Longplayer Letters is a commendable initiative to draw attention to long-term, prepatory thinking and ounces-of-prevention, rather than our current over-focus on quarterly returns. Please write to the LongNow Foundation and ask them to sponsor Kilkenomics Festivals too! Both efforts help increase the proportional feedback in play between the increasing numbers and subtypes of our national, human-network. More feedback would help now, as it would have in the past.
In retrospect, it sure seems like the Marriner Eccles revolution would have had a more lasting impact if people like Keynes had had the courage to "do" what's right, instead of "being" a successfully rewarded acolyte & junior member of the aristocracy. The few recorded exchanges between, for example, CH Douglas and JM Keynes - who was "knighted" and awarded a hereditary title, "Baron of Tilton" - are fascinating examples of commoners and aristocrats drily trying to discuss what they presume "must" occur if the actions of an entire electorate are to be understood and "managed" by managers!
Looking back, their entire discussions and competing careers can be quickly summarized from the paradigm of maintaining either an agile, pass-through society, or one whose net options are arbitrarily constrained by elites excessively hoarding static assets. No subgroup can possibly hope to wield static assets as well as a fully communicating, full electorate can. None of us is smarter than all of us. No general hoarding all the weapons can outperform an army where all weapons are distributed to all available, fully trained and practiced hands.
The only way for elites to justify excessive hoarding of static assets is to purposely limit the training and practice received by those declared non-elites. It just doesn't work. Letting elites buy officer positions in military armies, undertrained or not, was not a competitive strategy. Neither is letting elites buy access to political office, regardless of any and all efforts to keep serfs, sharecroppers and/or voters uninformed, untrained, and unemployed. It's a losing stratey wherever attempted. Elitism falls into the category of over adapting to any transient situation. That approach lessons both subgroup and national survival odds in unpredictaly changing situations, which always arrive an unpredictable intervals.
Looking back, their entire discussions and competing careers can be quickly summarized from the paradigm of maintaining either an agile, pass-through society, or one whose net options are arbitrarily constrained by elites excessively hoarding static assets. No subgroup can possibly hope to wield static assets as well as a fully communicating, full electorate can. None of us is smarter than all of us. No general hoarding all the weapons can outperform an army where all weapons are distributed to all available, fully trained and practiced hands.
The only way for elites to justify excessive hoarding of static assets is to purposely limit the training and practice received by those declared non-elites. It just doesn't work. Letting elites buy officer positions in military armies, undertrained or not, was not a competitive strategy. Neither is letting elites buy access to political office, regardless of any and all efforts to keep serfs, sharecroppers and/or voters uninformed, untrained, and unemployed. It's a losing stratey wherever attempted. Elitism falls into the category of over adapting to any transient situation. That approach lessons both subgroup and national survival odds in unpredictaly changing situations, which always arrive an unpredictable intervals.
The bestknown adaptive strategy is to build national resiliency, precisely by removing any arbitrary - e.g., hereditary - barriers between supposedly elite and supposedly non-elite classes of people. We pursue sexual, cultural and option-recombination precisely so that we can generate, select from and leverage diversity - NOT to forego our ability to use that diversity at a second's notice.
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