The Duplex Pyramids
http://TheNaturalSystemsInstitute.org
Shaking the Foundations of American Politics and Economics
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 19, 2009
How does a US president tell the nation that the “pursuit of happiness” was discredited with Aristotle, Moses, Jesus, and every other leading philosopher and religious leader? As Aristotle said, “Happiness is the result of the pursuit of some other magnanimous goal.”
How does he tell the nation that its belief, its devotion to, a growth economy has put us on a path to global destruction and must end?
How does he tell the nation that “The American Dream” is a recipe for individual stress, interpersonal rivalry, and national disaster?
How does he tell the nation that justice cannot operate like a market economy and it cannot be bought?
How does he tell the nation that the adversarial nature of our democracy, while great for boosting television station ratings, is antithetical to rational decision making and that it promotes a nation full of interpersonal enemies and conflict? The adversarial nature of our democracy is contrary to the dictum of Jesus that we should love our neighbor and our enemy.
How does he tell the nation that its belief in a free enterprise, capitalist, economic system forces its participants fundamentally to act as sociopaths?
How does he tell the nation that its educational system, based on an external reward system of grades, produces invidious comparisons and is counterproductive to intrinsic motivation, authentic learning, and the development of an autonomous capacity for independent thinking? Should our public schools be modeled after a factory assembly line?
How does he tell the nation that our free enterprise based economic system has made it possible to privatize and subject to the profit motive: water, DNA of plants and animals, and human medicine, and would even privatize air if it could? Privatization of water actually has been tried in underdeveloped countries. Patenting Genetically Modified Organisms is a legally accepted, widespread, practice in the US and it is spreading rapidly to the rest of the world. Such systems are the most anti-humane, anti-life, ever developed.
How does the US president tell the nation and the world that this free enterprise system is the very essence of evil? How can he explain to the nation that, devoid of ethics, the drive for success in the form of power, wealth, and fame, becomes the definition of criminality?
How does the US president tell the nation and the world it has and depends upon having the largest military, defense budget, defense industries, and security systems in order to defend and preserve these evil systems of politics and economics against opponents both domestic and foreign?
How does the US president tell the nation and the world that this system is operated by people who are shielded from public view and awareness? How does he tell the nation that its government is actually a plutocracy and not a democracy?
How can we the people reverse these demonic trends?
For nearly twenty years, I have been watching and researching information about our culture. I have been doing this particularly intensely for the last ten years. After watching, for many years, CNBC and MSNBC regularly, morning, noon and evening, and CNN less regularly, and sometimes even watching FOX news, I have arrived at the disturbing deductions listed above. In addition, I have viewed nearly 150 serious documentaries (see 3. below) covering the contemporary problems in our culture and problems we have ‘exported’ internationally. Moreover, I receive countless emails from liberal activist groups but, also, from GOP and right-wing activist groups.
Finally, my sobering conclusion is that Oswald Spengler was, in essence, correct about the “Decline of the West.” These various media sources, in effect, are telling me that our political and economic structures and systems are hemorrhaging at every seam. Springing forth to patch these seams are myriads of alternative organizations such as alternative professions; activist organizations; lobbying groups; think tanks; massive numbers of charities for everything under the sun; and on and on. Countless new governmental regulations are being proposed to cope with the vast disarray and corruption in our economy and politics. These are all designed, unknowingly or not, to try to keep our structures and systems from bursting into mass chaos and human and environmental destruction. Though not apparent to the mice on their treadmills, our much-touted 'American Way of Life' is quite simply not working. It is broken beyond repair.
To paraphrase the thesis of Thomas Kuhn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, ‘when you see this kind of patching up of obsolete, frazzled, totally indefensible theories in science, the stage is set for a Paradigm Shift’. After surveying the landscape of contemporary America, I think it should be glaringly obvious that a paradigm shift in our political and economic systems is quite a bit overdue! That is a précis of where we the people can begin to reverse these demonic trends. We must discard the antiquated approaches that have dealt with our culture’s problems on a piecemeal basis. Rather, we must begin by reforming our nation’s political, economic, and non-governmental organizational structures and systems as a integrated whole. If not now, when?
For those of you who are astutely prescient, you must know that otherwise it may be too late for us all. Wouldn’t you say?
3. One Hundred and Fifty+ Documentary Films Relevant to the Diverse Disorders of Our Culture