LAUSR

UNEMPLOYMENT: THE NUMBER ONE PROBLEM The historian Yuval Harari (1) predicted in 2016 that one of the most important social problems of the 21st century might be “what to do with all the useless people.” The people, indeed, became “useless” as automation greatly reduced the need for workers and soldiers. The more useless people were, the more anxious they were, and the more anxious they were, the more they looked for a “dear leader” who would return them to more comfortable days. But our real leaders (called “the one percent” at the beginning of the century) could see that those days would never return and began considering how they could continue to lead in an unemployed world. The sociologists Derber and Magrass (2) suggested in 2018 that these leaders knew by then that “the American dream” myth had run its course and needed to be replaced by a new myth that would be more realistic in a time of no jobs. They suggested that the transition had, in fact, already begun to the myth of “the security state,” whereby enemies are said to be everywhere and, “We leaders will protect you!” This scenario was not new, having been the operative myth in the European Middle Ages and analyzed for modern times in 1949 by the novelist George Orwell in his book 1984 (3). However, the security state turned out to be a short-term solution, and the leaders next introduced revolutionary myths that turned many of their older myths on their heads. (BTW, myth does not mean untruth. It means the stories we tell ourselves to order society.) The answer the leaders came up with regarding the “useless” people was: reduce the excess population. But not by clumsy methods such as ethic cleansing or holocausts. Their new story went like this: the earth was being rendered uninhabitable by global warming (a surprise turnabout for climate deniers); the reason for Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITP.2019.2949323