You are talking about Marx's "working class". The people you talk about - coal miners (and similar) - were never "on top". They were always at the bottom. But they were needed, while coal and steam powered economies, by the ones who were on top. The ones on top never had to go down coal mines, kill themselves with coal dust and excessive physical labour. In your move back into the past (which is actually a retreat into a fantasy of the past, just as Marx's working class has not existed for at least half a century), the poor remain poor. The rich control everything. They use the unhappiness of the poor to persuade them to eliminate the educated middle, to extinguish rationality, to turn back the Enlightenment, to retreat into mud and dung. Except, only the poor and the (current) middle end up there. The rich are richer than ever. Science, art, human intelligence and advance, will not disappear. It will still be there for the rich, produced by a smaller, computer-aided, group of the middle who will be preserved and protected by the rich. It's not about time, relentlessly marching on, the past disappearing, the future unfolding. It's not about the past or the future. It's about money. It's about the rich having more and more, and the rest having less and less. It is about human greed. Since 1980, the erosion of Keynes and the replacement by the Chicago School, caving in to greater inequality, the reducing of human compassion, caritas, and love, the cycle has been downward. But from the death of the Gilded Age, through FDR, through Labour and (in particular) the Attlee governments, the cycle was upward. There are cycles in human affairs. Seven fat years, seven lean years. So, the stage of the cycle is now still down. But we can see the signs of it bottoming out, and the cycle moving upwards. The downward movement is collapsing under the weight of its own absurdities and contradiction. We do not live in a world of plague doctors. We live in a world of Dada. The image you use is not the plague, but the theatre of the absurd. We do what little we can to wrestle the cycle from down-phase to up-phase. And, yes, education is essential. But then, it always was. Ever since the first tribes, the first villages, through the birth of cities, through the Enlightenment, through science, through mankind's invention of calculating machines as an aid to human thought. Education, education, education: what I say three times is true.
Well argued.
Fantastic spot on piece! Sums it up perfectly.
You are talking about Marx's "working class". The people you talk about - coal miners (and similar) - were never "on top". They were always at the bottom. But they were needed, while coal and steam powered economies, by the ones who were on top. The ones on top never had to go down coal mines, kill themselves with coal dust and excessive physical labour. In your move back into the past (which is actually a retreat into a fantasy of the past, just as Marx's working class has not existed for at least half a century), the poor remain poor. The rich control everything. They use the unhappiness of the poor to persuade them to eliminate the educated middle, to extinguish rationality, to turn back the Enlightenment, to retreat into mud and dung. Except, only the poor and the (current) middle end up there. The rich are richer than ever. Science, art, human intelligence and advance, will not disappear. It will still be there for the rich, produced by a smaller, computer-aided, group of the middle who will be preserved and protected by the rich. It's not about time, relentlessly marching on, the past disappearing, the future unfolding. It's not about the past or the future. It's about money. It's about the rich having more and more, and the rest having less and less. It is about human greed. Since 1980, the erosion of Keynes and the replacement by the Chicago School, caving in to greater inequality, the reducing of human compassion, caritas, and love, the cycle has been downward. But from the death of the Gilded Age, through FDR, through Labour and (in particular) the Attlee governments, the cycle was upward. There are cycles in human affairs. Seven fat years, seven lean years. So, the stage of the cycle is now still down. But we can see the signs of it bottoming out, and the cycle moving upwards. The downward movement is collapsing under the weight of its own absurdities and contradiction. We do not live in a world of plague doctors. We live in a world of Dada. The image you use is not the plague, but the theatre of the absurd. We do what little we can to wrestle the cycle from down-phase to up-phase. And, yes, education is essential. But then, it always was. Ever since the first tribes, the first villages, through the birth of cities, through the Enlightenment, through science, through mankind's invention of calculating machines as an aid to human thought. Education, education, education: what I say three times is true.