An interesting piece sent from Loyal Reader Bill V arrived in my email. For the first time, it gives a name for the two groups facing off against each other all over the world — the Physicals and the Virtuals. Read it, it’s all good, but this is especially noteworthy:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
Hence their hatred of the working classes — the “Physicals”. (By the way, you may recall the predicament of Manhattanites about a decade or so ago, when told they needed to seal off their apartment windows with duct tape against aerial contamination — and learning that these twinks not only didn’t know what duct tape was, they had no idea where to buy it. It was funny back then; it’s a fact of life for them now.)
We are heading for interesting times.
