There is Another Way

Just read an article that has given me hope, great hope, 'Evolution of Inequality, New Scientist, 28.07.2012'. I am no longer that nutter aspiring to impossible dreams. There are alternatives, so they are achievable if only we want them enough. Our capitalist based society of the winner grabs the lions share and gets to dictate has only been around for some 5,000 years. Whether or not you accept the premise that prior to that our hunt gatherers ancestors lived an egalitarian lifestyle  matters not. What does count is that there is an alternative to grab first and hoard. He with the biggest hoard gets to take his pick of what is available,  grab more and then use his hoard to buy fealty. The rich just get richer and richer off the backs of the poor, too poor and weak to resist.

The alternative is an egalitarian society where we look out for each other and make sure that what we have is no more than what anyone else has. No one is left in need or want, the group looks after it kin, as the weakest bring them all down, but together they have strength beyond the sum of their parts.

Just the required fresh new way of looking at our world as we have passed beyond the tipping point, where our plunder of its resources exceeds its capacity to replace or regenerate. We have to get back to a more frugal way of life. We have to stop putting our own little clique first and start to ensure all people born on this planet have some hope of a life not too disparate from our own expectations. A way to minimise our use and waste of scarce earth resources. A chance to rein in the incomprehensibly wild extravagances of the few and to look carefully at what the earth is able to offer so that we can all have a comparable share in it. Not equality. Not match for match, but comparable, not so disparate as to give rise to resentment, but a rough and ready fairness dependant on global position, climate and ease of access to resources.

Of course the bully boys and their cohort thugs have ruled the roost for millennia. Each generation is born with them as their only their role model of, take what you want and answer to nobody, as the possible viable route to follow. They are not going to give up their inherited accustomed rights and privileges. Yet their excesses can only be fuelled by the acquiescence of the masses that go without. So it is mutable, but whether peacefully or their rush to force can only be countered by a matching force, is the question to be addressed.

There are prospects, not everything we value in life is based on what can be obtained by force. Appreciation, respect, attention, these give an inkling of an Achilles heel that could bring the capitalist tyrants to book, maybe. Assuming, as a daydream, we overthrow our capitalist society and replace it with a society founded on egalitarianism, the battle is not over. There is always, in every society, it is in our human nature, the small percentage of cheaters, who claim full shares but hold back and conceal their gains. Or even worse steal or take by force when no one is looking. Nothing new here I guess. Like our hunter gatherer ancestors before us, the consequences of becoming a social pariah has to outway any advantage gained by stealing a march. When we all share in the same comparable distribution of resources, when we all know what we are entitled to, it does take the heat out of the need to go one better.

The longer you contemplate an egalitarian society the more it reveals in it a new calmness, the need to work together rather than to complete. How the world could begin to start out afresh in a new dimension. Inspirational but not beyond realisable.

War on Terrorists

Since ancient times it has been the practice of institutions to demonise the enemy. They then can play on our primitive fear feelings and the need to protect our wife and children from molestation, to justify their actions against this terrible enemy. This primitive fear response supplants any normal rationale or questioning, so the enemy are all equally evil and we don't pause to consider whether all individuals are the same, whether there may be other moderate or conservative opinions and we certainly don't empathise with vulnerable groups within that enemy stronghold.
So currently our diffused enemy we are told are vaguely the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Afghanistan with Pakistan thrown in for reserve or Usama Bin Laden or any mix or combination depending on the latest news. These terrorist put all our lives and families we care about at risk. So we are at war with these evil people.
Trouble is there isn't a hilltop, or a flag, or a strategic place or a town, river crossing, or army front line or airport or harbour that we can capture and say , yeah, we beat them. We have won. There is no identi-kit terrorist that you can instantly recognise by their speech, clothes, hairstyle, colour of skin as unambiguous give-aways. We live in diffused societies and no long, (for a very long time) do we live among kin that we know, recognise and can relate to. Praise be for the diversity it brings but the downside is our enemy is no longer definable.
Worse our enemy is now ideological. So that person sharing the seat on the bus, or on the train or that car coming towards you, may now be an ideological terrorist.
Institutions ascribe authority, control and technical competence to their actions which we, having or chosen to follow their lead, are happy to accept without too much questioning. So we accept the calm assertions that the State's surveillance, intelligence gathering, law enforcement and containment measures are more than adequate to curb any rogue terrorists cells that may exists within our communities, all we have to do is to grant even more extraordinary powers so they can get the job done.
No.
Because their competence is an illusion only matched by the bungling stupidity of those 'artful' terrorists we are told to live in fear of.
No
Because the only way to answer the ideology gap is by demonstrating, day to day, that democracy works, that free-speech is vital and that the State trusts and respects its citizens.
No
Because the only successful attack that can be made on terrorists and terrorism is for each one of us to engage and talk with that neighbour we are sharing space and time with. Not the State, not by more surveillance or more body checks, only by talking directly with them will we get to discover their extremists views.
Only by engaging in non-confrontational dialogue can we get them to expose and recognise for themselves the inadequacies of their ideology and by engagement can we hope to persuade them that there are real alternate strategies to achieve their goals.
That is the only hope for beating the terrorists that lives within us.