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Monday, November 08, 2010

Actually, They Can't Win

Either Republicans in their current form are defeated and marginalized, or, in power and on their usual know-nothing bloody-minded greedhead rampage, they will destroy the country and lead to its marginalization in the world to the ultimate benefit of the world in any case -- possibly soon enough to be of benefit to the more sensible among us.

If Progressives prevail (which requires not only that Democrats govern the country but also that Progressives shape the Democratic caucus) and manage to transform the country bit by bit into a sustainable social democracy in the nick of time, everybody wins. And the winners actually would include hateful, idiotic Republicans themselves, who would find themselves living in a civilization incomparably better in every respect than anything they could ever imagine, create, or maintain. But if Democrats can't stop the Republicans from destroying the country and exacerbating planetary crises, you can be sure the world will stop them.

Republicans can only lose, and so the question is whether Americans will stop them or the world will stop an America that has failed to stop them. I suppose the Republicans could "prevail" long enough actually to destroy the world altogether in an apocalyptic militarist convulsion or sudden climate collapse, but I don't count that as a "win," understandably enough, and in any case don't consider that such a likely outcome.

Violent empires predictably die as they should, irresponsible economies predictably collapse as they should, waste and pollution by profligate societies predictably devastates them as it should, celebration of the superficial and disregard of the factual exposes decadent societies to mortal dangers that eventually destroy them as it should.

I don't know if I draw much comfort from the fact that in the long run they can't win, since, as Keynes pointed out, the span of time in which humans aspire and struggle and meaningfully live our lives tends to be shorter than the longest of the long-terms we can fathom (in which, come what may, we are all dead). But, nonetheless, it is true.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> Either Republicans in their current form are
> defeated and marginalized, or, in power and
> on their usual know-nothing bloody-minded
> greedhead rampage, they will destroy the country
> and lead to its marginalization in the world
> to the ultimate benefit of the world in any case. . .
>
> [I]n the long run they can't win, since, as Keynes
> pointed out, the span of time in which humans aspire
> and struggle and meaningfully live our lives tends
> to be shorter than the longest of the long-terms
> we can fathom (in which, come what may, we are all
> dead). But, nonetheless, it is true.

An amusing passage from Iain M. Banks' latest "Culture"
novel, _Surface Detail_
http://www.amazon.com/Surface-Detail-Iain-M-Banks/dp/0316123404

Chapter 18

There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser
who'd made it. It was just part of the way things worked --
part of the complexity of life, he supposed -- that sometimes
somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be
one of the downtrodden, oppressed, the dregs of society,
lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.

At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry
themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come
through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck
of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who'd made it
always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance --
he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he'd
often been informed -- but it had to be deserved, you had
to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor
had to have worked for it.

Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement -- or
that mistook luck for true achievement -- was an abomination.
Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole
thing -- the great game that was life -- appear arbitrary,
almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since
decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained
about their lack of status or money or control over their
lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can
anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited
and work harder.

Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously
statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could
tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not
have believed was that you could find an entire society --
an entire **civilization** -- of losers who'd made it.
And the Culture was exactly that.

Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he
hated it for -- for far too damned many credulous idiots --
setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look
like and so what other peoples ought to aspire to; it was
what machines had aspired to, and created, for their own
inhuman purposes.

It was another of Veppers' deeply held personal beliefs that
when you were besieged or felt cornered, you should attack.

He marched into the Culture ambassador's office in Ubruater
and threw the remains of the neural lace down on her desk.

"What the **fuck** is this?" he demanded.
---------------------------

Oh those galactic politics. ;->

Dale Carrico said...

I've got the book but haven't read it yet -- you like it?

About natural winners -- I personally believe that there is no such thing as a life-long winning streak, that only a negligible portion of those who have more keep more because they deserve it more than most who have less.

It's rather like celebrity. While it is easily possible that one can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, I personally believe that every single person who manages to stay in the public eye for long sustained periods of time is psychologically disturbed and most likely a straight-up sociopath.

jimf said...

> I've got the book but haven't read it yet -- you like it?

Oh yes, very much. There's the usual human+AI repartee -- in this case, a girl and her Ship, or a Ship and its girl. The banter is rather, uh, earthier than in the past.

After finishing SD, I'm finally getting around to reading _The Algebraist_, which is another space opera, non-Culture this time. FTL travel by means of wormholes rather than hyperdrive, set in a specific Earth-calendar time (4034 AD, IIRC), AIs are illegal (there was a Machine War 7000 years in the past, and any remaining sentient machines are assiduously hunted down and destroyed by the current galactic regime. In addition to the fast-living species like humans there are slow-living gas-giant dwellers (called "Dwellers") that remind me of the dirigible behemothaurs of _Look to Windward_ -- not as big, but equally long-lived, and tolerant of a (very) few fast-livers picking their memories and libraries for the billion-year perspective on galactic history. Haven't gotten much further into _Algebraist_.