7
" There is nothing new about this. The kind of mutual rage and division we see in America today is trivial compared with other times in U.S. history—the Civil War, in which 650,000 died, or the 1960s, when the Eighty-Second Airborne was deployed to fight snipers in Detroit. Abraham Lincoln was called illiterate and an ape. Richard Nixon was called a criminal, which he turned out to be, even though he blamed it all on the media. Some presidents like Lincoln, Nixon, and Trump are reviled by some and loved by others, but the reality is they are not powerful enough to be causing the problems—nor in control of the underlying currents they are riding. "
― George Friedman , The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
12
" Technocrats live their lives abstractly, even while they are managing their own sphere. For them, all problems are intellectual. You must think constantly, and that thinking makes action possible. Once you have thought, the doing simply follows. Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world. The tension of the technocracy is between their work in their own fields and the universal principles that they practice. This shows itself most clearly in the way they deal with the declining class, the heavily white, industrial working class. In the thinking of the technocracy, the fundamental cause of oppression is whites who have historically oppressed using race, nationality, and gender. But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it. This declining class is plunging economically, but for the technocracy, which embraces a vast range of incomes, that decline is not of the essence. It is their unwillingness to abandon oppression. "
― George Friedman , The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
