In the natural world, a mother bear, during a particularly harsh winter in which it is hard to capture prey, will often eat one of her cubs. It will nearly always be the runt unless the larger one is sickly. If she is still hungry and unable to locate food from other species later that same winter, she will consume the remaining one. Thereby she will guarantee her survival, as the alternative would be all three bears dying -- the helpless cubs unable to live on their own and herself. However, she, by using her offspring for nourishment, will help ensure that she can carry on to produce further offspring in, hopefully, more auspicious circumstances. By such a manner, her species manages to endure.
All considered, life in the natural world, although often brutal, is neither moral, nor immoral. No animal sits around in a circle of his peers debating the relative rightness or wrongness of the act of eating one's own progeny, nor the ones of other species. At the same time, humans, in certain groups, can also forego ethical underpinnings in their actions.
For example, the Nazis, in a calculated fashion, rounded up children and adults from supposedly undesirably ethnic groups for systematic slaughter. So did European invaders with indigenous people in the Americas. So did Pol Pot in Southeast Asia and so did ancient Romans. There is nothing new in this regard. This sort of behavior has been occurring for times immemorial amongst humankind. So has cannibalism when life gets tough. As the author Peter Goodchild shared with me, "I sometimes think about a book called The Siege of Leningrad. The healthy people walking the streets were the butchers. But the meat they had to offer wasn't beef, and it wasn't pork, and it wasn't lamb. You figure out the rest."
Then, too, humans periodically face the types of decisions as did the pioneers at Donner Pass [1] -- a walk in the park in some ways compared to the Leningrad events in that there was no deliberate murder involved. As such, much of the difference between the two events hinges on intention and deliberate proactive choices rather than a passive stance to simply make do as had the survivors at Donner Pass. Meanwhile, the aggression inherent in deliberate slaughter of one's own kind reminds about how well "laws of the jungle" still are extant amongst people unless we are well taught that life, itself, has value beyond self-serving sorts.
Meanwhile, not all people, who are at risk for starvation, resort to dire unconscionable actions. Oddly, we sometimes even see quite the opposite type of behavior wherein underfed people consciously try to share whatever little they have with others. Perhaps surprisingly, such demonstrations are not rare. As Garda Ghista, the editor of World Prout Assembly, suggests, "One day I had gone with my auto rickshaw driver to the slums, to take photos of the very poorest people, the poorest of the poor who had nothing -- no home, no anything. It was to raise funds for a service project, a children's home, and I needed the photos for the flyer. So we would stop, for example, on a bridge where, on a ten by twenty foot piece of land along the bridge, some cloths were stretched across two poles, and people were living under them. There was no running water in sight. There was no anything. but, when I stepped out of the rickshaw and took out my camera, all these homeless, water-less, nearly foodless, nearly clothes-less people started moving towards me, with utter joy on their faces. "I simply could not take the picture. I needed photos of miserable looking people in desperate poverty. They just didn't look miserable. None of them did. It happened time and again, as when my rickshaw drove past the rock quarries where women with axes hammer at granite rock for ten to twelve hours a day, backbreaking labor - but again, when they saw me and the camera, they moved slowly toward me smiling.
"There is an NGO called Transparency International which rates corruption levels in countries. Bangladesh was coming out number one every year. (I haven't checked recently.) At the same time, an institute in Great Britain assessed "happiness" levels of populations, and determined that the people of Bangladesh were the happiest in the world. We Westerners do not understand all the love that exists in people there - whole families sleeping in one room. It is not a hardship for them. It is the only way to be. It is about staying close and intimate. To them, the way we stick each baby in a separate room is something primitive and backward."
"Here, so many Americans have forgotten how to talk - maybe due to watching so much TV. Even the TV programs and movies have such low levels of conversation. In contrast, go to India or Middle Eastern countries and speaking in poetry is something natural to the people. It is, also, loved and respected. "When I worked in a college in the Middle East, the students (local Bedu) would sometimes come to my desk to make a phone call. Who would they phone? Again and again, it would be their mothers."
"We, here in the US, can hardly imagine the closeness of the families and the other more extended groups found in third world countries. When my Bedu friends took me to the desert, we used to sit on the ground, and the father would immediately go and milk the camel and bring me a huge bowl of fresh camel's milk. Simultaneously, the mother (of my student) would cut up fruit and put it in my mouth. Does it happen here in the US? ...and in India, when I visited a family there and at dinner said that I am full, then that mother took the spoon and began feeding me spoon by spoon, putting the spoon in my mouth, ignoring my protestations."
Will it happen here? So who is more civilized and who is more happy?
I never saw such love, hospitality and happiness as I saw in the Middle East and South Asia. For this very reason, what the American Empire has done to my friends there is painful beyond measure.
My response to this is that, when people need each other to survive, they tend to act more kindly to everyone else, including outsiders. Indeed, they are especially generous towards those who serve their interests as does a teacher for their son. Conversely, they tend to develop a state of anomy, callousness, apathy, contempt and disregard in relation to the welfare of others when it is not in one's own interest to support them. This second state, one of almost complete alienation and independence rather than interdependence, has been shown time and again in various situations.
One of the most notorious episodes involved the murder of Kitty Genovese in NYC [2]. In addition, the Kitty Genovese incident would seem to indicate that the more people that exist concentrated together, the less likely that individual worth has much merit. Congestion studies amongst many species bear this out as does, in general, crime rates in crowded VS uncrowded regions when variables such as socioeconomic class are factored into the mix [3]. The implications relative to urban settings and overpopulation, in general, are clear. As Larry Winn states, "Imagine a group of humans, indeterminate in number, confined in a place of fixed dimensions, wanting for nothing. They have plenty to eat, plenty of water, plenty of places to live, and only the dimmest sort of apprehension of a larger world. They might even think of "the outside" as a kind of malicious fiction perpetrated by malcontents. It's a circumstance not unlike the one "sustainable development" is supposed to create for us. Also, not unlike the universes of John Calhoun's rats. [4]" He goes on to conclude in the same article, "...the rats in Calhoun's experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and cannibalism. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females - the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment - were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue."
At the same time, one could only barely suppose that such happenings as Kitty Genovese's type or as Larry Winn's description would have a high rate of prevalent to transpire in a small remote villages wherein personal relations are more all inclusive, intimate, relevant and indispensable for maintenance of optimal social welfare. With less people in a community, there tends to exist stronger intact ties across the board --even with strangers, who are merely passing through the environs. In addition, I predict that, with material affluence on the increase in Bangladesh and elsewhere due to globalization of industries, many people there will become more like much of the US population -- self-absorbed, largely indifferent to the welfare of the poor, insular, impressed by wealth and signs of wealth (as exhibited by Hollywood starlets and major sports figures), driven to get as much for themselves and their families at the exclusion of others as could be possible, etc. This is largely because cultural values are predicated on whatever serves to maximally support life in a particular set of circumstances.
In other words, people will more readily commune with each other and share if these sorts of behaviors foster their own well-being. If taking as much for oneself with disregard for others does it, then this model, instead, will be the one habitually learned and supported by the public at large. (Just as "necessity is the mother of invention," it is also the mother of behavioral patterns developing one way VS. another.) As such, people tend to work together to get water, feed each other, and provide for other material needs in these societies wherein it is necessary for many people to work together as a precondition to fulfill common aims (without which doing they would all die). Opposed to this are the conditions wherein success is primarily and almost exclusively tied to personal fiscal gain rather than mutual philanthropy.
With this alternative in place, there is little loyalty to companions, employees, nor employers. Instead, the overriding concern is simply advancement of one's own profit and this aim, alone. Hoarding behaviors will, then, be on the rise, too. At the same time, the gap between the haves and have-nots will, also, enlarge. All the while, people will be seen not as having much merit in and of themselves as they will largely be viewed as expendable commodities -- as means to an end to add to one's own financial and other assets. This being the case, the number of millionaires in the world swelled to 8.7 million. Meanwhile, is there any mystery about whatever most of them are trying to do rather than spread their wealth in service to humanity or improvement of the natural environment? No. Instead of promoting widespread benefits, they are, for the most part, striving to become billionaires (called "kleptocrats" in a related Wikipedia citation below as they are thievishly parasitic on the body politic).
Indeed, many are wildly successful in achieving this objective. 'The number of billionaires around the world rose by 102 to a record 793... and their combined wealth grew 18 percent to $2.6 trillion, according to "Forbes" magazine's 2006 rankings of the world's richest people [5].' In addition, their group has been expanding steadily. All the while they, also, command vast stores of resources (obtained through their purchasing power), manipulate their governments (through lobbies and other means) and control others (via military might and other kinds) to keep everything solidly behind their acts of racking in ever more dollars and possessions, including huge tracts of land and factories, for themselves.
Emily Spence is a progressive living in MA. She has spent many years involved with assorted types of human rights, environmental and social service efforts.
It is difficult indeed to reject the system when one is part of the system, particularly for politicians at the federal level. It's not like an autoimmune response of rejection of a transplanted organ. Rejecting the system requires a conscience and a concern for people all over the world, not just the ones that share your bloodline or the ones you have sex with. Most Americans are selfish to an extent not because they are evil incarnate but because capitalism requires it. It fosters hyperindividualism and the "every man for himself" syndrome. Not only that but it also reinforces itself so that when it occurs it creates the conditions for its own perpetuation. It's like religion when the pious tell you that listening to common sense is blasphemy. I personally believe we are way past saving what's left of this country. It was founded in genocide and slavery and really does not deserve to continue to exist. Our nativist, exceptionalist policies around the world have killed millions needlessly and with complete disregard for our common humanity. White supremacy stills runs amok here and in Europe where most of the world is controlled. (China and South America are changing this paradigm). All empires fall. The secret to longevity is to never become one in the first place.
by
Nfamous (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 63 comments)
on Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 12:26:17 PM
That's the big question, and I've found only one person who actually has a solution.
Most others want their partisan political party to win power over others through a "democratic" process of elections, and others simply want to sieze power by force of arms and create totalitarian rule by rigid theocracy or tyrannical fascism. But they are all misguided, and they merely perpetuate the problem.
There is a better way. A way that will establish government that is truly of, by and for the people. A way that will unite us and enable us to use the common wealth for the common good.
It took me half a lifetime (I am now 80) to realize that I actually had some options in this regard. By my early 40s, I realized that I was not getting ahead as I had wanted . . . in fact, I was slipping backward. And I saw that it was ultimately a losing game . . . that I was not made for capitalism NOR commercialism. Having only the desire, then, to back out of it, merely to use the time left to me in a more satisfying manner, I turned my back on the wage-earning world.
I had nothing to see me through such a challenge, but it still seemed the best of options, and I more or less consigned myself to living on the fringe, taking advantage of some affiliation with the youth culture of the times, and at least 'owning myself' for the full extent of my time. I had no idea what would become of me: it was truly an act of desperation.
But I made, then, the amazing discovery (which I could only have made by pursuing that sort of course) that when the parameters are changed the world actually seems to work differently. Amazingly, I succeeded in constructing a different sort of reality for myself! I not only had time, now, to be myself as I would, but I found myself making many friends, living in a social world that had earlier eluded me, and by collective means, able to get my needs met. Truly, it was a different world, but once used to its conditions, I found it extremely congenial.
That, as I say, was about 40 years ago. I have survived adequately, never been without a roof over me except by choice (on occasion), written a lot about it, self-published a few books (which have never been marketed, of course), even found myself recognized in Marquis' Who's Whoin America!
So I am here to say that the system CAN be rejected. And that we do have a say over the way our own lives are to be lived. But I know also, through the way I discovered it, that very few people ever will . . . which is sad. Because so many could be helped by it.
by
Irvthom (7 articles, 2 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 88 comments)
on Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 10:09:32 PM
And that was a good choice for many of us. In fact, there are many intentional communities (like Stephen Gaskin's group established on The Farm in Tennessee), and some of them are models that many people could and should follow. (Take a look at http://www.thefarm.org)
However, for the greater society, we do indeed need to reject the political-economic system which has increasingly caused such unfair income disparity and a huge income gap, ramant corruption, divisive polarization, and rule by the wealthiest few.
Joseph J. Adamson has presented sensible, credible, practical solutions, not only to our political-economic woes, but also to our religious woes. He suggests that we scrap partisan politics which puts a divisive partisan pretender on the throne, solidify the wall of separation between church and state, and treat all religions as equal.
What we need to replace government by the rich is government of, by and for the people. And Adamson shows us how from behind the scenes, without seeking power for himself. Instead, he empower all of us, and liberates us from ALL those who want to rule over us.
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
