The Classless Society + Machines
Please note, this is a freewrite where I am merely putting my thoughts down in writing as they come, focused on a particular topic. It's a way for me to explore a train of thought without actually committing myself to any of it.
There are a lot of secrets in this world that are held by a few at the bottom. Oh, they would prefer you to say that they exist at the top, but the truth is they are actually at the bottom, in the dark, in the underbelly of society, like engineers on a ship. These are the ruling class. The elites. The people in society that never have a Job, but rather a position and a title, and access to enormous resources and wealth.
The world has always consisted of two classes of people: The working class and the ruling class. Throughout time, the way in which the ruling class present themselves changes, always out of sync with the working class. For example in the middle ages the wealthy ate junk food and the poor ate extremely healthy. Today, the wealthy eat healthy and the poor eat junk food. Oddly enough, what was once called junk food is now referred to as health food. Funny how time warps our sense of reality. I think today we have it right as to what is actually healthy or not, but it really makes you wonder sometimes. Are the experts smarter, or is the bullshit more believable today than it used to be?
The ruling class is to the entire human population, as the brain cells in your head are to your entire body. In your body, there are also blood cells which are like the doctors and cooks and plumbers and couriers, and there are white blood cells that are like the police and soldiers and lawyers and judges that root out and deal with anything that harms the body. There are many different parts of the body that work together, but ultimately they all work under the central nervous system that connects everything in the body to the brain.
In society there are many different parts of the brain that work independently from each other. Sometimes a country will elect an idiot as their President, like a football player getting too many concussions. But, globally we're all under a single brain that operates with precision in our modern connected world. The internet has turned a slow moving global hegemony into a fast moving hydra that cannot be destroyed. Media and politicians alike stage a show to distract the plebs and pit them against each other, as though one side will lose their lives if they don't fight, programmed from childhood to be combative about their beliefs and world views.
The cycle of wealth is the only thing that connects the ruling class and the working class, the lords and the serfs.
Consider what a currency is. It isn't even money, because money is a store of wealth, while a currency is merely a vehicle to trade things of value, like a reserve currency for the people where every other thing that holds value can be traded for it, much like how countries of the world trade currencies, goods and services through the US Dollar.
Your currency can be traded for food, technology, a new car or a loaf of bread, your currency (Dollar, Euro, Yuan, etc) stores value temporarily, just like a capacitor holds a charge of energy that gets smaller over time if it isn't used. Inflation of the currency strips the value of the currency that you hold, and transfers it back to the original issuer.
The cycle that I allude to refers to the amount of labor and other time-dependent work that is needed in order to achieve a goal set out by the ruling class. If the Pharaoh wants a pyramid built, then the leaders need to figure out how much manpower is needed to gather the materials, how much food and lodging will be needed to sustain the workers, how much entertainment and luxury the workers will need to remain happy, and also in what manner all the materials will need to be assembled or combined to achieve the goal.
This is the secret to understanding the ruling class. They have goals, they need workers to achieve these goals, and they must figure out how to keep the workers happy and productive until that goal is achieved. In ancient times they built churches and monuments, but today we build everything. From youth you are told to get a job, get an education, get an career. All these things serve to help the ruling class achieve their goals.
But not is all roses and sunshine.
Imagine that one day one of the rulers has a bright idea to get the workers to build machines that will eventually replace the workers. Robots, machines, computers, you name it. Any task that requires a worker can instead be completed by an automated and/or artificially intelligent system.
Hmm, that's all well and good for the ruling class, but what happens to the working class? You know, the majority of human beings that believe they're supposed to be fruitful and multiply for some divine purpose (and not because the ruling class need more manpower)?
Obviously some of us will still be needed to maintain the machines and act as an audience for the vain rulers, but what about the rest of us? Is there any reason why we can't maintain our current world population?
One answer says that nothing will change, except that scientific achievement will be performed by machines and a lucky member of the ruling class will always take credit for it. Another answer says that the ruling class will initiate global war, famine, plague and death to wipe out most of us because we're expensive to maintain, especially since we are no longer the best choice for getting a task completed. Our increasing numbers no longer just pose a risk to the ruling class, but we're also a risk to the environment that keeps us all alive. We pollute, consume, pollute some more, and then dumbly grumble about carbon taxes like we're actually that intelligent to know more than the experts.
It seems that the hive mind of the human race is responding to this new reality in some ways. Young people are no longer feeling as pressed to have children, knowing intuitively from the core of one's being that the global population needs to stop growing because the historical growth chart is starting to look parabolic, and if we don't then it will mean certain war between nations in order to procure resources and reduce numbers. That is life at its most basic function: survival by any means necessary.
The youth of today subconsciously know somehow, maybe because the ruling class are pushing this message into the zeitgeist, or maybe because we are a product of our environment and our environment is signaling to move towards conservation. Whether its conservation of the environment or conservation of life itself, a large portion of the human race are feeling burned out, and that may be in large part because the ruling class are growing impatient. The economy is an illusion, created to trick people into believing that work is what you do when you're not on vacation, rather than vacation being what you normally do when you're not doing that insane thing called "working."
consider that there is more than enough food in the world for everyone, even with the crappy year we've had for crops around the world. In fact, there are more than enough resources everywhere to go around, to the point where every last person in the world could be living in luxury. But that doesn't make good workers, and until every last job is automated, workers are going to be pushed further and further without appropriate pay, all so they can earn enough money to keep going for another week or two before they get their next paycheque.
The human mind and body are not conditioned for year-long continuous labor. It is completely unnatural. We are a product of a world that has seasons, where you make hay while the sun shines, and relax in front of the fire when the snow is on the ground. That is the natural human state that our minds and bodies have been conditioned for over countless millennia.
So, whether we are collectively kicked into a planet-wide battle royal by the ruling class or not, the robots taking our jobs isn't actually a bad thing in the long run as eventually the two classes will become humans entirely in the ruling class, and machines entirely in the working class. That sounds really cold and empty when I write it like that, but at its core our reality is just that, and we ourselves add in all the emotions and meaning, or the ruling class do through entertainment and propaganda, just so that we are willing to work a little longer towards a goal that is going to replace us.
I think we can find a way to usher in the new era of a worker-less society, without needing to resort to war or rapid depopulation. I believe it's possible, but given just how mindless we've become as societies due to the propaganda and entertainment that was needed to keep us production on a mass scale, I sometimes wonder if much of the population can transition peacefully, given just how brainwashed we've all become. One of my favorite movies is Dark City, because it touches on this very topic of programming a society to conform over and over again to suit the goals of the rulers. It shares similar concepts as The Matrix, and was released around the same time, but much more on the weird and mystical side.
That does it for now, I will have to go back and read to see if any of that made any sense, but I think it does.
Thanks for reading.
