Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Well I'll take your word for it. I have not spoken about this personally with astrologers, simply read what's written about them. Apparently they downplay the harsher parts of their beliefs for the mass market.
And that in a nutshell is what went wrong with communism. They tried to do it backwards.
That was only a "large proportion" of the people who voted. It's often been argued that the reason so many people don't vote is that neither candidate speaks for them. As both a libertarian and a Libertarian, I can certainly relate to that. I vote, but it's a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Let's see, do I want them to deprive me of my money first and then my civil rights, or vice versa?
I agree. They can cause a lot of grief, but not enough to change anyone's politics. I don't think terrorists will ever be able to kill 20,000 Americans every year the way drunk drivers do, and we don't even report those people to the police.
I disagree with that. I have written about this extensively in other threads. The entire ten thousand year process of civilization has been one long battle between our uniquely massive forebrains and our animal midbrains. One long lesson in overriding the pack-social instinct of our Mesolithic ancestors with reasoned and learned behavior. And the forebrain is always the victor. At first we could only live in "peace and goodwill" with a couple of dozen people we had known intimately from birth. Then we built villages and learned to expand that instinct to include neighbors who weren't family members. Then we built towns and learned to expand it to people we didn't even run into very often. Then we built cities and expanded it to total strangers. Then we built nations and expanded it to people we've never even seen.
And it works. Civilization is very durable, surviving all of our lapses and dealing with the occasional throwback who doesn't want to live in harmony and cooperation. People in small cities leave their doors unlocked, keep an eye on each other's children, and pitch in to help the unfortunate without waiting for a social worker. That's an expansion of our pack-social instinct by three orders of magnitude over the Mesolithic, plus a transcendence to partially extend it to hundreds of millions of Americans.
The next step is to transcend nationalism and combine the whole race into a single "pack." That requires extending the pack-social instinct to people who speak different languages and have different cultures. Europe is already well on the way to that. It requires extending it to people on the other side of the planet who are mere abstractions to us. Well a lot of us have already achieved that too, proving that it can be done. You could say that we do our part to advance civilization out of purely selfish reasons: it works!
Well it is an archetype. It's a motif that occurs in almost all cultures in almost all eras. But archetypes are just instincts, some of those pesky leftovers in our Mesolithic midbrain like the pack-social instinct. We can transcend them all.
War is in fact on the wane. The percentage of the world population killed by government violence has been falling since WWII. Only four wars have had seven-figure body counts, the civil wars in China, Korea, Vietnam and the Congo. We weep over the dead in Iraq but the total for the entire war there would add up to one bad day in WWII. We're letting chaos reign in Darfur precisely because it's better than the alternative of the U.S. and China going to war over it. It's possible that the nuclear attacks on civilian targets by the U.S. really did force humanity to come to its senses and stop thinking of escalating violence as the best way to resolve disagreements.
"Stratification between the rich and poor" is just the manipulation of statistics. The per capita GDP of the human race is rising at an enormous rate. Ten percent per year in India and China, which between them have one third of the world's population. Just the other day the Washington Post reported that the percentage of the world's people who live on less than a dollar day has fallen by half in just the last twenty years. Find a nation in poverty and you'll find a despotic leader; it's a political problem, not an economic one. And the number of democratic countries on this planet increases with every passing decade.
The world is improving, more or less steadily in the long run. We have a lot to be proud of and much cause for optimism.
.."two tv sets and a cadillac car" aren't necessarily an advancement on a mere horse and carriage and an evening playing on the piano. The 'Myth of Progress' leaves us open to all kinds of brainwashing. The mere sweep of technological advance isn't necessarily an example of progress say..if you are working as a 13 yr old girl working 18 hrs a day in a Cotton Mill doing backbreaking work that can only lead to an early death. If thats progress then it can only be so to the owner of the Cotton Mills!