Friday 2 December 2011

How the New World Order is taking over: Part II

How the New World Order is coming in: Part II

The Machine Stops, is shortly to be available in audio form. Written over a century ago, it is an amazingly accurate prediction of our present predicament. The unthinking use of the new technologies of electronic communications could not, however, succeed in cock-up fashion without the development of some centralised system of control over social interaction. In E.M. Forster’s story, the Committee of the Machine determines policy and administration, keeping people in line with those policies – purely for their own good. In their very different ways, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 demonstrate the potential for centralised power to operate through psychological manipulation and terror. As Chris Hedges has demonstrated, the nightmare dystopias of the twentieth century are emerging as twenty-first century reality.

But what are the alternatives?  

Two essentials:
First, it is essential that the group shall have no conscriptive power over the
individual; i.e., the individual must have the power to contract-out of any group in society. Central to civil rights is the ability to contract out of waged or salaried slavery.  

Self-Employing Centers
The remedy for unemployment
is employment,
and there is no better employment
than self-employment.
Self-Employing Centers
are small shops
where repairs can be made
and workers can be found
to do work outside.
With the Self-Employing
Centers
could be connected Houses
of Hospitality where the
self-employing workers
could find shelter. This
complicated world is too
complicated to be dealt with
in an efficient manner by
specialized technicians.
Specialized technicians
knowing more and more
about less and less do not
know , how to simplify a
complicated world. We need
fewer specialists and more
encyclopedists, fewer
masters of one trade and
more jacks-of-all trades.
Peter Maurin
Catholic Radicalism (1949)
NOTE: This book is available to be downloaded from the internet, but I have failed to make the link work on this blog.

Second, maximum decentralisation of initiative is essential for human welfare. This is not devolution of power from a central power to the people living and working locally. On the contrary, it is a taking back of power over decision-making by the people creating and consuming the goods and services at local level.  

Cult, Culture, and Cultivation
When the Irish scholars
decided to lay the foundations
of medieval Europe,
they established:
Centers of Thought
in all the cities of Europe
as far as Constantinople,
where people
could look for thought
so they could have light.
Houses of Hospitality
where Christian charity
were exemplified.
Agricultural Centers
where they combined
(a) Cult—
that is to say Liturgy
(b) with Culture
that is to say Literature
(c) with Cultivation—
that is to say Agriculture. "
Peter Maurin
Catholic Radicalism

The origins and implications of these quotations will be explored in the course of this series of blog entries.

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