APP - Revolutions And The People

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midcan5

Member
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
 
midcan5 said:
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
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that short answer is not likely. That is because once groupings of people become too large for everyone to play a part in the community, you end up with holes in the societal fabric. When the two groups of people then complain about those holes and demand those 'in charge' to fix them, they go about it with thoughts of control in their heads, not community support.
 
Your post requires deep thought. It is early in the day. I will try to address your points when I get home later providing, of course, I haven't stumbled into the heart of a revolution.
Good post though.
 
midcan5 said:
Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
Click to expand...
Producing a better world is not the same as producing a world without flaw. And no, humanity was not born of peace, so how can it achieve it?
 
In reference to Midcan's comment about revolutions failing in Africa, there is a simple reason. Revolutions in much of that continent (not so much the very northern states, such as Libya) are always simply about removing a dictator, and not about transforming the local culture into a unified, cohesive, and sustainable mass, capable of establishing a 21st Century state.
 
midcan5 said:
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
Click to expand...

the poor we shall have with us always

competition for endless amounts of wealth preclude altruism and care for the down trodden

there seems to be a growing disenchantment with science that bodes ill for the world and especially our nation

part of the problem is that science hands us things what we are ill equipped to use or cope with and the rate of change in society exceeds what the older generation (mine! now) can handle or comprehend...or maybe i am just too lazy to keeps up, i used to make my living using technology and now i feel burned out

oh well
 
Revolutionaries believe that the old society was evil and that their new society will establish some kind of perpetual new perfection. Once in power, the revolutionaries find that there were reasons that the old guys acted the way they did. Perhaps it would be best, if difficult, to change things. But they have enemies, and, in the beginning, no new government ever has much legitimacy. Too often the revolutionaries cave and begin using the tools of the old government, convincing themselves that it is merely practical and just to use evil tools to establish whatever noble concept they believe they are establishing. However, once they've crossed the threshold, they can't go back. Pretty soon, new generations arise in the society, quoting but not actually believing this revolutionary nonsense, and things soon revert back to much the same as they had been before. Society is in many ways like an organism, and there's really no such thing as absolute power.
 
Interesting replies, thanks. Could we call the period starting in the last century the age of the corporation. Do revolutions in advanced societies reside today in ideas and propaganda and not violence? Was or is the modern conservative movement a revolution opposed to the New Deal and Great Society? If so, how, why, and who formed it. Or is it instead a religious revolution against the secularism of today?

While I was looking over some history and idea books, a piece Isaiah Berlin wrote about what he called the three major turning points in framing the world or at least the western world caught my attention. The second and third interest me. His second point is Machiavelli's recognition that you have to look at what men do and not what they say.

The third Berlin considered the most important Romanticism, the idea that there are no solid foundational elements. It is one we still debate in various forms. Consider the battle to bring back a religious authority in modern life; Christianity in America and Islam in various other places. The modern experience has broken the tethers that religion filled till the enlightenment freed men. Sometime freedom is unsettling.


http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Reality-Studies-Ideas-History/dp/0374525692/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8
 
Revolutions are typically viewed as violent and bloody, as in the French Revolution. As it happens, the term can describe major chances and advances, such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The American Revolution is distinct from the American Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, because it encompasses the entire period of 1763-1791, while the war merely occurred 1775-1783. People need to remember this, if they are going to win the peace.
 
Threedee said:
Revolutions are typically viewed as violent and bloody, as in the French Revolution. As it happens, the term can describe major chances and advances, such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The American Revolution is distinct from the American Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, because it encompasses the entire period of 1763-1791, while the war merely occurred 1775-1783. People need to remember this, if they are going to win the peace.
Click to expand...

Well, I think there's a key difference between the American and French revolutions as well. The American revolution was really a war of independence from a government that had become foreign. Even though it's ideology was radical for its day, it was widely agreed upon amongst the people. It was a war where the primary enemy was a foreign government that must be repelled. The French revolution, on the other hand, became a movement to entirely reform society, and was attempting to trailblaze many even more radical ideas, such as deism, the right to revolution, etc... They attempted to institute this on a largely religious society where a great deal of people still held loyalty to monarchist ideas. So, it was a war that pitted one section of society against another section that must be exterminated. So, I think that's an important distinction - revolutions of independence, such as that of America and many other colonies, and revolutions of revolution, such as the French and Russian revolution. Once liberalism had become well established, and people had real-world experience with what ideas worked and what didn't, it was pretty rare for a liberal revolution to establish violence on the scale of the French revolution. I don't think there's ever been a successful socialist revolutionary war. The only arguably successful socialist "revolutions" could only arguably be democratic and peaceful ones.
 
midcan5 said:
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
Click to expand...
But look at the bright side Mid. We now have processed cheese and MTV....life is good! :)
 
midcan5 said:
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
Click to expand...
But seriously, the answer to your question is "No, revolutions are not the means to create a society that supports the people.". You confuse cause with effect when you make such an assumption. The causes of revolutions and other mass political movements are psychological in nature and are a response to a given current condition which frustrates larges numbers of essentially prosperous people. No great revolution was ever started by the hoipaloi or the great unwashed uneducated and ignorant masses looking to improve their lot in life. The Romans were right there. Give them bread and circus and they are content. It's the people who have something at stake in the current political process, property owners, merchants, intellectuals, small holders, proffessionals, etc, these are the people who have started all of histories great revolutions. Why did they do so and not the great masses of the poor who suffer the most?

Frustration with the current regime is the answer. Those who dominate the political class are vested in the status quo. They have no need, wish or desire for revolution. Those of the very poor are to focused on meeting their basic human need for day to day survival to even be concerned about political mass movements. They are far more concerned with feeding, sheltering and clothing their kids and family.

So the questions you are asking your self about revolutions are based on a false premise. Revolutions do not start from some sense of reason or enlightenment that there is a better way of doing things. They arise because large numbers of prosperous people become frustrated to the breaking point with the current regime and determine that it has to go! Look at our own revolution as an example. It wasn't started by frontiersmen and settlers. It was started by the gentry, landowners and merchant classes who grew utterly frustrated with British rule.

It is this sense of frustration that is the causal agent of revolutions and not reason and enlightenment or some grand desire to find a better way. These are the affects of revolutions, not the cause.
 
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midcan5 said:
It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.
Click to expand...

I doubt that anyone has ever defined a point in a revolution at which the revolution may be deemed a success. If we eliminate the time constraint it may be said that all revolutions are successful for if they are not successful they cannot be called revolutions. There will be several objectives with each acting as a successful outcome. So we have a revolution and remove the monarchy. Success if that was one of the objectives. Then we continue and kill all the aristocrats. Success if that, too, was an objective. Then we attempt to wrest power from the corrupt leaders of industry but we fail.
So successful revolution or not?
Some revolutions are not really revolutions at all. A coup is not necessarily a revolution, yet a coup might, in theory, improve a society and achieve more than a revoltion.
We might also weigh the benefits against the costs. Was Mao's 'revolution' a success? More people were housed and fed than ever before in China. But millions of people died as a direct result. Success for those who lived and went on to build a new China, but a failure for those who now only exist in the memory.
How long was that piece of string?
 
Revolutions are a natural reaction to an over ambitious ruling oligarchy, regardless of how that oligarchy classifies itself.

Right now humanity needs to throw off the irrational shackles of fiat currency and the banker fascist killers who love it.

The ability to create money from nothing is ultimately a totalitarian power.
 
AssHatZombie said:
Revolutions are a natural reaction to an over ambitious ruling oligarchy, regardless of how that oligarchy classifies itself.

Right now humanity needs to throw off the irrational shackles of fiat currency and the banker fascist killers who love it.

The ability to create money from nothing is ultimately a totalitarian power.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this useful post.
 
Little name calling and curse words, is that the sign of a successful thread?

Are there revolutions in ideas? Consider the change from the world of spirit control to the modern sense of personal responsibility. The largest change would be the change from church to secular that took place over two hundred years ago and seems to still be happening. Many people still desire a central authority that remains unknown, Gawd, rather than the more obvious monarch, government, or what have you. If ideas matter more than the revolutionary act who manages ideas? If managed, who decides on whether an idea is good or bad or even workable. Are we at an impasse today in America as MONEY is the chief source of ideas and its idea is only more. Is money an idea?

Two interesting pieces on topic.

http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/rofl/blog/revolutions-black-swans-and-historians

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/07/what_would_marx_say_about_cairo
 
AssHatZombie said:
Revolutions are a natural reaction to an over ambitious ruling oligarchy, regardless of how that oligarchy classifies itself.

Right now humanity needs to throw off the irrational shackles of fiat currency and the banker fascist killers who love it.

The ability to create money from nothing is ultimately a totalitarian power.
Click to expand...

Remove your money from banks; burn it all. Problem solved, you are now free. :burn:
 
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