Dear Friends,
It seems to me, with the advance of technology, it will become impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. Put another way, laws against firearms, tanks, bombs and other dangerous devices will become moot, when anyone can make them anytime they want. The way the elite are approaching the subject is to simultaneously make the people into children unable to think for themselves, or act in an adult manner, and create a surveillance state so we are watched by big brother all the time. While this plan might make sense in a static society where there is no technological advancement, it cannot but fail in one where people are tech savvy. Maybe a better way would be to encourage people to be mature self controlled adults, who employ human heartedness in our daily lives.
The surveillance state is only effective when the people being surveilled are unable to do anything about it. Where the people being surveilled have a skill set that allows them to interfere with their surveillance… they will. It is human nature. In a technological society a large amount of the people will necessarily have such skills. Those skills will also be widely available since innovators will always need access to education. That is why freedom of education will become important because government cannot pick innovators, they pick themselves. Eliminate access to technology and education, and innovators will no longer b able to innovate. Once innovators can no longer innovate… advancement, scientific, economic and in our standard of living stops… then declines.
Immature people do immature things while mature people do mature things. Someone childish might fashion a bow and arrow, then shoot the arrow straight up to see how high it will go. Where someone more mature, might consider the possibility that when the arrow returns to the ground, it could present a mortal danger. Give a fool a 3D printer with the ability to produce anything… and he or she will almost certainly hurt themselves, very very badly. Give that same 3D printer to an innovator however, and they can produce something that will improve our standard of living, advance our scientific knowledge, advance our technology or make something they can sell and become rich. The difference is not the tool, it is the user of that tool, and we have the ability to make that user an adult, or a child.
The founding ethos of the United States was that the people would self control. De Tocqueville called it self interest rightly understood. While self controlled individuals are better suited for a limited republic, they are unsuitable for an autocracy, even a benevolent one. So the elite have steadfastly changed our ethos from one of self control, self reliance and thrift, to one of selfishness, lack of self control and profligacy. Adults are able to live and work, where guns can be made on a desktop 3D printer, but children can not. Unless the elite take us back to the 1970 level of technology, the people they have created will be ungovernable. Moreover, as long as the people have such skills the surveillance state will fail, because the people will be able to go around it, and “children” will be the first to do so.
The creation of childish unruly people might have been a benefit to the elite before, but with the ability to 3D print almost anything at home, creating generations of children, selfish, without self control and profligate, will lead to violence. Of course, the violence can then be pointed at by the elite to justify even more draconian surveillance and laws, which can only work if the elite take us back a few decades in technology. That can happen fairly quickly though. Just license access to technology, limit education and voila, society loses ground scientifically. Promote hedonism, profligacy and stupidity and the collapse will quicken. On the other hand, if we want to continue to advance scientifically, maybe it would be better to go back to teaching kids to be self controlled, mature and thrifty.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
