From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 7:40 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
On 11/6/2013 6:32 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
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.
>>You keep making these arguments that everything must necessarily get
worse, every human institution must become an oppressive force run by an
oppressive elite for pure selfishness. This is like the argument Boltzmann
initially made that entropy must always, and has always increased. To which
the response was, "Then why is entropy not maximum and the world not pure
chaos? Why is there abundant and complex life?" Maybe when you ask
yourself that question your posts will become more than simple rants and
counsels of despair.
Brent
We are on the path to everything getting worse. The evidence is
incontrovertible. Pick your yardstick: rates of desertification; loss of
biodiversity; loss of forest cover; collapse of ocean food webs;
toxification of the biosphere; loss of topsoil; loss of natural soil
fertility; peak fossil energy [peak oil, peak gas, peak coal & peak
uranium]; collapse of resource supplies for many strategic materials
required for industrial civilization.
Mix this all up with our propensity to solve problems by violent means
coupled with weapons systems of a destructiveness and reach that is
unparalleled - and you tell me why I or any one for that matter should not
feel pessimistic, despondent, despairing. take your pick.
I recognize the genius in our species and am immensely saddened that we are
burning it all up, for we could have had a long beautiful story. but it does
not look very promising - when one takes off the rose colored glasses and
looks at the hard metrics of resource depletion; of rates of species
extinction.. at what is really going on in the biosphere of the planet we
all live on.
By the way I have long asked that question myself. the answer that seems to
make sense for me is that entropy still prevails in the end - just give it
enough time. lots of time, but in the meantime, local dysentropy is possible
at the cost of increasing the overall entropy of the containing system.
I hope we can pull a rabbit out of the hat, or better yet wake up and mend
our ways and begin the hard multi century task of healing the biosphere of
the planet that has given us life.
I also propose that societies should erect a kind of cordon sanitaire around
power by making access to get into the running for elected office be
determined by a transparent & random means. That we need to do something to
keep power from becoming monopolized by a small subset - the very worst
subset -- of the range of human beings.
What do you propose?
Or do you feel that there is no problem?
-Chris
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