On Jul 23, 2008, at 8:31 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: >> For every Marx, there's a Stalin. >> (Which was one of the many examples I meant by "it's been tried".) > > I was not aware that either of those was associated with a movement > to convince everyone that they must love each other as much as they > love their family members or indeed themselves.
Marx's theories relied heavily on people acting on cooperative and altruistic motivations and taking ownership of their own responsibility to pursue those collective goals. As noble as that appeal is, it's idealistic in ways that don't take the darker and more destructive aspects of human nature into account. (And Marx was, arguably, describing ideal conditions, which the nominally "Marxist" Soviet system glossed over in many ways.) And there is a very real tendency in our species to find ways to game those "noble" systems for personal benefit, which in that case left the door wide open to the wholesale corruption and power-brokering that gave Stalin his opportunity to seize power. My point is that there is no such "noble" system of organizing a society that will not be under some degree of attack by people whose only motivation is to steal as much as they can from it and live like little kings off the spoils, or do their best to destroy it out of sheer spite, and the moment such a scheme takes shape, people like that are already working out strategies to game it to their benefit. The most frustrating thing for me is that they often like to leave the *appearance* of the more noble system in place as a handy camouflage to hide their manipulation, and adopt the language and trappings of it as a code to further their own agenda. This is almost a constant of collective human behavior, and it's part of the paradigm shift that will have to take place before we're ready to be ruled strictly by our own consciences and our wilingness to cooperate and love each other as much as we do our family or ourselves. We have to walk before we can run, and we haven't gotten much past the crawling stage on that scale. "If we go two lines without using the phrase 'unimaginably large military arsenal' we're out of our minds." -- Toby Ziegler _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
