Graydon
@alessandro @cstross the new ruling class wants to delegitimize all sources of authority which are not THEIR sources of authority.
Because they're an alliance of cults (there's no distinction of mechanism between a grift and a cult and most people don't have the philosophical tools to think about this at all), they're really against facts, democracy, or letting outsiders exist. Standard cult. (which is a primate band formation hack.) It's not just unity it's uniformity.
Graydon
@alessandro @cstross the other thing which by and large and on the whole people will not think about is that democracy arises from rifle regiments in the 19th century; you HAVE to let the majority of the male population in on the good thing because you need them to mobilize to be a Power or Great Power. This runs ~1860 to 1915; from 1915 to about 1970, you need industrial mobilization to be a credible Power, so not rifles but rather similar. (And all politics remembers breaking empires.)
Charlie Stross
@graydon @alessandro A secondary factor: the spread of multimodal container freight, which cut intercontinental transport costs by about 98% circa 1960-1980. Imperialism—in the Marxian sense—relies on maintaining distance between raw materials/capital-intensive production/consumption. That distance has now imploded. The only natural scale for an economy to function on today is global, which means the oligarchs require a global hegemony in order to avoid "domestic" threats.
Graydon
@alessandro @cstross Today the very rich are determined to exalt themselves free of any need for their fellows to rule without constraint.
It won't work; it is not able to work. But they are determined to have their selfish god and be told that all their sins are virtues.
"All my sins are virtues" is relatively cheap in blood when it starts; you could have changed history, and thus our present, with 20 deaths in the 70s. Restoring a policy of facts will be more expensive than that today.
Charlie Stross
@graydon @alessandro Gross planetary product is roughly $80Tn/year; a scale that dwarfs Elon Musk's riches (Musk is worth < 72 hours of planetary product). They probably feel helpless before a juggernaut, so they apply reflexes/ habits learned on a much smaller scale that are now inappropriate or counterproductive.
Graydon
@cstross @alessandro one consequence of "natural scale is global" is that no one has even the theory of a control mechanism.
The folks with the billions, just like they are intensely aware of what climate change is doing (if they want to get the real data they can), are intensely aware that they don't know what's going on. It frightens them for materially well-supported reasons.
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