FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE IMPERIAL DRIVE

Wave nations profited greatly from what was euphemistically called “imperfect competition.”
Rhetoric and Ricardo aside, the benefits of expanding trade were not evenly shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave world to the Second.

THE MARGARINE PLANTATION

To facilitate this flow, the industrial powers worked hard to expand and integrate the world market As trade passed beyond national boundaries each national market became part of a larger set of interconnected regional or continental markets and, finally, part of the single, unified exchange system envisioned by the integrational elites who ran Second Wave civilization. A single web of money was woven around the world.

Treating the rest of the world as its gas pump, garden, mine, quarry, and cheap labor supply, the Second Wave world wrought deep changes in the social life of the earth’s non-industrial populations. Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the world trade system and compelled to trade or perish. Suddenly the living standards of Bolivians or Malayans were tied to the requirements of industrial economies half a planet away, as tin mines and rubber plantations sprang up to feed the voracious industrial maw.

The innocent household product margarine provides a dramatic case in point. Margarine was originally manufactured in Europe out of local materials. It grew so popular, however, that these materials proved insufficient. In 1907 researchers discovered that margarine could be made out of coconut and palm-kernel oil. The result of this European discovery was an upheaval hi the life-style of West Africans.

“In the main areas of West Africa,” writes Magnus Pyke, former president of the British Institute of Food Science and Technology, “where palm oil was traditionally produced, the land was owned by the community as a whole.” Complex local customs and rules governed the use of the palm trees. Sometimes a man who had planted a tree was entitled to its product for the rest of his life. In some places women had special rights. According to Pyke, the Western businessmen who organized “the large-scale production of palm oil for the