You Don't Say 001...

 You Don't Say...  a new series of considered commentary inspired by quality journalism on contemporary subjects found floating through the digital universe.

Title: Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/new-deal-us-economy-american-dream/676051/

My reply:

Not a bad offering… particularly for The Atlantic… many pertinent points well taken, but as a “Why” explainer article I don’t see the last pieces of a full picture. There is a HUGE factor left utterly unmentioned, and it is a factor still very much in play today. It is an evolved factor, one mostly ignored in high places and misunderstood in low places. The demise of the United States economy is a consequence of the socio-economic evolution that went on everywhere on Planet Earth (as the planet was recovering from the Second World War) except… huge exception!… in the two champions of the Cold War!!!

The war is over, all our industries are beat to hell and gone… everyone is weary and weak… and we’re not sure those two idiots (US/USSR) are done fighting. The world as was. To survive that world where the United States was an oversize bumbling bully as a producer of consumer goods required the other industrial entities (working quietly beneath the rattling sabers of the cold war), to learn a cooperation never attempted before. Net result? The evolution of the Corporate Neo-Fascist, the current chapter of that organization being the second if not third generation  descendants of the leadership of the industrial coalition formed to compete with the post WW2 Americans!

Not according to Hoyle...

Murphy's Law
Chapter 2 Section 13:
Every job has at least one bitch bolt.

These... are not supposed to end up looking like this.  Very, very annoying when they end up looking like this.  I normally don't mind doing mechanic work, just one of many skills that poverty has inserted into my life.  But that's when things work like they're supposed to, when the fellow before you did it right.  When they get so stubborn that it takes a gross application of brute force to accomplish what should be a simple straightforward little task I do tend to get annoyed.   I don't like abusing my old hands and arms for several hours working an angle grinder up between the frame and the motor mounts to cut a heat seized nut off an exhaust manifold stud.  Just not the way it's supposed to work.  And all for the lack of a nickels worth of anti-seize.   You'd think the bright boys who design such things could have told the guys who make the studs to cast a nice 13mm hex where the little round divot thingy is so if it comes out of it's proper hole in the exhaust manifold (the one where you defend THOSE threads at all costs) while you were trying to unscrew the big nut you'd have something to get a serious wrench on to up the torque on the culprit threads, but no. That makes to much sense.  Oh, well.  Somewhere in purgatory there is a special place where engineers get to repair that which they designed... after it's been in service for a good long while out in the real world.  Ok... this completes this test of the idiot exposure system,  rant complete... back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Third Reality of Man Ch.11: Vorpal Blade Gone Galumphing

Swords are usually involved in grim things, matters of conflict, matters of war.  Not the happiest of subjects. The focus of the series has migrated into one of only a few realms commonly as grim as the reality of a sword: the realms of mental aberration and illness, the realms of insanity.  I'm not sure it is possible to speak about what is insane without sounding crazy.  Not like that's anything new around here, but still, this chapter is probably going to seem a bit off center even for me. Sorry, but at this point I'm afraid it's unavoidable.  Like Sarge said: "saddle up and stay sharp, we're movin' forward."

What brought the expedition to such scary terrain was realizing the possibility, approaching probability in many cases, that an awakening CE could be or would rapidly become vulnerable to the same sort of mental problems that afflict the individual humans upon which its' life is hosted.  Considered in light of the previously discussed circular and symbiotic relationships between the humans and the CE this presents a distinct problem.  

Such a group awakened as history had them positioned would be very much a community of  motherless children, feral children given the assumed nature of their  awakening, children in desperate need of being parented in point of fact.  One of evolutions major challenges, and certainly its' first survival test, is that each truly new thing… as self aware collective entities most assuredly would be, the technology to support their level of life is not half a century old… has no parent to teach it how to survive.

In this case where evolution has moved away from the chemistries of biology to work where the initial building blocks of the new life form are the tech-connected psych elements of the individual humans? The first element evolution would need to refine into some common level of compatibility would be the basic properties of its' new primary raw material.  Which, just for the record, would be the psychological structures and responses of you, and me.  You know, the places where you and I judge sane from crazy by habit as much as by thought.

Given the big picture of evolutions' rate of success and failure?  Light heartedly I'd say "therapist" should be a stable career field for the foreseeable future, even though that's a fool's optimism.  The parameters given assure us the shrinks will be every bit as crazy as their patients, quite possibly more so by today's standards. Shrinks present sanity as something  compliant with, if not defined by, the norms of society as much as anything and the conjecture here is the reference standard of sanity maintained by society gone dysfunctional  corrupt.

Gentle reader, these… are scary thoughts. Examine them at full potential in full perspective and they are easily seen as a fully terrible thought quite comparable to another terrible thought oft seen in the modern world: the idea of the ecosphere of Planet Earth shifting beyond what is survivable by the humans… whose activities were what caused the lethal change in the first place.