Keith, I have "Soylent Green" on DVD and have watched it every few months.
Just can't help it. And Roth's "going home" is a tremendous prelude to the
nasty stuff that happens next.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:09 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: The Next 500 Years
Ed,
At 20:47 29/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
The topic makes me think of movies. And movies make me think of how we can
possibly even think we know. "A Space Odyssey" had us flying about in space
with a truly marvellous computer in 2001. "Soylent Green" saw New York with a
hugely unemployed population of 40 million and food requirements met by
converting the dead into food by 2020.
Ah, now that's a film! I don't think I've ever willingly since a film more
than once -- except Soylent Green, and I think I've seen this about four
times. It had a great deal of an authentic ring about it than not. The
recycling of bodies is very far from being far-fetched either. In some parts of
China during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward millions were starving so badly
that parents were selling their young children to other parents for food, while
the latter, in turn, were selling their own children. Soylent Green is far less
shocking than that. The scene of Roth "going home" is especially memorable.
But if there's one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about 500
years into the future it is that status will still be all-important driver of
human behaviour after basic needs have been met. The genetic propensity to
status is the means by which every single group of people becomes stabilized.
Status means that every single group or organization produces one leader with,
at the most, only a small group of confidants around him (or her, much more
rarely).
This applies whether we are talking of a dictatorship or a democracy,
left-wing governments or right-wing, the local knitting circle or the Indian
Railway (supposedly the largest employer in the world). The fact of status is
so strong that theonly possible outcome in any collectivity is that one person
is forced to the top or one person finagles his way to the top.
And once there his power is enormous. The reverse side of the coin is our
propensity to deference. Once status is sorted out and once a leader emerges
then almost everybody else becomes biddable. (There are always a few mavericks
but they're usually individuals who are so charged with ambition themselves
that they cannot avoid being nuisances.)
Deference to leadership meant that thousands of Germans took part in the
extermination of millions of Jews and Gypsies in WW2 with hardly a murmur and
not a single protest. Deference to leadership meant that President Bush, with
no more than three supporters) could decide to invade Iraq with most of the
population going along with it. In the UK the status-deference syndrome meant
that only Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw needed to
decide to support Bush, and the rest of the Cabinet lamely agreed. It only took
an absurd lie by Tony Blair (that Saddam Hussein could attack the UK with
"weapons of mass destruction" at 45 minutes' notice) for the House of Commons
and then most of the rest of the country to agree.
What is less certain about the next 500 years is whether evolutionary biology
will be taught widely enough so people will be more vigilant in whom they
select as their leaders of this or that. Furthermore, that they will design all
their organizations, large or small such that leaders are always much more
accessible to be pulled down from power whenever necessary.
Keith
"Blade Runner" saw us making humanoid robots in some not distant future
and shipping them off to far off places in the universe and then making sure
they didn't come back to Earth.
Five hundred years ago, in 1510, the new world had just been discovered.
Very little of the great ruination that took place as a result had as yet
happened and Christian Europe was still trying to recover from Islamic invasion
(so what's new?). There was as yet no industrial or scientific revolution even
if the seeds were there. Could anyone then have predicted what the world would
be like in 500 years?
Ed
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