A Quiet, Global Revolution

America on the brink of a Second Revolution … “What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak – its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns,” warns Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. But why not three cheers for the Tea Party Express? – MarketWatch

Dominant Social Theme: A lot is going on. Hard to make sense of it all.

Free-Market Analysis: We would like to think that the Daily Bell offers a comprehensible roadmap to tumultuous times. Over the past years (a decade in fact) the modest braintrust of the Daily Bell has preached that the Internet is sparking a second Renaissance or Reformation, just as theGutenberg press did originally. We’ve stuck with this perspective while the mainstream press (and a good part of the alternative media) has pro-offered one suggestion after another to explain modern sociopolitical turbulence. Additional dominant social theme: “There’s really no connection between events. It’s all kind of random and everyone needs to just calm down.”

But even if people calm down, we don’t think the sociopolitical dynamic in play is going to vanish. What is interesting to us is that in covering what’s going on we’ve become convinced that modern Western history is the result of a clash between technology (and knowledge) and the lack thereof.

There is something else. We are not scholars, but we have often observed that great ancient and modern cultures usually arise out of fragmented regional states that are proximate to one another and have the same languages. Thus, if one is oppressed in one physical region, one can move with one’s family to another nearby place without much inconvenience. This means governments have incentives not to be too overbearing or cruel but to actually compete with one another to provide livable environments.

Within this context, government-to-government treaties and understandings ought to be looked upon with considerable suspicion. Anything that organizes governments at a bureaucratic level is probably going to have a negative effect on the larger polity. Thus, these days, when we read about conferences between hundreds of nations and the treaties that come from them, we likely should not be too impressed but should worry that these understandings eventually will be used as instruments of repression.

It is no coincidence, in our view that the rise of the United Nations and various forums that allow for “understandings” between nations have paralleled what can be seen reasonably as a rise in various repressive mechanisms of the state. The war on terror, in fact, providing Western governments with yet another rationale to seek these multi-party agreements, is probably not to be celebrated.

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