Uncanny Predictions Sealed Our Fate

Nikola Tesla didn't invent techno-hype.  That had been going on for generations, picking up tempo when railways first linked communities, spanned continents and spawned electronic communications.  But his astonishing  predictions, captured in the pages of Colliers magazine in 1926 were perhaps the most accurate of any.

What Tesla and his colleague Hugo Gernsback energized after the  first world war, others inflated into a cultural tsunami, with the proliferation of consumer-based economics and the explosion of mass media after WWll.

Most of Tesla's followers were less accurate, even careless.  But their purpose wasn't to be prescient. They filled the print  media and the airwaves with predictions to generate demand for consumer goods.  They succeeded beyond their own fertile imaginations, driving economic growth and prosperity throughout the 20th Century.

Industrialists and businessmen soon realized the potential of future-hype.  Their zeal propelled the advertising industry to unprecedented heights.  It created the futurist  movement, when they began to worry  that the engines of commerce were producing a population saturated with choice.

Only now are we beginning to understand the real cost  of expectations inflated by decades of  hype. Crippling consumer debt has collided with income inequality to create a middle class only now waking up to the fact that economic growth doesn't follow some trickle-down theory.

This new reality may  have played a role in Justin Trudeau's election victory October 19.  It is now certainly being played out in the U.S. primaries, where voters are  ready  to choose any option as long as they believe they aren't being duped.    

           

Falsehoods and Faery Dust

Here's an insightful look at how North Americans have come to understand 'the big lie' that  we can all share in trickle-down economics.  As a result, both Republicans and Democrats are shifting their support from establishment candidates.

Populism is in political vogue here too.  Justin Trudeau's Liberals enjoy 70 per cent support  from Canadians -- for the moment.  But a day of reckoning is at hand.

If the U.S. elects another wingnut as President, the disappointment and  the self-induced chaos will tear apart the fabric of America.  If Trudeau finance minister Bill Morneau can't find the right balance in his first  budget ... if Justin can't forego the selfies and faery dust act ...  if he can't at least look like he's paying attention to the balance sheet, Liberal fortunes will begin a downward slide that may not end until the next election.

But  for the moment, it's worth reflecting on how we got  here.    

Justin's Faery Dust Dims

It's somehow fitting that our new prime minister is tying Canada's future to the "fourth industrial revolution" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week.

Klaus Schwab in 2012

Just four years ago Davos co-founder Klaus Schwab astonished observers with his keynote remarks at the opening of the 2012 gathering of world political leaders and businessmen.  At the time, we posted a blog item that we called a placeholder in the Conversation of a Generation.  That was because we frankly didn't  know what to make of Professor Schwab's assertions that capitalism, in its present form, has outlived its usefulness.

The professor's analysis came on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement that caused people to question the sustainability of the gulf opening up between the economically disadvantaged and the crony capitalists who are killing their own golden goose one big slice at a time.

This time Justin Trudeau is the keynote speaker, an acknowledgement of his miraculous political upset of Stephen Harper only three months ago.  With the global economy sliding toward the brink of the unknown,  organizers undoubtedly felt that some boosterism might help. 

 Trudeau rose to the occasion  with the pitch that "My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources.  I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness."

Neil Nails It

It took CBC correspondent Neil Macdonald to rein in this show horse: "prime ministers have to cheerlead; they all do. But Trudeau's ... happy talk is beginning to sound a bit detached from certain realties that the unimaginably important heavy-hitters in Davos are probably quite aware of".

In other words, enough of the faery dust already. When Trudeau gets back on Canadian terra firma there are real issues to be addressed with more than incantations of diversity, cooperation and inclusivity.  It's time we had more to tell our partners in counter-terrorism who didn't invite Canada to the NATO conference on that subject this week.  Provinces and municipalities deserve a better sense of how the government plans to deliver its infrastructure commitments than Trudeau's standard reminder of how many 'just  folks'  he listened to while he was wandering in the political wilderness as leader of the third party.   

Leave it to Neil to state  the obvious:  "... we must all have internalized that there is value in diversity, and that we must work together as Canadians, and that we are an incredible, wonderful, virtuous place."

"We also have problems, though. Time to get at them, no?"

Is Gravity on Justin's Side?

The Occupy movement may have fizzled out early in this decade.  But this writer in The Atlantic argues that by launching 'income inequality' onto the public agenda, Occupy activists have helped to shift the political center of gravity to the left.  An interesting thesis with at  least as much evidence as forecasting the demise of the 'Laurentian Elites'.  Recent ballot box evidence seems to favor the analysis advanced by The Atlantic's

Are North American leaders going with the flow?

Peter Beinart, who goes on to say that police violence against  blacks has produced another tectonic shift to the left in the U.S.

Only time will tell whether the newly refreshed Trudeau Liberals were rewarded for extinguishing the dark political arts of Stephen Harper or whether they're onto something bigger.  If you follow the writer's argument, Justin Trudeau may be in the vanguard of a continental drift to the left.





    

Let Sunny Ways Occupy Us

Justin is in the house

A thoughtful deconstruction of the Occupy movement from 2011 reveals the confusion that keeps people from meaningful political action.  This insider's account of what caused the Wall Street movement to fade away isn't so surprising.  Newcomers to social activism often shun the tools that allow dissenters to disrupt the status quo.  It also wasn't astonishing that it happened in the U.S., where the republic's usual mechanisms are so tightly seized.

Since October 19 our own form of parliamentary democracy has shown it still has the flexibility to break the grip of the vested interests.  Working within the parliamentary framework that Winston Churchill called the worst form of government except for all the others, the new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has declared that it will use the parliament itself to consult Canadians on how to reform their first-past-the-post electoral system.  The self-interested are already starting to howl.  Like their recently-deposed leader so often did, they would rather dump the conventions that  have sustained this nation through war, depression and existential crisis.

Improbable as the new Trudeau mantra may be, it offers possibilities for change. Until somebody conceives of a better system, it makes no sense to abandon the procedures that history has bestowed.  But if tweaking can make them work better -- that is, to respect principles of democracy that vest power in  the  majority instead of  a privileged few -- why not support it?.  

          

A Season for Seeking

Oliver Boldizar appears to have had a remarkable life, to be sure.  I wonder who’s going  to document it.  Seems like his journey was designed as a lesson for others in the consumer-crazed and unsustainable society  that  we inhabit.  I had a nephew who broke the mortal bonds on his 33rd birthday in despair over the life he was living.  Although  he only left home for a year in rehab, he couldn’t come to terms with his existence in a culture that celebrated inane behavior and worshipped consumption.  In the end, his vital organs gave out too. 

Oh, and compliments of the season to you.  Increasingly, I’m with the reactionaries who want to strip the pretext of religiosity out of Xmas.  But there should always be a time to step off the treadmill and think about what we’re doing.

Citizen of the World

The environmental movement has been around since the early 1970s, more or less thanks to Maurice Strong.  Thousands of people have subscribed to its principles.  But Strong was the towering figure who transformed principle into action.  From  the beginning, Strong understood the extent of the threat from carbon emissions.  He also understood that nothing would be accomplished unless the environment and the economy were managed together, in a balanced and coordinated way.   And he gave effect to his  beliefs not from the head of a line of demonstrators, but as chairman of some of the most powerful energy industry leaders. The  point was, THEY had the power to make changes.  NOT the demonstrators, who could only pressure them to act.  Strong also understood that traditionally, politicians follow public  opinion.  They  don’t lead.  So, after one aborted attempt to run for office, he never aspired to political office again. 

There has been a disinformation campaign under way for many years, initiated by people who want to debunk environmental leaders like Al Gore and David Suzuki.  The criticism is usually that they have  profited personally from their preaching.  Because Strong has centered his efforts for the last  30 years or so around a think tank based in the West he has also been dismissed as an elitist, new age kook.  But Strong also understood that one answer to climate change is innovation.  Not more innovative consumer products so much as new ways of thinking by people with the power and influence to organize societies to act sustainably. 

Like Pierre Trudeau, Maurice Strong was a Canadian who became a Citizen of the World before that phrase was coined.  In a way, Justin Trudeau’s introduction to the world stage in Paris this week closes a circle that his father and Maurice Strong helped to create.  As a middleweight nation, Canada isn’t going to solve this problem single-handedly.  But we can show others the way with a credibility that warring superpowers have long since surrendered.  If they’re successful, I believe it will be people inspired by the likes of Maurice Strong who will make it happen

We're Back!

Hi there folks -- family, friends and fellow skeptics.  So you've had a break from my perpetual pestering.  Well that's all  over now.  It's been three years since I went missing from this forum to discover the true meaning of press freedom in  this new information age.  Thanks to some personal experience with the online news media, I've discovered it means working for nothing.  If I'm going to do that, I'll publish my own views.

According to today's contribution from the  CBC's Ideas series that may be a good thing.    Hard as it is for an old ink-stained wretch to accept, I understand the point that  writer Paul  Mason has made in his latest book entitled Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future  If you think that idea is too much to swallow, have a listen. It will only take a few minutes and I promise you it won't hurt.  What WILL hurt  is continuing to live with  this unsustainable system that rewards greed and ignores all other reality.

Oh, and by the way, if you're among those who cringe every time you've heard that "We're Back" since October 19,  that too is a good thing.

Of Pygmies and Giants

Nearly a year after the Occupy movement burnt itself out there's reason to believe that its message may be getting through.  The rejection of Romney's bankrupt economics by voters from the 99 per cent cohort gives one pause to think that America could come to its senses again some day.  But Obama will need to be a great president to pull it off and there's little evidence he can rise to the challenge.  After all, he too is a product of his own experience.  And in today's America, vested interests seem to be pulling too many of the strings.  If this assessment seems harsh, click on the link for a slice of American culture that lays it bare.  The fact that somebody can still bring this message to air is one of the few reasons to believe that the situation could ever improve.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7lKNjtvfpc

The Bless-ed Generation

 

By Phil Gibson

 My maternal grandmother was a holy person.  Not in the Mother Theresa sense of the word, but in the small town, churchy way of mid-century Ontario where religion still played a large part in peoples’ everyday lives.  Although her usually unsmiling, thin-lipped appearance made her seem more severe than she ever was with me, she was seldom quick to anger.  But when her thin face reddened, the only expletive I ever heard her use was “bless-ed”, as in: “… that bless-ed delivery man didn’t leave any milk again!”  The milkman wasn’t blessed in the clerical sense.  He would have been damned for his oversight if she had allowed herself to use the word.  But she was a product of her upbringing – one in which restraint, respect and community were paramount.  Instead, with the simple pause and the emphasis on the first syllable, Nana turned an otherwise sanctified phrase into a useful expression of her ire. 

 If she had lived to see what we have wrought, the boomer generation would have earned the same gentle condemnation as she reserved for the milkman.  While she never saw wrong in anything I did, she didn’t know all of it.  If she had been around for the great reckoning, she might have turned a phrase or two of disapproval with some of the excesses.  Instead, she went to her grave believing that the world was now safe from the Hun and that the good lord would look after the rest.  She would not have imagined how kids who could exhaust their baser instincts chasing frogs all day in the creek could come to believe they needed much more out of life.  She would not have understood how an acquisitive nature would one day supplant the simple virtues that she and her community had instilled in them and tried to instil in us.

Raising Uber-consumers

It is received wisdom nowadays that it takes a village to raise a child.  Well I was raised in a post-agrarian community, where doors were never locked because nobody had much to steal, and people greeted each other by name on the main street.  I knew I could have anything I needed by going to a neighbour’s door and asking for it.  Our expectations were so limited at that early stage of life that it would never occur to us to ask for more.  But by the time our generation was out of our teens, things were different.  Unlimited access to the trappings of postwar industrialism, fuelled by low energy costs and mass marketing, had unleashed the űber-consumer in all of us.   I often wonder if it takes a village to raise someone who turns out like that, is there any limit to what a whole city can do? 

Our generation was blessed in so many ways it’s hard to count them.  When my parents celebrated their 60^thwedding anniversary, I thanked them for bringing us into a world of such promise that it gave us the confidence to experiment with our future.  Bracketed by the Great Depression and the Second World War, their own youthful lives permitted no such freedom.  They took pleasure in simple things, like home and family and weekend escapes to the rural backdrop of their own upbringing.  They also paid the daily price of a psychological burden, knowing how easily their lives could be disrupted again. 

 Their experience produced two people who could wear adversity like a comfortable old coat.  They had a tolerance for things that would have sent weaker souls into a tailspin.  They also had, if not a joyless existence, a gritty aura of forbearance about them that dampened enthusiasms while it armed them against hardship.  Theirs was not a singular experience, but rather the continuation of an ageless way of life shared by the less advantaged in every era.  Lived within its boundaries, this existential homestead left you with the sense that heightened expectations could be more trouble than they’re worth.      

Engines of Hope

 That was not common to everyone.  The result of putting war-time deprivation behind them  was a mindset of optimism among the post-war generations that may never have been equalled in all of history.  The Second World War was played out on such a wide scale that it marked the existence of human beings everywhere.  The engines of war-time devastation required such ingenuity in design, production and distribution that they drove an unprecedented postwar economic boom in Europe, the Americas and many parts of Asia.  Rather than draining away all youthful verve, the war caused an explosion of demand and a juggernaut of productivity that has been with us ever since.  .             

On an historic scale, it’s hard to imagine a similar experience.  Since the Middle Ages, when everyone was impoverished, the underclasses have been downtrodden in every way.  Not until the revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries did the masses get to fondle the golden ring.  The First World War produced a splurge of optimism throughout the 1920s that was nearly extinguished by the Great Depression.  Not until the middle of the 20^th century was prosperity broadly available.  Then mass communications, in the shape of the ubiquitous TV screen, sparked an explosion of expectations to match all the output of the industrial age. 

 Against the ensuing backdrop of my own charmed life, the deathbed admission by my father was stark.  He was muttering weakly to himself when I entered his hospital room on one of our last visits … something about seeing that “the kids” were taken care of.  My next eldest sister and I were in our sixties at the time, with decades of experience fending for ourselves. 

 Then this whispered declaration caught my attention:  “Mother was never happy,” he said, with a resigned shrug. 

 ‘Why?’ I asked, less surprised than riveted by his sad admission.  I couldn’t help intruding on the privacy that his semi-consciousness afforded him. 

 “Because she never had the things in life she thought she should,” said Dad. 

 Then, without prodding, he added in the same feeble vein:  “I was never happy”. 

 “Why,” I asked again. 

 “I guess because I never was the man I thought I should be,” he concluded with another shrug.

 Revelations like this were occasional during the long period of my parents’ decline.  They came as no great surprise to anyone who knew the secrets of their lives together. 

 Contrary to Dad’s perception, Mother wasn’t any more motivated by things than many of her generation who survived Depression and war-time uncertainties.  She emerged from the experience with a homemaker’s pride of place and a healthy appreciation for what she had.  But she was easily content with the household improvements and occasional vacations that their modest income could provide. 

 Dad bought her a diamond ring for their sixtieth anniversary – a peace offering as much as it was a symbol of their six decades together. 

 After she died, living on several pensions and the proceeds of the sale of their home, my father broke down several times, exclaiming:  “I never had so much money.”   The tears weren’t for the bounty.  As he said so lucidly after a lifetime of saving:  “My only regret is that mother never got to enjoy it.”    

  Living the Dream                

 Living the dream has been a rare trip for those of us who were cosseted in the postwar era.  As I add these words to my memoirs on Canada Day 2012, I am reminded again that my bless-ed generation lived a charmed existence spared of war, famine and pestilence.  Maybe unique among the inheritors of the earth, we enjoyed a splendid isolation from the burdens of existence that have weighed on most mortals for millennia.

The legacy of our ancestors among the two founding nations was one of optimism, resilience, initiative and progressive thinking.  It also left us with a reservoir of self-importance, determinism and yes, of entitlement. 

 These same circumstances left us with qualities that have evolved from our common experience:  of openness, tolerance for diversity, adaptability and so far, an unshakeable resolve to succeed together. 

 In recent years we have been blamed for the uncertainty our offspring have to deal with:  a broken health care system, underfunded pension obligations, as well as free will and individualism taken to extremes.  It is understandable, in the historical context, and not all of it is undeserved.   Given where we came from – our roots in a post-agrarian society whose bedrock values left little room for artifice or extravagance – it is sometimes a heavier burden now that the impending collapse of the global economy has forced us to recognize our excesses.

 On this national day of celebration I find hope in the fact that we are Canadian.  Together we have overcome adversity, defied all odds against our survival as a nation and enjoyed the prosperity that our initiative has brought us.    

 As the connective tissue between our ancestral generations and our descendants, I hope we have passed on strengths as well as the weaknesses. And as a Canadian from a line that reaches back to the 1830s, I still have faith and hope that these values will see our offspring through their challenges as they saw our forefathers through theirs.      

West Quebec

Canada Day 1 July, 2012

Bookmark This Moment

We want to post this bookmark leading to Davos co-founder Klaus Schwab's astonishing keynote remarks at the opening of this year's World Economic Forum.  By using this technique, we are inserting a placeholder in the Conversation of a Generation.  That's because we frankly don't know what to make of Professor Schwab's assertion that capitalism, in its present form, has outlived its usefulness.

 CBC correspondent Terry Milewski posted one of the most pertinent commentaries on the Schwab analysis, reporting that the Davos doyen remarked:  "Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us... A global transformation is urgently needed and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility."

Remarkable as the professor's words were, considering that he has presided over this annual celebration of the western democracies' economic success story for 40 years, it isn't clear that his diagnosis carried the day in 2012.  Bill Gates, for example, told the BBC that the economic system that made him the richest man in the world, is a "phenomenal system". 

"We're going through a tough period, but there is no other system that has improved humanity," the Microsoft founder told the BBC.  Amen to Bill's assessment.  But despite his brilliant success and his stellar philanthropic role model, Gates won't have the last word on the subject. After all, about the time Davos was getting under way four decades ago, the blue chip Club of Rome declared the widsom of "limits to growth".  Despite the veracity of this prognosis and the widespread promotion of its message by the club's leading disciples, including Canadians Pierre Trudeau and Maurice Strong, the lemming-like swarm still went over the cliff in 2008.

Only time will tell if this year's Davos diagnosis makes any difference.  Professor Schwab's declaration was overtaken by competing voices before the conference concluded.  But as a signal event his words are worth remembering for what they represent. 

                    

Crony Capitalism Raising an Old Stink

Only 50 per cent of respondents to a recent U.S. poll reacted positively to the word "capitalism", reports Nicholas D. Kristof in today's New York Times.  Forty per cent reacted negatively,  In the 18 to 29 age group, people who held the negative view were in the majority.  Think about what that means.

Kristif interprets the result to mean that crony capitalism is turning America's dream team into socialists.  No poll results were made available on what reaction that term received.  But for at least two generations, socialism has been likened to devil worship throughout America.  If Kristof  and the Pew poll are right, we are seeing a tectonic shift in the core values of the generation that is currently expected to turn the ship of state around. 

Just to be clear again, Prophets of Boom has always held that the insights reported here do not challenge capitalism as the economic basis for a just society.  Like democracy it is the best system we have.  But it's far from perfect. 

Wait a minute.  Doesn't this language have a familiar ring to it?  Anyone who set foot on a campus in the Sixties and were not yet turned off by the self-serving, blowhard politics of later decades might recognize that these concepts have been used to take some of the stink out of the system for generations. 

Ironically, the despotism of international communism's rogue's gallery was used to give  socialism a bad name in the salons of self-interest. 

What is common to both is the balance of power.  A natural hierarchy always seems to corrupt the best of intentions. 

Will technology's new reach be the great leveller, as seems to be the case in the Arab Spring, in Obama's first election victory, in the Occupy Movement or in a multitude of disputes that now see just-in-time demonstrations of force around the world?   No doubt a networked world is awakening the power within us all.