cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
I just tried to submit a long reply to this and got Cloudflared. Hmpf.
I am not suggesting that the violation of rights is always irreversible, but definitely reversed in the instance of the violation we are discussing. I consider rights that cannot be claimed and realized to be abstractions and as such not very useful.
I do admit to an oblique admiration for your optimism about our human capacity to cast aside [the] system. However I propose a sort of test of the premise. What you describe is a common and basic desire many many people have. Typically the only thing standing between desire and realization is possibility. Can you name any societies within living memory (or currently) that have managed to cast away the system (while on its territory) and keep it cast off?
If you share my answer of No, would that not signify that the concretization (just checked; it's a word and works here) of that capability is, if at all possible, very difficult?
You have induced me to do Web searches earlier today about Malthus, and I have now lost my innocence/ignorance about his views. I distance myself from them. But imo the question of justification or justifiability is unimportant. Outside societies like China or old Sparta, once born a human is presumed to have a shot at survival. The important bit is not so much the right to live so much as success at it. And this requires luck, no matter where in the social ladder you were born.
I admit to curiosity: how an I utopian? In my estimation a necessary component of a utopian ideology is the premise that humans, if left to themselves, will tend to cooperate and be generally committed to community. I do not think this to be true. I would say that makes me the opposite, and I see myself as and own the label of a dystopian. I do not think human nature is centripetal to a moral stance, and I also don't believe the predators (raiders, empire builders et al.) can be held at bay without the considered application of power: force. Rights without power backing them are empty abstractions. Without enough power to take those rights from whoever might contest them, they don't do anybody any good. I do think that human nature is centripetal to the accumulation and exercise of power. Take M.K. Gandhi as an excellent example. He achieved results for two reasons:
1) the society in which he found himself was already decadent and prone to revolution with the application of minimal force.
2) His political actions were the application of all the force he had mustered, which proved considerable. Despite the rosy gloss many popular histories would polish onto the bare account of his deeds, he achieved a result by the very deliberate application of political power to the fracture lines he identified in the Raj. He was very much both a product and a beneficiary of a unique time and place in human history.
Finally, i do not think the current Western model is sustainable. I see it using key resources faster than they can be regenerated or replaced with a decent and available substitute. Personally I believe we are headed for a cliff ... perhaps not Malthusian in its nature, but just as looming. The corporations and banks operating world commerce and finance are inextricably tangled in the system and each other. When the West collapses (if it does, but I think in time it will.) the rest of the world follows. All our eggs are in one basket at this point. What marks me as a dystopian is that i see no way to avoid it short of the monstrous: social Darwinism with teeth. And I recoil from that. For all my wry regard for Macchiavelli, I do not want to be stuck at "the end justifies the means". That makes a travesty of trying to find any principles at all that can be made generally practicable. All jmo. cn
cn
