Motto:
“I recently read an American study on the industrial revolution that began with the first steam engine but is really only starting now. Even if the world sooner or later frees itself from the Lenten consequences, Cobde’s liberalism and Marx’s biblical vision wouldn’t have power over the deeper, tectonic transformations. It must be tolerated, that’s the only piece of wisdom here. For the first time in the history of mankind, the peasantry transforms into an industrialized society. The molting is painful.
The hardest thing to endure in this revolution: the humiliation. After a while, the American writes that the revolution is propagated by the half-skilled workers. He takes the burden off the day-laborer but doesn’t allow him near the machine. Just to a screw. (It’s known that Chaplin wrote an entire film about this.) The day laborers die out, but then the romantic proletariat dies out too, who were slaves to the entire machine –the position of draft horse and skilled laborer are too humane, for the privileged. A herd of screw-driving half-skilled workers gather under the skilled laborers, the semi-educated. The counterpart of the half-skilled.
I have to admit, as I was reading, the latter was on my mind. The Central European high school education and the incredible American night classes. Keyserling calls it the chauffeur-type. Just that that chauffeur is now sitting at his desk and slowly the whole world is his. He hovers between the farmer and the sophisticated professional forever homeless; descending to one as a planned economy, and tramples the other as an authority. Even though he would fall over in the fields, and can’t carve wood, and would get a stroke from a real book.”
László Cs. Szabó: Világlázadás (World Revolution)
We’ve gotten quite far along the path outlined by László Cs. Szabó. But today, the “half-skilled worker” is no longer just a worker but the plant engineer. Working in a modern automobile factory or even operating a state-of-the-art harvester requires extremely advanced technical and computational skills. In the meantime, a steady stream of articles is analyzing the effects of technological innovation, artificial intelligence and robotization that will make the work and skills of the masses useless. What will we do with them? However, later on in the day, these same authors publish their praises for the blessing of migration because in the West we are incapable of “maintaining the population” so these masses will make up for the “missing labor”. These two concepts cannot be simultaneously true, but the decaying West, sinking into self-abandonment doesn’t care – because they don’t care about anything. Except their own genitals of course.