Monday, November 14, 2011
The Problem with Discussions and Politics
I do not find discussions troubling. What does trouble me is the naive assumption that electing a different leader or passing some laws or repealing some laws or levying some taxes will change the course of history. How much has really changed in the past hundred years or the past thousand and I mean change that was directly attributable to some individual's leadership or some ideology or philosophy (apart from science and technology and we do not control THAT beast; we are at its mercy and it has a life all its own.) Is there really a chicken in every pot? I happened to catch Ron Paul on TV. He sounds like a decent person. But everything he said in response to all the questions were clever formulaic answers and he is SKILLED in rolling with the punches, but nothing he said was of any real substance that would make someone hope for some profound change or improvement. All these politicians are smooth talkers. But human nature is pretty much the same as it was in Homer's time of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It took until around 1870 for the world population to reach one billion. By 1930 (less than a century) it had DOUBLED to two billion. By the 1960s it had tripled to six billion. Ecologists estimate that the Earth cannot support more than one billion without the ecosystem being seriously affected. We live in a world which depends NOT upon earning its daily bread but rather upon ever accelerating growth of profits. There are only so many forests to exploit; only so many 3rd world countries to colonize. I personally see the entire world as a pyramid or ponzi scheme which is doomed to collapse at some point. I don't see how any ideology or ideologue is going to change the inevitable.
