Failure of a system...

[undergroundpanther]

The failure of a system... the socially dominant kill and enslave the World for the Money and power!



Economy -- the way we organize the making and shipping, the selling and buying of our human products and services -- meant `rules of housekeeping' back when the word was coined and everything people ate and used was grown or made within households. Now our human household includes all of Earth and we might call economics our `operating principles' and ecology our `organizational design.' Our economy is a worldwide system of manufacture and trade that works by both national and international rules. Yet this system did not evolve to serve a worldwide household at all -- it was not intended to become a single system. It grew out of rather lawless competition among individual nations, though it was eventually forced by its own evolution to make international rules for managing it. Unfortunately, these rules still serve the interests of those who already have economic advantage better than those who do not.

The industrial countries that set up the international economy, with its World Trade Organization management, simply have more money and power to make political and economic decisions than do the poorer countries that supply their raw materials and cheap labor. If we continue the analogy with our own bodies, we can easily see why this is an unhealthy situation. The parts of our bodies -- its `nations' -- work together as organs and organ systems, such as bone, blood, muscle, and digestive organ systems. If all these organs and systems did not work harmoniously within themselves and with one another, our bodies couldn't function.

Imagine, for example, what might happen to us if our bodies' economics worked like the economics of human society. Raw material blood cells are produced inside bones all over the body, just as raw materials are produced in supplier countries all over our world. The raw material blood cells are then transported to the `northern industrial' lungs, where the blood is purified and oxygen and nutrients are added, making it a useful product. So far, so good. But imagine the announcement of the heart distribution center, "Today's body price for blood is such-and-such. Who will buy?' Some of the bones in which the raw material blood cells are produced can't afford the oxygen-rich blood they need to stay healthy. But rather than lower their prices, the industrial organs destroy the surplus blood that no one can afford to buy, or put it in storage, hoping to sell it later. Bone cells begin to die of starvation. The starving bones would soon affect the whole body, making it unhealthy, crippling or even killing it.

It is clear that a few organs cannot exploit the rest of the body to their advantage. Nor do we find families that starve three children to overfeed the fourth. When we think of our bodies or our families, we have no trouble understanding why all their parts must be healthy. Yet, we do not manage our national or global economies by this same wisdom.
Read more...
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Erthdnce/chapter16.html



We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.
Read more..

http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html

We are a a radically skewed society. Rather than pages of numbing statistics I’ll sketch a couple of facts, the first from sociologist Steven Rose. If you drew a line on a building three stories high to represent the distance between the lowest and the highest family income, the average (median) income sits at only 10.5 inches off the ground and half the nation is clumped below that (5). Second, despite the prodigious numbers of poor, housing for them is so scarce that of the 3,141 counties in the United States, in only 4 can a person making minimum wage afford a one-bedroom apartment (6).

Read more..
http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm

Remember...


Upon entering the gates of Auschwitz I, the prisoners saw over the main entrance the words; "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work will make you free). These words were to promote the false hope that hard work by the prisoners would result in their freedom. Indeed the camp, and later the "Buna" of Auschwitz III, made extensive use of slave labor; however, death was the only real escape.

[catzies]

1. Fascinating stuff, especially when read with this recent thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5266176

There's a great deal here to digest.

edit to clarify: it's the OP of that thread that's relevant.

[undergroundpanther]

3. Oh Yes

that social dominance thread was great,It's a topic we all need to begin to honestlyy deal with because if we don't it will destroy us all.I thought my post would just expand it more,in more directions...

[catzies]

5. Yes, and that's a very good thing you did.

This is worthy of a thoughtful discussion; it will sink to obscurity in a very busy GD...thoughts?

[liberaltrucker]

2. Saved for further study

Bedtime for now. Thanks much.

[bloom]

4. I read the first essay ( so far)....

This is pretty much how I've come to see things as well. I read Diamond's book Collapse and one of the things I got out of that - was the necessity of societies working as a unit - considering the needs of the whole (if they/we don't want to collapse). That's why the libertarian view of people/companies just thinking of themselves - their profit - their immediate needs - seems like the most opposite view of what humanity needs - and is exactly what is working against us. Thanks for the post. :)

Let's be brutally honest with ourselves, for if we are the ones to change things, then we must look squarely at ourselves. The most obvious feature of human social, political, and economic systems continues to be empire building through dominance: humans dominate other species; the female half of our own species is still largely under the control of and exploited by the male half; most of the Earth's countries are still dominated and exploited by the few most powerful ones or by the banks and multinationals they have created; individual countries maintain their own dominance systems of class, caste, and discrimination, the few hiring the many to work for them and bring them the financial advantage that drives our economies; vast numbers of people have been dispossessed by this domination and driven to abysmal poverty and ill health; wars continue to erupt as dominance over land, resources, and beliefs are contested; the dominant culture is eradicating natural and cultural diversity.

Why this pattern of dominance, of competitive exploitation? Are we unique, or is this a normal stage in our species evolution?

We have already compared the evolution of the body of humanity with similar events earlier in our planet's evolution, suggesting that the development of communications and transportation, and the shift from competitive exploitation to a cooperative division of labor, are comparable to earlier processes -- ancient bacteria evolving into protists, protists evolving into multicelled creatures, ants evolving into ant colonies, and so on. All these show us a pattern repeating now, as modern countries evolve into a worldwide body of humanity...


Capitalists were right that people must work in their own interests, and communists were right that society must work in its collective interest, but both were are wrong in claiming that one or the other will do by itself. The present worldwide shift toward free-market capitalism will work in the long run only if it incorporates the best aspects of socialism -- the concern for the whole as well as the parts, including concern for the welfare of the entire body of humanity and its planet.

Nature never requires any individual to choose between its own interests and that of its larger body, society, or ecosystem as humans have been doing in forcing such choices, as we did between capitalism and communism. With the breakup of the communist world, it becomes ever more important to heed Toffler's advice that we stop looking at every idea in terms of whether it comes from the left or the right and see instead whether it takes us forward or backward. And the best way to see that is to look at living systems and how they function when healthy....

The sooner we recognize ourselves as being in transition from exploitative and divisive practices on all fronts to a united and harmonious living system, and the sooner we recognize that there are natural models to guide us, the sooner we will complete our healthy evolution by our own choice and efforts.