C. Wright Mills: Nuclear War

Nova Scotia Dept: The realism he was writing about had to do with the crisis mentality around nuclear war and the way that the Cold War and detente provided a justification for American political elites to turn the reins of government over to the serious people who really know how to run things and keep us all safe, according to The Chronicle Herald. But nuclear war is only one possible crisis scenario. It can also be the chronic economic crisis, which in Nova Scotia has been going on more or less unabated since about the 1880s. It can also be the reverse Malthusian time-bomb of a population that is shrinking rather than growing and in 1958, American sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the term crackpot realism. In a book entitled The Causes of World War 3, he argued that responsibility for governance had shifted to a class of what he called serious people. The serious people are the technocrats, high-level bureaucrats and captains of industry who are accustomed to making decisions in a data-driven, system-level vacuum. Since they talk mainly to one another, their sense of hard-nosed realism is remarkably at odds with the reality that most people face. If we spin forward to 2012 in Nova Scotia, the allegedly socialist NDP government cannot, for instance, listen to its own grassroots. Even though the party may have been elected by ordinary working people, government workers, unionized labour, activists, political radicals, left-wing academics and aging hippies, once in power the government must turn its back on this lot. These are not serious people. The serious people are for the most part hidden, speaking through professional pundits, spin doctors, and think tanks. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.