms. We fight for it all the time but we never seem to want to maintain it once we have it and almost always eventually fall into some form of autocracy or similar systems. Right now American is all but becoming an Oligarchy despite screaming how free we are. Its strange because if we actually regularly voted and participated we have power to make serious changes at any given point. But we dont. Instead we have a number of rich families and individuals that influence politics and even own whole news services and social media outlets. They have more say in our laws than we do, but again only because we dont participate. Ive always wundered what sort of systems is truly ideal for the human mind and body because on some level i think we might be too lazy as a species to manually maintain our needs. There has to be a system we can develop that allows us the opportunities to create forfilling lives that isn't so easily corrupted by power and wealth. Thanks for another interesting video! They always get me thinking.
It seems natural to not worry about something that's working, which ends up letting little problems become serious ones. And yet we try to solve social problems with laws or systems. If a system doesn't work, we get cynical and hostile. If it does work, we neglect it until it doesn't anymore and the cycle repeats.
Using the US as an example, we've gone from John Adams observing that our system works for a "moral and religious people" but is "wholly inadequate to the government of any other" to the present state of barely-masked oligarchy. Our elections have been more than half theater for a long time now and this time around one party isn't even bothering to pretend to listen to their voters.
I'm skeptical that any kind of stable social system is possible, any generation born into peace and prosperity seems to get lazy about it and take it all as a given. But maybe instead of trying to build better systems we build a better culture that places more value on asking good questions than having simple answers. But to do that we'd first have to reclaim a level of personal freedom and responsibility that is probably only possible in the face of some massive state-crippling calamity.
And yet despite the cynicism I remain strangely optimistic about the future.
Did John Maynard Keynes ever see a television commercial for an automobile?
GDP: Grossly Distorted Propaganda
NDP: Not Done Properly
Don't the Laws of Physics affect the economy by the act of making things wear out? Marx used the word 'depreciation' 35 times in the first two volumes of his major work. But neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx ever saw a planned obsolescence economy.
Net Domestic Product is GDP minus Depreciation
There were 200,000,000 motor vehicles in the United States in 1994. Where did the depreciation go? If you examine the Net Domestic Product equation that Western economists do not talk about, you will find that Depreciation only applies to Capital Goods. Consumers are supposed to be stupid and charge up credit cards to buy junk designed to depreciate, thereby sabotaging themselves economically in the process of increasing GDP. Paying interest on depreciation is so rational.
If you search Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations for "and account" you will find multiple instances of "read, write and account". He used the word 'education' Eighty Times. When did economists stop advocating for mandatory accounting/finance in the schools?
Sorry for Zathras
Was Zathras named after the Babylon 5 character? My condolences for the catto.
He was indeed.
What is your opinion on Blake's 7 portrayal of a dystopia?
It's interesting you chose the film over book version of Things To Come because Things To Come actually is more a precursor to the grander Foundation by Asimov.The film follows through on characterization more then the book, which is more the way a technocrat would look at human 'insects.' Of course, both We and 1984 fail precisely because they are w/o good characters and devolved into industrial fables.
Most people and critics look at Animal Farm as the far superior work to 1984 precisely because it is a fable, and makes no bones about it.
Brave New World is also interesting in that It's the bleakest end with suicide as the only way out; not even allowing the state the victory, so to speak.
I went with the film mainly so I could use clips from it. This one already has too much of me reading stuff. And the film just seems so damn pleased with itself about the whole thing.
I have a vague plan to revisit this topic from another angle, with Brave New World and some odd picks like The Master and Margarita as the scaffolding.
@@feralhistorian Plus BNW has Mustapha Mond- just sounds like a 30s serial villain like Merciless Ming.
I agree. But also it's just based.
I take it you're a Babylon 5 fan, naming your late feline companion after a character from that venerable production.
Want an argument for technocracy? Take a trip to Singapore.
Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and current China also have variants of heavily managed state capitalism. The difference is that Vietnam as and China have non-democratic one party states.
this episode was shadow banned into oblivion 🤣😂
Great video, but please don't use fake cyrillic in thumbnails. It's a nightmare for those of us who actually read and write in cyrillic. The first thing i read was "Sche thniygs to somye" followed by "perspectives oy Tesnyosrasu" It's like inducing a dyslexia in your viewers
This font is borderline. I had no trouble with it, but I also have to consciously switch to read Cyrillic. I did a quick edit to clean it up.
no body cares
@@hughgrection7246 Demonstrably false.
Why does it sound as if you are surprised an Englishman wrote a book?
Does it? That's funny, some of my favorite books were written by Englishmen.