The Senility of Progress

Dear George,

Progress is a funny thing. We are deluded into thinking that it propels us into the future on a straight, ascending line that is ever moving us towards a utopian dawn breaking somewhere on a far horizon.

The Greeks tell us that the reason for this delusion is that we walk into the future backwards. All we can comprehend is the past. The future contains too many variables for us to be able to predict anything with any degree of accuracy. So as we back into the future, what we think is a straight, linear line is really a curve that begins with an upward sweep before peaking and beginning its descent.

The paradox of progress is that it begins its descent at the very moment it believes it represents the end of history. The decay begins as the sophistication peaks. Medieval armourers suited the knights of old in sophisticated suits of armor at the very moment the crossbow made armor obsolete.

(Sure, the pope said the crossbow could only be used on heathens. But this is what happens with all new weapon systems. When bombing came into its own, civilized and sensitive minds argued that good Christians should only bomb natives. It was considered gauche for a Whiteman to bomb a Whiteman—at least until World War II.)

I bring this up to suggest that you and your minions should think about converting your assets into gold and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts, because corporatism has reached its high-point of sophistication, and we all know what that means.

Citing the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round, one writer called it a watershed moment when, “negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies to which the majority of governments has said ‘no’, time and time again.”

Yes, George, it appears that corporatism has entered the long dusk of senility as it finds itself lost and clueless in territory that was once familiar to it. As the “same” propels the world towards financial and environmental disaster, corporatism can only look for more of the same.

In America, our corporatists continue to bleed the country dry in their calls for even more sophisticated weapons system that will be just as useless as existing systems in fighting the insurgent wars of today.

Deregulation is dragging us down the sinkhole of financial ruin, and our corporatists call for more deregulation.

More and more people are going hungry and still our corporatists continue on to subsidize Big Ag, which contributes to the malnutrition brought on by soaring food prices.

And, in a final act of madness, our corporatists continue to destroy the base of the pyramid that supports them. Their efforts have created a surplus population of some one billion people that will never be absorbed by the system. And the numbers keep increasing as corporatism continues to expand by making people irrelevant.

They are mad, George, wonderfully and beautifully mad, and it is a thrill to sit here and watch the system shake itself to pieces.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones