What do you get when you mix the British Pound (B£) with the EURO?
Donning the cap of a ‘Futurologist’ and pontificating on such questions, I’ve had great deal of fun over the past two decades. Never one for false humility, I can say I’ve been very good at it. Just look in The New Barbarian Manifesto and you’ll see a number of my successful ‘prognostications.’ I prefer using that word, rather than ‘predictions,’ because of the way I use my crystal ball – I don’t predict the future, I forecast the present. That’s my secret – I spot trends in the near past, and just follow the trajectories. The hints are everywhere, you just have to see them – and for that you must reject orthodox thinking.
“Don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint;
learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint” (Lewis Carroll).
It helps to be standing on solid philosophical ground, which provides the consistent perspective needed for that mental squint – anyone who has attended my lectures won’t be surprised to learn that my particular guru is Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s one-liners slice across the hypocrisy of the political classes and strikes at the heart of so many issues. Consider: “Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones.” This one quotation lies behind my questioning of employment policies. Mass-production methods needed an over-supply of humanity; the Machine Age spawned the nation-state, but with its demise what is to be done with the glut as we enter the Information Age?
Territory in itself is a liability. New Barbarians do not waste resources subsidising large tracts of land filled with rusting industry and populated with the unemployed. To protect their wealth, rich areas will ‘rightsize’, ensuring a high proportion of wealth generating knowledge workers to wealth depleting service workers.
Barbarians will reject the liberal attitudes of the present century. The expanding underclass they have spawned, and the untrained migrants they welcomed previously, are now seen as liabilities.
I have seen the future …. and in that future, democratic government won’t disappear, but its role will be to nurture, propagate and supply the quality human raw material. Democratic government, or any other kind for that matter, is merely the supplier at the bottom end of the value chain that ultimately supplies wealth. This wealth is not the product of labour, but of individual intellect and determination.
The majority of society, the service and production workers, the unemployed and the underclass, are a drain on a region’s economic potential. In the Information Age, governments based on a universal franchise and chosen by this majority are governments elected by losers. The ‘politics of envy’ is suicide, and the ‘will of the people,’ voting for full employment, a minimum wage, and fair(?) taxation, is merely the turkeys voting for Christmas. The big political question of the coming decades is how to find a socially acceptable means of dismantling democracy. Even with strong political leadership this will be an extremely difficult task, but much of the West, with its cast of parliamentary degenerates, hasn’t a hope.
All these pressures fermenting the Information Age will produce new winners and new losers. Where does the European Union sit in all of this? Its outmoded collectivist and bureaucratic institutions, so steeped in the ‘Factory Metaphor’, are incompatible with the aspirations and expectations of the entrepreneurial networks that are creating the New Order of business. European politicians think that all businesses are run for their benefit, to pay for schemes that will buy them votes.
And you will never reduce government expenses, because those expenses have a vote. The European Union is a disaster waiting to happen. I’m not alone in saying that: Alan Greenspan is convinced that the EU is finished unless it finally leaves the Industrial Age and scraps its highly restrictive labour laws. I ask you to contrast the sentimentality of the European Union’s vision of a Socialist “Information Society”, against the hard-edged American Dream of an “Information Economy.” That says it all. The smart money is on the USA. And that’s only for the medium term. The US too will degenerate unless it can revitalise the American Dream. The future lies with China, India, Brazil, and a few ‘Smart Regions.’
The European Union (EU) won’t make the jump from EU to an e-U, but to an e-USSR. The EU is just the USSR with a forty-year time lag.
The European Union is just another collectivist disaster waiting to happen: the USSR with a forty-year time lag – the EU-SSR. The USSR was born in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and died on the Berlin Wall in 1989. The EU was born with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. My prediction for the year of its demise … 2029.
What do you get when you mix the British Pound (B£) with the EURO? A new world currency that will replace the dollar? No! The anagrammatic ROUB£E.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Attribution: http://www.ianangell.com