Summation of Contemporary Times

The post-modern society is a hodge-podge of new ideas mixed with old. Our current situation denotes a completely different one from one thousand years ago, when the world was agrarian and farmers held the key to survival.

But now? Radical fundamentalism is clashing with Western Empicalism, and the whole world is gettting ready for the next transition of mankind. Even so, that is not what this post shall be about. Instead, we ask questions to understand ourselves. We ask questions to understand just how we got here, and only then can we know where we are headed.

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It started with the industrial revolution. The enlightenment was a time of rational discourse and questioning new boundaries, where the majority of europeans completely rejected the church. Advances in mathematics arose. This was also around the time of the beginning of the American Colonies. The first types of industry were sowing houses, where women would work for hours at looms, creating cloth to sell and feed their family. The trick happened when the principles of motion were better understood. Thanks to Isaac Newton, we were able to harvest rivers and waterfalls. And we did.

The british created the first mechanized factories, powered by waterfalls which turned the large wheel out front. Suddenly, the amount of cloth the british were able to produce fell into the hundreds of tons. The cloth industry became highly profitable. The idea was sown, that machines could do our work much faster and more efficiently than we could.

The creation of semi-modern cloth mills was the key to the industrial revolution. But it wasn't the start of it. Miles away in france, enlightenment era thinkers were contemplating a new kind resource management, the likes of which the world had never seen. Laissez faire. At the time, many of the most important thinkers in france believed that resources had to be controlled from the top down. That was the way it had been for centuries, via the fuedal structure. Everything in the land belonged to the King, who was responsible for the well-being of his people.

There was a small minority, however, of emerging middle class. Around this time, the first modern businessmen began to appear, along with the mathematics to make it possible: accounting. They were dismissed as anomalies in the system. They would not last long, just a passing phenomenon.

Times changed however. The industrial revolution created such an abundance of resources that the emerging businessmen leaped at the chance. Entrepreuners, they became rich. It did not take long, but the industrial revolution was the start of modern commerce and trade, of which the massive amounts of wealth have been developed in countries that have become industrialized.

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Along with capitalism, however, came socialism, the child of Karl Marx. Karl marx reviewed Capitalism and came to the conclusion that it abused and exploited the lower classes. This was because in previous fuedalism, class was extremely important. Marx looked at capitalism from the tints of feudalism, which was why he came to the conclusion of class struggle and such.

But capitalism is not like feudalism, and while there will always be the poor, it effectively erases class differences. The class barriers become much more fluid, and thus the poor may rise and the rich may fall. Socialism and Capitalism grew in influence, the two competing ideologies of the modern world.

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World War II: Hitler had a vision of a new world order, ruled by the strong, where the weak did not exist. In theory, if there could be such a world, it undoubtedly would be atractive to the strong. In the 1940's, a war which ravaged all of Europe took place. And it ended with the unveiling of the most destructive weapon ever constructed. Now, the stakes are high, we possess the ability to end life on this planet. The world is a very dangerous place.

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So what is the viewpoint of today's world? In the previous centuries, the western world achieved dominance, and know the asian countries, the countries that have been shit on all this time, want a slice of the pie. Some countries, like china, have decided that the way to gain respect in the international scene in to become an economic power. Others, like Iran, have chosen military strength.

In truth, however, the western countries have already given up war. There will never be another war between two industrialized nations again. This poses a problem for countries like Iran.

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We also live in an age of Religious Fundamentalism vs. Athiestic thought. For the past centuries, there has been an uneasy tension between religion and science, and soon it will break out into all scale war. Pick a side, because one of them has to come out on top.