A Galaxy Brain Take On The Modern World

Someone today said I’m campaigning for the Federation.

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) March 18, 2019

I’ve been deeply studying the early modern and modern world for a year now.

This is why I took an extended break from writing here last year. I stopped writing from March through June to work on writing a book. I spent this time doing a lot of research and was only snapped out of it after I was dragged into one of the Charlottesville lawsuits.

If you look at the period from 1492 until the present from a deep historical perspective, one of the dominant themes is the rise of capitalism in the forms of both chattel slavery and wage slavery and the relocation and mixtures of people from all over the world. This was often done unwillingly. The slaves that were brought to the New World were imported against their will. Third World immigrants come here mainly to escape from poverty. There is a push-pull effect going on.

A place like Los Angeles, CA would not have evolved naturally. This bizarre, atomized society which is a mixture of races and cultures was made possible by wage slavery. There is no organic culture in Los Angeles, CA like you would find in the old nations of Europe or Asia. The whole sweep of the modern world has been this trend toward the expansion of capitalism, globalization and liberty and individualism being taken to ever greater extremes at the expense of human well being.

Suppose for a moment that in the future “slavery” was restored in the form of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. There are people who are hard at work right now creating a robotic servant class. This would restore the master/servant dynamic of the Old South. Humans would be the masters of a servile class of robots that generated wealth in agriculture, manufacturing, services, etc.

In such a world, the way you would deal with people who are driven out of employment by mechanization – first in agriculture, second in industry, third in services – is by redistributing wealth to maintain social peace and improve their well being. With their basic needs are provided for in the form of Universal Basic Income, they would be free to devote themselves to cultural, intellectual and leisurely pursuits. In the Middle Ages, there was an order of society that worked, an order of society that prayed and an order of society of ruled, administrated and fought in wars.

What if such a system were implemented on a global basis through the United Nations? Chattel slavery was abolished in the 19th century. A global version of Universal Basic Income would abolish wage slavery across the world. And without the push of poverty and the pull of wage slavery, the world would change dramatically as people around the world migrated. In fact, it is highly likely that the result of the end of wage slavery would be resegregation into homogeneous nations.

It is basic human nature that like attracts like. Wage slavery and immobility is what drives the growth of diversity, but without that driving force of modern capitalism everyone would just resort themselves all over the planet. The only thing that is stopping this from happening is a lack of wealth and its concentration in the hands of a privileged few.

I see this clearly because I have studied Southern and Caribbean history for years now. It was capitalism in the form of slavery that created these societies. It was wage slavery that made them even more diverse when Indian coolies were imported as a cheap labor force all over the world whether it was in the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean colonies.

Do you get it? If everyone in the world had, say, a debit card in which the benefits of advances in science and technology were redistributed through it to improve their well being, and that amount increased over the course of centuries, then wage slavery would be over and the world would kind of unscramble and go back to the way it was in the Middle Ages.