One thing I notice on a lot of dissident right sites is an obsession with the idea that immigration must be stopped and that every other issue needs to be either put on the back burner or even entirely abandoned in order to focus on immigration. I think this is a mistaken view. I want to emphasise that this does not mean that I don’t think the immigration issue is important. It is vitally important. I simply don’t think that fighting on that one issue is a viable strategy. I’ll try to explain why I think this way.
The most crucial thing to understand is that politics really is downstream of culture. The state of the culture determines whether a particular political fight is winnable or not, in the current circumstances. At this point in time I don’t think the political fight on immigration is winnable. It could become winnable but that will necessitate at least some degree of cultural change.
The immigration debate cannot be won right now for several reasons. These reasons apply in the US, in Britain, in Australia and in western Europe, to varying degrees.
The first reason is that many people, possibly even a majority, simply do not see immigration as a major problem. The communities devastated by diversity are mostly poorer communities. Upper class and upper middle class people have not been affected. Even lower middle class people have, to a large extent, escaped the worst effects. Since people generally have difficulty in understanding the concept of long-term consequences those who have not so far been affected still believe they never will be.
Secondly, most people are still more concerned about social conformity than immigration. The social consequences to the individual of opposing immigration (accusations of racism, possible loss of jobs, social harassment) seem to outweigh the social consequences of immigration for the nation as a whole.
Thirdly, most people still buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration - without immigration economic growth would slow down and nothing could possibly be worse than having a slight slowdown in GDP growth.
Fourthly, the elites are still absolutely united in their determination to push immigration.
So what changes need to be made to the culture? Firstly the idea that GDP is the one and only measure of national well-being needs to be attacked. People need to be persuaded that there’s more to life than having the latest smartphone. Secondly, the whole basis of liberalism has to be attacked.
The most dangerous delusion is that you can accept liberalism on social issues and still successfully oppose immigration. You can’t. If for example you accept the liberal argument on abortion then it’s impossible not to accept the liberal position on all other social issues. If individual choice (even extending as far as the choice to kill your baby) is all that matters then how exactly are you going to oppose the principle that individuals should have the choice to live wherever they want to live? Including the choice to live in your country rather than their own?
You can’t use the argument that by exercising that choice they are infringing other people’s rights. You’ve already accepted that a woman’s right to choose is sacred, even if it means killing her baby (which is about as big an infringement of someone’s else rights that can be imagined). You can’t use the argument that immigration has social consequences, since you’ve already accepted the principle that only the individual’s wishes matter. It’s the same with all other social issues. If you accept that people can choose their own gender you can’t very well argue that they can’t choose where to live.
If you accept that the individual is all that matters then society as such doesn’t exist (this was in fact the position taken by the right-wing liberal Margaret Thatcher). If we’re nothing but individuals pursuing pleasure and our own interests then borders must inevitably come to be seen as unnecessary, oppressive and harmful.
Interestingly enough you can oppose immigration from a left-wing perspective, if you drop the internationalism. In fact if you’re seriously left-wing you have to abandon internationalism anyway - it’s impossible to maintain a welfare state or anything approaching a command economy if you have open borders. So a communist can, quite logically and coherently, be opposed to immigration but a liberal cannot. This is not an argument in favour of communism, merely an observation.
The bottom line is that if you accept liberalism you will get open borders. If you oppose open borders you must oppose liberalism. And the fight against liberalism is the fight that really matters. It’s the fight that must be won.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
is the USA already post-Christian?
One of the more astonishing phenomena of our times is the speed at which the United States is becoming a post-Christian nation.
Of course Christianity has been declining throughout the West for at least a couple of centuries. The decline has however been a gradual one. Until three decades ago it seemed like the United States was bucking the overall trend. In the 1980s the Religious Right still had immense political clout and this was based on the fact that conservative Christians (especially Evangelical Christians) really did form an enormous voting bloc. They had power and that power was based on numbers.
Since the 80s it seems to have been all downhill, at a very rapid pace.
It’s worth taking a look at Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Study. They did two very extensive surveys seven years apart, in 2007 and 2014. In that short time span the percentage of the American population identifying as Christians fell from 78% to 71%. It was not just a relative decline - the absolute numbers fell from 178 million to 173 million.
Mainline Protestants fell from 41 to 36 million. Evangelical Christians are holding their own in terms of absolute numbers but declining as a share of the population. Catholics have declined in both absolute and relative terms.
And this is in just seven years.
If you’re a Christian there are other even more disturbing trends in the survey. The number of people identifying as out-and-out atheists has jumped sharply. These are people who are not merely irreligious, but anti-religion. And the decline in Christian belief has been most dramatic among Millennials, and most dramatic of all among the younger Millennials.
Of course there are always problems with surveys such as this. If the US was still 71% Christian then everything that has happened in the past thirty years would have been impossible and incomprehensible. Obviously the vast majority of those who identify as Christian for the purpose of surveys are not Christian in any meaningful sense. That has almost certainly been the case for at least a century. The difficulty is to estimate how many of these people are genuine believers who actually practise their religion and it’s a formidable difficulty. It would also be useful to know not just how many supposed Christians are merely nominal Christians but how this compares to other religions.
It’s also possible that being a Christian doesn’t mean what it used to mean. We’ve seen the hierarchies of most churches become more and more liberal and secular in outlook but does this apply to the ordinary rank-and-file church members? While I would suspect that most members of the rank and file are considerably less liberal than their leaders I would also suspect that they are a lot more liberal than the general run of church-goers half a century ago. If the latter is true then the prospects for any genuine revival of Christianity are grim.
It’s also worth noting that the churches that have tried hardest to survive by compromising with liberalism are the ones that are dying out most quickly. I have very mixed feelings about the Evangelicals but they do seem to be doing significantly better than the other Christian churches.
There’s another interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this. There was a popular idea a while back that Christianity would survive simply because Christians have more children than secularists. That idea is clearly completely wrong. Christians almost certainly are having more children but a very large proportion of those children end up being secular liberals. This is a subject I addressed a while back in my post conservative delusions - the War of the Cradle.
Of course Christianity has been declining throughout the West for at least a couple of centuries. The decline has however been a gradual one. Until three decades ago it seemed like the United States was bucking the overall trend. In the 1980s the Religious Right still had immense political clout and this was based on the fact that conservative Christians (especially Evangelical Christians) really did form an enormous voting bloc. They had power and that power was based on numbers.
Since the 80s it seems to have been all downhill, at a very rapid pace.
It’s worth taking a look at Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Study. They did two very extensive surveys seven years apart, in 2007 and 2014. In that short time span the percentage of the American population identifying as Christians fell from 78% to 71%. It was not just a relative decline - the absolute numbers fell from 178 million to 173 million.
Mainline Protestants fell from 41 to 36 million. Evangelical Christians are holding their own in terms of absolute numbers but declining as a share of the population. Catholics have declined in both absolute and relative terms.
And this is in just seven years.
If you’re a Christian there are other even more disturbing trends in the survey. The number of people identifying as out-and-out atheists has jumped sharply. These are people who are not merely irreligious, but anti-religion. And the decline in Christian belief has been most dramatic among Millennials, and most dramatic of all among the younger Millennials.
Of course there are always problems with surveys such as this. If the US was still 71% Christian then everything that has happened in the past thirty years would have been impossible and incomprehensible. Obviously the vast majority of those who identify as Christian for the purpose of surveys are not Christian in any meaningful sense. That has almost certainly been the case for at least a century. The difficulty is to estimate how many of these people are genuine believers who actually practise their religion and it’s a formidable difficulty. It would also be useful to know not just how many supposed Christians are merely nominal Christians but how this compares to other religions.
It’s also possible that being a Christian doesn’t mean what it used to mean. We’ve seen the hierarchies of most churches become more and more liberal and secular in outlook but does this apply to the ordinary rank-and-file church members? While I would suspect that most members of the rank and file are considerably less liberal than their leaders I would also suspect that they are a lot more liberal than the general run of church-goers half a century ago. If the latter is true then the prospects for any genuine revival of Christianity are grim.
It’s also worth noting that the churches that have tried hardest to survive by compromising with liberalism are the ones that are dying out most quickly. I have very mixed feelings about the Evangelicals but they do seem to be doing significantly better than the other Christian churches.
There’s another interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this. There was a popular idea a while back that Christianity would survive simply because Christians have more children than secularists. That idea is clearly completely wrong. Christians almost certainly are having more children but a very large proportion of those children end up being secular liberals. This is a subject I addressed a while back in my post conservative delusions - the War of the Cradle.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
the new class struggle - the same but different
I’m going to start this post with a quote from a couple of feminists.
It’s amazing how the actions of the elites often seem incomprehensible and even self-defeating until you start to consider the part played by class interests. Then it all becomes crystal clear.
Now don’t panic, I’m not going to start recycling tired old Marxist arguments. Marx was wrong about almost everything. On the other hand, Marx’s errors notwithstanding, class struggle is a very real thing. It’s just that class warfare isn’t capitalists versus workers. It’s more complicated than that.
In fact even at the time Marx was writing, in England, there was a different kind of class warfare happening. It was a struggle between the old elite, with wealth based on land, and the new industrial elites whose wealth was based on money. And another intra-elite class struggle would soon develop, between the industrial capitalists and the financial capitalists.
In the 20th century yet another would-be elite start jockeying for power and influence, a class of intellectuals, journalists, media moguls, career politicians and senior bureaucrats. And more recently we have seen the emergence of another elite, the Silicon Valley elite.
There is however one thing that unites and always has united all these elites - they all hate and fear the non-elites. They hate the poor and what remains of the working class of course, but they also hate and fear the moderately affluent lower middle classes. They hate and fear everybody who does not belong to the elite. As far as the elites are concerned the only reason for non-elite people to exist is to prove cheap labour and docile consumers. They need the non-elites but they are determined to keep them in their place. The soft totalitarianism of modern society, feminism, identity politics, mass immigration - these are all ways to achieve that aim of keeping the non-elites powerless, divided and demoralised.
Once a society abandons traditional values and traditional ways of life and embraces liberalism then class warfare becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. The intra-elite class struggles can be fairly vicious but the class war of the elites against the non-elites will always be merciless.
“Feminists Teresa Amott and Hester Eisenstein, writing separate studies, both came to the conclusion that feminism is largely a means for corporate America to ‘remain competitive’ by lowering labor costs. Further, Eisenstein adds that the weakening of unions was a part of this. Male-dominated unions both kept wages high and controlled the labor pool for an industry. Breaking the unions meant that more part-time and new female workers (let alone immigrants) can move into an industry, drastically cutting labor costs. It was a diabolically brilliant idea that was based on crass self-interest while able to pose as the most selfless of idealisms.
Teresa Amott notes: Hiring women was a central part of the corporate strategy to restore profitability because women were not only cheaper than men, but were also less likely to be organized into unions and more willing to accept temporary work and no benefits.”
It’s amazing how the actions of the elites often seem incomprehensible and even self-defeating until you start to consider the part played by class interests. Then it all becomes crystal clear.
Now don’t panic, I’m not going to start recycling tired old Marxist arguments. Marx was wrong about almost everything. On the other hand, Marx’s errors notwithstanding, class struggle is a very real thing. It’s just that class warfare isn’t capitalists versus workers. It’s more complicated than that.
In fact even at the time Marx was writing, in England, there was a different kind of class warfare happening. It was a struggle between the old elite, with wealth based on land, and the new industrial elites whose wealth was based on money. And another intra-elite class struggle would soon develop, between the industrial capitalists and the financial capitalists.
In the 20th century yet another would-be elite start jockeying for power and influence, a class of intellectuals, journalists, media moguls, career politicians and senior bureaucrats. And more recently we have seen the emergence of another elite, the Silicon Valley elite.
There is however one thing that unites and always has united all these elites - they all hate and fear the non-elites. They hate the poor and what remains of the working class of course, but they also hate and fear the moderately affluent lower middle classes. They hate and fear everybody who does not belong to the elite. As far as the elites are concerned the only reason for non-elite people to exist is to prove cheap labour and docile consumers. They need the non-elites but they are determined to keep them in their place. The soft totalitarianism of modern society, feminism, identity politics, mass immigration - these are all ways to achieve that aim of keeping the non-elites powerless, divided and demoralised.
Once a society abandons traditional values and traditional ways of life and embraces liberalism then class warfare becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. The intra-elite class struggles can be fairly vicious but the class war of the elites against the non-elites will always be merciless.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Catholic converts vs cradle Catholics
There’s an interesting post at A Political Refugee From the Global Village, Anthony Burgess on Catholic converts, on Catholic converts vs cradle Catholics. I’m not a Catholic so I’m not really in a position to have any kind of dogmatic opinion on this subject. I was intrigued though by the suggestion that cradle Catholics tended to react to Vatican II by shrugging their shoulders and accepting it, while Catholic converts like Evelyn Waugh saw it as an unmitigated disaster.
My instincts tell me that the Catholic converts were probably correct in this case.
Converts do seem to be generally speaking more zealous than those raised in a particular creed, whether that creed is a religion or a political ideology. Converts to communism back in the pre-World War 2 period tended to be very extreme, sometimes even to the extent of becoming Soviet spies. Were they more zealous than the so-called “red diaper” babies of the postwar period, who absorbed communism with their mother’s milk? I’m not quite sure.
Converts to cults and fads (such as veganism) are of course usually very gung-ho.
And social justice warriors are often converted to the cause at university so that might explain some of their fanaticism.
The various dissident right groups (alt-right, neo-reactionaries, whatever) are of course comprised entirely of converts, which might have interesting consequences.
Getting back to religion, perhaps one reason for the weakness of modern Christianity is that it’s just not making converts on a large scale any longer. Perhaps a religion needs the zeal of converts to keep it vital and alive?
My instincts tell me that the Catholic converts were probably correct in this case.
Converts do seem to be generally speaking more zealous than those raised in a particular creed, whether that creed is a religion or a political ideology. Converts to communism back in the pre-World War 2 period tended to be very extreme, sometimes even to the extent of becoming Soviet spies. Were they more zealous than the so-called “red diaper” babies of the postwar period, who absorbed communism with their mother’s milk? I’m not quite sure.
Converts to cults and fads (such as veganism) are of course usually very gung-ho.
And social justice warriors are often converted to the cause at university so that might explain some of their fanaticism.
The various dissident right groups (alt-right, neo-reactionaries, whatever) are of course comprised entirely of converts, which might have interesting consequences.
Getting back to religion, perhaps one reason for the weakness of modern Christianity is that it’s just not making converts on a large scale any longer. Perhaps a religion needs the zeal of converts to keep it vital and alive?
Saturday, January 20, 2018
the dangers of IQ fetishism
I occasionally read various HBD blogs and I’m always bemused by the IQ fetishism. Now I’m not denying that IQ is important and I think it is likely that genetics is the major (but not sole) factor in determining a person’s IQ. I just don’t think it’s as all-important as the HBD crowd thinks.
On such blogs you will always find commenters solemnly intoning the mantra that only a high IQ population can create and maintain a functional society. Now it’s certainly true that high IQ populations have been quite successful in building functional societies. Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia are obvious examples. The problem is that once they’ve built those functional societies high IQ people seem to be overcome by an overwhelming desire to destroy them.
So what is going on? My personal belief is that part of the explanation is that that IQ tests do measure something real but the quality that they measure is only a component of overall intelligence but not the totality. To be a “smart” person requires more than just IQ. Unfortunately the other components of “smartness” are not easily measurable. Those other components include what is usually referred to as common sense. And there is not necessarily a correlation between IQ and common sense.
There’s also the problem that a high IQ can be an actual disadvantage. It seems to make people more inclined to believe things based on theory rather than experience, and often to believe things based on fanciful theories that make no actual sense.
The other part of the explanation is that maintaining functional societies requires a lot more than just being smart. An instinct for self-preservation is necessary. Some degree of self-confidence is required as well. For a society to survive the members of that society have to believe that they have a right to survive and that their society is worth preserving.
Some moral sense is required. Without that moral sense civilisation soon declines into decadence. The family decays. Degeneracy becomes more and more the norm. Society rots from within.
It’s unfortunate that these other very necessary qualities do not seem to be at all well correlated with high IQ. In some cases there may well be a negative correlation.
When you look at countries like Sweden, Germany, the United States and Britain (all countries bent on self-destruction) it becomes painfully obvious that high IQ is not much help in maintaining functional societies in the long term. Japan, with an average IQ slightly higher than those countries, seems to be much less interested in destroying itself. On the other hand Taiwan, with about the same average IQ as Japan, seems to be enthusiastically embarking on a program of national self-destruction. Russia, with average IQ comparable to the US, seems to have very little interest in destroying itself.
China’s average IQ seems to be roughly equal to that of Japan and they have no interest whatsoever in national suicide.
When it comes to national survival IQ does not seem to be terribly important.
On such blogs you will always find commenters solemnly intoning the mantra that only a high IQ population can create and maintain a functional society. Now it’s certainly true that high IQ populations have been quite successful in building functional societies. Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia are obvious examples. The problem is that once they’ve built those functional societies high IQ people seem to be overcome by an overwhelming desire to destroy them.
So what is going on? My personal belief is that part of the explanation is that that IQ tests do measure something real but the quality that they measure is only a component of overall intelligence but not the totality. To be a “smart” person requires more than just IQ. Unfortunately the other components of “smartness” are not easily measurable. Those other components include what is usually referred to as common sense. And there is not necessarily a correlation between IQ and common sense.
There’s also the problem that a high IQ can be an actual disadvantage. It seems to make people more inclined to believe things based on theory rather than experience, and often to believe things based on fanciful theories that make no actual sense.
The other part of the explanation is that maintaining functional societies requires a lot more than just being smart. An instinct for self-preservation is necessary. Some degree of self-confidence is required as well. For a society to survive the members of that society have to believe that they have a right to survive and that their society is worth preserving.
Some moral sense is required. Without that moral sense civilisation soon declines into decadence. The family decays. Degeneracy becomes more and more the norm. Society rots from within.
It’s unfortunate that these other very necessary qualities do not seem to be at all well correlated with high IQ. In some cases there may well be a negative correlation.
When you look at countries like Sweden, Germany, the United States and Britain (all countries bent on self-destruction) it becomes painfully obvious that high IQ is not much help in maintaining functional societies in the long term. Japan, with an average IQ slightly higher than those countries, seems to be much less interested in destroying itself. On the other hand Taiwan, with about the same average IQ as Japan, seems to be enthusiastically embarking on a program of national self-destruction. Russia, with average IQ comparable to the US, seems to have very little interest in destroying itself.
China’s average IQ seems to be roughly equal to that of Japan and they have no interest whatsoever in national suicide.
When it comes to national survival IQ does not seem to be terribly important.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
the rise of SJWism in eastern Europe
There’s a very interesting recent piece by Anatoly Karlin at Unz Review, Poland Will Legalize Gay Marriage Within 10 Years.
He argues that SJWism already has an almost unstoppable momentum in Poland and indeed in most of eastern Europe (but not in Russia).
I fear that he is almost certainly correct. American popular culture is a poison to which white people seem to have no resistance. And of course there are also the deliberate nation-wrecking policies of western NGOs and the western media.
American popular culture has been the biggest single factor contributing to the destruction of western Europe and of countries such as Canada and Australia. American popular culture is pure evil. All of it. It’s not just the overt SJW propaganda contained in Hollywood movies, American television, pop music, etc.. It’s more basic than that. It’s the promotion of a materialistic, hedonistic consumerist worldview.
Some social conservatives like to imagine that Poland will have some immunity to this due to the supposed strength of Polish Catholicism. Anatoly points out that the facts do not support this belief. The sad truth is that organised Christianity is now part of the problem. It is part of the globalist/SJW axis of evil. I personally incline to the view that it’s an inherent weakness in Christianity. Christianity’s universalism makes Christians particularly susceptible to the siren call of globalism, and Christianity’s basic touchy-feely obsession with the virtues of niceness makes it almost impossible for Christians to resist the lure of Social Justice.
It’s clearly much too late to save western Europe, so what can be done to save eastern Europe? Anatoly suggests that the promotion of cultural anti-Americanism is essential. I agree entirely. The problem is, how can such a thing be done?
Russia has resisted because the American desire to destroy Russian civilisation and Russian society is so painfully obvious. The Americans also intend to destroy all eastern European societies but this is not yet quite so obvious to Poles, Czechs and other eastern Europeans.
It’s probably not too late to save Australia but it soon will be. And while the promotion of cultural anti-Americanism is the only way we can save ourselves it is difficult to see any prospects of this happening.
One of the chief difficulties is of course the fact that Americans are not evil people. They are in fact quite pleasant people on the whole. American culture is however a different matter. The old American culture, the one that generations of Americans cherished, has been destroyed. Those who currently control American culture hate ordinary Americans with a burning passion. They hate the old American culture and the old American values. Ordinary Americans and the culture they cherished were the first targets of the new American elites. It’s the US cultural establishment that is the problem.
Being anti-American culture is very different from being anti-American. Being anti-American culture is necessary for survival but there’s a lot of money behind the US cultural establishment.
He argues that SJWism already has an almost unstoppable momentum in Poland and indeed in most of eastern Europe (but not in Russia).
I fear that he is almost certainly correct. American popular culture is a poison to which white people seem to have no resistance. And of course there are also the deliberate nation-wrecking policies of western NGOs and the western media.
American popular culture has been the biggest single factor contributing to the destruction of western Europe and of countries such as Canada and Australia. American popular culture is pure evil. All of it. It’s not just the overt SJW propaganda contained in Hollywood movies, American television, pop music, etc.. It’s more basic than that. It’s the promotion of a materialistic, hedonistic consumerist worldview.
Some social conservatives like to imagine that Poland will have some immunity to this due to the supposed strength of Polish Catholicism. Anatoly points out that the facts do not support this belief. The sad truth is that organised Christianity is now part of the problem. It is part of the globalist/SJW axis of evil. I personally incline to the view that it’s an inherent weakness in Christianity. Christianity’s universalism makes Christians particularly susceptible to the siren call of globalism, and Christianity’s basic touchy-feely obsession with the virtues of niceness makes it almost impossible for Christians to resist the lure of Social Justice.
It’s clearly much too late to save western Europe, so what can be done to save eastern Europe? Anatoly suggests that the promotion of cultural anti-Americanism is essential. I agree entirely. The problem is, how can such a thing be done?
Russia has resisted because the American desire to destroy Russian civilisation and Russian society is so painfully obvious. The Americans also intend to destroy all eastern European societies but this is not yet quite so obvious to Poles, Czechs and other eastern Europeans.
It’s probably not too late to save Australia but it soon will be. And while the promotion of cultural anti-Americanism is the only way we can save ourselves it is difficult to see any prospects of this happening.
One of the chief difficulties is of course the fact that Americans are not evil people. They are in fact quite pleasant people on the whole. American culture is however a different matter. The old American culture, the one that generations of Americans cherished, has been destroyed. Those who currently control American culture hate ordinary Americans with a burning passion. They hate the old American culture and the old American values. Ordinary Americans and the culture they cherished were the first targets of the new American elites. It’s the US cultural establishment that is the problem.
Being anti-American culture is very different from being anti-American. Being anti-American culture is necessary for survival but there’s a lot of money behind the US cultural establishment.
Monday, January 8, 2018
economic apartheid
What is the future for the West? It seems to me that it’s more and more likely to be apartheid. Not racial apartheid, but economic apartheid.
It’s not just that the gap between the elites and the non-elites is widening. There’s also the elephant in the room, by which I mean automation. Now people have been saying for decades that automation is going to have grim consequences. It already has. Countless jobs have disappeared. That’s nothing compared to what we can look forward to in the next twenty years or so.
Of course there are other factors that are going to make the problem worse, immigration and outsourcing being the obvious ones.
There are going to be more and more people with no prospect of decent employment. No prospect of well-paid or meaningful employment. What exactly are the elites going to do with all these people?
Most will exist on welfare. They will still have some usefulness for the elites as consumers.
It is quite likely that the elites will want to employ more and more people as domestic servants. At the moment they prefer immigrants for this because they can pay them less. Pretty soon that won’t be a problem. They’ll be able to pay pleasingly low wages to anybody seeking such work, immigrant or not.
We may even see people forced into domestic service as part of “work for the dole” schemes. A very attractive proposition for the elites - they get servants at rock-bottom prices plus they get the pleasure of humiliating those forced to do such work. The media will applaud such schemes.
Of course the non-elites will be increasingly dissatisfied but that’s not going to be a problem. The elites will be living in well-guarded compounds. The non-elites will be confined to townships where they can’t cause any trouble. They can easily be bussed to the elite compounds to perform their menial chores and then bussed back to the townships at night.
Economic apartheid seems to be the best description for such a future.
But it won’t be so bad for the non-elites. They’ll be given enough money to buy cheap smartphones so they’ll still be able to access social media, there’ll still be lots of porn on the internet and superhero movies in the theatres. They’ll be happy with that.
It’s not just that the gap between the elites and the non-elites is widening. There’s also the elephant in the room, by which I mean automation. Now people have been saying for decades that automation is going to have grim consequences. It already has. Countless jobs have disappeared. That’s nothing compared to what we can look forward to in the next twenty years or so.
Of course there are other factors that are going to make the problem worse, immigration and outsourcing being the obvious ones.
There are going to be more and more people with no prospect of decent employment. No prospect of well-paid or meaningful employment. What exactly are the elites going to do with all these people?
Most will exist on welfare. They will still have some usefulness for the elites as consumers.
It is quite likely that the elites will want to employ more and more people as domestic servants. At the moment they prefer immigrants for this because they can pay them less. Pretty soon that won’t be a problem. They’ll be able to pay pleasingly low wages to anybody seeking such work, immigrant or not.
We may even see people forced into domestic service as part of “work for the dole” schemes. A very attractive proposition for the elites - they get servants at rock-bottom prices plus they get the pleasure of humiliating those forced to do such work. The media will applaud such schemes.
Of course the non-elites will be increasingly dissatisfied but that’s not going to be a problem. The elites will be living in well-guarded compounds. The non-elites will be confined to townships where they can’t cause any trouble. They can easily be bussed to the elite compounds to perform their menial chores and then bussed back to the townships at night.
Economic apartheid seems to be the best description for such a future.
But it won’t be so bad for the non-elites. They’ll be given enough money to buy cheap smartphones so they’ll still be able to access social media, there’ll still be lots of porn on the internet and superhero movies in the theatres. They’ll be happy with that.
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