Artificial Crisis

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Let’s face it, in today’s world there is very little real work left to do.
Most things have been automated, downsized, optimized, you name it, most real labor is no longer necessary. So what happens to a society that can’t keep millions of people busy for 8 hours a day everyday ? They create an Artificial Crisis. An Artificial Crisis is a monkey wrench thrown into the system to block a certain part of it, to create a sudden “emergency”, to create a sudden “threat” to then provoke a large amount of oddball activity (aka “work”) to control the sudden block. But especially to make a part of society very much richer than the rest, to create an opportunity to feed off the emergency.

Like the Easter Island population that ultimately simply self destroyed itself, societies create an emergency usually in a part of the system that is quite important and fundamental. An example in the USA would be Health Care. Now health care in most of the world is something taken for granted, the government furnishes it to everyone, and in the end it is a routine activity, that should never go into “emergency” mode. There are thousands of doctors, nurses, and many decades of experience in this field, things are well known, people in general are not stupid. How come health care has become such a mess in the USA ? well an artificial crisis has emerged, or maybe was piloted and many insurance companies were born and many lawyers have to deal with this mess and many hospitals and offices and people have to fight about all things dealing with health care. Why is this ? because there is nothing left to do for millions of people, you can only open so many Malls, you can only have so many “High Tech” companies that by the way can only employ so many people, and mostly the brightest anyway.

So an Artificial Crisis is the mode of operation of modern societies. There are other examples in other continents. In Italy there is a “Waste Management Crisis”. Something that you take for granted since you are a little kid all of a sudden doesn’t work anymore. In Naples you can see that people can’t throw out their trash anymore. Behind it is politics, corruption and who knows how many companies want to join the bandwagon to make a fast buck.

The same with the prices of homes exploding in many parts of the worlds. You take for granted that a home costs or you can rent a home at an average price compared to an average salary, but in many parts of the world prices have become absurd along with rents. Another Artificial Crisis.

Do societies develop them automatically, are they piloted by interest groups ?
For me it is a sign of societies commiting suicide, self destroying.
All of these crisises are in things that you normally take for granted, that have always worked for decades but all of a sudden “have to get broken” to “get fixed again”. Waste management can never really be a crisis, a large enough landfill in a place far enough from cities can always take care of it. Any good hospital can easily take care of 99% of any patient without asking for 100,000 dollars, a house shouldn’t cost more than say 150,000 dollars or 600 dollar monthly rent. And this in most of the world is the same and should be.

But we are entering a world of Artificial Crisis and self destruction.

ON the waste management:

“It is interesting to note that “lack” of space is a political rather than a physical problem. Physically there is more than enough space; all municipal solid waste generated in the States for the next 1000 years could be disposed of at one site 30 km x 30 km if the depth of the landfill were 100 m.”

from:

ecologia.org/newsletter/year95/jun95.html

2

Typical large scale sociological theory. Things are always more complicated than that. The Irak War is maybe a really good example of an invented Artificial Crisis, and many if not all wars are huge artificial crises. But artificial compared to what ? Everything man does is fake and invented, and those crises you talk of are often just power struggles, fights between people, irrational events that self evolve. Who controls what ?

I don’t think they are piloted, they just emerge…

3

Like emerging complexity, complexity for compexities sake. More systems, more networks, more transfers of goods and information, since the economy can only “grow” through more transfers and exchanges of items, hence more complexity.

We may drown in a sea of complexity, political, social, technological, and conflict …

4

How about when a bridge falls down, is that an artificial crisis? Did some group do that just to keep us busy?

No, that bridge fell down because of fatigue or it wasn’t maintain properly. And that is the crux of the matter, most of what keeps people busy are not artificial crises but the imperative things we have to do to maintain and sustain society. Things are constantly waring out and need replacing, cleaning or rebuilding.

Anyway, the most important thing is to keep busy and the essence of life is in the doing, not in the having.

5

Yes but WOW with all the high tech we have today, with all the millions of man hours of economists and scientists studying everything in the last 30 years we don’t know how to and can’t throw out trash anymore and hospitals and doctors don’t know how to repair people without some kind of beurocratic - political - economical mess, upheaval and fight!

We’ve come a long way in becoming terribly inefficient in everything, science and high tech is actually rapidly producing increasingly diminishing returns in everything! like wild banks providing subprime loans to almost poor people and other great inventions…

6

Don’t get carried away, there are problems, there have always been problems, there will always be problems, so this era has its own quirky set of problems. If Hillary wins she will fix some of them up …

7

“We’ve come a long way in becoming terribly inefficient in everything, science and high tech is actually rapidly producing increasingly diminishing returns in everything! like wild banks providing subprime loans to almost poor people and other great inventions…”

There is something illogical and irrational about that statement. It sounds like a wild stab at some and missing the target. Although technology help enabled it, the subprime debacle has more to do with hubris and arrogance than science and technology. It has more to do with gross miscalculations by humans.

On the contrary, science and technology are making the world more efficient and increasing returns. For instance, people are using less electricity per capita than they did 20 or thirty years ago. There are also many more alternative of generating electricity today, solar power, wind power. The LED lighting of the future will use 80% less electricity. And recycling is producing many pluses. It is cutting back on the use of landfills and saving on depleting resources. And it is extraordinary how the world and science sustains 6 billion people, that there is enough food and land to grow it on. That’s because science is forever devising new ways of squeezing out the most of what the world has to offer.

Science teaches us to do more with less. And that’s what it has been doing since the beginning.

8

The problem we have today concerns the monetization of the economy. So much capital has been diverted to monetary investment seeking ever higher returns that investment in everything else is failing becuse everything else in the economy has become just a means to maximize monetary returns on an immediate basis.

The rise of housing markets and their subsequent crashes worldwide is a prime example of this. Those who drove these markets up and up did so in search of monetary gain alone and when that slowed they pulled out. Meanwhile, the millions who are just trying to live are subject to this yoyo of too much money chasing too little opportunity flooding and leaving markets like a tidal wave and leaving destruction wherever it lands.

9

There actually is and will always be plenty to do.

But your observations about the way some entities go about making money are unfortunately accurate, to a point.

These tactics are driven by a need for money to fuel commerce. The perverted methods of producing market needs would be unnecessary if income flowed from every person on the planet.

A trickle up economy provides a large and consistent market for human needs, so commerce or capitalism need not invent retarded excuses to spend the money that exists, or doesn’t.

I’m pretty sure that most of the world doesn’t really have health care available at a functional level.

10

Health care is a bit of a problem everywhere, in the US it is much greater. There will be problems in the “system” in the future, water, oil, waste, etc. Most problems in the future will be systems problems, organizational problems. Science and technology have mostly reached the end of the road, there will be incremental improvements, but nothing like 20th century jumps in progress, heck from horse to moon in 50 years, from relay to supercomputer in 50 years etc. This was a one time quirk of progress given that the low hanging fruit is the fastest and easiest to get. Now the fruits are higher and higher and progress will really slow down a whole lot. Just to understand simple molecules and simple brains may take millions of years and trillions of computers, they are all NP complete problems meaning simply we have no idea how to go any further.

Why haven’t we automated factories ? this is very simple technically, but we still have millions of people doing idiotic repetitive jobs, most offices are really totally void of any useful function except perhaps the image of making believe they are actually “producing” something when in fact they produce pure fluff. The entire “financial industry”, banking, insurance, law is just a self referential primitive activity system made up exclusively of power struggles and economic fights between peoples and groups. The whole concept of “8 hours” work is old as 19th century factories.

But how are you going to keep a billion people busy “8 hours a day” ? Just put them all in front of a TV, or just make them sleep 20 hours a day, I really don’t know, but our current system is truly absurd…

11

We have had these debates before. What is economy, work and progress ? every civilization chooses to live according to some totally quirky set of rules, ther are no right or wrong rules. So ours is based on rules you find absurd. For some working 24 hours a day is the best possible world, for others it is the opposite. Who is right ? Economy is just a fight between people, a fight for resources, or influence, or just a fight for fight’s sake. Work is futile ? Well the entire living experiment by nature, the whole game of evolution is futile as far as I can see, that is why people believe in god.

There are no solutions to the equation you want to solve. Easter Island civilization ultimately commited suicide as you say, we will probably do the same, we are no better or smarter, we construct huge complex systems instead of huge statues …

12

Factories get automated as the cost of the automation becomes less than the cost of wages.

10-14 hours work was more common in 19th century factories.

If, as you suggest, we are evolving toward shorter work days, I don’t think it is a problem to keep people busy. People seemed to adapt pretty well to the eight hour work day, I don’t really think we will have any problem or complaints if it goes down to four or six.

The European work week has already gone below forty hours, and they are not standing around on the street corners wondering what to do.

13

I was thinking, it’s not artificial crises that have kept modern humankind busy as old 6598 suggested. However, I do think that humankind does create problems, though inadvertently, to keep itself not only busy but alert. I believe humankind inadvertently creates problems for itself to keep things churning, so as to remain alive and awake. Hegel also sensed this when he spoke of the dialectical process, a process that advances us through having to struggle with problems.

To put it another way, we create problems as a way to advance ourselves, through the dialectic process that problem solving encourages.

14

From edery.org/2006/04/the-end-of … -arms-race:

“Does this sound unreasonable to you? If so, let me direct your attention to two markets: computers and mp3 players. Not coincidentally, the company currently making waves in both is none other than Apple, which has excelled not via power, not via distribution (at least, initially), but via style and function. This is only possible because computers and mp3 players have reached the point at which more power isn’t terribly useful (at least right now). You only need so many gigabytes of song storage. You only need so much speed to run the spreadsheet, browser, or mail client of your dreams. When hardware limitations cease to provide reason to upgrade, what’s that leave you with? Vanity, my friends. Brushed aluminum, perfect form-factor, exceptionally-designed software, and a marketing campaign so cool it causes frostbite.”

That may describe corporations today, not much real work left (the harware) , the only thing left is alot of style, fluff, “personality”, “office power struggles”, presentations …

By the way, most software is not “exceptionally designed”, but on the contrary designed worse and worse so there are more bugs and features and confusion to keep the programmers busy …

15

Yes, Bill Gates once even said that Micrsoft does not design their products for usability.

Control depends on fear. A fearful society is easier to control so the generation of artificial crises that generate fear is integral to the control of society.

Today we have the latest crises and it is a crises of consumerism.
It appears that the consumers have run out of money.
Fear is rampant.

Look for more clamping down on personal freedoms.

16

Was 9/11 an artificial crises, a crises created to keep us busy as the author of this post suggested ?

17

In the greater scheme of things, 9/11 was a speck of sand, almost invisible. We have thousands of people in the world dying from wars, poverty etc. have had many worse situations and almost nobody noticed or notices them.

What was a real “Artificial Crisis” is the ideology and fear and war preparation and threat that the US invented upon the event. They were just 20 losers who wanted to create some mess in the US, they did it, who cares, lets get on with life, and actually completety ignoring it, or greatly downplaying the event would have taken alot of mythology and fuel away from the nutcase terrorists. But the US decided it was a great way to pump up the military spending, to create alot of new “security” activities and jobs, to create paranoia and especially to CREATE A MUCH NEEDED ENEMY to justify all the military spending and all its wars.

So by always talking about it, they were really saying, “hey terrorists, do some more!, do some more attacks, be our enemy because we really need one!”. Just look at how Spain and the UK reacted to the terrorists attacks, if anyone even remembers them. They didn’t create a climate of fear, guantanamo jails and a climate of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt that the US did.

It may also be that when nothing much is happening, any event, however small can become huge compared to a very uneventful background.

18

Actually the US does well in preparing for wars and military spending. When all is said and done, in the end you will have to always fight someone, war is the natural outcome of the human condition, so even if there is no work at all, even if nothing is worth doing, just prepare to beat up someone because sooner or later someone will want to beat you up.

Keep up the 500 billion dollar military spending, US, we will certainly have to go to war with China or Russia or who knows who.

19

I find it fascinating that no one ever talks about the “reasons” the terrorists say they did the attacks: they didn’t want the US military bases in Saudi Arabia. If the US left Saudi Arabia and just left all the middle east, they wouldn’t have an “excuse”. But someone will say the US needs their oil. Right, but you can get their oil anyways, in so many ways without having to have bases there. We get oil from Venezuela without having bases there, and anyways 20 % worldwide oil production would always end up in the US since there are just not enough economies capable of using so much of it up.

20

old6598,

You do sound like an anarchist. Good on you!