So...I'm not going to lie, I've been thinking about this one for most of the year, as the dark enlightenment movement has reared its ugly head within the Trump administration, and also as I write my book and reflect on what society really is, and how it is essentially a playground for billionaires at the expense of the rest of us, but someone in the basic income community recently posted this article titled "they want us dead." It's about how as AI eliminates jobs, there will be no UBI. There will be no salvation for the working class. If anything, the wealthy will want to cull the population. While I can't see the future with a crystal ball, unfortunately, I think that this is actually correct, and it's why we're seeing these authoritarian moves from the tech billionaire community a la Elon Musk and Peter Thiel now in the 2020s.
For most of society, the wealthy have indirectly run and controlled it. It's not QUITE always just this shadowy group of billionaires conspiracists talk about, but let's face it, American democracy is completely controlled by the billionaire class, and it's the entire reason why we've seen society go in the direction we've seen it go in since 2016. The democrats, controlled by billionaires, pushed the party toward Clinton and away from Sanders. On the republican side, I don't think people care either way, as all of them serve their interests. Point is, the donor class controls the politics and the politics reflects the choices of the billionaire class.
Now, the billionaire class is not united, as I said in my own article recently on billionaires being evil or not, I don't think it's fair to paint an entire social class with one broad brush like that and there is room for nuance. But I've heard it said recently that modern politics is a debate between oligarchs and corporatists, and how they're two different factions among the billionaire class who have different visions for the future of the country. The oligarchs want some form of neo feudalism where we do away with any pretense of bourgeois democracy and just have the corporations rule directly. We see this with the trump administration, and with the dark enlightenment influences within it. However, the democrats are run more by the corporatists who want something closer to the same crappy status quo, warts and all. And society is in a fight with these two groups representing the American political binary, while any working class or humanist vision is pushed to the periphery because guess what? We don't have money. It's like being kids watching mom and dad fighting and not liking either because both are abusive jerks, but preferring mom because dad is somehow even more psychopathic than mom. And that's where we are.
But...here's the thing. If we take this dark enlightenment thing to its rational ends, they are really scary. I mean, they ARE true psychopaths, and I dont think we realize how psychopathic we are. All in all, for most of human history, population growth has been a net positive, and it's been heavily encouraged. It means more workers, more soldiers, more wealth, more power for the society, with most of that wealth going toward the top with the billionaires. But....we're coming to a point where perhaps a large population is a negative for the wealthy. It may eventually represent more mouths to feed, with no return on investment. And what happens to a farm when the farm is no longer profitable? The animals are all slaughtered. That's what. And we're their livestock. We even see this in a sense when economists use strange terms like "human capital stock", which came up not too long ago in economic debates when inflation raged.
Now, I doubt that the wealthy would necessarily directly KILL us all holocaust style, although they might. Rather, what they're likely to do is to just...let us die. As the jobs dry up from AI, rather than giving us UBI, which they see as "maintaining the farm" to paraphrase something said in the article, they'll just let us fend for ourselves. We already see what happens when the capitalists cant profit off of people overseas in places like Africa. They just let them die, which is why that part of the world is so F-ed up. We enslaved them for hundreds of years, robbed them of their natural resources, and now the current situation of mass political instability and poverty over there comes when we, the first world countries leave. And it's possible that may come here. Capitalism has always been like this. Imperialism has always been the sharper end of the stick but I do want to remind people when capitalism rolled out 200-250ish years ago, that oppression was seen on the home front. I've been doing a lot of research on these topics for a book I'm writing and uh...JESUS it gets dark. We basically enslaved the world to this capitalist system based on jobs and work, and we created a social darwinist hellscape where we are all wage slaves. And now the democrats, the corporatists want to maintain that system forever, while the oligarchs see the technological future in a similar way as I do, a world without work, but rather than share the wealth and give it to everyone, they would rather let everyone but them starve and NOT share.
Honestly, I think this is why, with the trump administration, the oligarchs are making their move in trying to move us toward autocracy. Ya know, that unholy alliance between Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, the tech billionaires, and the Trump administration and how this alignment seems dedicated to dismantling democracy? I believe they're doing this to prepare for the future.
In coming decades, as jobs continue to dry up and this dark final solution of theirs rears its ugly head, we may see mass uprisings. That happens when people don't have enough food to eat. They also fear democratic reprisals from the people, as when this sorta stuff happens (see the great depression), we see mass political realignments that tend to support some left populist perspective. However, the wealthy REALLY don't want left populists taking power. It's why they've been fighting those of us who have already awakened to this stuff so strongly, and suppressing our movements from gaining mainstream appeal (again, referring to the bernie movement, the yang movement, etc.). If anything, it's always been a fear. The wealthy who control society fear the people. They tolerate democracy when they can control the outcome, but what they fear are people waking up, voting in their interests, and voting to redistribute their wealth, so they're making moves now to take that democracy away from us and consolidate power under their rule. That way when the crap hits the fan and mass protests come, they can use the state's monopoly on force to put them down.
Btw, on a side note, this societal control by the billionaire class is the reason why all this propaganda about "hard work" and all this nonsense about how all wealth needs to be tied to work in an ironclad way is so prevalent. It's why we talk about this american dream where if you can work hard, you can make it. This dogma of hard work serves as the justification for the current wealth distribution, and why we all have to work all the time. The argument is that the billionaires earned their wealth, the poor are lazy and deserve their poverty, and if they want to not be poor, they need to git gud at capitalism. And because society works just well enough for enough people, most average people are rather reactionary themselves and are more riled up about some poor person on welfare than some guy with the wealth of hundreds of thousands of average people.
As such, our society's debate is becoming shaped between the corporatists who will continue to preach this dogma of jobs, and the oligarchs, who know it's all BS, and basically are preparing to cull the poor when the time is right. I really think that's where we're at in society.
To me, I find this sickening. I mean, I'm a humanist, and I do believe in democracy, rule of the people, enlightenment principles, FREEDOM. And a debate between de facto slavery and death does NOT suit me at all. As such, I will continue to advocate for my own ideals, one that seek to liberate humanity from servitude, and to redistribute the wealth to the masses. I believe that's what the future SHOULD be. And I believe it would have organically gone that way had the billionaires not meddled with our elections. But again, they beat bernie, they beat yang, and here we are, debating between feckless democrats advocating for the same crappy status quo no one wants, and the fascist trump administration who is popular and populist, but in the long term is literally the wolf in sheep's clothing, and even then, their sheep costume is so fake anyone should see it but half our population are literal simpletons on political issues, so here we are.
Scary stuff, isn't it? But yes, I did want to comment on this article, give my thoughts, and, sadly, agree with it.
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