The problem of any system ever devised is that eventually it will become corrupted - through one path or another corruption will become endemic and increasingly it will parasitize the system until eventually the empty husk of the hollowed out society collapses as all the illusions and Ponzi schemes become marked to market and no one is buying into it any longer.
Systems are human creations and suffer from all the pitfalls and blindness characteristic of our species. A system organized around a Party or a Church will end up creating the same social structure of a corrupt class of successful crime families becoming entrenched at the vertices. In Roma there is a saying that translated more or less: "The first generation are bandits; the second generation are bankers; the third generation are politicians; and by the fourth generation a Pope." Or the Anglo saying "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime" I think it is important to look at how even a system dedicated to the principle of wiping out class has invariably spawned various nationalistic red bourgeoisies (the Radish communists - red on the outside white on the inside) Look at the princelings in the PRC; or the weird family dynasty in the PRK. or the Stalinist bourgeoisie of the former USSR. Or conversely how a system purporting to be based on the teachings of Jesus Christ resulted in the sordid history of the Papacy. It does not matter much what the superficial forms of a system are, if the end outcome is invariably the same - that is the society becomes dominated by a small entrenched elite that enjoys disproportionate benefits and is concerned only with its own self-serving interests. -Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 2:24 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World On 06 Nov 2013, at 17:25, meekerdb wrote: On 11/6/2013 12:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: There is nothing wrong being rich, unless the money is stolen money, and that's the case today. There's nothing morally wrong with being rich, but it creates an ethical problem. Being much wealthier than others bestows a lot of power. If there is no effective government (like parts of Somalia) then the rich hire a personal army to protect their property. Where there is government, the police protect their property and the rich attempt to control the government through propaganda and buying influence. So long as the rich are not so rich as to live in a different 'world' than the middle class and they are relatively diverse this works OK. But the system seems to be unstable in that the rich can and do use their wealth and power to get more wealth and power - and not necessarily productively. So those who inherit wealth tend to gain even more wealth. Society needs to do something to stabilize the system and prevent the increasing concentration of wealth. I completely agree. The problem is that with money, you can produce more money in two ways, honestly or dishonestly. Once a few "fake money" (based on a lie) appears, it corrupts the whole system, and the society get pyramidal, with a higher gap between poor and rich, and eventually this crush down. We must think about a way to prevent that. Some state can play a role. But we have to get rid of the bandits first, and there is an easy way: legalize all drugs. Regulate them, and tax them proportionally by the "real" harm (that is measured by statistics no more confusing a -> b and b -> a) they do. May be that is not enough. Prohibitionists should be judged. We have to get spiritual or mature enough to understand that. The state must ensure the fairness of competition among products, their traceability, the presence of notice with the secondary effects, etc. But the state has nothing to say about what is good or not for any one. That's between you and you, with the help of your shaman if you decide so, but it is your decision, to say "yes" or "no" to this or that shaman. Stopping prohibition will not solve all problems. But continuing prohibition aggravates the situation, ... except for the super-riches and the bandits. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
