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rob05c  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I, for one, do not welcome our new Neoliberal overlords.

    Who was experiencing 300 years of liberty?

The West has experienced three hundred years of unprecedented liberty, freedom, and social mobility. I was saying it appears to be ending, at least in the US.

By all evidence, Liberty is an anomaly against nature. Natural Selection creates Plutocracy. Money is power, and the masses fail the Prisoner's Dilemma and are unable to work together against it, excepting rare charismatic leaders, most of whom immediately create another dictatorship after revolution anyway.

    The foundations of the power structures that you identify are dissolving.

I hope so. But I think your argument doesn't take into account game theory. That is, that the masses will always fail the Prisoner's Dilemma. Technology or not, the public will never be able to suppress the power of wealth if they can't work together, and all of human history suggests they can't.

    If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.

    But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.

    Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

—Nineteen Eighty-Four