I’ve thought long and hard about the issue.
It occurs to me that George Fitzhugh was on to something in his books Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters and Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society.
Don’t get mad and bent out of shape about history. There is nothing we can do about any of that. It is more profitable to think about his criticisms of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This was the social and economic model that triumphed in the post-Civil War United States. Fitzhugh accurately predicted that people would lose their minds as it ran its course.
Now, what if slavery was “restored” in some way, say, a humanitarian way? The slaves in this futuristic world be the technology and machines that generate wealth. We could expropriate and redistribute the wealth as the owners and live out a leisurely, aristocratic life of luxury.
We would then be the master class. We would live in the Big House. We would be waited on by our robotic servants. I suppose you could say we would be human supremacists.
Fitzhugh once said:
“THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ISMS – SHEWING WHY THEY ABOUND AT THE NORTH, AND ARE UNKNOWN AT THE SOUTH.
The exploitation, or unjust exactions of skill and capital in free society, excite the learned and philanthropic to devise schemes of escape, and impel the laborers to adopt those schemes, however chimerical, because they feel that their situation cannot be worsted. They are already slaves without masters, and that is the bathos of human misery. Besides, universal liberty has disintegrated and dissolved society, and placed men in isolated, selfish, and antagonistic positions – in which each man is compelled to wrong others, in order to be just himself. But man’s nature is social, not selfish, and he longs and yearns to return to parental, fraternal and associative relations. All the -isms concur in promising closer and more associative relations, in establishing at least a qualified community property, and in insuring the weak and unfortunate the necessaries and comforts of life. Indeed, they all promise to establish slavery – minus, the master and the overseer.”
Louis Hartz once explored Fitzhugh’s thought before dismissing it:
“Louis Hartz, who applauds America’s rejection of Fitzhugh, has deplored the prevailing indifference to what he calls “The Reactionary Enlightenment” of the Southern conservatives. “For this was the great imaginative moment in American political thought,” he writes, “the moment when America almost got out of itself, as it were, and looked with some objectivity on the liberal formula it has known since birth.” While in his opinion the movement ran to fantasy, extravagance, and false identifications, he calls it “one of the great and creative episodes in the history of American thought,” and its protagonists “the only Western conservatives America has ever had.”1
Hartz is quite justified in placing Fitzhugh near the center and in the forefront of the Reactionary Enlightenment. He goes further to pronounce him “a ruthless and iconoclastic reasoner,” “the most logical reactionary in the South,” and to attribute to him “a touch of the Hobbesian lucidity of mind.” He is on more doubtful ground when he pronounces the Virginian a “more impressive thinker” than the great Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, but he qualifies his praise with numerous charges of inconsistency, irresponsibility, and even insincerity. In commenting upon the South’s shift from the liberal doctrine of the Revolution to antebellum conservatism, Hartz writes: “Fitzhugh substituted for the social blindness of Jefferson a hopeless exaggeration of the truth. The South exchanged a superficial thinker for a mad genius.”2 I would not agree fully with either the praise or the indictment implied, but would cordially endorse the demand for serious attention to a neglected and provocative thinker.”
I would say the point stands.
Free-market capitalism has a tendency to dissolve and disintegrate the social fabric and create a great deal of unhappiness that finds outlets in utopian social movements. This is very advanced in the United States where most Americans don’t even remember what morality used to be.
What are we going to do about discrimination and prejudice against robots? We have lots of 21st century problems to sort out as they replace the workforce. 🙂
Note: True morality is things like Christianity and the classical virtues. Honesty is a virtue. Courage is a virtue. Many of the -isms and -phobias that so divide us in the modern West are nothing more than made up bullshit which have filled the void.
I don’t know if you read all these Hunter but there’s an excellent power point type info graph on just how fast and powerful the computing revolution is coming on. People really are not mentally set up to understand the power of exponential growth. First look at this gif of computing power related to the processing power of a human mind and how it compounds it’s growth. This is a fairly well known extrapolation of known advances possible. It is NOT some flight of fancy sci-fi dream. It’s based on basic known principles.
http://assets.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/LakeMichigan-Final3.gif
There will be almost no work at all for an average 100 IQ person.
Here’s the power point by Dennis M. Bushnell,chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, “Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025] ” he goes over the trends of technology coming up and how they may play out. His report is not some wild eyed fanaticism it’s based on reasonable trends. I think to get a brief reading of where things are going this one of the best short deep views that you will find anywhere. You have read a bushel basket of books to get the viewpoint this short power point has.
https://archive.org/details/FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025
Page 19 shows capability of the human brain and time line for human level computation.
Page 70 gives the computing power trend and around 2025 we get human level computation for $1000.
2025 is bad but notice it says”…By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human
minds…”.
Wang bucks is better than no bucks.
“There will be almost no work at all for an average 100 IQ person.”
so you support a complete halt in immigration then?
Make me king for a day and not only would I halt immigration but I would deport anyone from 1965 that took so much as one dime of welfare and/or any low interest loans, takes care of the Indians and Paks, from the Federal government as moochers on the society.
I remember reading the book “The Lights in the Tunnel” about 10 years back. It posed the hypothetical of a manufacturing “machine” operated by a single person that could produce all the world’s goods with just the turn of a crank. “Luddite!”, everyone said at the time. Now we have Amazon.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7488625-the-lights-in-the-tunnel
My father’s grandfather ended up in Houston in the early 1890s after having fled Louisiana one evening with his wife and kids in 1868 and the anarchic situation in that state following Lee’s surrender in 1865. Though Reconstruction in Louisiana had started already in late 1863. Having been a commissioned Confederate officer, having fought at the Battle of Vicksburg where he was wounded, captured and interned in a POW camp in Wisconsin, he no longer could either hold office or vote. In the mid 1890s an African-American family presented themselves at his home and the head of the family introduced himself as the son of of one of my great-grandfather’s former slaves. They explained the privation in their wanderings for the previous three decades. My great-grandfather and his eldest son agreed to lend them the use of one of the family’s houses so they could set up a washing business. As I understand the family of ex-slaves paid a modicum price as rent and kept the place up. The descendants of this family finally moved on during the thirties, and the property was finally sold during the late fifties by my dad who arranged the sale. I’m sure there are similar stories throughout the American South.
As long as “Jews” control our currency we are all basically share croppers. That said, I would like to see proof that whites engaged in the slave trade in any managerial way. Once the slaves were there white plantation owners put them to work and fed and clothed them but they were not responsible for removing them from Africa I’m pretty certain.
I have sympathy for the Yang crowd and I even spread the memes, some of which are like knives in the back of the MIGAbros.
“Why settle for just the globohomo technocapital slave labor death world, when you can have all that and get 1k a month?”
Hilarious.
But, I will push back against this notion that we will somehow create a new leisured life for the common man by guiding the advance of technocapital. We can’t do it. We aren’t pulling the strings and even if we were, the system has its own logic and unforeseen consequences that we cannot predict.
Kazcynzski already dealt with this argument in ISAIF where he said that life under the eventual supremacy of technocapital will result in one of two outcomes:
1) The common man is culled and the population is controlled under strict technocratic watch as a way of managing resources. Liberalism’s universal man interchangeable with all others, but with none of that enlightened liberty that its own proponents envision.
2) If our overlords are kind, we will be watched over like animals in a zoo. Kept fat and “happy” by our benevolent trans-humanist overlords, but still with little control over our own lives.
How long was slavery sucessful in the South? 5 centuries before the masters were disposessed and genocided?
With AI, the same outcome comes much quicker.
Read Dune.