Plutocracy Kills Progress

Why has innovation slowed down? It has everything to do with the rise of plutocracy beyond the reasonable, and the promotion of the Dark Side of human psychology, Hades, to the detriment of the Light Side, the Enlightenment of mind, science, and technology..


This is why I like mild inflation: it makes technological implementation more profitable, hence the whole research system behind it, more attractive.


It is also why the prize system for technological innovation is so good: many aviation pioneers went to their death to get prizes, pushing, to do so, weird new machines, with fantastically creative engineering.


Another factor in innovation, sorry to say, is the military, in the technological superiority tradition of the Athenians, Romans and Franks (instead of the brute force of the masses).


The first cars, in the eighteenth century, were actually enormous (steam powered) all terrain vehicles mandated by a French military program. So were the first planes to take off with an engine. So were the first metal monoplanes. All French military programs, and so was initially nuclear energy (Paris 1938, later morphed into the \"Manhattan project\", 1942). Radar (and thus microwave) was also a military program (in many countries simultaneously during WWII).


So what is going on now? Why is innovation dying? Because the USA went from a nation of bold engineers (1941) to a nation of despicable plutocrats (2011). And it has been contagious, at least throughout the West.


Whereas the emerging countries, such as the BRIC, made the correct analysis that the West's superiority was due to science, technology, and many of them, such as now many Arab countries, or India, or Brazil, and China or Russia, in part, from the superiority of the mind, hence communications.)


This is not exactly the first time this sort of devolution, the one affecting the West now, this sort of take over of the Dark Side, happens: it has happened again and again in history. It happened to Athens, it happened to Rome, and there were periodical bouts of it during the European Middle Ages. each time plutocracy took over.


In the case of Athens, the Athenian hyper rich colluded with the thoroughly fascist imperialist Macedonian plutocrats, to crush democracy, and thus science and philosophy.


I use here the concept of \"Pluto\" in its most general meaning, covering the entire Dark Side, not just wealth. But wealth is the greatest facilitator, as it can exploit the exponential growth interest provides with.


The plutocrats themselves are not stupid; they reign through stupidity. Their enemy is intelligence, hence new forms of thinking, hence what feeds them, new philosophy, new ethics, new science, new technology.


If a youth is smart, right now, she will do as Obama does, and extends the hand to plutocrats. And the plutocrats will fill that hand. Thus the smart go to the wolves. And the smartest, like Demosthenes, the philosopher who condemned Macedonia, they may as well swallow poison, before the state police grabs them, as Demosthenes did.




And what is taking poison with them is the highest and best of what makes the human spirit, and stagnation ensues. At best. At worst, great mayhem, as under the Nazis.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/