Duty Now For The Future, 2023 edition (Part II)

Prior to the industrial revolution, almost every society established strict societal status symbols that the underclasses were not allowed to possess.

In parts of pre-industrial Europe, a lower-class person wearing too large a lace collar could find said collar being trimmed by force by local gendarmes.  In Japan, your social status determined how large a tree you could use in the construction of your house, and the gods help you if the local daimyo found your beams to be bigger than his.

A big reason for an object’s status value lay in the difficulty of making or acquiring it.

Anybody could own a badly patched tunic of rough wool.

Only somebody wealthy, somebody important could own satin and silk.

As a result, hand crafted items tended to be better made and more durable, and thus more expensive.

But as industry boomed, the human element in manufacturing became less valuable.

One machine operator could easily do the work of ten craft masters.

While setting up the factory cost considerable investment, once operating it tended to pay for itself quickly.

Further, because engineers designed the machines to manufacture goods without the need of an apprenticeship to learn the basic skills to make whatever they made, the human operators only needed training in operating those machines, not the entire process.

As such, their individual contributions became less important, more easily replaced.

One might still require a master cobbler or weaver for a truly excellent pair of boots or elegant rug, but for something to stomp around in the mud and then wipe that mud off, the machines cranked out a good enough product, faster and more cheaply than the human masters.

The machine owners couldn’t get premium prices for their mass-produced goods, but they didn’t need to. They could make more boots and rugs faster and cheaper than their human competitors, and sell them at lower prices.

Ironically, they often did so at a higher profit margin than the human cobblers and weavers, because craft masters needed to factor their own time and labor into their final product while the machine owners found those costs dramatically lower.

So a boot manufacturer could typically sell more boots faster and at lower prices while still making a higher profit margin than the master cobbler.

Problem:  How many boots does the average person need?

This is not an idle question.

To maintain economies of scale, one needs equally large-scale markets.  A truly excellent master cobbler might survive comfortably off a dozen sales a month, the machine owners needed to sell hundreds every day.

It became necessary to steer mass market consumption away from durable items that could last and be repaired or mended, handed down to younger generations until you “make it do, use it up, wear it out.”

The factories and their owners needed people buying their goods even when they didn’t really need them.

And thus the owners pushed the status driven consumer economy down upon the very workers they exploited to create those consumer goods.

Americans laud Henry Ford for building cars cheap enough for his workers to afford.

That’s like applauding dope dealers for getting their pushers hooked so they could afford their own fix.

Modern capitalism is a ponzi scheme that requires an ever-widening pool of chumps buying in.

When limits of growth are reached, the ponzi schemes collapse.

Right now we see thousands (perhaps millions!) of ponzi sub-schemes propping up the big underlying scheme.

As they fail one by one, we’re amused.

Schadenfreude feels good, don’t it?

But eventually we will hit an insurmountable wall, and the scheme can no longer continue growing.

In a worse case scenario, that wall is the collapse of Earth’s eco-system, resulting in a mass extinction event that might take out the human race.

In a slightly less worse case scenario, it sees the collapse of every economic system we relied on and a great many cultural ones as well.

A lot of people will suffer and die as a result.

© Buzz Dixon