More of the same. Inventors penalized for possessing their own self-developed technologies.
Posted by lrbeggs 10 years, 7 months ago to Technology
and it goes on and on...
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"As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto “dog eat dog”—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory of ethics. The existential monuments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia."-Virtue of Selfishness
If you mean the slide toward mediocrity, it won't go on long. It only takes a few years. Once mediocrity becomes law, though, it appears to take a generation or two for people to lay down. The first generation works on out of pride, then habit. In spite of a growing number of slackers, the second generation works on out of deference to their elders and the feeling that something will change. It's the third generation that gets it; forced to watch those who do nothing handed same life as those who work; they eventually lay down and without outside aid, the economy collapses. I hear the same story in Cuba I heard in Russia: "They pretended to pay us, so we pretended to work".
I've always thought Rand a romantic. She hoped the achievers would quit and band together and achieve in their own world. In real world experiments it doesn't seem to happen that way. The achievers finally give up, lay down and live in the same misery as the takers.
Ayn Rand did not hope that achievers would quit and band together in their own world. The plot in AS was intended to show the role of the mind in our existence by showing what happens when it is withdrawn, not to urge a strike. She wrote that quitting as an attempt to influence the looting to stop is futile, and opposed 'libertarian' proposals for creating new 'nations' or societies.
She did observe that, one at a time, many of the best minds do in fact naturally cut back or withdraw rather than put up with the punishment as their 'reward'. But achievers do not 'give up' and live in the same misery as the looters. When they cut back to avoid the full brunt of the punishment they continue to achieve in personal ways less susceptible to the government looting. The collapse of various attempts at unrealistic "utopias" is another matter.
Regardless of a reduced material well-being, no individualist who is an achiever could live in the 'same misery' as the looters, who suffer from their own mental and psychological squalor. For all the royal opulence of the Obama's lifestyle living off the taxpayers, what sane person could want to be like them?
So Atlas Shrugged is allegorical? The shrugging achievers are our minds when we withdraw? I read AS 40 years ago. I wasn't a sophisticated reader then.
My experience in the communist/ex-communist world is the achievers, if they can't flee and aren't killed outright are usually reduced to an existence less comfortable than the takers and prevented from achieving. For that reason they have no further impact on the society around them. You may say they can achieve within their minds, but I don't think I'd consider that a satisfying existence.
The collapse was portrayed fictionally in a greatly accelerated form -- a few years rather than the generations of it we have seen -- and abstractly focusing on the accelerating destructive elements as the essence, without the zigzagging we have experienced within a net downward trend despite occasional corrections (slowing it down) and bursts of progress like technology that bureaucrats didn't understand enough to control in time to prevent general progress in that segment of the economy.
But these are observations and descriptions she gave afterwards, not something explicit in the novel. And you don't have to wait more than 40 years to reread it and enjoy it again :)
Also people today who cut back aren't just achieving in the imagination of their own minds, but in personal actions in their own lives. At some point that becomes much less possible in societies like communist countries. In a mixed system some individual success is still possible, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what kind of political system you live under -- We the Living illustrates that perfectly.
Beyond providing social engagement and distraction in the material realm of work or play, the need for transcendence, solitude and spiritual communion is addressed with the ubiquitous availability and universally endorsed consumption of the drug soma. Soma is an allusion to a ritualistic drink of the same name consumed by ancient Indo-Aryans. In the book, soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays". It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run "religious" organisations; social clubs. The hypnopedically inculcated [sleep-programmed] affinity for the State-produced drug, as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort, thereby eliminates the need for religion or other personal allegiances outside or beyond the World State; the book describes it as having "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, [with] none of their defects."=====
for me, love and sleep take care of it!!! -- j
Jan
Actually, some consumers got creative with that product and figured out how to open up the soap dispenser and put any liquid soap of their choosing inside it. I'm surprised no one figured out how to do something similar with this coffee machine. Oh, wait, they probably have, now that I think of it. I've seen commercials for something like this, I think.
But I digress. That's pretty shocking. 'Predatory technology'?? Did the horse-and-buggy industry call the automobile by that name? This isn't even that much of an innovation--it's a differently shaped coffee device. I mean, if you have the tech to make it in the first place, changing its shape shouldn't be all that difficult, should it?