NOTES

I wrote “The Coming Revolution” several years ago at the suggestion of a young Spanish man, and I wrote it in Spanish. Here, obviously, I’ve translated it into English.
As I originally wrote the notes to “The Coming Revolution” many of them contained direct quotations, translated into Spanish, from English language sources. If I translated these quotations back into English, the results certainly would not be identical with the original English-language versions. Therefore, where possible, I have returned to the original English-language sources in order to quote them accurately. However, in several cases I no longer have access to the English-language materials in question, and in such cases I’ve had to use paraphrases in these notes rather than direct quotations. But material enclosed in quotation marks always is quoted verbatim.
1 Quoted by Gordon A. Craig, The New York Review of Books, November 4, 1999, page 14.
2 My correspondent who writes under the pseudonym “Último Reducto” disagrees. he says that the United States, with its “hard capitalism,” is in a certain sense backward: The path of the future is that of Western Europe, which, with its more advanced social-welfare programs, seduces and weakens the average citizen by making his life too soft and easy. This is a plausible opinion, and Último Reducto may well be right. But it is also possible that he is wrong. As technology increasingly frees the system from the need for human work, growing numbers of people will become superfluous and will then constitute no more than a useless burden. The system will have no reason to waste its resources in taking care of the superfluous people, and therefore may find it more efficient to treat them ruthlessly. Thus, possibly, it is the “hard” capitalism of the United States rather than the softer capitalism of Western Europe that points to the future. Only time will tell.
3 In regard to the sickly psychological state of modern man, see, e.g.: “The Science of Anxiety,” Time, June 10, 2002, pages 46-54 (anxiety is spreading and afflicts 19 million Americans, page 48; drugs have proven very useful in the treatment of anxiety, page 54); “The Perils of Pills,” U.S. News & World Report, March 6, 2000, pages 45-50 (almost 21 percent of children 9 years old or older have a mental disorder, page 45); “On the Edge on Campus,” U.S. News & World Report, February 18, 2002, pages 56-57 (the mental health of college students continues to worsen); Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, 1996, Volume 24, page 423 (in the United States the suicide rate of persons between 15 and 24 years old tripled between 1950 and 1990; some psychologists think that growing feelings of isolation and rootlessness, and that life is meaningless, have contributed to the rising suicide rate); “Americanization a Health Risk, Study Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1998, pages A1, A19 (a new study reports that Mexican immigrants in the United States have only half as many psychiatric disorders as persons of Mexican descent born in the United States, page A1).
4 E.g.: Gontran de Poncins, Kabloona, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1980, pages 32-33, 36, 157 (“no Eskimo has ever punished a child,” page 157); Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia, The Natural History Press, New York, 1969, pages 204-05 (an unruly child is never beaten; children generally are allowed great latitude for physical expression of aggressive impulses against their parents, who are patient and long-suffering with them); John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man, Harper & Row, New York, 1969, page 317 (The Australian Aborigines practiced infanticide, but: “Nothing is denied to the children who are reared. Whenever they want food…they get it. Aborigine mothers rarely spank or otherwise punish their offspring, even under the most provoking circumstances.”)
On the other hand, the Mbuti of Africa did not hesitate to give their children hard slaps. Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, Simon And Schuster, 1962, pages 65, 129, 157. But this is the only example that I know of among hunting-and-gathering cultures of what by present standards could be considered child abuse. And I don’t think that it was abuse in the context of Mbuti culture, because the Mbuti had little hesitation about hitting one another and they often did hit one another, so that among them a blow did not have the same psychological significance that it has among us: a blow did not humiliate. Or so it seems to me on the basis of what I’ve read about the Mbuti.
5 E.g., Gontran de Poncins, op. cit., pages 212,273,292 (“their minds were at rest, and they slept the sleep of the unworried,” page 273; “Of course he would not worry. He was an Eskimo,” page 292). Still, there have existed hunting-and-gathering cultures in which anxiety was indeed a serious problem; for example, the Ainu of Japan. Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1971, pages 372-73.
6 See, e.g., Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2002, pages 30-37.
7 Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age, translated by J. S. Whale, Doubleday, 1973, page 13 (“Jay W. Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that in the field of complex systems, cause-to-effect relationships are very difficult to analyse: hardly ever does one given parameter depend on just one other factor. What happens is that all factors and parameters are interrelated by multiple feedback loops, the structure of which is far from obvious….”)
8 “Allergy Epidemic,” U.S. News & World Report, May 8, 2000, pages 47-53. “Allergies: A Modern Epidemic,” National Geographic, May 2006, pages 116-135.
9 In regard to the decay of honesty in the United States, see an interesting article by Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1998, pages E1, E4.
10 Rebecca Mead, “Eggs for Sale,” The New Yorker, August 9, 1999, pages 56-65.
11 “Redesigning Dad,” U.S. News & World Report, November 5, 2001, pages 62-63 (sperm cells may be the best place in which to repair defective genes; the technology is nearly ready).
12 See Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000, pages 238-262. One should not have too much confidence in predictions of miraculous advances such as the development of intelligent machines. For example, in 1970 scientists predicted that within 15 years there would be machines more intelligent than human beings. Chicago Daily News, November 16, 1970 (page citation not available). Obviously this prediction did not come true. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to discount the possibility of machines more intelligent than human beings. In fact, there is reason to believe that such machines will indeed exist some day if the technological system continues to develop.
13 See Bruce Barcott, “From Tree-hugger to Terrorist,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 7, 2002, pages 56-59, 81. This article describes the development of what may become within a few years a real and effective revolutionary movement committed to the overthrow of the technoindustrial system. (Since writing the foregoing several years ago, I’ve had to conclude that no effective movement of this kind is emerging in the United States. Capable leadership is lacking, and the real revolutionaries have failed to separate themselves from the pseudo-revolutionaries. But Bruce Barcott’s article, along with information from other sources, shows that the raw material for a real revolutionary movement does exist: There are people with sufficient passion and commitment who are willing to take risks and make great sacrifices. Only a few able leaders would be needed to form this raw material into an effective movement.)
14 Último Reducto has pointed out a possible ambiguity in this phrase. To eliminate it, I need to explain that the word “materialism” here refers not to philosophical materialism but to values that exalt the acquisition of material possessions.
15 See the interesting article “Propaganda”; The New Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 26, 15th edition, 1997, pages 171-79. This article reveals the impressive sophistication of modern propaganda.