Thracian, David and Discussion.
In my last visit to the MD I spoke of this site looking more and
more like other Internet general dicussions with a “quality” thrown
in for appearances sake. I don’t deviate from that, but found
Thracian Bard’s “Some thoughts on various ...”. and David
Wilkinson’s response highly interesting even if the quality
connection is a bit obscure. It touches an idea of mine with strong
Q-connection! It stems from long before LILA, but soon got its
quality coating. I labelled it “the rate of change curve” and is why
these posts struck me. If I have spoken about this before - privately
or on the forum - please forgive, but it goes like this:
If we use a hundred-year yardstick and imagine a person from 1900
being "transported" to 2000 he/she would be completely lost. One
from 1800 would find many things familiar in 1900, and a 1700er
would be still more at home in 1800, and so on backwards with
smaller and smaller differences until none would be detected
(except for the faces). A year 700 person would have had trouble
finding anything new in the year 800 (this in the western world,
there may still be places where it still applies). However, returning
to our time one need not be a hundred-yearling to be lost, those
who passed away in - say - the fifties would have been equally
disoriented, my mother-in-law who left just recently did not have an
inkling of the digital revolution, and I read somewhere about a
young person in the info-tech business who was sacked after a
sick-leave because he was outdated! It is said that more newness
has been created over the last decade than over the entire previous
history! That’s how fast the pace is ...and still growing.
Now, to Bard’s approach. I may not have got his message right,
but at first he seems to se it all as progress: human rights, legal
protection, political power from the kings and nobility to the people,
emocracy ... and link socialism with progress. At the end he takes
an even grander view, but still cantered on socialism and
capitalism and sees a new "nobility" in the capitalists ....
>If we view time as a never ending, yet slowly expanding spiral, we
>see that the Industrial Revolution is the beginning of a new cycle.
>It's beginning is more obvious than previous cycles, because so
much
>more documentation exists. This new cycle produced a new set
of
>monarchs - venture capitalists. It is not the capitalism that is in
>contradiction to socialism (or quality), it is this new power
>structure that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Socialism, in
>its naturally dynamic way has now
this triggered David to launch his Toffler-based wave theory. I have
read both message thoroughly and don’t disagree with either, but
will concentrate a bit more on David’s because here the “rate of
change” aspect is more pronounced. My only objection to the wave
picture is that it sounds like a sudden surge and then calm until
the next one, while I prefer to view it like a sinus curve almost flat
from the beginning of history, then slowly rising (the agricultural
revolution is a good start) growing steeper at the industrial age, and
since then becoming ever more precipitous. Maybe it's no great
difference, a curve can be broken down to incremental steps, but it
is something ominous in this development that the “sinus curve”
analogy makes us see better. According to my limited
mathemathical knowledge such an exponential curve can find no
stable angle: it must keep rising or start falling, but vertical is also
“forbidden”, there can’t be infinite change over no time.
It can be discussed how steep the angle is by now, but as I tried to
show it’s quite dizzying. What will happen? If my sinus curve
analogy is valid no abatement is possible and isn’t that exactly
what we see: Change for change’s sake is what stokes the
economy - IS THE ECONOMY IN A SELF-STOKING MANNER -
the smallest sign of relaxation sends shock waves into the stock
exchanges.
NB! An acceleration analogy is also useful. If a spacecraft keeps
up a permanent increase in speed an earth gravity (1G) can be
obtained, but this eventually bring the craft’s speed up to that of
light, yet, turning off engines immediately brings on weightlessness
whatever the speed. Braking will however bring back gravity, but
where/what are the brakes?
Now enter the MoQ. David speaks as if evolution is the driving force
and 'quality' a by-product - and sounds like a good socio-darwinist
in the process :-) - but according to Pirsig it's the other way round
and finally my point: The Q-biological level's evolution which would
have filled the earth was arrested by the Q-social level which in turn
threatened to suffocate existence and was halted by the Q-
intellectual level ....whose "evolution" now is going amok and only
can be brought under control by a new Q-development. A groping
5th level?
Phew, Bard spoke about a tome.
Bo Skutvik
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