Inert America: Crossroads to the Future

by Gary Griffin

  Technology acts as an impetus to social change. That is not to say that all technology brings social change but to allude to the fact that when certain technology(ies) enter our society, they provide the means by which major social changes occur because they allow macro level structural changes that did not exist before their invention. When such technology influences the core essence of our society—work and productivity—the changes cut across all levels of society and all social institutions. We are now witnessing such changes in the twenty-first century.33

  While technology is not the only means of change, it can be the catalyst for change. It performs this role by providing the capability to form new patterns of behavior. When this occurs, only a new social structure can serve the needs of the population. The new structure does not change people, but people do respond to a different social structure. The response to the structural change results in social change. At the end of the day, it’s not really people who are changed, it the societal structure that has changed. When these changes directly affect the work or livelihood of citizens, the reaction is generally not positive. One famous example is that of the Luddites.34 The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested— often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution that they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life.

  This English historical movement should be seen in the context of the era’s harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars, and the degrading working conditions in the new textile factories. Since then, however, the term Luddite has been used derisively to describe anyone opposed to (or perceived to be opposed to) technological progress and technological change.

  The Luddite movement, which began in 1811 and 1812 when mills and pieces of factory machinery were burned by handloom weavers, took its name from Ned Lud, an eighteenth-century resident of a Leicestershire village. For a short time the movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British army. Measures taken by the British government included a mass trial in York in 1812 that resulted in many executions and penal transportations.

  The principal objection of the Luddites was against the introduction of new wide-framed automated looms that could be operated by cheap, relatively unskilled labor, resulting in the loss of jobs for many skilled textile workers. From the individual worker’s perspective, the technological advancement took away jobs. I suggest that such conditions simply denote a structural systemic problem, and that the technology acted only as a catalyst. Today a Luddite would reject new technology simply because it is new; nineteenth-century Luddites were acting from a sense of self-preservation rather than merely a fear of change.

  The need for change is very apparent throughout all levels of American society. Everyone is screaming for reform, as evidenced by the dominant issues in the 2008 presidential election. These reforms are needed in all areas of our society—government reform, education reform, welfare reform, etc. The list is long, and the time is short.

  These reforms are needed because the current social structures don’t meet the needs of a twenty-first century information society with a knowledge-based economy. These social institutions are artifacts of a bygone era and can no longer meet the needs of the population of this country. What most people don’t realize and understand is the breadth and depth of these changes and how they influence social systems, and thus the very structure of American society. The cornerstone of American society is the social systems that support it. That is, the political, economic, philosophical, and social systems that makes it possible. The need to change the major systems and the human experience of that change are appropriately termed social change because they are fundamental to the social lives of every American.

  In this chapter I wish to provide a deeper understanding of what these changes are, how they need to occur, and, most importantly, what these will mean to the structure of American society. If informed, the reader can then take appropriate steps to manage these changes in his or her day-to-day live. Changes both from a personal viewpoint as well as at a societal macro level through the use of informed social policies must become a strategy for American government.

  Why is this happening in America? Social systems such as a political system or an economic system are fundamental structures that support our society. The human life is fundamentally about work. We are born, we live, and we die—in between, we work. Currently, the average workweek is forty hours. At fifty weeks a year35, this translates into 2,000 hours of work each year. If we start at age eighteen and work until age sixty-six, which equates to 96,000 hours of work in a single lifetime. Work is fundamental to our survival here on planet Earth. We must work to survive. As work is hard, somewhere along the way, someone had a spark of creativity and translated that idea into a tool that made the work easier, and the person more productive. At first, these were simple implements like a shovel.36 Although it may seem like an odd thing to say today, this was new technology at one point. All of technology is but a tool that facilitates work. A shovel is a piece of technology that facilitates work—it’s just not a sophisticated tool by twenty-first century standards. Examples of twenty-first century tools that fundamentally changed the nature of work are the desktop computer and the Internet. These pieces of technology also facilitate work— mental not physical work. These are much more advanced tools, but they are still tools nonetheless. No matter what the technology is, it still requires someone who knows how to use it in order for the work to get accomplished.

  New technological advances do not influence the mass population of a society when the technology only is used by a few; the space shuttle is a good example of this.37 While this type of technology is very advanced, very few people will ever take a trip to the moon. Thus, the more widely a technology influences work across the social spectrum of a society, the more deeply felt it is on an individual level. It is experienced at this level as job loss, income loss, etc. These traumatic events, of course, are very disturbing as they directly affect our ability to meet our basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. That is, our very survival is threatened. When we experience such changes, we do so as social changes. These changes require fundamental shift in social structures—political, economic, social, and philosophical systems—to keep up and meet the new demands of our society.

  These types of changes influence our style of living because they directly alter the choices we have available. That is to say, our choices become restrained in terms of how we can work to meet our needs for survival. From a human perspective, these changes seem chaotic and random. These changes have systemic meaning in that society itself is a system that requires human beings working together to accomplish common goals. When our social structures change, the social change triggers changes at all levels that the individual experiences as chaos.38

  Social change is essentially chaos in the human system called society. It seems random, but it’s not. When the way human beings must perform their work changes, the political, social, economic, and philosophical social structures must also change in order to align the accomplishment of work (production in economic terms and productivity in human capital terms) to the needs of a society. If the system does not change, a depression results (both the psychological and economic type). People can’t be productive and meet their needs. Structurally this results in jobs loss and unemployment.

  In recorded history, two major shifts have occurred that resulted in this type of chaotic system changes at the fundamental core of American society. The first was the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression of the 1930s. This period marked a fundamental shift of work away from an agricultural society to an industrial society.39 The next one we are currently experiencing as we move from an industrial society paradigm to an information society paradigm. As I will discuss in more detail in chapter 3, it’s important to understand the what, why, and how of the Great Depression in ord
er to learn the lessons of the past and not repeat them today. With sadness, I must report that the current leaders in our society haven’t learned much, and we seemed destined to repeat these same mistakes.

  The technology of the 1920s that influenced the work aspect of society on a wide scale was the invention of the mass transportation that was made available and affordable by Henry Ford.40 This innovation helped bring about the great shift from an agricultural society to an industrial society. In chapter 3, I illustrate how these occurred and describe their significance.

  This fundamental shift in work changed the dimensions of time and space, and it made possible mass transit, mass production, and mass consumption. Without these, the growth of the U.S. population of the baby boomers could never have been supported. Without these, World War II may have had a different outcome.

  These social changes represent a forward progression of time where events are connected through time and space. Work is fundamental. Without it, depression results, and the outcome is poverty for the average American. The only road to prosperity is one where the average American can work, produce, and be productive. The factor that influences, prevents, and/or supports that ability is the very structure of society itself. We must focus on making the changes to our existing social structure that will make the next generation of Americans productive—hyperproductive to be more precise—and with that America a prosperous nation once again.

  Why is it important to understand these social changes, their influence on social structures, and how this is related to work? Simply stated, work equates to value. Value is what supports our monetary system of exchange or the American dollar. More of this is covered in chapter 7 on the political economy, but suffice it to say here that if we don’t make these changes the standard of living for the average America will plunge drastically. The current structures don’t and won’t allow it to go up.

  How can we make these changes? When we examine planet Earth, and all that is on it, we can clearly see a certain cycle of life, even for human beings. We are born, we live for a short period, and then we die. This is true for all natural things on the planet. These events are controlled by the natural laws established by God himself. They are universal laws that no human being can change.

  These universal laws and the cycle of life also have things to teach us about our existence on the planet. As mentioned elsewhere, human beings also have the capacity to create. The evidence of this ability is all around us in every detail that is not of natural—buildings, automobiles, telephones, computers, etc. Society and social structures are but examples of these types of manmade objects. They come from idea(s) created by a man/woman or sometimes a group. Such an idea was brought into reality and an object called America was born at the signing of the Declaration of Independence and then the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Ideas are like apples in that they, too, rot and then decay. Fortunately, they leave seeds behind that can be used for planting.

  In America, we must plant the seeds left by the American ideal we call the American dream. We must plant, water, and nurture these seeds in order to have a prosperous nation once again. If we don’t plant the seeds and water them, then poverty will overtake us and destroy this nation. We can’t just simply replace the current existing social structures overnight. As I stated everything has a natural course—a cycle of life. Moreover, everything on the face of the planet, all objects, must comply with universal laws of physics. In this case, no two objects can occupy the same time-space continuum because they will collide. There are only two options. First, we can allow the idea of America as it exists to rot and decay, and then plant the seeds left behind. Second, we can destroy this object just as one destroys a building in order to build a new structure in its place. These are the only two options.

  PEOPLE AS STRANGE ATTRACTORS

  In mathematics, a nonlinear system is a system that is not linear, that is, a system that does not satisfy the superposition principle, or whose output is not proportional to its input. Less technically, a nonlinear system is any problem in which the variable(s) to be solved for cannot be written as a linear combination of independent components. A nonhomogeneous system, which is linear apart from the presence of a function of the independent variables, is nonlinear according to a strict definition, but such systems are usually studied alongside linear systems because they can be transformed to a linear system of multiple variables.

  Nonlinear problems are of interest to physicists and mathematicians because most physical systems are inherently nonlinear in nature. Nonlinear equations are difficult to solve and give rise to interesting phenomena such as chaos. The weather is famously nonlinear, and simple changes in one part of the system produce complex effects throughout. Society is another example of this same type of system. It is deterministic, dynamic, and nonlinear.

  An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory. A trajectory of the dynamical system in the attractor does not have to satisfy any special constraints except for remaining on the attractor. The trajectory may be periodic or chaotic or of any other type.

  Attractors are parts of the phase space of the dynamical system. A phase space, introduced by Willard Gibbs in 1901, is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space. Dynamical systems in the physical world tend to be dissipative: if it were not for some driving force, the motion would cease. The dissipation and the driving force tend to combine to kill out initial transients and settle the system into its typical behavior. This one part of the phase space of the dynamical system corresponding to the typical behavior is the attracting section or attractee.

  Some dynamical systems are chaotic everywhere, but in many cases chaotic behavior is found only in a subset of phase space. The cases of most interest arise when the chaotic behavior takes place on an attractor, since then a large set of initial conditions will lead to orbits that converge to this chaotic region.

  An easy way to visualize a chaotic attractor is to start with a point in the basin of attraction of the attractor, and then simply plot the attractor’s subsequent orbit. Because of the topological transitivity condition, this is likely to produce a picture of the entire final attractor, such as the general shape of the Lorenz attractor.

  This attractor results from a simple three-dimensional model of the Lorenz weather system. The Lorenz attractor is perhaps one of the best-known chaotic system diagrams, probably because it is not only one of the first, but it is also one of the most complex shapes and as such gives rise to a very interesting pattern that looks like the wings of a butterfly.

  Unlike fixed-point attractors and limit cycles, the attractors that arise from chaotic systems, known as strange attractors, have great detail and complexity. Strange attractors occur in both continuous dynamical systems (such as the Lorenz system) and in some discrete systems (such as the Hénon map). Other discrete dynamical systems have a repelling structure, called a Julia set that forms at the boundary between basins of attraction of fixed points. Julia sets can be thought of as strange repellers. Both strange attractors and Julia sets typically have a fractal structure, and a fractal dimension can be calculated for them.

  In the human system we call society, individuals are the strange attractors. Actually, to be more specific, it’s their ideas that are the strange attractors. Since ideas originate in the mind of a single individual, it seems more accurate to classify people as the strange attractor in the society system. As America is the subject of this book, it’s American society with which we are concerned.

  Whenever a person first has an idea, and that idea
is transmitted or communicated to others, if it takes root and begins to grow, that is others adopt the idea as something they believe, then a specific trajectory of that attractor or idea starts to emerge. As more people adopt the idea or ideas as part of their belief systems, it becomes the basis of action.41 Action toward creating that idea results in a pattern that emerges from the action of multiple individuals. Over time, a specific pattern is constructed; it becomes an object such as a philosophical, social, economic or political system. As these are formed, the object that emerges from that pattern is American society.

  These objects, while invisible, are no less real that any tangible object such as a car or a boat. They occupy the three dimensions of space—length, depth, and width—and the one dimension of time. In order for these objects to solidify, the mathematical formulation on the Cartesian plane must be either additive or multiplicative to create it. For it to be destroyed, the opposite must be true. It must be divided or subtracted. Such patterns are possible through the multiplicative and additive functions of the sheer number of people involved in the activity or activities that are necessary for the action, and by extension the sustainability of the object. From an individual perspective in the day-to-day living, the formed object is the result of our work. When objects of American society no longer meet the needs of the people, such as an economic or a political system, these objects begin to break down and decay. America must build new structures, and this falls on the backs of its citizens. It is the individual work efforts of all American citizens that make this possible.