That's the only thing politicians seem to care about anywhere. And strangely, 'jobs' seems always to be referring to manufacturing or construction type jobs. Just bizarre.
It's zombies from the 1800s. It's some sort of denial of the current state of the world.
US, UK, & australia are all fixated on the 1950s. How good it was then. It should be that good now.
They forget that during that time the US & allies had the only real functioning industry. So obviously with no competitors times were going to be good.
We are all supposed to be digging iron ore & making steel all of a sudden. Damn it all to science. I live just once and who cares about a million years of evolution.
The reason all this is happening is because technologists give control of their knowledge to people who have no knowledge. We allow them to co-opt us to their plans. It's one way to fix things. Get hard assed about handing out technology to idiots. Have a technologist / humanist sort of president. Bill G would be pretty good.
Freedom is (maybe?) psychologically (perhaps biologically?) untenable in humans.
GNU/Linux ---> too much user choice
Freely shared scientific inquiry ---> technologists giv[ing] control of their knowledge to people who have no knowledge
Everyone probably does want the iron fist in the velvet glove.
The large majority – me included – wants to be passive and rely on an
efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire
social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace. Walter Lippmann
wrote in his Public Opinion (1922) that the herd of citizens must be
governed by “a specialised class whose interests reach beyond the
locality" – this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that
circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the
"omni-competent citizen". This is how our democracies function – with our consent:
there is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is an obvious fact; the mystery
is that, knowing it, we play the game. We act as if we are free and freely deciding,
silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction
(inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think.
“People know what they want” – no, they don’t, and they don’t want to know it.
They need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests,
it is through him that they discover what they “really want.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher
It's the "masses" who may be the least delusional: The whole point is to know you're not in charge. The elites actually believe they're in control.
In The King's Speech the cause of the king-to-be's stuttering is precisely his inability
to assume his symbolic function and identify with his title. He displays little common sense,
seriously accepting that one is a king by divine will; and the task of the Australian coach is
to render him stupid enough to accept his sovereignty as natural property. In the film's key scene,
the coach sits on the throne. The furious king asks him how he dare do this, to which he replies:
"Why not? Why should you have the right to sit on this chair and me not?" The king shouts back:
"Because I am a king by divine right!" At which point the coach just nods with satisfaction;
now the king believes he is a king. The film's solution is reactionary: the king is "normalised",
the force of his hysterical questioning is obliterated.
---Slavoj Žižek
Obviously. Manufacturing and construction jobs are the opposite of "bullshit jobs". You can point to something you built and feel satisfied. Anybody can understand it. Service jobs are demeaning because the service worker always has lower social status than the person they serve. Of course politicians care about the same jobs the voters care about.
the service worker always has lower social status than the person they serve
I'm not sure about that. Does a doctor have a lower social status than his patient? Does a politician have lower status than his constituents? Does a banker have lower status than the one applying for a loan?
Those aren't pure service workers because they also have an obstructionist/rationing role. They have the power to prevent you from getting medical treatment/loans/etc., which raises their social status.
