Comment by nabla9
10 years ago
"civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people. What people need is hope and predictable outcomes from their personal efforts.
The Great Depression of 1929 struck America hard but Weimar Germany much harder. Incremental changes and hard work did not produce improvements. Life was uncertain and critical amount of people felt that life was unfair to them. They were ready to try stupid and unorthodox.
I find it unlikely that radical and stupid ideas alone can rock liberal democracies. They are always present. What is needed is personal uncertainty and fear of the future that resonates with the society.
> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.
Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.
And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.
Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.