Ed,
At 19:09 31/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
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.
I haven't actually seen it for many years -- so much so that in my memory
Roth's "going home" occurred at the end. Of course, Harry Harrison wrote
his original book ("Make Room! Make Room!) long before the Internet and
bloggers were even dreamed of, but the scene in the secret library in which
Roth finally sosses out the true facts of Soylent Corporation seems to me
to be prescient of the Internet today, bloggers and whistleblowers.
Keith
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Keith Hudson
To: <mailto:[email protected]>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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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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