In The Land Where Work Makes People Free....

Where ever freedom leads, it seems to lead
to where liberty is sorely lacking. 

 

A Choice Of Slippery Slope

The Doomsday Clock is less a clock
more a report of the deliberations
of a committee of scientists that reports
every January, where the communique
is called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 
and this year the report for the choice
of slippery slopes seems particularly wide
and vertiginous as world leaders choose
how much they can push each other closer
towards disaster not knowing how much
they may well be being pushed further
towards catastrophe, unaware of it, themselves.

From this years report our choice of slippery slopes,
down which we might all disappear forever, is wider
and more precipitous than all the previous reckonings
set since 1947. The clock is now set at 89 seconds,
when in times past maximum safety from nuclear annihilation
was set at 17 minutes in 1991. With the end of the Soviet Union.

With President Putin seeking the return of the Soviet Empire
in some new Trump approved hegemony, we are nearer
to perilous times than we have ever been before.  

Back To The Future

I predict that the future
is going to be like the past
where what intelligence there is,
or lack of same, will be analogue,
rather than digital, the better 
to be limited and self contained
in an era when AI requires levels
of electrical energy to support it 
that may not be available.

Political Distance

It used to be thought 'wisdom'
for managing disagreements
to say 'keep your friends close
and keep your enemies closer.'.

With political differences peaking
afresh across 'the free world'
and distances between nations
being reset with varying levels
of agreement it remains unknown
how much the new distances
countries keep from each other,
with their diplomacy, are proof
of friendship, or of a new enmity. 

Misapplied Science

When naturalist/natural scientist Charles Darwin
inferred the theory of evolution from his observations
of the animal specimens he collected on his journeys
he was being entirely logical about what he observed,
and postulated about the scale of the planet's history.

But he was less logical about the human hierarchies
created by Adam Smith's theories about markets,
and the migrations of financial and political capital
to the levels of inequality that remade a feudal order
which meant only 10 % of males could vote for
the 1 % of males who owned the most property.

There the vast majority of the population, men
women and children worked the textile machines
until their wages were reduced. As power looms
replaced handlooms, so many highly skilled men
took revenge against the machines that made them
unemployed, by destroying them.

In evolution no animal had even been given the power
over other animals on the scale that factory owners
had over the girls and boys who worked the machines
the factory owner owned, all for such a petty pittance.

Meanwhile distant figures wrung their hands
over the suffering of those they had power over,
whilst offering no sense of respite.

Darwin, his cousin Herbert Spencer could live in the luxury
of the inherited wealth of their extended family  As males
they inherited so much because inheritance laws disinheriting so many.
They could proclaim their superiority, and profit much from the workers
the family employed much more than said labour could negotiate a life
away from labour for itself, away from the reach of the factory.

Such accumulated wealth, and insulating material comfort,
was just as much accumulated avarice as anything else.
Caught up in the social and physical mechanisms
that enclosed them, they disguised their lack of feeling towards others,

Grifting From The Grave

Egyptian royals of old were known
in the 20th century for their lavish abodes.
In their deaths the beliefs they sustained
such amazing dwelling places as the pyramids,
where they could stay there. Because their souls
weighted less than the weight of a feather.

But with the present post modern capitalism,
still developing, the rich are working towards
a new theology of money. Where the eternity
of the richest in the world will to be sustained
by new, more sustainable, mechanisms of inequality.

There Trump and other vampires of finance may well
be dead. But will keep on grifting from the grave,
via financial instruments of arcane design
that they believe will drain those living long after them.

It will be less them living in pyramids amid servants
and great bling, and much more them living on
in more abstract form through their pyramid selling
where for all eternity the poor will keep being bankrupted.

Life In A Vacuum Requires Strength

Protesting against leaders they cannot reach,
because they live amid 'emit, don't receive'
media regulations that only the leaders control
requires those who still seek to understand
said media that allows them only to listen
to bear witness to such entrenched inequalities
requires a strength of character, to withstand
the forces of the immoral vacuum
the great leader's create for others, beneath them.