Re: Future Scenarios ...

Although these are hefty questions you are asking, they are either too open-ended or are being drowned out by the endless repetition of news items and gossip. However, I think they are worth looking into more closely, and would appreciate if you could take them a step further by providing your own views on the topics you are raising.

-----Original Message-----
From: Luke Rondinaro <larondin@yahoo.com>
To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: Κυριακή, 23 Σεπτεμβρίου 2001 6:45 πμ
Subject: Future Scenarios ...

Here's another question for the list on the topic of future scenarios. The public mind has always associated Marxist socialism and communism with the dystopia of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

But isn't it all the more likely that such futuristic societies gone awry are the natural development of a decadent, hegemonizing Western culture in Europe and the United States rather than what grew up in the Eastern bloc under the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China? ... What do you all think?

Doesn't the West, under Classic Liberalism - in the 19th century sense of the word - have more of a potential to become totalitarian than the communist world ever (supposedly) was? What are your thoughts on this matter? ...

My own (conservative-libertarian) fears about a New World Order/world government scenario in the next fifty to hundred years (more likely in the next few centuries rather) have never been soley a fear of "socialism" or Marxism or even of just "big government." My fears are of a future world where "big business" (always negligent and willfully ignorant of the needs of the individual, the common person, the worker, and the masses in general) merges with "big government" to form a social monstrosity the likes humanity has never seen. (Ok, perhaps I'm overdoing the literary description a bit - maybe I'll write a novel or short story about it sometime).

Based on what's happening right now & material from the past 10 or 15 years ... what are your own predictions for humanity's future in this world based on the following concepts? . . .(consumerism, the cloning controversy, media manipulation/social control, big business mergers, gov't intelligence agencies, and unaccountable state leadership in the USA and abroad --> i.e, leaders not accountable to their own people, the international community, humanitarian decency, and so on ... )

Finally ... one other thing ... if you can stomach it, consider the following poem from the Anglo-French writer Hillaire Belloc. It came from the Chesterton-Shaw "Do We Agree" debate (held I believe in the 1920's but I could be wrong; if I am and you know it, then please correct me). I never knew how they pulled that one off --> a debate between two literary titans, and the person they got to be the moderator ("the chair" as his position in the debate was referred to) was Belloc, the most thunderous of them all. Anyway the poem's good because it shows the inherent instability and, yes, decadence of the Modern West in the post-Industrial Revolution world. Driving issue --> economic change/material commodies that drive the economic engines of industrial Western societies. (Question: I can't remember this off the top of my head. I should! When exactly did oil become the dominant [driving] economic commodity in the industrialized West? What were the main signs that it was going to? -- such that Belloc, Chesterton, and Shaw would have recognized it by circumstances developing around them in the world ...) Great poem w/ a great literary, rhetorical flair. Here it is: