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Democracy and personal empowerment both depend on informed decision making.
Informed decision making depends on people having accurate information.
We are all human beings, and we all live on Earth. This is the common ground we all share. The universe works the way it works, and all we can do is to figure out how to cooperate with it.
Everyone’s perceptions of reality are subjective. But by triangulating among many people’s perceptions, we can identify things that everyone perceives the same way. That depends on observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability. This results in information that doesn’t let you down. Anything else results in conflicts of opinion and other people thinking you’re just making stuff up.
People all over the world have figured out how to do this. The English word for this process is “science”.
We have a serious problem here in America. The United States Constitution was written in the 18th century. The Theory of Evolution and the Laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until the 19th century. That means our government was founded by people who had fundamental misunderstandings about biology and physics, which means human behavior, the environment, and economics.
The lifecycle of a species depends on its relationship to its environment. Every species always uses all the resources available to it in its environment to survive and reproduce, until the environmental impact of the species balances to the impact the environment can withstand.
If the environmental impact of a species isn’t balanced by predators limiting the population size of the species, eventually the species’ impact will be limited by food availability. If that happens, the species’ relationship to its environment goes through two phases: the colonization phase and the sustainability phase. First the species eats up all the food it can find and goes through a population explosion. Then the population size grows beyond what the food productivity of the environment can continue to support. Then most of the species dies in a famine until the population size is reduced to level the environment can support—which is how the species makes the transition to its sustainability phase. Since the species is eating its food as fast as the environment can produce it now, the population size of the species levels out far below what the environment could’ve supported if the population size had been limited by predators.
With weapons and medicine, humanity has eliminated predators as a limiting factor on our population size, which is why our species is in a population explosion right now. We call our usage of resources an economy, and our relationships to each other that determine who decides how resources are used a political system. But really, those are just the manifestations of our species’ environmental impact.
Capitalism is the simplest economic system to use because it’s the direct manifestation of a species’ colonization phase. Organisms use whatever resources they can get to advance their own interests in the best way they can think of. There’s nothing original in that founding principle of Capitalism, because that’s how every species in the animal kingdom relates to its environment.
The global revolution against Capitalism and globalization is happening because our species is the only species in the world that can think far enough ahead to realize we are in the transition between our colonization and sustainability phases, and that if we don’t limit our environmental impacts voluntarily, the environment will limit it for us after billions of people die in a global famine and resultant plagues and wars. Some people have joined the revolution because they’ve learned about that ahead of time, while other people, like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, have joined (or in their case, started) the anti-globalization revolution not by learning this in the abstract but because they can see their lives are being threatened by our economic system—because they are the among the first who are being threatened by the transition.
I was a volunteer in the War on Terror. I trained to land the SWAT team on the roofs of buildings controlled by people who hate our government. I thought those people were going to be terrorists, not environmentalists!
I volunteered to defend democracy and the freedom of speech. Unfortunately, George W. Bush doesn’t believe in either of those. (President Obama is making a lot of big promises, but I’m not holding my breath. He promised an expeditious withdrawl from Iraq too, and what was that worth?) When education is outlawed, only outlaws will get educations!