On 11/6/2013 9:58 PM, LizR wrote:
On 7 November 2013 17:11, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 11/6/2013 7:44 PM, LizR wrote:On 7 November 2013 16:39, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: 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. Well, civilisations have fallen with boring regularity throughout history - and generally when they fell, they had an entrenched elite telling the populace that everything was hunky dory. At least if one can believe Jared Diamond, Ronald Wright /et al/.You miss my point. If you fall you must first get up. All I see from Chris is down, down, down. Down is inevitable. Corruption is inevitable. Oppression is inevitable. Do you see no problem with this picture?Well read like that, yes. My point was that what we have tended to do historically was rise and fall, and rise again -- but now we may have got "too big to fail" - which is a problem when we still have the same old types of people in charge, leading us towards the usual systems failure that has beset earlier civilisations. We urgently need to "jump out of the system" and find a system that isn't doomed to fail.
I think that's the kind of utopianism that leads to despots. There is no "out of the system". I'm suggesting we look at the UP. How did systems get UP before they fell. I agree that all systems to keep power diffuse ultimately get gamed. But some work better and last longer than others. So we need to keep creating new UP systems and keep them UP longer. There are no final victories. But neither are there final defeats. Think of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus".
Brent -- 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.
