The Peter Principle of Human Societies?

At Bush's State of the Union pace, events to force the U.S. off crude will have little to do with price, time or technology and everything to do with politics. They all seem to really hate us: Saudi, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela... and as soon as they are able, they will turn off the spigot, and starve us in the same way that our way of life has ignored/exploited/corrupted/starved them.

I read this yahoo newsgroup, NASPIR and it's very esoteric and replete with intellectual/academic language, but I believe, as the writers there do, that our only hope -- our only "solution" -- is political, economic and religious compromise, not cultural, economic and military war. But global, near nuclear, war (in the form of U.S. capitalism) has been waged against the earth since the end of World War II. But does globalization mean simply better, more efficient global arbitrage and exploitation? If so, we're all doomed to endless war and pointless death. And if the answer is less for us and more for them, then I say fair is fair. A world (like Bush's) with absolute winners and losers, where losers far outnumber winners, can never be secured and therefore has no future. Doesn't the ultimate collapse of every empire to date prove this?

And while I dream that one day secular idealism will finally and ultimately refute and replace these silly, pointless religions (both Christianity and Islam). Today we witness a potentially catastrophic fundamentalist backlash from the un/mis-educated on both sides. But when you really look, it's a backlash against precarity and not for religious ideals. But precarity is not death and it's time we all begin to understand this. Human beings can adapt to scarcity and precarity just as we did to the false advertising of free/cheap abundance through mass/over production.

In other words, I and many others believe there must be a sustainable, human compromise to be struck:

1. capitalism, combining both regulated AND free markets, bringing innovation and modernity, while limiting and penalizing greed and corruption.
2. secularism, but with morality and common sense modesty, devoid of offensive sensuality and vulgarity.
3. spirituality without absolutism -- a right to private prayer/meditation, while publicly abiding the golden rule -- is a recipe for societal Justice, which is both core and culmination of every religion.

And if I'm wrong, then I'm afraid it's the Peter Principle of human society -- and ours has simply ascended to the nadir of its incompetence.

Todd Ryder

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