As I mentioned, I have been trying to keep abreast of thinkers who are able to step outside the flux of the present and grasp the obvious currents that are building and waning for our species and the world. Recently, I saw an article about the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty who published Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America in 1998, and who has become famous for predicting someone like Trump achieving power. His criticism of the Left's abandonment of the working class, which would eventually lead to the rise of a 'strong-man', was at that time highly prescient. Now it appears obvious - the wisdom of hindsight.
I was thinking about the capacity involved in this man's ability to stand aside from current events and see the trajectory of consequences. I know many people attempt this, and are so idealogically encumbered, that they end up reflecting their own mental obsessions instead of the path of actual events. But some succeed in a highly rational perspective of the future from outside the cockpit of immediacy.
In our shamanic role, we also have a duty to stand on a high ground and see into the future for our tribe, and our world. Awareness is not just about perceiving the good things that abound amongst the bad. It is also about seeing the direction of events. Assessing the current of influences and seeing the consequences.
We are at a crucial practical crossroads in the evolution of our species. This is not about our species' spiritual evolution, but about our species' social evolution - how we structure practical life and meaning for the bulk of humanity. There are many storms of change converging on our immediate future, and they are all involved (although some will spin us totally out of the game - this is not about those).
The vast majority of people, men and women, were and continue to be, involved in manufacturing. Physical goods identify the economic evolutionary period in which we live. It has not always been this, but for the last few hundred years, it has been the focus. The global trade environment has meant that no one country or company can exist completely outside this extra-national mercantile sphere. We have been swept by precious items - tulips, pepper, fur, oil, coal, etc and etc. But the international sphere has grown within commerce to the point where if you are out of it, you collapse. There was absolutely no choice for any manufacturing business to avoid shifting production to Asia. And no political party or government could stand in the way.
Trump talks about rebuilding tariffs, but he has no comprehension of what this means - basically it spells disaster for the US, as globalisation is a force that can not be stopped - technological change has guaranteed that. All that a government can do is mitigate the consequences of those sections of its population that inevitably lose-out in this change. 'It will all be well in the long run' the Chicago School of Economics sprouts, but as John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead." What to do for the living? That is the crucial question that governments will stand or fall on.
Unfortunately, that is just the beginning. Another storm is approaching. That very same technological change is not constrained to global trade. It is altering the fabric of the workplace, and especially manufacturing. The working class are screwed, no matter which way they turn, and they are not an insubstantial political quantity!
In India, recently elected BJP supremo,Modi, is hailed as a saviour by all the aspirants for a working future - down on corruption and up on jobs etc. In the state of Gujarat, he, as Chief Minister, made his name as an economic miracle maker. But actually, he achieved a boost in the state's economic growth through high subsidies to capitalists. They duly invested in capital improvements to achieve efficient production - not in labour. Unemployment increased as the wealth of the state increased. Sounds familiar? The USA?.
Now, you could blame the capitalists, or the government. Why did Obama fund the large corporations to avoid collapse after the 2008 GFC, instead of giving the money directly to the people, as the Rudd government did in Australia? Would it have made any difference? Ultimately, it would probably have saved Hillary's pitch for President, but it would not have stalled the inevitable.
Technological change is not just an issue of capital investment over labour, efficiency over humanity. It is a total shift of the mechanism of production, away from human involvement, and it has been happening now for about a hundred years. The working class are stuffed - no one needs them any more except in the trades like electrical, carpentry and plumbing etc. Wherever a computer can do your job, it will go!
The bald fact is that we no longer need humans to do the bulk of the 'middle' work. We still need immigrants to do the dirty work that no national wants to touch. We still need the health carers, creatives, programmers, upper-management and so on, but the vast majority of tasks previously undertaken by both blue and white collar workers will soon be done by computers and robots. And most importantly, this applies to all those Asian workers. The jobs are never coming back!
Now the tricky part. How do we manage this socially? Saudi Arabia has been doing it for some time - shuffle the money down to those who are born nationals, then import the gross-job workers and pay them peanuts. But in most Western and Orient countries, work is a 'man's' status and self-worth. Women are more intelligent and capable of fitting in wherever possible, but still, everyone is subject to an entire economic and political system that rewards for productive effort. Take away that possibility, and what happens?
We have two choices.
One, pay people a living wage for simply living, and fund centrally all utilities and health. This means shift to a social model where the sheer fact of being alive is guaranteed by the state. The issue of status connected to work, would have to change. But some form of meaningful activity would need to be provided, as humans can't just sit in front of their TVs all their life. Health requires meaningful and effortfull activity. Competition will still have to exist in some way, but community involvement will be paramount.
Bali stands as an example. It is an island that was naturally abundant in food production, leaving the population with significant time on their hands. They solved the problem by developing a creative cultural environment, where 'substance-production work' was not the pivot of identity. A deeply engrained social focus on ritualised creativity took the place of the work-centred self-worth-based cultural focus that we have in most nations of the modern world.
Two, politicians strive more and more to placate the anger, frustration and impoverishment of their losing-out citizens. How can that be displaced, as the real solution is frankly impossible? The age old answer of scapegoating politics will begin with vilifying those within the nation who can be classified as 'not us', and who have 'taken our jobs'.
Democracy will begin to decay from within, as politicians seek to rally continuously disintegrating support from a population that is completely disenfranchised from meaningful participation, let alone financial viability. Climate Change will exacerbate the population migration and resource stresses. The only last pseudo-solution to calm this anger will be to blame outsiders: war against foreign nations.