Fast-forward twenty years to 1965. These pint-sized packages of Down Syndrome advocates are now being asked to invoke the violence required to maintain the empire that has pumped them full of consumer-driven affirmation regarding their unwarranted self-importance. Of course, Mr. and Ms. Too-Fucking-Important backs down with the biggest, most pathetic doe-eyed stare ever captured on media and opts in, instead, for a covert empire based on shell games and shadows. You get all the perks of empire with none of the ruckus! You see, they are clever!
Instead of overt military conquest, they prefer covert monetary conquest. Blood doesn't film so well. Math, on the other hand, is confusing and an equation doesn't cause mobs to froth as much.
Instead of fixed exchange rates, they prefer floating exchange rates. Socioeconomic stratification caused by fixed exchange is evil, so making sure everyone is in debt forever is the surest way to enforce the moral imperative of equality.
Instead of leveraging taxation to pay for their Utopia (which will naturally be offset by public outrage), they prefer paying for their Utopia with seigniorage. We'll do whatever it takes to save the poor, even if it makes someone somewhere else poor.
 |
| I completely relate with this sentiment. I should go to Starbucks with my Macbook and share this image with my friends on Facebook. |
If you pay close attention (see: You can't) to the tone in which you are told these myths, you'll find it eerily similar to the tone that parents use when they give curt explanations to children to shut them up. Of course, you're not a child. You're a respectable adult with responsibilities.
Just because you can envision some magical universe where everyone pisses chocolate milk in that Crayola-based goulash you call a brain doesn't mean you can actually change the fundamental law of the Universe: Power always wins. If the "meek" win, then it was because they were actually powerful, and thus, the axiom remains. Power always wins. Revolution is not about style. It's not about cultural heritage. It's not about tradition. It's not about earning your stripes, or slumming it, or being edgy, or being artsy. It has nothing to do with altruism, or the greater good, caring, or love. Revolution has been, and will always be, about power. Therefore, if you cannot explain, with crystal clear clarity, what power actually is, but you want to participate in what you think is a revolution none the less, then you are a useful idiot. (Please drop me an e-mail so that I may tempt you with the bullshit that sends you into an easily controllable froth at my discretion.)
Maybe, somewhere along that never-ending tail-chasing idiocy you call a "life experience", you may have formulated some inkling about what power might be entirely based on having a one-sided, subservient relationship with it. And you're wrong about that, too.
Power is the deployment of means to assist in leaving a persisting and replicating imprint of your will onto the universe. Revolution is the acquiring of means to assist in the demonstration of power. Labor vectors, the tools they use, the techniques they employ, and how they are organized are the means. To only way to amplify the means is through technology. The only thing that can create such technology is a mind that has been trained to find comfort at the chaotic edges of the universe. A mind of this nature must be comfortable with a compass that never points in the same direction twice, can disregard instructions but knows how to create them, and whose attitude towards complexity is path-finding. This is the revolutionary mind and it is the foundation of all power.
As it turns out, statistics are the best abstraction we have to manage the data we collect about the copmlex nature of the universe. Every time a new technique is discovered that can assist in the management of statistics, new technological processes are unleashed that amplify the output of labor vectors. It could be assisting with the physical interaction with resources via chemistry and mechanics, increasing organizational efficiency by informatics, or commanding larger armies of of labor through electronic media. When applied to financial matters at the highest levels, statistical discoveries can create new markets out of thin air to address previously ambiguous demands. The power of these processes translates to economic influence which is then used to contend for social influence and only at that point does the average peon see revolution in action.
Of course, by then, the horse has already left the barn and the serf is just opting in to be a meat shield for said cause. But this revolution did not begin where only the stupid can witness it. It began in a mind of someone who discovered a statistical process that changed how information about universe could be processed. From here, enough information was collected that changed how a person could see the universe. This interpretation then influenced people to create techniques and processes based on serving the needs of this interpretation. Once those technical processes streamline and become cost efficient, more people can then use the technology to acquire a better financial position. Once someone consolidates all of these economic actors through political techniques, that consolidator (and his statistical architect, if he is still alive) can then contend against the lingering power of previous architects
If you want to be a revolutionary, don't be a free-spirit artist whose wild and edgy antics can't be stopped by anyone fuck you parents law teachers omg I'm so fucking rebellious I should have my own TV reality show/band/documentary called "Dick Storm and the Furious Razor Apes: The Adventures of Me, The Ultimate Rebel". Be a mathematician, you intellectually lazy parasite.
John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain were the revolutionaries responsible for 1965. The invention of the transistor changed how mass media could spin its stories to the public, allowing people to watch warfare, for the first time, from a similar safe distance as a Middle Ages prince on a battlefield. They did not like what they saw, so they whined until someone used digital computers (again, only possible via transistors) to assist in the maintainability of floating exchange rates.
