And we have front-row seats............

 

The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

Pretty sure we aren't there yet.........

      Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically."  Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate.  Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock

discharged........................

 Man enjoyed no greater blessing, he argued, than civil government.  It protected him both from his neighbor's self-interest and his own "propensity to superiority."  To resist a ruler was treason.  Adams rejoiced in the security their sovereign extended to his subjects.  It was "the duty of every subject, for conscience's sake, to submit to his authority, while he acted according to the law." Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, "he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience."

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

came naturally...................

      Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution.  It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism.  Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Vantage points....................

 What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Recommended....................

      As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men.  He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman.  While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic.  Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government.  Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values.  He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.

Do you not see...................

 I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.

Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men's minds.  See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas that are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation that is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?

This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano. I am profoundly convinced of it.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, as he begins this 1848 speech

proud property owners................

 The Peasantry:  Many of them in 1789, were still day laborers or sharecroppers, working other men's land; but by 1793 half the soil of France was owned by peasants, most of whom had bought their acres at bargain prices from the confiscated properties of the Church; and all but a few peasants had freed themselves from feudal dues.  The stimulus of ownership turned labor from drudgery into devotion, daily adding to the surplus that built homes and comforts, churches and schools—if only the taxgatherer could be propitiated or deceived.  And taxes could be paid with assignats—government paper money—at their face value, while products could be sold for assignats multiplied a hundred times to equal their nominal worth.  Never had the French earth been so zealously and fruitfully tilled.

     This liberation of the largest class in a now classless society was the most visible and lasting effect of the Revolution.  These sturdy providers became the strongest defenders of the Revolution, for it had given them the land, which a Bourbon restoration might take away.  For the same reason they supported Napoleon, and for fifteen years gave him half of their sons.  As proud property owners they allied themselves politically with the bourgeoisie, and served, throughout the nineteenth century, as conservative ballast amid the repeated paroxysms of the state.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon 

Youngsters..................

      Nevertheless France was weary of revolution . . . Youngsters, constitutionally rebellious, were now rebelling against revolution.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1795

dangerously certain....................

      In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them.  He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people.  He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy.  He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability.  In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.

     Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will.  His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective.  He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes.  The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain.  "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says."  He went to the guillotine.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon

the limits of moderation.............

 Mirabeau begged the deputies to retain the King as a bulwark against social disorder and mob rule.  He pictured Louis XVI as a man of good heart and generous intentions, occasionally confused by shortsighted counselors; and he asked, prophetically:

    "Have these men studied, in the history of any people, how revolutions commence and how they are carried out?  Have they observed by what a fatal chain of circumstances the wisest men are driven far beyond the limits of moderation, and by what terrible impulses an enraged people is precipitated into excesses at the very thought of which they would have shuddered."

The delegates followed his advice, for they too felt the groundswells emanating from the sidewalks of Paris.  But instead of meeting a measured loyalty with substantial concessions to the Third Estate, Louis outraged radicals and liberals alike by dismissing Necker a second time, replacing him with the Queen's uncompromising friend Baron de Breteuil, and making the warrior de Broglie minister for war.  The chips were down.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon

the watermark.......................

      Adams banked on the sage deliberations of a band of hard-working farmers reasoning their way toward rebellion.  That was how democracy worked.  He dreaded disunity. "Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction," he warned.  There was nothing feigned about his zeal for liberty, "the best cause," he assured his wife, "that virtuous men contend for."  In his case it was bred deep in the Calvinist bone.  Adams could not live in the house with a slave and arranged for the one who arrived on his doorstep to be freed.  He refused to believe that prejudice and private interest would ultimately trample knowledge and benevolence.  Self-government was in his view inseparable from governing the self; it demanded a certain asceticism.  He wrote anthem after anthem to the qualities he believed essential to a republic—austerity, integrity, selfless public service—qualities that would become more military than civilian.  The contest was never for him less than a spiritual struggle.  It is impossible with Adams to determine where piety ended and politics began: the watermark of Puritanism shines through everything he wrote.  Faith was there from the start, as was the scrappy, iconoclastic spirit, as were the daring, disruptive excursions beyond the law.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams

Seat belts fastened.................................

 Today most people believe that cultures are more matters of taste than sources of guidance for behavior that can mislead as well as inform.  We are all too keen to believe that all cultures are created equal, too slow to recognize the drawbacks of counterproductive cultures.  This is especially true of the hybrid cultures that have begun to emerge in the hothouse of subsidy and intervention in many parts of the world in this century.  Like the criminal subculture of America's inner cities, they retain incoherent bits of pieces of cultures appropriate to earlier stages of economic development and combine them with values for informing behavior in the Information Age.

       The Information Revolution, therefore, will not merely release the spirit of genius, it will also unleash the spirit of nemesis.  Both will contest as never before in the millennium to come.

       The shift from an Industrial to an Information Society is bound to be breathtaking.  The transition from one stage of economic life to another has always involved a revolution.  We think that the Information Revolution is likely to be the most far-reaching of all.  It will reorganize life more thoroughly than either the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.  And its impact will be felt in a fraction of the time.  Fasten your seat belts.

-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age