When Making Things Became More Important Than Helping People

Ever since the advent of Agriculture, people have been growing their food - they were making food. And they built houses and cities to live in - taking other products from the land. In short, they were making food, housing and clothing - the basics. And they were fishing.

It is still possible to visit these cultures - I lived in the Maldives for awhile. They caught fish, dried them in the sun, and traded them for rice in India. They were expert sailors, on their boats made of coconut wood. They had a good life.

But meanwhile, thousand of miles away, in Europe - different things were happening. Things we call Industrialization or Capitalization. Where things were not so good.

Volumes have been written about this, and are still being written. I will add my own feeble attempts to them, by noting what seems obvious to me - things benefited from this, while people (for the most part) did not.

The net effect was amazing - people who did not know who they were, and don't want to know. This has been summarized as "Stone Age brains in Modern Skulls." Which is not entirely accurate, but explains a lot.

Ever since the rise of Networks, people have been overwhelmed by their technology. The basic invention here was Electricity, that made possible the Teletype, that connected everyone with copper wires - on land, and then under the seas. This eliminated time and space, and a more fundamental elimination cannot be imagined. People's reaction was immediate - they didn't want to know about it. It was too much for them to understand.

And with the vast speedups made possible by the Internet and Cellular networks, their response has been the same - they do not want to know, how this has affected them.

This morning, another article plopped into my inbox Will the Liberal Order Survive? This was written by, and is being read by, perhaps one percent of the population. An endangered species.