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Хайнлайн предсказывает диктатуру
Mar. 30th, 2007 10:55 pmfrom "To sail beyond the sunset":
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Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from mid-century on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did labour-saving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?
Some said the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was wasted.)
But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolised and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important... so his opinions on foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)
Consider these:
1) 'Bread and Circuses';
2) The abolition of the pauper's oath in Franklin Roosevelt's first term;
3)'Peer group' promotion in public schools.
These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper's oath as a condition for public charity ensured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion ensured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And 'Bread and Circuses' is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on `social' programmes ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.
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Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from mid-century on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did labour-saving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?
Some said the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was wasted.)
But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolised and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important... so his opinions on foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)
Consider these:
1) 'Bread and Circuses';
2) The abolition of the pauper's oath in Franklin Roosevelt's first term;
3)'Peer group' promotion in public schools.
These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper's oath as a condition for public charity ensured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion ensured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And 'Bread and Circuses' is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on `social' programmes ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.
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