LocalizeYourMind wrote:I think you are missing something here as well. I expect technology to develop quite a bit in the future. Likely it will get to the point that anything that can be outsourced can be done cheaper at home by robots. The new wave of the future economy will be towards marketing, localization, and innovation. This is what will keep people employed.
Sorry - I missed this post.
The way the world is 'set up' at the moment - holding up greed and displays of wealth as the main route to happiness - shadenfreude indulgence, basically - will not let countries go ahead with effective and practical automation on behalf of the masses because that will piss on the bonfire of Rothschilds and Rothschild-wannabes of this world. They are having a ball trying to amass grotesque wealth just to say, "I've got what you want and that makes my DNA feel good, in a kind of lonely, twisted way, but that's just the way it is".
See my thread on
Moneyless Society: Resource-based Economy (especially p3) for more on that. I'm still waiting for someone to refute my statements in my most recent post on that thread
here.
In China and India at the moment, however, the obsession with money is not completely about greed or schadenfreude. It's also also about covering oneself legally - where 'money talks', and buying what they call a 'parachute' out of their conservative, socially-repressed and corruption-rife country - most often to the West - Canada, for example.
There
are some apparent positive global developments afoot in all this, though - smartphone technology, and thus portable, cheaper, concealable information technology providing more education and potential social networking via the internet, and a 'science of happiness' illustrating apparent facts behind social contentment in wealthy and impoverished social circles - something which is championing and rolling out a basic psychology and philosophy governing the stress response and how to undermine it.
See Google's 'Search Inside Yourself' program, for example, and the secular mindfulness meditation techniques they are promoting - practices proven to have been helping US soldiers from Afghanstan with PTSD, and with on-going military use with soldiers to manage their nerves during intense situations such as counter-insurgency operations where any person in their midst could be an assassin. See my thread
Zen Meditation Promoted by UK Mental Health Services for more on that, and there have been plenty more developments over the past year to reinforce that thread, with the West's main advocate visiting the UK government to recommend the efficacy of the secular mindfulness practices:
Zen and the art of keeping the NHS bill under controlThe Guardian, Sunday 7 April 2013
Back in 1965, a grad student in molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled across a class of five people on Zen Buddhism. He'd never heard of Zen and knew nothing of Buddhism. Nearly half a century later, that grad student, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has arguably done more than any other individual to put Buddhism into the mainstream, not just in America, but in dozens of countries around the world. Now, Downing Street policymakers are keen to hear more.
[...]
Kabat-Zinn's work has spawned a cluster of different applications of mindfulness training, including for addiction, the elderly and parenting. In the past couple of decades, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has won recognition from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), as a treatment for depression.
All of which explains why our interview is happening in Westminster, where Kabat-Zinn has a string of meetings with senior politicians before he heads to Downing Street for a session with policy advisers. There are good reasons for the policymakers to be listening closely, as Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have a compelling proposition: mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it's cheap.
[...]
He now believes that mindfulness is on a steep adoption curve. Given the benefits of mental clarity, insight and creativity that practitioners claim, the interest from corporations is wellestablished, particularly in Silicon Valley, where Kabat-Zinn is a regular speaker. Even the US military has adopted a version of mindfulness for training soldiers.
I interact with many high-flyers from the burgeoning Chinese IT industry here in Beijing, and they have heard of these practices - one of them even attends courses run by Western mindfulness meditation teachers - even though the core practice was refined in China 1500 years ago. It's the secular, straight-forward nature that they are drawn to - an example of Western science stripping down and distilling a resource and selling it back to the people they got it from - this time it's a mind-body skill, however; a cultural paradigm, and a potentially very powerful one at that.
These current developments were not so obvious when I started this thread, however, and I do think they are very powerful and effective game-changers to a degree. Racial bias can be transcended by effective secular accessible and relatively 'obvious' psychology revolving around the human innate stress response - something more easily triggered by unfamiliar territory and customs. As soon as we are all operating
positively on the same scientifically verified psycho-social basis, then everyone is primarily operating as a human, rather than a race of 'God's chosen people', or self-professed genetically superior strain, or whatnot. If anyone suggesting they are superior gets angry, those wise to the mechanisms underlying the 'feral' now relatively redundant fight/freeze/flee stress response will know otherwise. I predict two broader categories governing the future of our world - those in control of their emotions, and those not. Race will be a lesser consideration. I am more inclined to do business with a person who is less likely to get angry than a person who acts like a toddler having a tantrum.
We see this today, even, with regards to religions which define themselves as peaceful and civilised until someone outside the religion does something they disagree with and then they are chasing them through their own house with an axe in the name of that 'offended' religion. Getting offended because someone is different from you is a 'primitive' reaction in today's world. The future divisions will be between modern, resilient, civilised scientifically-leaning and
tolerant human beings and 'the others'.