(no subject)

Jul 01, 2010 04:18

I was going through the recent twitter posts of people I'm not intimate friends with when I saw this post by the RZA about some politician looking to win the Brooklyn seat in congress. I read through his "ideals" and "goals" for the people of Brooklyn and all I could really think of was how little that all made sense to me. It might be an haughty position for me to have, but I have absolutely no faith in any sense of greater good that the masses (READ: majority) could ever have to the point where I would willingly become their servant.

I am ok with him using that tactic to make the masses want to choose him over his opponent, at least in a competitive sense. I am however not ready to let someone use the public's blind faith lead them into an office where they are then free to make any decision they want. I know that this is how the American republic has run since its inception, but this is not what the ruling party has taught.

This leads me to a cross roads. I know that the general population is unable to make decisions to keep the whole happy, safe and prosperous, but I also know that those in power are only concerned with staying in power and not with what the whole needs to attain those goals. These are two absolutes that I do not want to admit exist, but I do not know how to remedy them. I'd like to have faith in the both the masses and the rulers, but all come to is that I hate people.

Maybe religion is an answer? If you push a faith hard enough and long enough you can get the masses, or at least the vast majority of them, to believe that it is truth and that it must be followed for the greater good of the world. This also requires the religion to drill into their heads that the world's fate hinges upon the decisions of both the individual and his family. This will get the forceful people to make sure that everyone around them follows the rules, which building up will encompass most of the society.
If you put one person at the head of that, a la the pope in Rome during the dark ages, you create a hierarchy in which people try to maneuver themselves as close to the top as possible in order to have power for themselves and the people they love, thereby bringing the rest of those under them and around them along.

There is a fatal flaw in this hierarchical and hereditary practice of power, and it is known as the Protestant Revolution. There comes a point where those close to the top realise that they can never actually reach it and thus want to break away from the leader to become supreme leaders of their own. The fact that the power was focused in religion, which some prominent people decided to speak out against, was enough to make every prince and lord decide they wanted to switch faiths in order to not have the Pope over their heads. Without someone to answer to they were all Kings in their own right.
Once the Lords of the land realise that they can just ignore the "King" of the land to become "emperors" in their own domains, there is no stopping the breaking down of the society. This was the beginning of civil war in the post-Roman era of Europe until they turned their conquests away from each other to the foreign lands around the world, though that in itself only relived the tensions as long as there was more unconquered wealth to gain.
That unconquered wealth has moved away from land and populations and toward random pieces of material that can be priced by a vague and fluctuating scale called money. We are still at the point of having multiple currencies that all give this concept their own 'real' value, but are quickly coming to a point where they are all merging into one. This leads to a point where there either has to be more material to go around, or the projected value of what exists is no longer enough.I fear that we will create an environment uninhabitable by most creatures currently alive long before we reach the point however, and this is where my love for the continuation for humanity as species vastly trumps my care for the current individual.

I want to make sure that life as we know it, both for Homo Sapiens Sapiens as it is currently defined, and for other species on the planet can exist for at least the next 1000 years on earth. I may even selfishly wish that at least "humans" (in whatever form evolves, hopefully without the force of environments created by human error) can exist for another 5 million years. In this regard I am reminded of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which boils down to SPOILER ALERT!: The last scientists of the Industrial age genetically creating a people to live through the fungus they create to clean the earth so they can reincarnate themselves when the world is back to their standards END SPOILER ALERT!

I don't want to go to those extremes to protect my species, but I do want to stress that we are on a path that we can not travel across forever. We will reach a point, sooner I feel than later, in which we can no longer survive because of the rampant pollution we have spread throughout the globe. I have heard complaints about ruining the "economy" if we try to stop things like off shore drilling in the United States, but I believe that we must go much farther in our halt of earth-changing endeavors, regardless of the short-term discomforts to our society, if we wish to make sure that our grandchildren are safe in a world that is devoid of poisons in the air, sea and soil that will quickly kill them off.

We are reaching that tipping point. We can bring ourselves back into nature now or we can push our luck far enough for it to royally fuck us over in retaliation to the point were humans can survive as hunter-gatherers IF we are lucky enough to survive with 1000 people and enough animals and plants for them to eat left in the world. Otherwise we will cause a mass extinction on par with those in the past that resulted in upwards of 80% of living creatures dying off in mere centuries, a time much longer than the United States has even existed.

future, faith, past, science, philosophy, anthropology, religion, man, politics

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