According to a 2020 book by Joel Koktin, ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism - A Warning To The Global Middle Class’, neo-feudalism is a global phenomenon that includes the US, UK, Australia, Canada and most of continental Europe. The trend indicates that, by 2030, 1% of the population will control 2/3 of the world’s wealth.

Globalisation has aided the upper classes but not the rest. The ‘learned’ people, or clerisy, and the oligarchy have a common world view, believing in globalism, cosmopolitanism, the value of credentials, and the authority of experts.

Technology, once seen as good for democracy, has become a tool for surveillance and consolidation of power. Our new “overlords” are the technocratic elites, a “priesthood of power” based on scientific expertise.

Self-determination, family and community are out, replaced by ‘progressive’ ideas about globalism, environmental sustainability, re-defined gender roles, and the authority of experts.

Where liberal capitalism built affordable housing for the upwardly mobile, Neo-feudalism is creating a world where fewer and fewer people can afford to own their homes. The ‘enlightened’ environmental policies are imposing “extraordinarily high energy costs on the less well off”.

The clerisy/oligarch class will expand the scope of welfare and state with subsidies and direct payments for the masses in the hope of staving off a rebellion. A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the ideas touted to keep the ‘serfs’ quiet.

A high-tech Middle Ages or feudal system will emerge as economic power is dominated by fewer companies in the technical and finance areas, resulting in very little progress for most people. In 2005 to 2014, the percentage of people with flat or decreasing real incomes rose to over 60% in twenty five advanced economies. (‘Financial Times’, 19/7/17).

Tech leaders controlling a few powerful companies resemble a feudal ruling class. Like aristocrats of old, they are resistant to any dispersion of their power.

Dear Ttbn,

In the old dispute between socialism and communism, communism believed that things must first get worse before they can get better. Indeed, wherever communism came to power they managed to build a terrible hell - and it never got better!

UBI can lessen the pain, it allows people to refuse working for employers whose business-model goes against their moral grain, including by refusing to work in the production of increasingly monstrous technology. It also allows people to refuse stupid credentials that are of no real value. It allows unemployed people to think because hungry people cannot think properly.

Democratic means can work - political party(s) can be peacefully formed to reject technology, globalism and tyrannical environmental demands, take the air out of the intellectual oligarchy and possibly even tax global corporations out of existence.

But you oppose it because you only believe in a revolution, you think that only hungry people may be desperate enough to use violence to overthrow the progressive systems. What you are likely to get with this approach is starving people, too weak to help themselves AND a flourishing technological elite that governs them by the whip and a dangling carrot.

You failed to address the root cause:

Technology is the inevitable curse, the necessary punishment for overpopulation. It is simply not otherwise possible to feed, clothe and shelter that many people on our planet. Technology and regimentation go hand in hand and mankind will never be rid of them without first being willing to control their genitals and procreative urges.

The young generations want technology because they are still ruled by their genes and their demands for progeny. The conservative family model actually helps to lock this idea in their minds about the necessity of offspring, which they feel the owe their ancestors. The re-definition of gender roles may therefore actually be a step in the right direction, though I think, far too little and far too late.

A drastic reduction in human population is also the only possible way to help the environment recover - all other attempts are just a joke.

ttbn and Yuyutsu,

It's obvious the neither of you have had any training in social theory.

theory
Mr Opinion,
That's exactly where just about all of our societal problems start, Academic theory !

individual,

I reckon you are a big comics reader. Who's your favourite Batman ot the incredible Hulk?

Very interesting topic.