OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Lies of the Times: Obama needs to fufill his promise

With the wiki came a new concept. With society's structure we have complex rules systems, and when these rules are broken there are consequences, compliance failure may be met with violence: this is nothing new. But with people who are disconnected from society because of mental challenges, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, you also find complex rules. The example I like bring out is "try robbing a violent thief and see what he does, he will probably try to kill you." Criminal gangs are run by self-named enforcers and often the rules openly lend to rationalization such as with the Latin Kings: "if you lie to me, you don't love me." And presumably you may die.

Suddenly there is a relationship between society and components that can be thought of as anti-society: complex and enforced rules-bases systems. But if you look at natural systems, such as Darwin's natural affection, or Ruth Benedict's Synergistic (meaning successful) native tribes, you find systems with only a few meaningful rules. Christ was unquestionably a revolutionary in his time, and he is best known for simplifying Jewish law's more than 700 rules to only a few about love, equality, and forgiveness.

I had experienced Anarchist systems in my youth when I was involved with popular music, and I rejected them for their violence and dangerous drugs. But evidence that complex rules may be both at the root of society's problems as well as individual destructiveness, and that these two problem areas seem to be increasingly related with every bit of newly introduced information, makes one want to take a fresh look at Anarchism. Defending Darwin's idea of natural affection against the so-called social Darwinists was Prince Petr Kropotkin with his Mutual Aid. In it he describes the natural village, one that is closely connected to the environment, as the ideal state for human living. Lewis Mumford concurs with his Technics and Civilization, though he shows that it takes civilization to create highly complex technologies. Still, Mumford shows that these highly complex technologies may not necessarily be a good thing, and his research goes back to the command and control systems of the Egyptians used to build monumental structures with slave labor and and nearly neolithic crafts abilities.

Today's exciting technology is of course digital communication through the Internet, and this can be easily be used for collaborative efforts by researchers and resource developers distributed around the world, and hence potentially living in natural environments. The need for large centralized systems is gone: capital structures in financial capitals funded with capital, or resources accumulated by capital institutions from other people.

As the economist EF Schumacher said, "Small is Beautiful," in his book of the same title: this is what Obama has to learn to succeed in leading America, and hence the World, out of its present dilemmas.

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