Ok, had some coffee now...lol
I started to study history, most especially Military History, when I was nine years old. [I'll be seventy this year] When I was seventeen I was out in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Organized students at my high school and we confronted the police, violently. [made for great post-demo sex lol]
The single Great Sociopolitical Lesson I learned with that was how classic National Socialist crowd control techniques worked seamlessly on Leftist art students. [I went to the old High School of Art & Design in NYC] With proper technique, The Herd is easily guided and controlled no matter how intelligent its individual members may be...and most people ain't that bright.
Many of us, myself included for a while, truly believed 'The Revolution was at hand'. What we got instead was Nixon, Reagan and finally Trump, plus Corporatist Apparatchiks like Clinton, Obama...and ofc Joe Biden. [Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter tho, he has remained a Good Man] And nearly all my Old Comrades became Capitalist Roaders, aka 'Yuppies'.
I was never a Communist, tho I used some of their rhetoric. Even as a teen it was easy to see that Stalin and Mao were homicidal psychopaths, that no Russian or Chinese workers 'owned the means of production' and the so-called 'communist states' were really Authoritarian State Capitalist.
Democracy works fine in small polities, maybe no more than five or ten thousand people. That is the maximum most Baseline Humans can handle. Beyond that, all the institutional mechanisms required to run a Modern Technological State outstrip the Baseline Human capacity to keep track them. After that, running things gets 'farmed out' and that's where Corruption starts to kick in. Once we get to millions of people, it is endemic and Democracy is more and more subsumed until we get to our present state, the Inverted Totalitarianism you so blithely dismissed.
Baseline Humans [me, thee and all we know] simply cannot make Mass Democracy work. Just look at how most of us deal with Accelerating Climate Change, which is likely to kill most if not all of us. Denial...Denial...Denial...Extinction.
That, more than anything else, led me to become a Transhumanist. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that The Rich and Powerful will be the main beneficiaries of the Genetic Engineering and Cybernetic Augmentation technologies that are being developed in this very moment. But maybe a workable form of Democracy will come out of these New Humans having a Cybernetic form of Telepathy where one can download all the information required directly into one's mind.
Of course, I have little doubt that a Genetically Engineered 'laboring class' of 'less than humans' will be created to serve these New Humans, controlled by brain implants and 'made happy with their lot'. We love having servants.
Because of our failure to deal with Accelerating Climate Change, these New Humans will have to live underground and in orbit for a while, centuries I expect. But I'm sure they'll adapt just fine. They'll still be 'humans' and we're like f'ing cockroaches. lol
Me, I live out in the desert with my 2nd wife and our many cats, which worked out quite nicely in The Time of Covid [a symptom of Accelerating Climate Change BTW]. I write and think and pass the time until I pass onto the next Turn of The Wheel.
You see, I'm [mostly] at the Acceptance Stage of Grief, while you seem to be somewhere in the Anger/Bargaining Stages. /sigh I suppose that's in part a function of age...
...and that's just about that.
See here:
https://nebris.tumblr.com/post/677383159172792320![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
