2888213 thùs individuals with very different pasts

FIND THEMSELVES HERDED BY CAPITALISM
& TECHNOLOGY INTO A COMMON PRESENT, WHERE GROSSLY UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTIONS
OF WEALTH & POWER HAVE CREATED HUMILIATING NEW HIERARCHIES!?
Thìs proximity, or what Hannah Arendt had called 'negative solidarity',
is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications, the improved capacity for envious
& resentful comparison, & the commonplace, & therefore compromised,
QUEST for individual distinction & singularity.
At the same time,
these fierce devastating contradictions
of a dynamic economic system, which were first manifested in 19th century Europe -
bursts of technological innovation & growth offset by systematic exploitation
& widespread immiseratation - REVEAL THEMSELVES NOW [and hére]
UNIVERSALLY ALL THE TIME.
"Many of these shocks of modernity
were once absorbed by inherited social structures of family & community,
and the state's welfare cushions? But today's individuals are directly exposed to them
in an age of accelerating competition
on unéven playing field-
struggles!!!
Our perplexity, as
simultaneously globalized & over-socialized individuals,
is greater since no statutory warning came with all of these promises of world-improvement [or so it seems?!]
in the hopeful period after the FÀLL of the BERLIN WAL: THAT SOCIETIES organized FOR THE INTERPLAY
OF INDIVIDUAL SELF-INTEREST CÀN COLLÀPSE
INTO MANY MANIC KINDS OF FERVENT
TRIBALISM, IF NOT
NIHILISTIC VI-
OLENCE!?
It was simply
assumed by the powerful
& the influential among us that with socialism DEAD AND BURIED,
buoyant entrepreneurs in free markets wóuld guarantee SWIFT ECONOMIC GROWTH
ÀND WÒRLDWÍDE PROSPERITY, & THAT ASIAN, LATIN AMERICAN & AFRICAN SOCIETIES
WÓULD BECÒME, LIKE EUROPE & AMERICA, móre sèculàr ànd rátional
às economic growth accelerated?!
ACCORDING TO AN IDEOLOGICAL ORTHODOXY,
WHICH HARDENED AFTER THE FINAL DISCREDITING OF COMMUNIST REGIMES IN 1989,
all governments needed to do wàs gèt óut of the way of individual entrepreneurs
& stop subsidizing the poor
and the lazy?
The long, complex experience
of strong European & American as well as East Asian economies -
active state intervention in markets ÀND SUPPORT TO STRATEGIC INDUSTRIES,
LONG PERIODS OF ECONOMIC NATIONALISM,
INVESTMENT IN HEALTH and EDUCATION -
was elided in a new triumphalist
history of free enterprise!
NGO's as well as the World Bank
assumed that the great struggling majority
of the world's population WOULD COME CLÓSER TO THE LIVING STANDARDS
of Western Europe & America IF they made their economies
just a bit more liberal, AND THEIR WORLD
VIEWS LÈSS INIMICAL TO
the individual pursuit
of happiness
......

07 aug 2017 - bewerkt op 09 aug 2017 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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