Politics and Technology:

That which cannot go on, will not go on.

I've been entertaining a theory the past few days, that runs like this.  It is no coincidence that our political insanity has been growing in exact correlation to our technological innovation.  For instance, no one ever thought we should free the slaves until the cotton gin was invented, rendering their labor practically worthless anyway.

America fought a Civil War over slavery, but most of the rest of the world freed their serfs and slaves at the same time peacefully, without any outside intervention.  This is because technology had rendered the entire practice archaic and made the entire institution insupportable.  If there had been no Civil War, if there had been no abolitionists, slavery in the South would have disappeared anyway, probably to be replaced by the very same Jim Crow laws that were actually put into place after the war.

There was never any hue and cry for mass immigration until the invention of reliable boats and airplanes made it possible.  So you see, what is considered a moral must today, having your country be a perfect reflection of the world census, wasn't even possible in the past and therefore was never a question in political life.

The idea of universal public education couldn't have occurred until the invention of the printing press, and beyond that, the steam engine which gave a new source of farming labor power beyond strapping young lads with pitchforks, and the sewing machine which gave a new source of clothing than young maidens with needles and thread stitching something or other all day every day.

Humanitarianism is the idea that all human appetites are innately good, and the only problem is the cost of procurement.  When technology lowers the cost of procurement, new 'freedoms' open up which suddenly become moral rights/necessities, which previously no one ever imagined.  This is why the 'revolution is never done.'  Sure, we now have health care for the poor and retirees, but wouldn't universal health care be even better?  Sure, we have primary schools for all, but wouldn't college for all be even better?  The moment technology allows another one of these benefits to open up, it will suddenly become a universal right that the government has to provide too.

In a thousand years it will no doubt be a human right for everyone to own their own planet, when before we never thought to imagine it was our right to individually own Earth and everyone else was just a trespasser.  But why not?  There are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, all waiting for just one tiny invention of cheap space flight.

What's fascinating about this trend is that humanitarianism always knows when to stop.  It never demands more than reality can give in a mostly painless manner.  It waits for freedom to be free before it demands any additional freedoms.  For instance, humanitarians loved criminals and always wanted lower sentences for them, until about 1990 when crime rates had gone so high that entire cities were going up in flames  (i.e. L.A. riots).  Then all of a sudden they stopped talking about the rights of criminals, and all across the country tougher sentences, freer gun laws, and the death penalty came roaring back again.  It suddenly wasn't the right for criminals to rape and kill at pleasure free of the hindrance of those annoying cops anymore.  Now crime is at historic lows, around the same as the 1960's, and so far at least no humanitarians have made any progress in getting lighter sentences for criminals or restricting gun rights again.

In 'socialist' Europe and socialist diaspora nations like Canada and New Zealand, they all eventually reached a point of fiscal collapse, where they had promised more benefits than their tax revenue could possibly provide.  In each of these countries a conservative was elected and sanity restored to the balance sheet.  New Zealand and Canada today are probably more to the right than the United States, but just ten years ago or so they were workers' utopias.  These sorts of things happen all the time, even though they're extremely remarkable.  Speeches are made about human rights, moral rights, and our duty to our fellow man.  And then a deficit gets too high and poof, all those speeches disappear and governments get back to business.  Communists had principles.  If they had to kill half the country to equalize the other half, then so be it.  But humanitarians talk with the same bombastic words, the same concept of absolute justice and righteousness, then retreat like beaten dogs the moment the stock market goes down.  Somewhere deep down they realize that half a loaf is better than none, and their prudence has navigated countries all over the world for decades through all sorts of dangerous reefs.

What does this say about future trends?  Well look at illegal immigration.  It looked like we were simply going to be wholesale colonized by the entire population of Mexico, a few years ago.  But now more illegal immigrants are actually leaving the country than entering it.  Off the radar, increased deportations, tougher state law enforcement, and a weak economy have turned a devastating trend into a minor nuisance.

Humanitarians, in their hearts, want to make America home to the whole world, but they can't advocate for open borders until the economy has gotten the current population a satisfying amount of jobs, pay, and savings again.  They realize it's not a good time to talk about the moral right of Senegalese with AIDS to come collect welfare in America, and so they just let it lie.  Even though we had a fully democratic house, senate, and president, they couldn't even pass the DREAM act and give a partial amnesty to illegal immigrants already here.  How far away are they from open borders immigration for the whole world outside of America then?

Some clever pundits have pointed at rising gas prices and said it's impossible for whites to tolerate the desolation of inner cities now that they can't afford their suburban commutes anymore.  But this doesn't take into account the endless technological advances coming down the pipeline.  Rather than going into the messy business of reforming the entire black race up to civilized norms, wouldn't it be easier to save 33% of our gasoline via automated cars, which don't have to accelerate or brake as much as the poor-driving-skills of humans?  Via technology, we'll make commuting easier than ever, with no traffic jams and low oil use.  Also, if oil becomes too expensive, a whole host of reprieves will kick in at market optimums.  Synthetic gasoline from coal or natural gas, electric cars, biofuels from algae, or a whole bunch of expensive but available oil from remote regions of the world will open up at various price points, and gasoline will find it impossible to become more expensive than these alternatives.  The trend of rising gas prices can't last forever.  In fact, at current prices, there are already several gasoline alternatives that could make a profit.  It's just that gasoline prices fluctuate so wildly, and capital is so hard to get, that resorting to such an energy alternative is a bad gamble.  If, say, these gas prices lasted for ten years running, however, businesses would start to realize what's up, and the market would quickly adjust to the new reality.

So there won't be any peak oil crunch, or any need for whites to return to urban centers to find work again.  We can just leave them to the blacks, and leave the blacks on welfare, and let sleeping dogs lie.  And since we CAN do it, we definitely WILL do it.  That is the law of humanitarianism.

Cap and trade has been a non-starter in America because our economy can't afford the rise in energy prices.  For one thing, America's climate isn't moderate like much of Europe.  We have deep southern areas where the temperature is regularly above 100 degrees, and freezing northern areas whose snow doesn't melt until August.  We have vast open stretches of land that trucks must drive across to ship goods around the country.  We simply can't afford steep taxes on energy or cars like Europe can.  Because of our different geographical realities, cap and trade succeeded in Europe but failed in America.  But what's interesting is that if cheap solar power really is invented, which I think it will be in the next decade (there are so many advances that really all we need to do now is put them all together into a single package.), you will quickly find that the talk of the moral necessity to rescue the planet from global warming will win the day.

That's because the moment it's possible to switch to clean energy, the moral arguments behind environmentalism will sweep the field -- and not a moment before.  It's a very funny thing to hear doomsayers talking about global warming ending the world if we don't act "NOW, NOW," all the while knowing that support for clean energy correlates exactly to cost and nothing else.  Moral arguments are so fruitless so long as technological realities stay the same.

For the same reason, the fish of the ocean will never really die out.  People enjoy eating fish too much to let that happen.  The moment fish become too rare to affordably feed the world via catching them in the wild, fish farming will be instituted and then fish will become as numerous as ever.

Before populations completely die out due to low birthrates, governments will find it prudent to reward a 'homemaker's salary' and provide all sorts of tax and spending incentives for children.  No one feels any desire to act now, because the world is overcrowded as is and could use some spare room.  But if it ever became a problem, suddenly the right to an abortion would disappear and everyone would see the right for a baby to live in a new light.  These threshold triggers are everywhere, and they all rely on prudence.  You can have your cake and eat it too, but only if times are good.  If the situation isn't so rosy, the moral rights of the purple spotted toad suddenly fly out the window.

Intel has invented a 3d chip fabrication process which will allow transistors to get even faster than before, a technology which will still be maturing, and doubling our processing speeds, for a decade to come.  Meanwhile Seagate has invented a hard disk storage system that will take what is today a three terabyte hard drive and in ten years will have a 60 terabyte hard drive instead.  Meanwhile display technologies are finding ways to make yet sharper images, with more frames per second and better coloring, all for cheaper than ever before.  These three inventions together give digital content an ever larger role in recreation.  The bottleneck right now is the poor infrastructure surrounding the internet business.  Google talked about making gigabyte per second connections a reality, and we will need to take them up on their offer, because tv's are going to keep getting higher definition, and they need content badly.

What's so great about this, though, is that an economy that used to rely on real solid objects, like food, metal, wood, paper -- is now increasingly relying on bits.  If people previously demanded real objects for their labor, we could quickly run into a scarcity of all sorts of materials.  Wood, metal, chemicals, everything is now in short supply.  But if billions of people say, "I don't really need a beautiful wood floor, I'd rather have a phone and a television," then guess what, every time we double the size of our processors or memory or internet speeds, we've halved the material resources necessary to make someone feel comfortable, well-off, and 'rich.'  Instead of a bunch of silverware and gold plate, which really would be impossible to provide for everyone, living rooms have a big screen composed of relatively cheap materials, and a stream of photons/electrons -- and they prefer it this way!  Not only is it cheaper to entertain people in this manner, the goods just keep piling up.

If you decide to party by eating a nice briscuit sandwich, the cost to make the briscuit, and the enjoyment of it, are permanently lost.  But if you pay for a stream of electrons, well guess what, anyone else who comes by can just pick it up for the price of delivering electrons to their eyes, which is really quite cheap -- and no one's the worse for it.  If someone steals your briscuit then that's a time to kill, but if someone slyly watches an I Love Lucy episode for free, who exactly is hurt?

The wealth of the digital world never fades.  It just keeps piling up, year after year, like some dragon's treasure horde.  If you were lucky enough to be born one hundred years from now, or two hundred, not a single TV show, music record, movie, video game, or book would be lost from this era.  They'd all be available online, for free, for anyone's consumption.  And these are some extremely good products too.  This is the cultural inheritance that each new generation gets, a mass deposit into their bank accounts at birth, that far surpasses the inheritance of kings.

Just imagine how many people would be willing to live in a small apartment, without any fine clothing, or anything else resembling 'wealth' as we're used to thinking of it, so long as they had a nice TV and a powerful internet collection, and 200 years worth of media entertainment?  So when we're talking of economic malaise and how wages haven't risen since 1970, in terms of how much butter we can buy, the coming generations are thinking 'I actually don't need that much butter, come to think of it.  I'm fine with a bit of silicon.'  In this way world poverty, world unemployment, even world overpopulation, can all be gently defused without anyone even feeling the pinch in their daily lives.  As far as they're concerned, it will still be the best time to ever be alive, even though all our trends show that they'll be far worse off than us.

The combined fact that humanitarians are prudent and don't ever demand more than society can bear, and that technology is continuing to improve at a blistering pace in several different promising fields, means that economic and political collapse is realistically speaking impossible.  Which means real political reforms, instead of sniping at the edges of trivial issues like student loan interest rates, is also impossible.  Without some extreme motivating force, people aren't going to leave their comfort zones and change their views just for the heck of it.  And no extreme motivating force will occur, because moderates will compromise and fix any such problems before they arise, decades in advance.  Is crime getting out of hand?  Okay, time to get a handle on it.  Social security is insolvent?  Well, guess we'll raise the retirement age.  And so on.  These little fixes in the '80's and '90's will have similar parallels into the future as well, and the end times will never come.

Humanitarians will protect that which is valuable to them, peace, quiet, and ease.  The bigger problem is that they won't protect that which is valuable to utilitarians -- truth, beauty, and love.  That is the real 'crises' of our time.  It's not economic, demographic, environmental, etc.  Humanitarians have enough sense to steer a path through all those issues and emerge on the other side unsinged.  It's a spiritual crisis.  H.G. Wells theorized in The Time Machine that if human needs were ever perfectly met via technology, humanity would atrophy into a bunch of thoughtless, carefree Eloi who would have no concept of anything grand or important, but would just run around sunbathing and tossing flowers at each other.  We are moving in that direction when we deny basic truths about the world just to not hurt people's feelings.  We are moving in that direction when we don't hold anyone to their promises because promises are just too hard to keep and after all, why bother?  We are moving in that direction when people say life is more important than anything else and violence is never justified.  Sure, it's a pleasant world.  But will it burn with the sacred flame?  Will it be an awe-inspiring future?  That is the question.