Politics!
Posted on May 12th, 2008
by 
Domi333
Domi333
Yes, it's the P word.
There isn't much else so controversial(except possibly Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, hah),
in politics just as in philosophy, we have ideals that can be explained, that should actually work...I understand that we have political philosophy, which leads us into asking what is the ideals that society should aim for, how should a society be governed? what is the relationship needed to relate between the individual and society.
Not so long ago I was watching the Canadian series Andromeda, there was a group called the Nietzchians(taken from his,Nietzche's ideas of course) That was a society in which strength was honoured atheism and science was the truth, patriarchal, genetically perfectionists...I could go on...
Once much of this was the norm for society(some of it looks to be) but coming back to politics I ask, should we all be judged the same(i.e. all countries under same system, same judicial etc.
Is politics ever good enough? Plato's philosopher king could indeed be something incredible but also corrupted like other human beings can be...
Humanity's first great attempt at world governance with the League of Nations failed, can I say that the UN has succeeded?
Would it be true to say that by the possibility of extraterrestrial interaction we could unite for once?
I know, we still have a long way to go...hopefully it's not too long.
Dom
There isn't much else so controversial(except possibly Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, hah),
in politics just as in philosophy, we have ideals that can be explained, that should actually work...I understand that we have political philosophy, which leads us into asking what is the ideals that society should aim for, how should a society be governed? what is the relationship needed to relate between the individual and society.
Not so long ago I was watching the Canadian series Andromeda, there was a group called the Nietzchians(taken from his,Nietzche's ideas of course) That was a society in which strength was honoured atheism and science was the truth, patriarchal, genetically perfectionists...I could go on...
Once much of this was the norm for society(some of it looks to be) but coming back to politics I ask, should we all be judged the same(i.e. all countries under same system, same judicial etc.
Is politics ever good enough? Plato's philosopher king could indeed be something incredible but also corrupted like other human beings can be...
Humanity's first great attempt at world governance with the League of Nations failed, can I say that the UN has succeeded?
Would it be true to say that by the possibility of extraterrestrial interaction we could unite for once?
I know, we still have a long way to go...hopefully it's not too long.
Dom
Access: Public
consciousness
June 2008
I must admit that I try to think about politics as little as possible. It depresses me and I don't need any help in being depressed. :) I'm kinda gnostic when it comes to political power. I read a nice comment in one of Robert Anton Wilson's books: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I have faith in many things, but politics ain't one of them… and probably not extraterrestrials either.
Hehe…I was just using the alien bit to show what it might take to push people to put away their differences….
'Power corrupts', definitely! It seems everytime something big was happening it failed…lenin-stalin, mao(at all times) but then you want to do something and then realise the politics gets stuffed up…
maybe gandhi was right in thinking about living in villages concepts, at that level, the small people do matter…
but did we fail though, while moving from agricultural to urban societies?
I don't know much about Gandhi's idea about living in villages. Does he mean living on the small-scale in a close-knit community? If so, it makes sense to me. I think that is what we're evolutionariy designed for.
Paul Shepard wrote about a similar idea, but a slight difference. He thought the whole shift to agricultural society was the problem… partly because agriculture allows for the possibility of large populations.
Well, those small political units, organised neighbourhoods etc.
I admit we tend to idealise the village, but with small-scale agriculture, small-scale trading among groups,required tech men…etc.
Oh I see what you mean, more food, more population though massive population growth has been over the past few hundred years…
Well, actually, the massive population explosion began when agriculture began thousands of years ago. There is the obvious notion of more food, more population… but Shepard added another interesting component. He claimed that an agricultural diet caused people to mature sexually at a younger age and so agricutural societies produced more people more quickly than their non-agricultural neighbors. Combine that with a settled lifestyle and you have the possibility of large specially trained armies that could also annihalate those neighbors.
Its been a long time since I read him, but I think I generally agree with him. He believes that our disconnect from nature is the problem, but he doesn't believe that we should romanticize about returning to tribalism. Even though I don't know what the solution is, I agree with what he sees as the main problem.
Anarcho-primitivism
“Other scholars and thinkers such as Paul Shepard, influenced by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, have written of the ”Evolutionary Principle” which roughly states that a species removed from its natural habitat and behaviors will become pathological. Shepard has written at length on ways in which the disruption of man's natural “ontogeny” which developed through millions of years of evolution in a foraging mode of existence has been disrupted due to a sedentary lifestyle caused by agriculture.”
Paul Shepard(The Only World We've Got):
“We should not be mistaken about our terms. It is not technology or materialism that is the problem. The love of materials and the physical world and the extraordinary craftsmanship in its use have made us human. By catastrophes of industrial greed I refer to the corporate organization of the economy, with its destruction of the human community, its blindness to place, its obscene disregard for scale, its garbage, its rapacity, and its excessive desire for 'products.'”
ok,
we really must be lost then…
we can't really return to tribal lifestyles…what to do?
An Integral lifestyle?(Gebser and Wilber-type?)
Yeah, I'd think that an integral lifestyle might be the most helpful response to this seeming impossible dilemma. A problem can't be solved on the same level the problem was created. And, so, a collective solution would necessitate a collective development. But can a collective development be caused by human effort or is it simply a natural evolution that will occur?
who knows?
this whole integral evolution is about a possible way we can evolve, or maybe we can just make some good decisions for the planet..
i think it was albert einstein who said that!(problem not solved at the level of consciousness that created it)