Venator asks himself:
"Who in their right minds would want a return of...?" (p. 63)
- and then inwardly recites a list of horrors which I will reproduce as a list:
war
poverty
rampant criminality
disease
famine
cancerously swelling population
necessity to work no matter how nasty or deadening the work might be
mass lunacy
private misery
death in less than a hundred years
Thank you, Venator. That is a very good list of very bad things, a comprehensive list of horrors inflicted on human beings, some by themselves, others not. There is nothing in this list that mankind cannot in principle end in the future although right now we are stampeding the other way - either denounce or applaud mass destruction, depending on who perpetrates it.
We can certainly reply to Venator:
No one in their right mind wants war etc but we also want individual and collective self-determination and we should not be compelled to accept your peace at the expense of that.
I think that we can have it all - but let's find out.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A "cancerously swelling population"? I don't believe that because Stirling has convincingly argued we may well face a catastrophic demographic crash.
Other things, like war, ISWHBD, and can only be managed, not eliminated.
Ad astra! Sean
War can be eliminated.
OK. I have some unexpected free time this morning so I will go through it all again.
This is a hope and a speculation, not a prediction. IF advanced technology regularly produces far more than everyone needs and IF that technology is controlled democratically, with information and communication technology used to ensure genuine participatory democracy and accountability, THEN everyone will benefit, there will no longer be any need to compete for scarce resources, energy sources, trade routes, markets or profits, there will no longer be a need to distribute goods through a market place, money will be redundant, there will be no division of society into employers and employees or into rich and poor, there will be no need for security guards to protect warehouses against theft, there will be no need for an apparatus of police, courts and prisons to prevent the poor stealing from the rich because there will no longer be any rich and poor, everyone will be housed and fed and receive medical treatment without having to pay for it, there will be no motivation to scapegoat immigrants for any social ills or deprivations because there will be no such ills or deprivations, there will be no need to produce weapons or to divide humanity into armed nation-states competing for territory, levels of local, regional, national and international solidarity will be entirely positive with no need for any antagonisms.
I say all this without the slightest intention of persuading, just to demonstrate that my view stands and is rationally defended.
I suggest that we either say something genuinely new on the subject or we leave it, having apparently already said all that we are going to say.
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