FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE HIDDEN BLUEPRINT

By the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of ostensibly sovereign or independent political authorities, stretching around the planet, were connected to one another through the circuits of the economy, through vastly increased travel, migration, and communication, so that they continually activated and excited one another.

The thousands of representational mechanisms built out of components of the represento-kit thus increasingly came to form a single invisible supermachine: a global law factory. Now it remains only for us to see how the levers and control wheels of this global system were manipulated—and by whom.

THE REASSURANCE RITUAL

Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave revolutionaries, representative government was a stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane.

Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully.

Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power who ran the integrational engines of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative government was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history.

Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations—the structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. Indeed, far from weakening control by the managerial elites, the formal machinery of representation became one of the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power.

Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that-everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by, implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens