Status Quo

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I've been talking to my son about this and I've been wondering about the general reactions from different sectors of society about it. It is true that changes in society's values tend to move at a glacial speed, and that attitudes change with generations because human nature prevents major changes once the mind of the individual is set, yet certain aspects and attitudes while popular do not reflect the speed at which society takes them, which lends the belief that there are interests in keeping said status quo. Personally I'm inclined to think that the incredible inertia society exhibits goes beyond human nature and that power and wealth actively work to keep the status quo even if the change it self doesn't affect them, for instance, the sections of society that do their utmost effort to keep the economical status quo are usually the same that fight social issues like the acceptance of homosexuality even at the cost of depriving them from an extra source of customers.

I understand some of the motivations of the conservative (with lower case c) mindset (cautious, avoid risk, don't fix it if it works, prepare and save, etc) and I recognize the value of some of those attitudes, but I wonder if those become part of the Conservative (with upper case C) mindset because there is a natural fit or if there is more to it.

Thoughts?

[Opsa]

Are you asking about the glacial movement of societal change, or about conservative attitudes?

I am not sure what the difference is between the upper and lower case conservatives, but I think that some of the resistance to otherwise logical  change is due to those who do not want their business to have to be modified in any way. They just want to rake in the bucks the same way they have in the past. For instance, the US auto makers have taken a heck of a long time to explore and embrace alternative fuels. This is because the oil companies have been having such a jolly time draining our pockets and polluting the environment. Recently some of them have been wising up and offering hybrids, finally. I am looking forward to the smart companies that will start making them as affordable as the gas guzzlers.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Are you asking about the glacial movement of societal change, or about conservative attitudes?

Both or, the relation between them. It is understood that a ruling class will try it's best to maintain the status quo because it is in their best interest to keep what directly benefits them, but I see two funny things happening. On one end the perception of the elite that any change can potentially destabilize their position, regardless of how it would affect their business, and on the other, the attitudes of those supporting the system even if they are not directly benefited by it's endeavors.

It's like a feeling that by allowing something completely unrelated to power said power will be affected and create instability, the implication being than by allowing social change (individual freedoms) the economic powers would be endangered.

[Griffin NoName]

Power and wealth = values - always stay at the top.

[pieces o nine]

It's like a feeling that by allowing something completely unrelated to power said power will be affected and create instability, the implication being than by allowing social change (individual freedoms) the economic powers would be endangered.

This might be it, in a nutshell.I have met people who resist any and all change just on principal, obstinately obstructing even that which would clearly benefit them.

My mom speaks often of her belief that her generation has seen more change than any other (her grandparents farmed with an animal-pulled plow; she looks at very deep-space photography on her computer). Part of the coping skills of the women in her circle is an adamant refusal to budge on random issues. I see it in myself as I get older, and as I find it more difficult to "start over". There are changes I want to see which would benefit me directly, and changes I want to see which would benefit people quite different from me directly. Then there are other changes which I have an irrational opposition to or irritation about, and feel the sense of wanting everything to remain static, please.

The "status quo" is vague and all-encompassing. Is there something in particular that prompted this discussion?

Edit: quote code.

[Aggie]

I see a (terrifying to me) headlong rush into massive societal change being pushed upon us by our corporate overlords, with almost zero discussion taking place about what this will mean or whether it's appropriate. I'm specifically talking about the changes in communications technology and to some degree the financial system.  There's very little evidence that ANYONE is trying to keep the status quo in place with respect to the acceptability of being in debt as a way of life, for example. From the technological perspective, the smart phone and the next shift into augmented reality** is being forced upon us as a society* without any real pondering of whether this will actually improve the experience of being human or degrade it. There's no relevant body overseeing whether the use of new technologies is 'safe' in terms of mental health and brain development in the way that there are standards for ensuring that you won't be electrocuted by your coffeemaker. Yet we're eagerly pushing these things into the hands of our toddlers in order to shut them up so we don't have to personally engage and entertain them, and will continue to do so throughout their childhood, while we pat ourselves on the back for raising such a smart and adept technology user.

But hey, the stock market wouldn't be back at pre-crash levels (see graphic below) if we all weren't willing to go into debt to have shiny new toys that can replace a significant portion of our mental skills.  Who wants to have to go to all the work of learning to read a map, learn and retain facts that you could just google, maintain face-to-face friendships or be patient in boring situations when you can carry all that in your pocket?  I do happen to think that these devices are wonderful prosthetics for people whose mental or physical disabilities prevent them from otherwise engaging fully with the world, but that by adopting them wholesale we're voluntarily becoming people who will not otherwise be capable of engaging fully with the world. However, you'd better up the limit on your credit card and get your hot little hands on this stuff ASAP, because without consumer-debt usury the banks won't make any money and then we'll all be fucked.



<sub>*I was extremely angry and dismayed last week to find out that my phone provider has discontinued and recalled my particular model of talk-and-text dumbphone. It's a Samsung with a slideout QWERTY keyboard.  I was planning to use some accumulated credits to buy another one as a backup (spare charger, spare battery, spare phone essentially for free). Most providers no longer offer more than one model of dumbphone (which tend to be IMHO intentionally aesthetically unappealing), so essentially we've lost the choice to buy an appropriate technology or a phone that isn't the size of bloody deck of cards. Data plans make more money than talk and text only, so therefore Thou Shalt Have A Smartphone, thus sayeth the Corps.

**Have you seen the new Google Glass? This scares the shit out of me.</sub>
[youtube=425,350]6BTCoT8ajbI[/youtube]

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More to the point of what Zono is asking, I think this is at the moment not a uniquely American issue, but more visible in the US than some places The variations I've seen in Britain and Canada are currently focused on using supposed crackdowns on 'people cheating the system' to pull legitimate social support away from those who need them, namely the disabled and the unemployed, respectively. I tend to be a pessimist and think that the main point of cultural Conservatism isn't so much about maintaining the status quo as maintaining divisions and hatred between different segments of the herd. Especially during times such as this where anger and frustration is starting to build against the richest and most powerful segments of society, it's important to those in power to keep the masses focused on other 'enemies', real or imagined.  

In terms of politicians, how do you realistically get people who are struggling to keep food on the table to stand up and enthusiastically support a candidate who may literally never had to cook a meal for themselves in their life? There's two ways...  put out a message of hope and change, or else throw up enough smoke, mirrors and bogeymen to re-structure the dividing lines about trivial cultural issues. If your opponent has gained office on a message of hope and change, it's critically important to make sure you obstruct any attempts to improve life for the people of your country, as this would give political credit and power to your opponent. It's much better to pound the voters who bought into that message of hope further into the ground (and into a worse standard of living) to make sure that technique doesn't work in the future. That way, you either disenfranchise them completely or alternatively can get them so worked up on superficial cultural issues that they stop trying to ask for change, and instead clamour against two people entering a legal bond of love and commitment because they happen to look the same with their underpants off.  

IMHO, culturally widespread messages of hate and intolerance are divide-and-conquer tactics which owe a large degree of effectiveness to their emotional impact. It's much, much easier to provoke fear and hatred than hope in people, especially in people who are anxious about their own standards of living or the state of their nation.  When things are darkest economically and socially, appealing to the dark side is the most effective tool available for social control and promoting political or religious conformity. Hey, there's also the hundred-billion dollar a year Made-In-USA industry in the treatment of anxiety disorders to maintain...  heaven forbid we all learned how to relax and stop worrying about those people three houses down who look, talk or pray differently than we do.  

What royally pisses me off about this sort of thing is that the long-term economic interest of the capitalist class would IMHO be best served by actively creating a (relatively) happy, secure, healthy, well educated and socially accepting society.  However, this approach takes money and effort now, and doesn't pay off quickly.  Economic and political decisions are based on the returns and gains made during the next quarter or by the next election.  I find it completely ridiculous that we keep electing politicians who have zero interest in making the country a better place for its citizens at large and are instead quite openly working to remove power and money from those with the least and put it in the hands of those who already live like gods. It's in the interest of large financial institutions and the extremely wealthy to promote a cycle of booms and busts, ESPECIALLY if government-sponsored bailouts are waiting to pick them up.  The stock market in itself is a fantastic tool for moving money out of the pockets of individual investors during the busts, and transfer it to the hands of the nimble. Large institutions and hedge funds literally use stock-trading computers capable analyzing and exploiting price differentials over milisecond intervals to squeeze out profits, while the average Joe Investor sticks a lump of money in one of the seven mutual funds offered by the 'financial planner' at his bank and hopes like hell that it'll still be there when he retires. Bank bailouts using taxpayer money are literally a direct transfer of wealth from the average citizen to the wealthy.  Hey assholes, the country's in bad debt...  how about a government bailout by the banks in the years you are profitable?



Overall, I really don't believe that societal change is a glacial process. There's no reason we can't meme-shift faster than we technology-shift, or even faster. I tend to agree with Zono that there is intentional manipulation of certain social issues as a means of social and political control.  I don't believe that there's any conspiracy among the elites to achieve this, but rather that it's an evolutionary process whereby what works is retained and what doesn't is jettisoned. Our current financial and social systems provide a structure of rewards and losses which drives the development of such control techniques.  I think that advertising is a good example of this sort of evolutionary development of techniques; while early advertising drew heavily on psychological research in order to design effective techniques, modern advertising is increasingly dependent on combining raw creativity with the ability to monitor and assess the effectiveness of new techniques and the relative fitness of existing ones. There's very little need for central control to achieve the end goal with these sort of systems; one merely needs to set up the parameters by which rewards and losses are determined, and then try everything to see what sticks.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

The point I'm trying to reach is one related to attitudes themselves, I agree with Aggie that societal changes do happen and sometimes faster and in directions we would consider destructive, but the attitudes don't change as much as those tend to be generational. I also get Aggie's point about the 'divide & conquer + fear' currently used by the elite's mouthpieces, yet when you inquire to an average babyboomer about, say, gay issues, you can feel the discomfort even if they openly agree with a more liberal position. This not only applies to gay issues mind you, but plenty of social issues, from poverty, to sexuality, to immigration, how does someone living in a once small and quiet town feel when a more suburban population starts to show up in their radars? Same as watching two guys holding hands, or people from different colors walking down the road. Those conditions threaten the established preconceptions of the world of those experiencing and push for a desire to keep said status quo. "I know my world, how it works, it tool a lifetime to figure out how it works for it to change it's rules and I'm not going to take it graciously". The feeling can be strong enough to be exploited by the elites which in turn, want to keep one particular status quo, one in which they write the rules.
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From the technological perspective, the smart phone and the next shift into augmented reality** is being forced upon us as a society*
..
*I was extremely angry and dismayed last week to find out that my phone provider has discontinued and recalled my particular model of talk-and-text dumbphone. It's a Samsung with a slideout QWERTY keyboard.  I was planning to use some accumulated credits to buy another one as a backup (spare charger, spare battery, spare phone essentially for free). Most providers no longer offer more than one model of dumbphone (which tend to be IMHO intentionally aesthetically unappealing), so essentially we've lost the choice to buy an appropriate technology or a phone that isn't the size of bloody deck of cards. Data plans make more money than talk and text only, so therefore Thou Shalt Have A Smartphone, thus sayeth the Corps.

I don't think it is 'forced' as much as transformed as the market adjusts desires and costs. What happens with phones now is no different to what happened to computers 20-30 years ago, and you could argue that it also applies to planes, cars, machines, etc. If you look at it more closely it isn't that different feel from the one described above. True, there are consequences to each technology, be it cars, computers or cellphones, but I honestly don't think there is any particular conspiracy to push tech on unsuspecting citizens, more a desire for convenience. That in it self could be a different issue to debate.

As for your desire of a dumber phone (cellphones have had microprocessors from the start, they're just more functional now) it is true that finding them isn't as easy as it used to be but still I could find non Android/iOS/Blackberry/W8 unlocked phones on the market place in just two clicks:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/SAMSUNG-RUGBY-II-2-A847-BLACK-YELLOW-UNLOCKED-CELL-PHONE-AT-T-T-MOBILE-/400427340699?pt=Cell_Phones&hash=item5d3b54539b

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875561018

[Aggie]

....you can feel the discomfort even if they openly agree with a more liberal position. This not only applies to gay issues mind you, but plenty of social issues, from poverty, to sexuality, to immigration, how does someone living in a once small and quiet town feel when a more suburban population starts to show up in their radars? Same as watching two guys holding hands, or people from different colors walking down the road. Those conditions threaten the established preconceptions of the world of those experiencing and push for a desire to keep said status quo. "I know my world, how it works, it tool a lifetime to figure out how it works for it to change it's rules and I'm not going to take it graciously". The feeling can be strong enough to be exploited by the elites which in turn, want to keep one particular status quo, one in which they write the rules.

I think this is a very valid point.  My maternal grandmother, who was an open and tolerant person, got quite vocally biased against Sikhs in her old age, mostly due to the massive influx of Sikh immigrants into her neighbourhood and surrounding area.  She'd always been happy to live in a multicultural city and was good friends with Chinese immigrants throughout her life. However, as the demographics changed (while she was in her 80's and 90's) she saw stores near her apartment that she was used to shopping at close down and get replaced with shops catering to that particular community; the major-chain supermarket two blocks from her house closed and she now needed to take a bus to get groceries.  Most importantly perhaps, I don't think she ever befriended anyone from the Sikh community.  

I definitely agree that non-exposure to certain social conditions breeds fear of the unknown when these conditions begin to appear.  If you've never been around LGBT people or people of a certain ethnic background, the sum of your knowledge is largely tainted by stereotypes and tasteless jokes.  Once you've worked with or befriended someone who is of a different background or orientation, it's easier to see that there's really more commonalities than differences.

True, there are consequences to each technology, be it cars, computers or cellphones, but I honestly don't think there is any particular conspiracy to push tech on unsuspecting citizens, more a desire for convenience. That in it self could be a different issue to debate.

I suppose it depends on whether you would consider massive government propaganda campaigns to qualify as 'forcing' an ideology on citizens, or simply 'a reflection of the desires of the population'. Advertising is quite literally a massive, multi-billion-dollar capitalist propaganda campaign to get you ideologically aligned with the idea that buying more stuff will make you happier.

Perhaps I'm not trustworthy on this point, as I severely restrict my exposure to advertising (no tv, no commercial radio, good at tuning out print and banner ads).  I'm not very well informed about all the benefits and conveniences of the new tech.

_{p.s. yes, there are alternative options for old-school phones (hell, ebay likely still carries rotary-dial phones), but I'm dismayed more that my budget carrier has reduced them to two models.  I also personally dislike shopping online for items prone to getting electro-gremlins... I've got an order of books coming from Amazon at the moment, but they tend not to go on the fritz and need returning. I've had mixed results with online orders in general, and it's harder to bring things into Canada than to have them shipped within the US. I'm going to try to go phone shopping when I'm in South Africa later this year, presuming there are still lower-tech (and lower-priced) phones on the market there.}

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Smartphones took over already, and you may find that while you can buy dumber phones in SA the overwhelming majority will be value smartphones (I bought a cheap alcate phone in Mexico a month ago because it was cheaper than unlocking a an American phone, but the store was full of Androids). BTW, the links I gave you were .ca both for newegg.ca and ebay.ca

I suppose it depends on whether you would consider massive government propaganda campaigns to qualify as 'forcing' an ideology on citizens, or simply 'a reflection of the desires of the population'. Advertising is quite literally a massive, multi-billion-dollar capitalist propaganda campaign to get you ideologically aligned with the idea that buying more stuff will make you happier.

Is the Canadian government actively promoting the use of smartphones? That would be news to me.

[Griffin NoName]

Ok. Total Topic Drift.

Once I am in the middle of a phone call on my smart phone, it is very difficult to do things like press 3 for complaints, as the smartphone does not present sensible screens. Once away from the screen with end call on it, due to doing something else, like eg. clicking hands free, it is almost impossible to get back to the screen with end call on it. It is irritating. Like the phone is great at everything except making phone calls.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I refuse to kill my own thread replying to this (and upsetting the status quo), please post on Electronics and Technolust and I'll give some pointers there.

[Griffin NoName]

Shifts away from some status quo seem to happen via technical revolutions, like the industrial, the telegraph, electric light etc. Sometimes the uptake is swift, sometimes not. Personally I think the biggest was piped water (but that's because I am sure I would have been the one fetching it).

[Aggie]

I suppose it depends on whether you would consider massive government propaganda campaigns to qualify as 'forcing' an ideology on citizens, or simply 'a reflection of the desires of the population'. Advertising is quite literally a massive, multi-billion-dollar capitalist propaganda campaign to get you ideologically aligned with the idea that buying more stuff will make you happier.

Is the Canadian government actively promoting the use of smartphones? That would be news to me.

I was using analogy there.  Ads are corporate run, not government-promoted, but I consider both systems to be similar.  Massive public exposure to sponsored messages designed to promote compliance to the will of the sponsor. Ads push the capitalist message quite as hard as say, Communist regimes.  Thankfully, one actually profits (financially) if one disobeys capitalist propaganda.  Resisting a brutal regime can get you killed, resisting capitalist toymakers just means more money in the bank.


Interestingly, ads tend to be fairly inclusive and are much better at plugging into positive emotions than many other forms of media (I quit watching the news, too).

I like using my money to buy time; they used to pay me too much to resist selling it, so now I'm buying my time back when it's cheap. I'd rather have less stuff and more time to develop myself.  I view smartphones as massive time-wasters, because I'm a little ADD and internet-addicted enough that I wouldn't be able to stay off the damned thing. That's where most of my resentment derives from; having one would be like having a second job, but I'd have to pay it to let me stay plugged in. Text is bad enough, but serves a useful purpose. Having wikipedia in my pocket would not.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I do consult Wikipedia on my phone but mostly if there is a tidbit from a conversation to backup/check. Most of the time I just use it to play solitaire when I have dead time waiting for something.
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Re advertising, you bring up an interesting point: if and/or how is advertising promoting the status quo? And as much as I dislike it I'm not fully convinced. Certain advertisement perhaps (like the obnoxious and IMO immoral ads for pharmaceutical products) but it isn't generalized or very subtle.

[Aggie]

If we're talking about economic interests promoting their own self-interests, how is advertising not the maintenance of the economic status quo? The top money needs our money to stay on top. The idea of being in the owning class is to make profits such that the money you pay your employees is less than the money you receive for the product (much less, considering overhead and production costs).  This way, you continue to accumulate money while allowing your employees to put money back into the system (and in part, back into your pocket).  You need to convince them to spend as much of their wage as possible; this is the point of advertising.