Tag: History of the Revolution

Madame Guillotine

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The world is on the cusp of something great.  Artificial intelligence is poised to change the way we do everything.  And what I immediately think of is the introduction to a book.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” is about what happens when change is unleashed on the world without any provision for how it will impact human beings.  France was leaving behind feudalism and the Industrial Revolution was changing the way the rich and the poor related to each other.  Unfortunately, the nobles weren’t up to the challenge of managing the transition.  And so, they were swallowed up in the crash of the old system and it took Napoleon to build some kind of new foundation for France and much of Europe.

We may be in a similar place.  An old order is crumbling in the face of a technological and sociological upheaval.  We have an elite class that is definitely not up to the challenge.  Their lack of self-awareness and lack of empathy for their fellow countrymen has made them the object of anger and now hatred.  Maybe Trump and his successors can intervene and save the “nobles” from the guillotine.  Maybe not.

But what is undeniable is that the age of automation and thinking machines will fundamentally alter our society.  The only question is whether the people in charge have the wisdom to direct this transformation in a way that allows people to change along with it in a non-destructive arc.

After all, the machine age didn’t eliminate humanity.  It allowed incredible productivity and created whole new industries that the children of the former age could move into.  The same is true today.  Everyone has to adjust to tools like AI that constantly hector us with their algorithmic pestering about how we should set up our reports or Power Point slide deck or whatever the hell it is that they claim to know better than us.  But when push comes to shove it will still be humans that decide whether hemlines go up or down this season and whether thin or wide pinstripe suits stand for winning on Wall Street; even if it is the algorithm that picks the stocks.

But what worries me is that the elites really do feel that they alone are needed in this society.  We can see that from what went on the last few years.  Open borders were their ploy for flooding us out with third world peasants and then levelling us down to that status; serfs.  And the COVID fiasco was their demonstration of how unimportant we really are.  The whole country could be shut down but they were unaffected and our lives could be destroyed and we could dry up and blow away and it wouldn’t bother them one little bit.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot.  Our side has a chance to adapt the revolution to our needs.  Maybe it’s the best of times.

In Search of a Myth

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During the lifetime of the Greatest Generation the powers-that-be created a myth of what America was.  FDR and Hollywood and everything under their control built up a story of who we are and what makes us special.  And it was a beautiful story and it was poetry.  And that myth was good enough to help them survive a Great Depression, win a World War and create everything from atom bombs to the internet.  We were the good guys.  We stood for truth, justice and the American Way.  Sure, we had some ugliness and pain in our past and we hadn’t banished poverty and crime but we were working on it.  We had a war on poverty and a war on drugs and we believed in color blind justice and we loved everyone.

But somewhere around 1960 a new generation of elites decided we needed a new myth.  The grown-ups wouldn’t buy into it so they started selling it to the kids.  And it was a depressing story and it wasn’t going to fuel a bigger and better tomorrow.  In fact, it was a blueprint to demolish the American Way.  It was about murdering America and creating a world that would feed on the carcass.  And amazingly after sixty years of selling it this new myth is the reality.  And if you think I’m exaggerating just look through the headlines of the last few years.  The majority of young people believe that America is evil and the only way to fix things is to take away the freedoms and money of the people they don’t like and give it to the people they like.  And it’s happening in real time before our eyes.  I can’t imagine that we are going to convince these people that they’re wrong.  They believe their myth.  It’s what they grew up on and it’s very real for them.  And they’re not going to convince us.  So, we’re in a new world where two peoples are living together inside one political entity.  Somehow, we’ll have to separate.  That’s a long story and we’ve been talking endlessly how that will happen.  But one thing that we need is a new myth.

We can’t keep the old one.  They blew that one up.  They polluted it and destroyed its basis.  The people who defiled it are the descendants of the Pilgrims.  They invalidated their own ancestors to destroy our myth.  We have to write a new story.  We will have to take our parts in the original story and write out the usurpers.  We have to make their betrayal a central thread in this new tapestry.  Overcoming their treason and building something new and better is the purpose of what needs to be achieved and that will be how we come up with a new myth.  We need an inspirational story of who we are and what makes us special.  And we’ll have to see who will be the heroes of this epic.  We know that Donald Trump will be in it.  He’ll be like one of the earliest chapters.  He’ll be like Samuel Adams or Thomas Paine.  Maybe Ron DeSantis will be there too.  And Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be in the story too.  They’ll play the part of Benedict Arnold or some other traitor.  And since Google and Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Silicon Valley boys are silencing voices on our side of the fence maybe our myth will be recorded on websites like this that haven’t been silenced by the powers-that-be.

A lot of people will say that myths aren’t a thing anymore.  That people in the information age work with facts.  A lot of people would be wrong.  All we have are myths nowadays.  Reality is manufactured in newsrooms, government agencies and corporate offices.  The truth can be censored or photoshopped into anything or nothing.  We need to create our own truth.  It needs to be something that nourishes our souls.  It needs to be what will help us survive Antifa, BLM, anti-white hate, equity, diversity, inclusion, LGBTQ nonsense, transgender madness and a hundred other things that the other myth is using to destroy us.  So, with no disrespect to Thomas Paine, consider this to be my daily dose of “Common Sense.”