Originally posted by E V I L
People will resent being dominated by other people whom they'd rather think of as relatively inferior. Behaviorally, they will jump at the chance to pick out weaknesses should they surface and especially during times of distress. I've seen it on every stage of life, from the playground and now here in politics. Bottom line: America dominates. Are you disputing this?
What America dominates is mainly in military terms. Indeed, most of what Latin America tries to do is nothing but copy the American culture, which I find despiseable. Besides, that is just the position of ignorant Latin America, and not of Europe, nor Asia. Jealeously? I think that maybe the more likely explanation is that jealousy has just become a convenient excuse. If you think someone is against you simply because they're jealous, that somehow excuses you from defending yourself. People absolve themselves from guilt, from explanation and from personal accountability simply by pointing the finger of jealousy at their detractors. Americans keep on evading the negative sides of their situation, since they are considerably more than the positive. Freedom? Liberty? Basic principles? My ass. America is pretty screwed up in cultural terms. Last year's elections were mainly acts of bread and circus, just like they were in ancient Rome. You actually dare to say that system has given you freedom when all you are and all you have been since the independence are slaves of thought and will.
I parry the question back to you. Do YOU know what socialism is? To give an admittedly unscholastic answer, I understand socialism is an umbrella term for a number of things. In basic, or popularly, these things are variants of a collectivist theory of government and social policies, policies for a reform usually radical in their scope, usually advocating a proletarian redistribution of wealth. I won't attempt to define it any further than that as I'm no scholar. I'm at odds with this because this is often another form of what the author, for instance, of your signature (Nietszche) termed (in the french) resentimente It is the expression of a nihilistic inversive will to castrate natural values, and punish the strong. And by what means? Totalitarian.
I'm a humanistics student, so I'm frankly more acknowledged with this topic than you probably are. For once, let me give you some statistics just for you to look at what the capitalist system has done to the world:
Today of the approximately 6 billion people in the world, it is estimated that at least a billion live in abject poverty, lives cruel, empty, and mercifully short. Another 2 billion eke out life on a bare subsistence level, usually sustained only by one or another starch, the majority without potable drinking water or sanitary toilets. More than 2 million more live at the bottom edges of the money economy but with incomes less than $5,000 a year and no property or savings, no net worth to pass on to their children.
That leaves less than a billion people who even come close to struggling for lives of comfort, with jobs and salaries of some regularity, and a quite small minority at the top of that scale who could really be said to have achieved comfortable lives; in the world, some 350 people can be considered (U.S. dollar) billionaires (with slightly more than 3 million millionaires), and their total net worth is estimated to exceed that of 45 per cent of the world's population.
In the U.S., the most materially advanced nation in the world and long the most ardent champion of the notion of progress, some 40 million people live below the official poverty line and another 20 million or so below the line adjusted for real costs; 6 million or so are unemployed, more than 30 million said to be too discouraged to look for work, and 45 million are in "disposable" jobs, temporary and part-time, without benefits or security.
The top 5 percent of the population owns about two-thirds of the total wealth; 60 percent own no tangible assets or are in debt; in terms of income, the top 20 percent earn half the total income, the bottom 20 percent less than 4 percent of it.
All this hardly suggests the sort of material comfort progress is assumed to have provided. Certainly many in the U.S. and throughout the industrial world live at levels of wealth undreamed of in ages past, able to call forth hundreds of servant-equivalents at the flip of a switch or turn of a key, and probably a third of this "first world" population could be said to have lives of a certain amount of ease and convenience.
Yet it is a statistical fact that it is just this segment that most acutely suffers from the true "comfortable disease," also called "affluenza": heart disease, stress, overwork, family dysfunction, alcoholism, insecurity, anomie, psychosis, loneliness, impotence, alienation, consumerism, and coldness of heart.
The Worldwatch Institute (
http://www.worldwatch.org), which issues annual accountings of such things, has warned that there is not one life-support system on which the biosphere depends for its existence -- healthy air, water, soil, temperature, and the like -- that is not now severely threatened and in fact getting worse, decade by decade.
Not long ago a gathering of elite environmental scientists and activists in Morelia, Mexico, published a declaration warning of "environmental destruction" and expressing unanimous concern "that life on our planet is in grave danger." And recently the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists (
http://www.ucsusa.org), in a statement endorsed by more than a hundred Nobel laureates and 1,600 members of national academies of science all over the world, proclaimed a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" stating that the present rates of environmental assault and population increase cannot continue without "vast human misery" and a planet so "irretrievably mutilated" that "it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know."
But your almighty capitalist system won't listen. Thanks to it, the world economy has grown by more than five times over in the last 50 years and is continuing at a dizzying pace to use up the world's resources, create unabating pollution and waste, and increase the enormous inequalities within and between all nations of the world.
I neither ignored the thread nor perceived your other posts as insulting. There is a problem i notice about people who accuse others of not thoruougly reading threads, in order to avoid the responsibility of owning up to the thoughts they have espoused.
whatever you say.
