Thus spake Douglas Roberts circa 10/05/2008 12:19 PM: > I'm afraid, as Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Excactly! So the first step is for each individual to accept their responsibility think/speak critically at every opportunity. The next step is to package such critical thinking inside an infectious wrapper so that it spreads across all humanity. "Enlightened self interest" (ESI) is the current packaging for infectious criticality; but we're learning that, in its current form, ESI is inadequate. It doesn't capture the "externalities" of any given contract because any single human is too myopic to sense (much less understand and compensate) for those externalities. Perhaps what we need is for the population to cluster into small communal non-profit gangs, where each gang is self-interested but each individual in the gang is altruistic toward the gang? Oh wait, that's tribalism, isn't it? [grin] Hmmm. I guess what we need is a scale-free network of gangs, some of which are non-profit, some of which are for-profit, some of which are self-interested, some of which are altruistic, where some individuals are members of multiple gangs and some of which are entirely devoted to a single gang .... Oh wait, that's what we have NOW! Hmmm. Perhaps we should all quit bitching and enjoy whatever luxuries we're lucky enough to have right now because tomorrow we may not have them? [sigh] Sundays aren't my best days for generating empty rhetoric. Sorry. I'm off for a pint at the pub. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org