Monday, February 6, 2012

Halftime in America?

Kind of hard for a Producer type like me not to celebrate the Industrial Class virtues in the best of this year's Super Bowl commercials.  Not that I would actually want to own a Jeep, understand, but I sure do like their commercials. This one, narrated by Clint Eastwood, is about economic recovery through manufacturing excellence.

And I especially like the idea of our current economic disasters as "halftime."  It was one of the themes of Elegant Technology.  From Chapter Four, page 51.
Shutting down industry is not the solution. Whether people believe the industrial revolution was a good idea or not; it happened. With the industrial revolution came an enormous population rise. If industry is indiscriminately closed, the dense populations that are the result of industrialization are in great peril of their very survival.

A better way to view the industrial revolution is to see the current industrial class crises as the halfway point. If the world turns back to an early stage of industrialization, there will be a massive reduction in the human population. If the present confusion of industrialization and its values is not clarified, there will be also a massive mortality of humans.

The solution is clear, the world must build its way out of the current problems using an environmental blueprint. Industrial values must be environmentally purified. Hope stems from the realization that this value purification process, while still in its infancy, has already appeared in the sophisticated industrial economies of northern Europe.

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