New Year’s Eve and Ethical Resolutions for 2012

New Year’s Eve and Ethical Resolutions for 2012
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
December 31, 2001

Typically, New Year’s resolutions revolve around what people think they need to do differently in the coming year to avoid their failings in the previous year and improve their lot in life in the coming year. Considering the current economic situation in the US, resolutions like those seem a bit outmoded. From a philosophy of life point of view, and in view of the way people around the earth have been catapulted into interlocked global collisions of forces that inevitably affect their personal lives, perhaps it is time to move beyond provincial and narrowly self-interest concerns.

There will be and should always be a need to examine and correct one’s personal ethics. We are not born with a motive to develop and abide by a well thought out ethical philosophy. People simply incorporate the moral conventions they grow up with and leave it at that. The media thrives on conventional morality and morality conflicts, knowing full well that the majority audience never thinks beyond that.

Ethics of Nineteenth century philosophers like Kierkegaard and Kant were decidedly personal. The ethical philosophies of Hegel, Rousseau, and Lock, for example, had a different focus. They were more concerned with the ethics of politics or governments and social issues. Yet, as Chomsky pointed out, the ethics of nations, de facto, operated in gross contrast with both personal ethical philosophies and political ethical philosophies. The late nineteenth century communist philosophers, like Marx, saw nation states and their economic policies as unethical as they put the interest of the state above that of the individual and even condoned exploitation of individuals. Early American statesmen and philosophers ostensively emphasized individualism while practicing elitist interests at the expense of the populace.

The early industrial revolution pitted the corporate interests against individuals and the labor movement began to counter their exploitation. F D Roosevelt began a switch to compassionate concern for the poor during the great depression. Initially, movie newsreels and radio broadcasts were addressing a nation of small town Christians and the New Deal appealed to them. With rapid growth of the media’s televised news programs, democratic and Christian values dominated over corporate interests. This usurped the power of corporate leaders and their ability to determine political leaders through cloistered, smoke-filled, secret ‘caucuses.’ Corporate leaders quickly countered populist, democratic politics, by co-opting the media and flooding it with corporate friendly news programs that promote (amoral) free enterprise oriented values. Parallel to this, corporations promulgated an appealing fundamentalist, protestant principle, anti-big government message to the masses even though this was in a schizoid relation to their true interests and beliefs. They knew full-well, that the less educated, media-mesmerized public would never figure this out.

Through creeping contamination, this corporate strategy spread around the globe to all within reach of a television or radio. Through the rise of multinational corporations, this combined approach of control of national leaders and media brainwashing, they have been able to run roughshod over the interests and rights of individuals. They have even gone so far as to pollute earth, air, and water, destroy biodiversity and ecologies, enslave populations of impoverished nations, massively threaten lives through manufactured military conflicts, deplete the world’s natural resources, and disastrously alter the earth’s climate.

In the twenty-first century the rogue upstart internet began a global counterattack informing the computer savvy around the world about true nature of the multi-national, corporate ‘shadow’ government and their media and economic strategies. Corporations, their lobbyists, and their legislative lackeys quickly attempted to stem this revolutionary tide by trying to enact laws constraining the new power of internet whistleblowers, like WikiLeaks, and pressuring the FCC to allow them to restrict internet access and to horizontally and vertically monopolize all of the various media modes.

Now, it should be clear that the personal ethics of philosophers and religions of the previous centuries, while still important, must be transcended by a new ethics oriented to the common good. The massive groundswell of activists’ movements around the world, facilitated by the internet, indicates that this is and must be the way of the future. The people have access to web sites like those below that do not originate from flakey rabble-rousers but rather from corporations’ media sources and government sources like the CIA. You and I can access this information and, using our analytical minds, we can induce what is driving corporatocracy^[i] and what we must vigorously oppose if the earth and its people are to survive. Be assured that corporations will not self-correct because they are like addicts that cannot stop their self-destructive behavior.

Let this then be added to your New Year’s resolution that you will endeavor to develop a mature ethic of the common good and dedicate yourself to it.

Sincerely,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousseau

hunger http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41976

http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/hotspots/Documents/cihotspotmap.pdf

World of Free Energy URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28365

http://www.climatehotmap.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_2011%E2%80%93present

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_conflicts

http://www.globalissues.org/issue/83/conflicts-in-africa