Rocket Ride

Dateline 2012: As important, wealthy people  ramp up efforts to secure assets and avert environmental catastrophe, it is useful to put 'remaindered populations' in context.

Human beings have always recognized that being bright, comely or strong was a good idea. Such individuals frequently enjoy splendid lives. They are encouraged and applauded   because the rest of us  hope to share in the spoils such lives accomplish. What we did not anticipate were the  ways the wealthy would devise to  only  share the wealth they were boiling out of our lives with  colleagues and progeny. Thus was born the aristocracy, nobility, neo-capitalism ...  and the rich/poor adventures comprising the historical record.

Although the rest of us still dream of leading handsome  lives, history recommends that we  anticipate what Thomas Hobbes called a "nasty, brutish and short" existence.

For a time, the industrial revolution meant that Heaven on Earth looked like a real possibility. Although the  majority  still had no chance of becoming wealthy,  modern  technologies meant we could participate vicariously in extraordinary lives. Fabulous inequities were  made acceptable by publishing salacious details and occasional troubles of a few wealthy lives. Hundreds of millions  now depend upon such news every day.

What we do not notice is that this  vicariousness, this new haplessness and dependency, was preparing us for the next stage in our Hobbesian career. The middle class is under attack and the reason is simple: Although we did our best, the poor could never elevate  the gifted people to their manifest destiny.

The Industrial Revolution set the stage and provided a solution.  Folkways, self-sufficient individuals and communities became as ashes in  mouths of poor people.  We were herded - we herded ourselves, it truth be told - into cities, factories and shopping centres.

The resulting middle class means modern nations can be thought of as three-stage rockets. The lower and middle stages have now successfully propelled the wealthy into orbit. Mission accomplished, the middle class must be discarded lest environmental catastrophes  bring the whole affair down. The world cannot afford 7 billion middle class lives. The world cannot afford the billion or so now existing.

As the 3rd Millennium gets underway, economic and political dislocations signal that the needed middle class collapse is underway. Technologies made possible by a few centuries of industrial-strength profit-taking have spawned a globe-spanning super-nation. This nation has no boundaries. Its citizens hide in plain sight as they disencumber themselves of the booster populations that made them possible.