On Industry, Iniquity and War
(New Communications Technologies May Bequeath Bloody Political Turmoil for the same reason that the late industrial revolution made the first half of the 20th Century a Dungeon of Death.)
By David Gottfried
The explosive growth of communications technologies may induce wars, atrocities and global annihilations for the same reason that the late industrial revolution made Europe, in the first half of the 20th century, a charnel house of metastasizing cemeteries.
In the first third of the twentieth century, many men, in their 40’s and 50’s, realized that they were too young to retire but too old to adapt to the plethora of new technologies that were running roughshod over the populace. Most men did not work with their heads (we had not yet suffered a world in which every other moderately literate spoiled brat thought he was a poet or had something to say); they worked with their hands. And working with one’s hands now often involved working with electricity and cars and engines, and if one’s roots were in the horse and buggy era, the new accoutrements of the 20th century were too much to master, even if they were not too intellectually challenging, because they were such a stark and unforgiving culture shock to what one had known.
For example, after the first locomotive trains went into use, some people, upon seeing large railroads for the first time, got heart attacks and died. Huge railroads were so much larger, noisier, blacker. faster, bigger and dirtier than everything that had preceded them. They made a carriage driven by four large horses seem as meek as a cat with four furry legs. The belching smoke suggested fires as hot as Hades.
In any event, the millions of men who were too young to retire, and too old to adjust to the turmoil of the new workplace, seethed, and they bequeathed all manner of political turmoil and kindled a yearning for the bloodiest politics Mars could mete out.
Today, many men have been displaced by modern communications technologies. It is not simply that learning something new may be daunting. To a large extent, I think the new technologies have an ambience or nauseating aura that we find repulsive.
If one is a man over the age of 40, one remembers a time when men were taught to be strong. This did not mean, as many feminists would say, being a male chauvinist pig. I am talking about the masculine sensibility that made men freeze to death in the waters of the North Atlantic, while women were given lifeboats, because they somehow believed that every woman was more deserving of life than every man.
When one is taught to believe in being strong, the very idea of sending a tweet, or participating in twitter, seems girlish and frivolous. Little birdies go “tweet, tweet, tweet.” When men want to build something, they build New York or London or the stockyards of Chicago. When men want to rebel and raise the red flag of communism, they have thrown Molotov cocktails and made very starry nights. But when the scions of suburban affluence and decadence have something to say, they tweet.
Also, instead of using real words, they use all manner of symbols which to me do not symbolize anything. (My vision is poor and I have always been a bit visually insensitive). The smiling and smirking little graphics seem to be the very essence of equivocation and fearfulness and is another way in which they are antithetical to the lessons older men learned in their youth. The graphics seem equivocal because they say something, but they say it softly as those graphics are very tiny, do not say what they have to say with words, and only suggest what they mean to say as if they don’t have the balls to say it in an explicit, declarative +sentence.
Also, these older men are spat upon by the liberal elites. Consider the sort of repartee that dominates the snotty and chic halls of the New York Times:
“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
— Sarah Jeong, newly appointed editorial board member, the New York Times
Source:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/white-privilege-debate-elizabeth-warren/
Sarah Jeong was not fired, was not chastised and was not censored by the New York Times. By contrast, if I had said that when I confront maskless and menacing black men, screaming at the top of their lungs, I sometimes think they are enormous, animated feces, I would be thrown in a prison to be a source of Schadenfreude for black hoods.
The New York Times and its sister organs of neo liberalism consider themselves humane and benevolent and, when feeling cheerful, are apt to say Allah is G-d and Thomas Friedman is his prophet.
But for all their compassion and goodness learned in Harvard and other institutions where liberals hone their sarcasm, sadism and unbridled egotism, they have, at root, the sensibilities of the British Aristocrats who obtained Schadenfreude from the Irish starving in the famine and the English poor wasting away in poor houses.
Just as the ruling elites of Europe did not give a damn about the industrial proletariat, and finally were forced to pay for their indifference with revolutions from both the left and the right, the neo liberal bastards of today will pay in much the same way, and the Trump rioters were but an appetizer in the vomitous meal the world governments may be slated to consume.
Have a hearty meal.