We're Entering An Economy Never Seen Before In Human History
We're Entering An Economy Never Seen Before In Human History
Three new factors mean vastly new (and worse) outcomes
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:9
There’s a well-known saying “by” Mark Twain (it was psychoanalyst Theodor Reik) that goes like this:
It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.
If there is one economic theme that has played itself on repeat for all of recorded human history, it’s that exploitation compounds.
Given enough time, powerful elites always amass exponentially more resources until civilization breaks, the poor revolt, millions die, and new societies are born.
I call it the Mammonomics Cycle.
No civilization has ever avoided the Mammonomics Cycle.
Ever.
Many techno-utopians think we are the magical exception.
They are wrong.
But not entirely.
Because we are, indeed, entering a new economic reality never seen before.
It could be the longest cycle of economic exploitation ever witnessed in human history.
Which is saying a lot:
Ancient Egypt endured for about 3,500 years
The Sumerian Empire lasted roughly 2,350 years
The Roman/Byzantine Empire endured for 1,123 years
The Republic of Venice endured around 1,100 years
The not-so-Holy Roman Empire endured for 1,000 years
Sharp readers will notice all the long-lasting civilizations had rigid hierarchical structures with strict social classes and were ruled by brutal monarchs, priests, and powerful elites.
The same goes for civilizations that didn’t quite make 1,000 years but lasted for more than 500 years — the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire, the Zhou (Chinese) Empire, etc.
All of the civilizations that lasted for centuries roughly functioned the same way — vast castes of serfs and slaves doing the actual work, ruled by rich tyrants who stole all the wealth.
Rule by the strongest.
This is fallen man’s “natural” form of social organization.
You and I have just been lucky enough to live in the aftermath of World War II, where, for the first time in human history, many countries were run not by tyrants, but by capable administrators.
Those days are obviously over.
Since the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher era of the late 1970s, you can trace humanity’s descent back into assetless serfdom by nearly every metric available.
Inflation? Soaring.
Real wages? Dropping.
Inequality? Doing awesome!
Assets? Monopolized by the top 1%.
Debt? Compounding rapidly.
Bankruptcies? Everywhere.
Homelessness? Skyrocketing.
Democracy? That would be nice.
99% of human history: Serfdom.
The forty years after WWII: Slightly less serfdom in certain countries.
But that blip is over.
We are poised to enter another empire of exploitation that will likely last for centuries or millennia — however long it takes to extinct the human species.
It’s called the corporatocracy.
Really, it’s just hyper-rich people weaponizing three new factors to achieve something truly new in human history:
Permanent dominance.
1. For the first time in documented history, the world is truly global.
Regimes in the past couldn’t physically take over the entire planet.
They didn’t even know most of it existed.
Now, Coca-Cola gets delivered to remote Honduran villages that don’t even have roads. (True story, I’ve been there.)
Friends, the era of nation-states is over.
Corporations can now sue nations.
Corporations can avoid being taxed by nations.
Corporations can lobby (bribe) politicians to get rid of regulations (people-protections) they don't like.
Corporations can sponsor entire political parties and entire political systems, ensuring they get tax breaks, protections for their monopolies, handouts and bailouts, and ink sweetheart deals like overpriced government contracts and buying public assets for dirt cheap.
Corporations want cheap labor and maximal demand, so they’ve all but done away with national borders, flooding Western nations with people with overwhelmingly anti-Western values. There is nothing citizens can do to stop them. Long-beloved cultures will cease to exist in the quest for shareholder profit. Corporate directors decide the fates of nations.
For the first time in history, elite-controlled corporations, not nations, are the new global superpowers.
2. Technology
Today’s technology is the ancient tyrant’s wet dream:
Imagine telling Caligula he could have a currency that he could create, control, surveil, and delete at any time.
Imagine telling Stalin he could compile a real-time database of every human on the planet.
Imagine telling Mao he could use cameras and speakers to recognize any human’s face or voice and use AI to read a person’s emotions via blood pressure, heart rate, and brain activity.
Imagine telling Hitler he could destroy individual enemies with economic de-personhood, cyberattacks, or autonomous drones.
But never mind all that.
Most importantly — and most powerfully — for the first time in history, elites are able to make the majority of human beings economically non-competitive.
Picture Jane…
Jane is 62 years old and has a high school degree from the early 1980s.
Due to poor education, economic conditions, and living in a nutritional desert called Middle America — all thanks to the corporatocracy’s thirst for profits — like half of Americans Jane is obese and on her way to having either dementia, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes.
Like 47.7% of the population, Jane has an IQ below 99.
She’s just been made redundant (fired) from her job at McDonald’s now that they have AI order-takers and robot burger flippers.
Are you excited about her future work prospects or terrified?
Historically, people with lower intelligence were about to find jobs thanks to the prevalence of extremely important manual jobs that required fewer cognitive skills, such as agriculture and manufacturing.
But every day, robots and artificial intelligence are gaining ground on what it means to be economically competitive.
In the past, we competed with 8 billion humans for jobs.
In the future, we’ll compete against 10 billion humans and an unlimited number of digital and physical machines.
When a piece of code or machinery can do your job (or parts of your job) for cheaper, you’re a goner.
Sure, our brave new world of tech will enable new jobs to be created, but they’ll require a much higher average intelligence.
Remember, half the world has an IQ below 100.
(The average person with a university degree has an IQ of 115, which tells you how truly non-competitive humanity is compared to what’s coming.)
In the future, jobs might only exist for those with doctorate levels of expertise.*
(*If you take the university route to achieve this, a lifetime of unbankruptable interest-bearing student debt is included.)
3. No resistance is unquellable
Contrary to Elon Musk’s Twitter fantasies, civil war in the United Kingdom is not inevitable.
In fact, it’s not even possible.
Same for America.
Canadians will not stop voting for their corporatist masters.
There will be no year-long general strike in any Western country.
There will be no nationwide riots.
No revolution.
No democracy.
In the past, when the elites pressed the French into serfdom, the poor chopped off the aristocracy’s heads.
When the British pressed Americans with taxation without representation, the Yanks sent them packing in a hail of bullets and cannon fire.
But what did Occupy Wall Street accomplish?
Literally nothing, except for hundreds of people now having criminal records.
The minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour.
True inflation has stolen over half the people’s purchasing power since 2011, with the price of everything more than doubling.
Americans are now in debt an extra $39.5 trillion — nearly double — since that 59-day protest against the banks.
Even violent revolution —which is never the answer — is no longer possible.
There is no revolt that cannot be put down.
No uprising is unquellable in the age of AI, facial recognition, militarized policing, super-computing, robot soldiers, drones, central bank digital currencies, and the digital internationally connected economy.
Even a multi-year global general strike like the Roman Secession of the Plebs wouldn’t do the trick, because the global economy is now so connected — and the masses of city people no longer own land to garden/farm to see them through — that it would just lead to mass starvation.
Protest? Arrest.
Resist? Imprisoned.
Revolt? Shot.
Strike? Starve.
For the first time in recorded history, the landless weaponless masses are collectively out-resourced and outgunned.
They have nowhere to turn.
Nowhere have I seen this so starkly as when I visited North Korea. Here is a nation of 26 million souls that is operated identically to an Antebellum slave plantation with the help of a few USSR-era rifles.
The Western decline will be different as the corporatocracy plunges the bottom 99% into assetless serfdom of all kinds:
debt-serfdom
rent-serfdom
gig-wage-serfdom
surge-priced subscription serfdom
Personal ownership will evaporate.
Technofeudalism will grind the real, productive, contributive economy to a halt.
The masses will struggle in silent poverty.
There will be no meaningful uprising.
Western nations will become so weak they will be destroyed, not by a giant invasion and land war, but by the simple and insidious nature of the very monster created by Western elites — by shareholder colonization.
Do China, the nation of Islam, and a handful of hyper-rich families really need to physically sack America if they can just buy all our assets and milk us for the remaining centuries instead?
Where does that leave the little guy?
For the first time in history, the entire globe is globally connected, technology is making the majority of humans economically non-competitive, and no resistance is unquellable.
What are our options when the hyper-elites can press the bottom 99% into permanent and perpetual assetless serfdom, where we all grind ourselves to dust just to stay fed, clothed, and sheltered?
We can’t afford to protest. We literally don’t have the spare money, and can’t risk the criminal record or jail time.
If we all general strike, the elites will just build more tech to do the work they need doing.
If the elites push us to the brink of starvation like they did the ancient French, revolution will be quelled with brutal robotic force.
Renewal and revival are the ONLY options available to us now.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a “Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.”
We need to do the same thing — and mean it.
The hyper-elites need to see that they are evil and then stop being evil.
The rest of society needs to see and stop their complicity in the colonizing system (namely — any participation in economic exploitation via interest, stocks, bonds, for-profit land-lording, or voting for any politician who protects these injustices.)
We need… wait for it… a great reset.
Not the kind of great reset the global elites want (where the world reverts back to its millennia-long standard of serfdom.)
A reset where humanity, especially the hyper-rich, realizes we’re stuck in a cycle of our own making.
A reset where we realize we are building an empire from which there is likely no end until the end of us.
Perhaps, with a renewal or revival of our elites and everyday people, we really can be the first in human history to break the Mammonomics Cycle.
Or will we be the last gasp, the final few generations to eat ourselves on this beautiful, terrifying, glorious, spinning planet?
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Watch Jared A. Brock’s documentaries about slavery and trafficking and read his myth-busting biography about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.
Very disconcerting and, I believe, almost all true. I've been wondering for some time where neoliberalism will eventually lead and I think you've nailed it!