muir
Banned
- MBTI
- INFJ
Dude, it's out of love, I just find it really quirky and lovely. But I really can't understand the key things I'm supposed to take away from it. It's really foggy and confusing. Perhaps it's beyond me, but I feel if it was more concise and ordered differently I could absorb it in a more constructive way.
Ok
Sometimes people on the right like to call people on the left things like 'bleeding heart liberals' or 'naive' or 'utopian' in order to discredit their ideas or because they simply see their ideas as unrealistic
It seems that they think that such 'utopians', as they would call them, fail to understand the true nature of people. Those sort of people seem to argue instead for a more dog eat dog system, which they feel better reflects human nature as they see it.
Human nature, as i see it, is composed of both good and bad. I think humans are capable of great acts of kindness and also great acts of selfishness.
So when i argue that we should create a system where power is exercised from the bottom up instead of from the top down, it is not because i am not taking into account the darker side of human nature....it is EXACTLY because i am AWARE of the darker side of human nature that i RECOGNISE the need to create a system in which the many can protect themselves from the darker impulses of human nature that might be expressed by some.
If you have a top down system and the people/person at the top of that system is cruel then everyone else is going to suffer.
That is what we are seeing globally at the moment. In a population of 7 billion the wealth of the world is largely concentrated in a very small number of hands. This small group are not politicians. They influence the politicians. They own and control the central banks and many corporate interests eg oil, media, weapons manufacturing, pharmaceutical etc and because of their wide reaching interests and influence they can influence the decisions of governments and can even hold whole national economies to randsom.
They exercise their power visibly through various bodies for example think tanks but mostly their influence is hidden from public view and therefore they are not accountable to the public....which is undemocratic.
So if this 'power elite' decide that they want to fraudulently get governments in debt to them by corrupting politicians then they can then demand that politicians sell off those countries assets dirt cheap....they will of course then buy up those assets and they will end up owning all the land, buildings, utilities and public services as well as the press etc
It will return Europe to a previous fuedal age where people worked on the land for barons as serfs. They had no rights and could be thrown from their land at any point, hence the enduring popularity of the Robin Hood story about someone who stood up for the poor against the robber barons....we of course have our own robin hood in scotland jim as you know: Rob Roy MacGregor who used to wait until the lairds factor had taken his crushing tax from poor old ladies, then Rob would rob the factor as he was travelling away and then go and return the money to the old ladies!
Well we are moving back towards those times where the people own very little, whilst the one percent own everything. If they own everything, including the government then they can impose whatever labour laws they want on the people. For example it would be like your boss saying tomorrow that from now on instead of working 8 hours a day you must work 14 hours a day.
If all the wealth is centralised then those people can then do away with physical money. Your labour would be recorded digitally on a microchip for example on a card. Everything could be put on that one card (they have tried this already with ID cards, which got shelved....for now) for example your passport and your drivers licence and without the card you could not purchase things, use public transport, enter buildings, go online, use your mobile phone, travel on private roads (all the public roads will be sold off to the 1%) etc
If you wanted to contest your new 14 hour work day the 1% could simply switch off your card and you would be frozen out of the corporate world they are busy building.
If this all sounds a bit dystopian scif-fi it is a vision of what could be if we keep giving away power and our rights to the 1%
So it is this posibility of abuses of power that a hypothetical system would have to guard against
A central tenet to such a system would have to be that whenever there is centralised power there is corruption and exploitation.
That would be the pillar to build a new system on. If you then follow that premise logically it leads to power being decentralised down to the people, who would then be involved in the decision making process through peoples assemblies. With the internet this way of making decisions as a community has never been easier to achieve.
Anyway to cut a long story short....the way to guard against abuses of power is to ensure that power lies with everyone and not a single person or group.
If reformists don't want to see a total system change...and i can appreciate such an idea might seem a little frightening then i would suggest to them that they should shape their reforms around the premise above with the intention of bringing power back to the people as much as is feasibly possible within such a profit orientated system.
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