[wildman]

I am now 74 years old. I have been around the block more than once.

For what its worth I have never read anything within my memory that is more consistent with my actual life experience than the following article. It is spot on.

It is a bit long but give it a try. It goes a long way in explaining our apparent inability to deal effectively with so many of the problems we now face.

I would be very interested in others opinion of this.

Chris Hedges: The Careerists - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

[mikemike]

What is his solution? He goes on for three pages about a problem and never offers any remedies.

His descriptions of people shows how disconnected he actually is from it:

They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it.

In my experience the people who are at the front line of denying food stamps, insurance coverage, etc... are extremely empathetic to the fact that they cannot provide a needy person with help. From his description these people's feel no emotion in executing these difficult tasks. The world is a hard place and at some point people need to deliver hard news and others need to receive it. A doctor can be faulted for poor bedside manners if he or she deadpans a terminal diagnosis, but that doesn't change the diagnosis if it is correct.

The author is critical of "complicated systems of exploitation and death" such as insurance, food stamps, commodities markets, advertising, and accounting without any sympathy to the fact that these are the very systems that allow a greater share of the 6 Billion people on this rock to live well nourished, productive, safe lives by distributing basic needs as fairly as possible.

He indicts all members of a profession because some go forth with producing something which has been used immorally like drone aircrafts. When I was graduating from college in computer science, that was one of the hottest technologies with lockheed, boeing, raytheon, general dynamics all hiring and recruiting heavily to get people to work on those projects. I didn't bite and I know a lot of my peers didn't either, they found some people to do it, but no one will ever know how many people turn down a job when they find out it is working on weapons guidance systems.

If this historian could turn around for a second and look to the future so that he may offer a better solution he would have written a much better article.

[Nesster]

The intent of the author is to point out from the extremes the lesser faults of us paper pushers. I do find it rings true to a good degree: over the years I've thought about this (my parents were in cancer research, my mother was on the team that discovered Hepatitis B and its cure, while I'm a corporate drone...)

From this POV, the following does ring true. Depressing, and what is the solution? To keep one's job one has to go with the flow... and corporate flow (whether commercial or state) is easily amoral, as groups tend to be. We divorce our personal from our work, all too often, and only affect things in the margins.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

....


Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.

[mikemike]

The intent of the author is to point out from the extremes the lesser faults of us paper pushers. I do find it rings true to a good degree: over the years I've thought about this (my parents were in cancer research, my mother was on the team that discovered Hepatitis B and its cure, while I'm a corporate drone...)

From this POV, the following does ring true. Depressing, and what is the solution? To keep one's job one has to go with the flow... and corporate flow (whether commercial or state) is easily amoral, as groups tend to be. We divorce our personal from our work, all too often, and only affect things in the margins.

The solution is moving on from our legacy systems and transitioning to better systems. Disruptive technologies are constantly pushing old industries out of business not by continuing the incremental improvements but by fulfilling the need in a radically different way. Telecommunication technology is providing the thousand cuts necessary to kill off so many unsustainable industries: postal services, air travel, daily commutes and the requisite auto and infrastructure. Those industries will never admit that they are the walking dead they will reluctantly disappear into the history books or be relegated to niche markets. Often times, successor industries will need the expertise of the industries they are destroying, like renewable energy needs the expertise of the oil industry to drill geothermal wells, build offshore structures for wind and wave power, or transmission technologies. There will be people left in the dust, like coal miners whose jobs will become obsolete. Technologies that are maturing right now, like e-book readers will reach a point of stability where they will effectively end the need for publishing on dead trees, much to the dismay of loggers and printing press operators, and won't be subject to a 6 month product cycle, much to the cheer of the environment. The authors pejorative generalization of "paper pushers" being amoral is just an attempt to spread a prejudicial view.

With regards to the idea that climate change agents, such as oil companies, deny the negative impact of their activities I always encourage people to think if they did exactly the opposite. If they admitted that their activities were harmful to the environment, that their continued operations set the world on an irreversible course for destruction of the human habitat - what would their suitable options be and how would that effect the world? They should then close up shop, shut in production, dismantle their wells, refineries, and pipelines, and use their intellectual property to obstruct anyone who tries to continue producing oil. Does hitting the kill switch on this industry make the world a better place or a worse place? You could argue either way but there would be some catastrophic consequences for some people who truly rely on the oil economy for their livelihoods and essential needs like food transportation and heating.

[Wheatfield]

... will effectively end the need for publishing on dead trees......

The authors pejorative generalization of "paper pushers" being amoral is just an attempt to spread a prejudicial view.
.

In much the same way that your using the term dead trees in place of paper is an attempt to spread a prejudicial view?