Shut up and dance!
Social rant
Societies should be very careful when deciding how much power they are willing to give up to the government. Too little means anarchy, too much means dictatorship.
Power corrupts. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Now, to prevent this (theoretically) we use a thing called democracy, power is divided into little pieces and distributed among the people, so everyone has some power, but not enough to be corrupted by it. The problem with the way we understand democracy is the fact that we built a wall that separates people from government, when the fundament of democracy is that the people is the government.
Utopically, this would mean that the government will always do what is better for the people. But (being the primitive creatures that we are) we are unable to run our societies without a power structure, so we concentrate the power of democracy in a few people. So instead of voting to choose what to do with the oil production, we choose who is going to take care of it. That way, if it goes wrong we have someone to blame. Although, in reality it is our fault for voting him president in the first place. But what else can we do? Without power structures we are utterly unable to do anything.
No matter how much we evolve, we always seem to need the big monkey - small monkey system.
Perhaps that is because society changes so quickly. It is a behaviour for which we have no instinct. Do we naturally tend to be civilised? Well, yes, since we did it. And yet it somehow seems awkward, that we are not programmed default to act the way we do. We need to learn everything. Think of a feral child, raised by apes or wolves, and how handicapped he is on a human society.
True, civilisation is just an animal behaviour. As we grew smarter and physically weaker, we needed more and more co-operation to survive. A single caveman has no chance against a wolf. But ten cavemen can kill a mammoth. Together we had a better chance at life, and eventually we came to this, a point where we depend completely in our society to survive.
The problem with civilisation as a survival strategy is that it is not sustainable in the long run because it is based on the idea or perpetual progress. And with our notion or “progress” we would need infinite resources to do that, and –oh noes- our planet as a fixed amount of things we can exploit.
What is the human nature? I mean, yeah, like all other animal we just act the way we do. But is civilisation such a good idea? We could have access to a much bigger amount of resources if we could travel space distances efficiently. Sadly, we are a couple thousand years from that. And we probably we wont last that long. Are we, hmm, fucked?
I want to run free and wild. I want to retain my wilderness. So, I will.
Tomorrow: Part III (or maybe a short essay on the Big Monkey-Small Monkey system).
Societies should be very careful when deciding how much power they are willing to give up to the government. Too little means anarchy, too much means dictatorship.
Power corrupts. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Now, to prevent this (theoretically) we use a thing called democracy, power is divided into little pieces and distributed among the people, so everyone has some power, but not enough to be corrupted by it. The problem with the way we understand democracy is the fact that we built a wall that separates people from government, when the fundament of democracy is that the people is the government.
Utopically, this would mean that the government will always do what is better for the people. But (being the primitive creatures that we are) we are unable to run our societies without a power structure, so we concentrate the power of democracy in a few people. So instead of voting to choose what to do with the oil production, we choose who is going to take care of it. That way, if it goes wrong we have someone to blame. Although, in reality it is our fault for voting him president in the first place. But what else can we do? Without power structures we are utterly unable to do anything.
No matter how much we evolve, we always seem to need the big monkey - small monkey system.
Perhaps that is because society changes so quickly. It is a behaviour for which we have no instinct. Do we naturally tend to be civilised? Well, yes, since we did it. And yet it somehow seems awkward, that we are not programmed default to act the way we do. We need to learn everything. Think of a feral child, raised by apes or wolves, and how handicapped he is on a human society.
True, civilisation is just an animal behaviour. As we grew smarter and physically weaker, we needed more and more co-operation to survive. A single caveman has no chance against a wolf. But ten cavemen can kill a mammoth. Together we had a better chance at life, and eventually we came to this, a point where we depend completely in our society to survive.
The problem with civilisation as a survival strategy is that it is not sustainable in the long run because it is based on the idea or perpetual progress. And with our notion or “progress” we would need infinite resources to do that, and –oh noes- our planet as a fixed amount of things we can exploit.
What is the human nature? I mean, yeah, like all other animal we just act the way we do. But is civilisation such a good idea? We could have access to a much bigger amount of resources if we could travel space distances efficiently. Sadly, we are a couple thousand years from that. And we probably we wont last that long. Are we, hmm, fucked?
I want to run free and wild. I want to retain my wilderness. So, I will.
Tomorrow: Part III (or maybe a short essay on the Big Monkey-Small Monkey system).
posted by Antua @ 10:45 PM
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