Sunday, October 2, 2011

Late Developments

The pre-History of The Wall Street Occupation Some 100,000-odd years ago our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, worked out a way of communication by abstract mouth-noises. This enabled us to cooperate at a much more sophisticated level than primates that use mouth-noises to express emotions, but it limited group life to a couple of dozen adults, and we developed by fissioning and moving away from one another. We organized ourselves by being equal-on-the-average with a hunting-chief who took more risks facing immediate problems and a shaman who solved chronic problems by facing death. That made them equal-on-the-average. When we invented agriculture (around 8,000 bce in the mideast) we could grow more than we could eat so we could have larger tribes and, eventually, cities. These infrastructures were run by a secular elite and a religious elite. The agricultural surplus allowed us to develop technology, but because the social structure contained an elite made civilizations unstable. In the 1500s Calvin invented a way for the middle classes to be upwardly mobile by the accumulation of money. This stimulated the invention of technology that was profitable. After the revolutions in America and France social evolution continued through various groups becoming elite. In the United States the elite was the slave-owning Planters until the Civil War, after which the elite were the northern industrialists. As they became decadent control was taken by the clerks and mechanics, who became the corporate bureaucrats. The government bureaucrats became powerful in World War One and were the ruling elite in the depression and World War Two. By 1950 the bureaucratic elite realized that if the certification of upward mobility continued to be conspicuous consumption there would be a scarcity of resources, so they had to do something. The easiest way appeared to be to reverse evolution by making the middle class downwardly mobile. That has been the secret policy of both the corporate and governmental bureaucratic elite from the mid-1900s to the present. The evolutionary pressure toward a new version of global equality-on-the-average has caused the bureaucratic elite to be more desperately open in their desire to make the middle and working classes downwardly mobile, and has made the middle and working classes more willing to participate in public demonstrations of their opposition to the tactics of the elite. The demonstrations in Wall Street have now spread throughout the United States and followed the "Arab Spring" with an "American Autumn". There may not be an immediate effect, but it will certainly affect the elections of 2012. People are normally afraid to do something out of the ordinary, but they will be much more willing to join an existing activity. The description of the theory behind social evolution and the history leading up to the current demonstrations can be downloaded from http://mayday.karleklund.net Karl Eklund karl@karleklund.net