I am only into the third in this series
of books but I thought it time to both recommend them, as well as use
their theme as a way to give a wider audience to the fundamental
question underlying their theme.
These are good reads and I do recommend
them. They are a decent balance between an engaging story, reasonably
believable characters, and a truly interesting sub text; which is, of
course, by main point of focus here.
In a nutshell, the idea presented is
this: Extraterrestrials created a virus that would dumb us down into
overly aggressive, and selfishly oriented, individuals, with the
intent being to keep us tribal, disorganized, and generally at each
other's throats as a matter of course. As I understand it so far,
their purpose is to be able to have war like cannon fodder they can
easily manipulate. Another virus, however, comes along from a source
that isn't clear yet. Some Russian scientist is given the means to
create it, as a retrofit of the dumbing down virus, by extra normal
communication. He is a secret Jew forced to work for their bio
weapons program but he maintains the core morality to create the
virus without telling his masters; for he can see how they would
react to it. The only problem is that not only does he not quite get
it right, but the fall of the old Soviet Empire results in his work
getting shut down with the rest of many secret bio programs, and
forgotten.
In the aftermath of the Soviet fall,
with facilities looted, and the various death agents coldly sold for
profit, chance intervenes when certain canisters containing a still
viable store of the pure virus are found by an equally cold CIA
operative. An operative who see's not only great monetary gain from
what it can do, but as a means to leverage power far beyond what
money alone would provide.
Which brings us to the core of the
matter here. What this new variation of the dumbing down virus can
do. Quite simply it is two things: 1. It provides an absolutely
comprehensive healing mechanism throughout the body; one that allows
for the curing of all ailments and diseases, as well as prolonging
life to many centuries at the very least. 2. It also creates what the
books refer to as the “virtue effect.” An effect related to
putting all of the brain circuitry back into perfect working order.
And the upshot there is that this effect makes those who carry the
virus altruistic to a fault. So much so that even the thought of
doing harm, or taking advantage of others, makes the carrier quite
ill.
The question the books then pose is
this: would the powers that be see such a boon to human health, not
to mention social cohesion, as a positive thing, or a very
threatening thing, and the answer, as you might expect, is the
latter.
It is such a resounding recourse to the
latter, in fact, that a possible criticism one might have for the
series comes up. One could argue that it goes a bit overboard on how
broadly spread the greed and power aspect would be throughout
government at the highest levels. It is certainly a debatable point,
given the degree to which greed and power has taken hold of American
governance now. I would hope, however, that an immediate reaction
that would cause a President to nuke Los Angeles, or destroy a cruise
ship, simply because all the people therein were infected, would be
resisted to a considerably greater degree than what the books suggest
would happen.
That being said, though, still does not
change the bottom line in the contention that significant numbers of
powerful people would not want to have the current economic
arrangement taken away from them to the degree that such a
development would allow. And you needn't think too long, or deeply,
to see even the half of it.
The health care and pharmaceutical
industries alone are a big percentage of our GDP now and, as such,
significant profit centers. Forgetting for the moment that jobs are
also involved here (because they certainly are), if you took those
profits away you'd be taking a tremendous bite out what gives Big
Money its ability to have its way with how the “inequality of
outcomes” works. But that's just the beginning.
There are two other aspects to keep in
mind here. First is the mere fact of what having control over near
immortality would provide. Do you think the elites would let the
common folk have unfettered access to that? And the second aspect
would be the new found difficulty in not only corrupting folks in the
first place, but to be able to have minions do the harsh leg work of
enforcing the will of the selfish at all.
It does not paint a very pretty picture
of an economic mind set that would prefer institutionalized suffering
as opposed to change that would, quite certainly, be difficult to say
the least. But that admission also allows me to get back to the
question of “jobs” that I set aside a couple of paragraphs
before. It is here that one of the most disquieting aspects of
Capitalism comes to light.
Because it was originally based on the
idea that, since skill sets were not easily transferred, and that
production not easily moved across large distances, specialization in
labor, as well as regional specialization in the kinds of things
produced, made good sense. In league with these factors was the fact
that the increase in basic knowledge that would allow for wholly new
ways of doing things would also not happen that frequently. Change
happened, but it took time. Time that could help a great deal in
smoothing out the dislocations inherent with it.
Now that not only has the base of our
knowledge grown so spectacularly, but that we have virtually all
technique instantly transferable, most skills quickly retrievable,
and capital able to go where ever it wants to at the speed of light,
all of the above paragraph is no longer valid. Everything happens at
ever increasing rates. New developments. New ways to do things. And
certainly the machine tools, the robotic arms, and coded processes
that scores of secretaries, clerks, draftsmen, and book keepers, used
to do, don't care one wit about being reprogrammed for. Reprogramming
people, on the other hand, is a great deal more problematic.
The interesting thing in this is that
the one percent and less of us don't care nearly as much if a new way
to do things puts people out of jobs if it also comes with a new
profit center to replace what those jobs revolved around. For them
this gets characterized as the unavoidable consequence of
“innovation.” Propose a change, however, that takes away both
jobs and their profits and you have what is characterized as
“economic chaos.”
As a systems analyst I often find
myself asking the more fundamental questions. A lot of times in the
course of creating new, or reconfiguring existing, data processing
systems, you are confronted with a moment where you have to do what I
always used to call “doing a reality check.” This would entail
confronting an aspect of what was required in the new, or existing,
system that presented contradictory trade offs. A new system, for
instance, might be feasible (in terms of the ability to engineer) but
it would take years longer than was practical (often to the point
where things would already have changed to the point of demanding new
design requirements). Or the change in the existing system would
require ten times or more of the effort (both in original
programming, as well as the subsequent debugging) that a new system
would require.
When this occurred I would say to
management that we have to reassess all of our fundamental
assumptions. Either we need to look in a completely new way at the
system we wish to automate, and thus come up with a wholly new
paradigm for the design requirements, or the automation we already
have is so fundamentally out of whack with the operating environment
now in effect, we need to start over in evaluating what the new
environment does, and how it does it, so that completely new
requirements can be created, and for which an appropriate design to
address them can then be put together as well.
This is, in a nutshell, what we face
now with an electrified information environment. Jobs now cannot be
tied to livelihoods not only because human skill as a commodity makes
no sense any more, but also because what need produced, and how we
produce it, needs to be both infinitely more flexible, as well as
infinitely more integrated into society as a whole as to the making
of those decisions. Marketized commodities can't do it. The
collateral damage of the hyper consumption such an approach entails
ought to have made that more than abundantly clear by now. Each and
everyone of us, at the level of some kind of “City State,” needs
to be directly involved in both the management, and the maintenance
of production; sharing the output of basics so that each individual
can then choose to make their own end use items. I just don't see any
other way to do it.
We may not have now a medical
advancement so momentus as an “Eden Plague” virus at hand, but we
do have developments that match it in importance. So many natural,
and social, systems are nearing their breaking point precisely
because of the “contradictory tradeoffs” now required with either
doing nothing, or making changes in a fundamentally invalid economic
operating system. An unanswered “Reality Check” has been hovering
over us for quite some time now and we ignore it at the peril of our
species surviving at all much longer.
#CapitalisIsObsolete
