Merge to Purple

Hey guys. Long time no blog. Today I wanna talk about Red and Blue, both standing on a typical Western constitution. Our constitutions were made prior to democracy being properly in place. Here in Norway, our constitution is from 1814. Back then we were in a union with the Swedish. Parliamentarism wasn’t a reality until 70 years later, in 1884. The first political party formed here is still very much around, though struggling to keep their representatives in the parliament in modern times. The oldest party’s name is “Left” but is today drifting in between the center and the right/blue block. It has traditionally belonged to the right in spite of the somewhat misleading name, and it is the only party to the right with a clear environmental profile throughout. I suppose (guessing) the peasants were number two to form a party. They’ve been associated with the right block, but belong in the center today, and they’re currently a coalition partner with two other parties, constituting almost the entire red/left/socialist block. Third party would either be the Christians, belonging to the right, or the party called “Right”, consisting of moderate conservative forces. Then the Labor party was formed. All the parties formed to the left of the Labor party and to the right of “Right”, are relatively young parties established in the 70’s. When I was a kid, there were also three tiny communist parties, none of them big enough to be represented in parliament. Until fairly recently. The old revolutionary parties and the Marxist-Leninists are basically gone today and got absorbed into a fairly new party just called “Red”. Last election they made a record 5% nationwide, thus giving them several representatives. I’m not sure how many, because I’m not paying attention to Norwegian politics anymore to any significant extent. My party used to be Labor. I grew up in a Labor family. It has happened I voted differently. I voted for the Christians once, and “Red” two times. Not because I’m so communist, but for the sake of healthy debates in our democracy. You see, the smallest parties get more attention than their size would suggest in comparison to the big ones who dominate when it comes to the voting. This is a wonderful thing about democracy and free speech.

So – why am I telling you these things? Well, I believe it could be useful for you guys to get slightly familiar with more examples of relatable democracies, in order to understand that politics have also been subject to many changes after WW2. Our “communists” no longer have armed revolution in their program. You could say that they got domesticated over the years. Per now, none of the parliamentarians disagree about the fundament – the constitution. You could say that the 10 different parties represented have a large degree of consensus. In addition, they have a culture of collaborating across the party boundaries in order to gather a majority from any given case to another.

Let’s just establish that the communism you knew from last century doesn’t exist anymore, and the socialism that is left in modern Europe, is very similar to the moderate conservatives. They’re generally roughly equally big groups. In other words, they coexist with a common democratic agenda – to provide politics for both public and private sectors. The differences between the blocks are, generally speaking, about how to spend the gvt’s money. Socialists and conservatives have somewhat different philosophies, but both must also have some sort of social profile nevertheless, otherwise people wouldn’t be voting for them.

It was WW1 that really made modern European politics from the start. People went enthusiastically to war, thinking it wouldn’t last long. When the war was over, people got home from the front and realizing that the politicians they had been fighting for were to a great extent incompetent when it came to social issues. There were no politics to cope with poverty, the lack of work and a poor governmental economy. Those in power were traditionally rich people in the elite. They didn’t have to worry, because they’d be fine whatever happened to the people. This is when regular people started making demands in regard to social reforms, indeed inspired also by the Russian revolution.

So – what happened from in between world wars all the way to present day? And what did we learn from it? This is interesting. Communism got stuck and thus, failed. Now, how come some countries still cling to their oppressive regimes founded in other times, the last century?

I think the Chinese have figured that a one-party system serves the purpose of controlling their vast population. With that said, they are these days overtaking the US as the largest economy in the world. How did we get here? Well, the Chinese have since chairman Mao, adapted to the system that runs the majority of the rest of the world. With a plan compatible with capitalism, they have undertaken the most massive and effective effort ever witnessed by mankind, to lift many hundreds of millions out of poverty. This is by far the most important effort made to maintain world peace from WW2 till now. But there’s a flip side: Western paranoia grows equally fast as the Chinese need for energy to its many citizens approaching our living standard.

I could say a lot more by discussing North-Korea, Cuba and Venezuela today too, but I don’t wanna flood this piece with excess information, besides, I’m not preaching Red any more than I’m preaching Christianity. The only point from my side is to emphasize that every system on this planet has gone through its own evolution. The images or associations people make today aren’t necessarily accurate or real at all.

Now – let’s talk a little bit about capitalism. It’s the only working model we know how to operate successfully over some time, but it’s not by any measure free from problems, or “bugs”, if I may. A free market is like any kind of wilderness environment in nature. And as we all know, it’s survival of the fittest out there, and precious few moral codes if any at all. All I want to shed some light on is the same as after WW1, we need politicians able to create social politics that benefit people, not corporations. The way things work today, people whose identities remain buried in mazes of ownership, can practically rule the world with an invisible agenda, no faces attached or no democratically controlled processes. Given the fact that nothing changes in any significant way, in spite of decades of protests, we can safely conclude that incognito forces are reluctant to let go of their advantage, this system protecting their anonymity as well as assets. Assets often gained through war or crime and hidden in tax-paradises around the world. This means “we” have a piggy bank of blood money with some considerable proportions. Instead of investing these funds in WW3, I say we re-invent our economic system and make a ridiculously large deposit to begin with. Now – how to spend?

The idea is to try reversing the national debt. I’m not sure how heavy this burden is in practical terms, but if you can’t even pay interest, we will need a reset or reboot of the world economy in order to straighten up trends that otherwise would be impossible to turn. The advantage of such a reboot is that as long as we know what we’re aiming for the moment we throw the switch; we could start selling and investing in tomorrow’s economy right away. Knowing it was all under control and disaster avoided by collective cleverness.
But if we’re heading for the big reset, there’s no point in tossing vast amounts of black funds into the bottomless pit. However, if it could be useful to pay it off, that’s where we start. Let’s say you manage to relatively quickly cut the debt in half. That would secure world confidence in the USD, give you a realistic credit rate, and give you back the flexibility you need to finance social reforms; such as free healthcare and education.

What remains the biggest problem of capitalism is the fact that perpetual growth is not sustainable. In addition, it’s subjected to speculation and works pretty much as a casino. I’m no economist, but I’m sure we could improve the reliability of the global and national economies by doing several things to regulate the market, like we learned to corporate protective legislation as a result of the great depression in the 1930’s. Since then, the currency has been detached from the gold reserve and the last of the protective laws made in the first half of the last century, were put to death by Nixon and later Reagan as well. This means, like we learned in the 80’s and yet again in 2008, that the system is bound to crash in similar ways over and over again. Naturally, the people working with and understanding the complex markets would necessarily start speculating on trends that are dangerous to society, further contributing to such devastating scenarios.

How do we regulate, but at the same time preserve the principles of free markets, and the laws of supply and demand? I have plenty of ideas, but to make it short; visualize any economy as a more or less complex network of pipes. Pipes with a certain pressure and flow rate. Now imagine we had a 3D computer model of these pipes. In this model, there would be virtual gauges giving readings from all important locations in the vast structure of channels. In such a model, we could basically test and try out different economical ideas without causing jeopardy in the real world or launch never ending political debates. In theory any such model could be operated and monitored by AI. I’m thinking about how to virtualize such as economy and property. An advantage with digital space is that it’s infinite. Perpetual growth in such a system is actually possible. For all I know, maybe we’ll end up resetting our economy twice every century or so. Or could we by AI program our desired economic reality?

Lately there have been many topics, but as to production we’re accustomed to the thought that competition will create the drive for efficiency and lower costs. Depending on a given project and the nature and size of it, collaboration between many different manufacturers could be much more effective than a purely competitive setting with every man being on his own. We should start thinking right now about what could be done one way or the other for better end results. We should also start hunting for magical numbers, relations and phenomena in every society in this world in order to share it. The future is sharing and collaborating across borders, because our atmosphere has no borders…

Hope to see you in here again soon 😉

Lars
horizonpolaris