We are privileged, you and I. We have seen the birth of a new civilization. This is a rare event. It has occurred only three times in all of human history.
The first occasion was the birth of agriculture. Up until this point humans wandered the face of the earth as homeless things, gathering berries and killing small beasts. We put down no roots, built no temples and remained few in number.
Gradually, here and there, humans learned to plant crops and domesticate animals.
It took a thousand years and it is unlikely that the people involved were aware that much was going on.
Along with the cities and the written culture came social change. Patriarchy replaced Matriarchy across all of the earth apart from the few tribes that remained undiscovered and lost in the stone age.
Technology is never politically neutral. First it tears up the entire social system and then it transforms the human soul itself. Man can to see himself as the prime mover in the world. Under Matriarchy, every rock and stream contained a spirit and mankind was very small indeed. Now these thing became tools for the transformation of nature.
Along with a written culture came the steady accumulation of knowledge and a gradual understanding of the scientific method. This, in turn launched the industrial revolution.
This followed the same patten. It was not apparent at first that anything was happening. Chemistry was evolving in Germany and steam engines were pumping water from the mines of England- but these were marginal developments for most people.
The difference was the speed of change. In the past it could take a hundred years for an agricultural technology to travel a few hundred miles. Now, a new technology could travel the same distance in a few months. Dates are always arbitrary but we could say that in the rears between 1830 and 1930 the industrial revolution transformed the world just as completely as the agricultural one- at ten times the speed.
The defining characteristic of industrial societies is instability. The products that are produced today will be impossible to give away in five years time. Industrial man looks at everything as a work in progress. I can hardly look at my laptop without seeing an improved version in my mind. Equally, I cannot look upon my boss in the same way a serf would look upon his lord. Nothing is permanent. It is possible that my company may not exist next year and that my boss will be looking to me for a job.
This leads to a basic optimism about human society. Society may be broken and remade according to human plan. This is a natural assumption- surely human society can be built along modern lines like a railway. All that is needed is a perfect plan and sufficient dynamite to remove every obstacle!
This is the root cause of both Hitler and Stalin. Both emerged from an optimistic mindset that believed that planning plus ruthless willpower equals progress. This works very well when building a railway (many people died in their construction) but it does not work in politics. Following the world wars the industrial revolution entered a more apologetic phase. We see this in the rise of the green movement and the concept of human rights. The green movement seeks to limit the damage done to the earth by industrialisation, but it is allied to darker forces. Postmodernism even denies there is any single truth. This amounts to a rejection of science itself.
Around about 1990 we saw the launch of the third and most explosive of all revolutions. The Internet.
The agricultural revolution took a thousand years to gain dominance.
The industrial revolution took just one hundred years- although it still continues.
The Revolution of the New Civilization.
The Internet is not the New Civilization- any more than the steam engine was the industrial one. The Internet is only the lead technology of the revolution.
So what is the new civilization?
We see the following themes.
1) The Sovereign Individual.
The industrial nations are ruled by a surprisingly small group of ideologies who took control of the universities sometime in the 1960’s.
From this base they were able to act as gatekeeper to all other institutions. In other words- it became necessary to accept the ideology of the ruling group in order to obtain some forms of degree. Nobody can earn a sociology degree without believing that women are victims of a vast male conspiracy, or that the state should control greater areas of private life. This means that government has become full of people who incapable of viewing the world except through these glasses. This is the root cause of the PC sickness.
The new civilization treats everyone equally. It does not matter that I am a white man. All that matters is that I have something interesting to say. The liberal establishment and the liberal media regard most people as reactionary and irrelevant. This is why newspaper circulation is falling and fewer people watch the TV.
The liberal elite have lost control of public debate but for the moment they can continue to ignore this. The established media has massive cash reserves and can employ new technology to reduce their overhead but they are engaged in a constant race against their falling readership. Eventually they will have to look at themselves and realise that the public has left them behind in understanding.
2) Bottom up organization.
The liberal elite only succeeded in gaining complete power within media and government circles some time around 1990. During this time all genuine debate was closed down- not with the gulag and the firing squad but with a patronising smile. None of the critics had the necessary qualifications you see.
This is a sweet irony for me. The liberals and the feminists gained control of the state at the precise point that it began to decline in power. Marginalised groups such as men have set up services for themselves that the state will not provide. Worst of all (from the liberal/ feminist perspective) is that new ideas began to circulate. The monopoly of ideas was broken.
We also see the creation of entirely new forms of political organization such as Anonymous- who oppose the $cientology scam. This terrifies the elite because they realise that the rise of these new organizations correspond directly to the decline of political parties and voting. Politicians such as Dave Cameron have realised this and talk vaguely about a new participatory politics. Unfortunately he has no idea what this would look like of how to bring it about.
In short, we power bleeding away from the political elite. A new civilization lies beneath the horizon but no one can predict its shape.
3) Bypassing of corporate interests and big government.
It is now possible to buy and sell over the Internet on the same terms as the largest company. Very often people buy and sell between one another directly rather than selling to a company first. We have seen the re emergence of gold as a global currency. This is money that even bypasses governments and central banks!
We see the emergence of Internet Gurus and Internet self help. This is emergent new civilization wisdom. One example is the Pick Up Guru. This is a man who has overcome political correctness to such an extent that he can approach any woman with honest masculine interest. Political correctness is based upon shame and so any effort to overcome shame is revolutionary.
So here we have it. A new political system, a new economy based upon new technology, and finally, a new human being. Long live the new civilization.
