Appraisal: Well Done — Must Try Harder

Well Done!

Before: Traditional privileged elites looked with contempt on the masses—unwashed, uneducated, poor and unimportant—except to show deference, to be taxed and to fight the elites' wars of pride or plunder.

Now: The majority of people are fairly comfortable and enjoying their technologically sophisticated society built around the political institutions of Modes 1 through 4. Law, Commerce & Science have become sacrosanct social institutions.

  • Mode 1: Pluralist: Inequality still exists, but the populace has a sense of actual or potential equality, rather than feeling excluded by and inferior to a ruling class. Membership of various diverse associations of personal choosing leads to many more groups affecting government. Wealth is a new route to influence.
  • Mode 2: Legitimist: Basics are in place and accepted in principle: universal suffrage, equality under the law, rule of law, the importance of justice, use of law courts for disputes, commercial law dealing with contracts and property.
  • Mode 3: Individualist: Freedoms are valued. There is encouragement to become self-reliant by working hard and prospering. Effective access to markets allows genuine competition in many areas. Norms and laws foster enterprise and provide opportunity for most.
  • Mode 4: Rationalist: Regulatory authorities, quasi- autonomous public bodies, and government departments use scientific methods to analyse and deal with problems of all sorts: housing, health-care, energy, transport, pollution, communication. Public inquiries shift the balance of power away from submission to the crude will of powerful interests.

Must Try Harder!

What hasn’t changed?  The corrupting lust for wealth and power has not been tamed. The new elite classes—professional politicians, central bankers, regulatory officials, financiers—may manifest it differently or more discreetly. But the result is the same.

ClosedMedia Limitations in Plutocratic Pluralism

What is new? Society is now far wealthier, so the wealth and power of the political classes is now far greater than that commanded by the cultural elites of the past Society is also more complex and sophisticated, so wealth can be transferred easily from the poor to the rich. Instruments of surveillance and control are far more powerful.

Will truth dawn via the rationalist ethos?Closed Perhaps in theory, but not in practice. Vested interests work hand-in-hand with politicians to distort rational analyses and distract attention, so impeding the public good, and delaying implementation of solutions for many years.

Wait for It: Calamity Ahead

Societies at this watershed find that many solutions called for by rational analysis as adjusted by social consultation are not implemented at all, or only implemented half-heartedly at best due to the pressure from vested interests.
ClosedMore…

Politicians water down recommendations while vested interests follow the letter of the law and ignore its spirit. Big firms break the law because the financial penalty is trivial in comparison to the benefit obtained; or because the wealth and power of the firm overwhelms any complainant.

Sometimes it seems that the solutions are barely understood by those who must make them work. For these reasons and others, many otherwise highly-developed societies have festering sores that persist, despite all efforts.

Discomforts for most of the people or devastation of minorities are not enough to generate pressure for significant political development in any society. Festering sores do not lead to maturational change. What society unfortunately needs and must expect is a full-blown calamity.

The natural calamity following many decades in Plutocratic Pluralism-II would be a financial or economic collapse of massive proportions. This will be brought about by the «financialization» of society combined with the corruption-incompetence and disconnection of the political-financial elites.

ClosedWhy is crisis and maturation inevitable?

A crisis is inevitable because every time recession or depression threatens, the elites apply remedies that give them more power and more money—and the people less of both. Until eventually there is no remedy, and the myth that political leaders know what they are doing is debunked.  Read more.

When (not if) an economic calamity eventuates, people in the West must recognize:

  • that the economic crisis is actually a socio-political crisis;
  • that everyone shares responsibility for the crisis, because the people selected and elected politicians, knowing full well how they function.

Sooner or later, however, an educated people will be ready to recognize their own unique and particular responsibility for allowing and encouraging the political-financial elites to dupe them, remove many liberties, and steal their wealth and the wealth of their children.

Now that free enterprise is widely valued as an economic sine qua non in most societies, the far harder task of installing and tolerating a workable individualist ethos in former socialist states remains.

The problem is that in many of these countries, the legitimist mode is weak. As a result, the masses are unable to get protection through the law; the elite classes often violate the law and cooperate with gangsters; and basic services like education, health-care, sanitation and fresh water are poor or sparse.

Where free enterprise is introduced, perhaps via foreign multi-national corporations, side-effects and societal consequences are ignored by the political elites. Science exists, of course, and may even be very advanced in universities and institutes, but the rationalist mode has little impact on psychosocial malfunction.

Originally posted: July 2009; Last updated: 27 Mar 2014