The Industrial Age of Government and Economic Systems

After watching a recent episode of South Park, in fact the latest one as of this date, I came to think about how it might be that a fear based on a distant, alienated understanding of some aspect of life, might come to be within the areas of economic and governmental systems. That is, how it might be that one can be frightened by an force of some kind because of a lack of understanding of that force. A good example would be say, people's natural phobia of aliens, if they came among us. As such, an force in which we have alienated understanding of, is frightening, and even more dangerous then is such a force that is malevolent. All these relations can be seen if one looks at the latest episode in how it comments on the recent economic meltdown, the nature of the United States' economic system being service-based, 9/11, and more details than I can think of.

Now, after considering how this alienation of understanding and subsequent real threat is tied to governmental and economic systems, I came to see that the Industrial Revolution not only applied to the sciences and production methodologies, but also to governmental and economic systems in America. The idea of modernistic alienation is an impression in the United States that existed after the Industrial Revolution took place. Typically in my exposure, this has been shown to have been applied to material goods and the sciences; the alienation is caused essentially by making the production of goods and progress in science dependent upon machines rather than actual humans. One cannot see as easily that which came from a human (production of goods) or can comprehend with the human senses (atomic sciences) that which is before them; it appears to be from machines.

The same impression of alienation exists in the United States' economic and governmental systems because the process of industrialization was applied also to them. For government, the leaders structured it such that it became highly reliant upon a system that allowed greater number of people to be governed using less actual people. A couple of illustrations that reveal how this was expressed is, first the increase in internal structures of organization in how government was handled (bureaucracy), second the increase in importance of citizens of following laws. These two expressions caused man to follow dutifully the intricacies of detailed organizational procedures and caused the populace to not be as governed by actual people, but by laws.

The industrialization of economic systems followed the same mentality of streamlining how a nation approached economics such that making profit, liking making products for the factory sector, was streamlined using highly mathematical systems. The need to keep progressing (a value strengthened greatly by the Industrial Revolution) is now so intrinsic within the United States' view of economics that it isn't acceptable to have a level market; but rather one that is always increasing. And so, of course, it is a crisis that a market would turn in an opposite direction, as it is now.

An important extension to the industrialization of economic systems that one should note, is that it led to the creation of the service economy we now have. This is due to the fact that people were already comfortable with an alienating system; a system that becomes more reliant upon people far away is less daunting. Of course, that sneaky alienating force that is built within such a service will make some people frightened, and rightly so, for we are reliant upon others who could easily destroy our way of life because we are so strongly tied to them; a modern Republican-esque belief. This extended idea could really be gone into more fully in a separate posting all together.