Thursday, December 1, 2011
Sport, Science and Art each have strengths, but none of them has proven capable of replacing War in its natural form. It seems plausible, however, that one could create a true War-class ECS by synthesizing the three together. In other words, we might be able to reverse-engineer the system we need from the parts that [...]
Thursday, November 24, 2011
In the old days, prior to Individuality, your Identity was entirely a function of what slot your community plugged you into. You might be the Village Idiot, the Village Chief, the Village Medicine Man, the Village Wise Woman or the Village Whore, but there was no question of you taking on a role outside of [...]
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Fourth in a series on ending war. Art may seem like a odd substitute for War, but there’s reason to not dismiss the idea out of hand. We already know that Art can be a powerful economic engine, legions of starving artists and musicians notwithstanding. For proof just look at the movie and music industries. [...]
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Third in a series on ending war. If Sport can neither take the place of War, nor of Consumerism, then how about Science and Technology? Together they compose a powerful economic engine, with advances in technology shaping and reshaping the global economy both through the development of new consumable products and through technological advances in [...]
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Second in a series on ending war. The most obvious and ancient substitute for War is Sport. The origins of the first athletic game are lost in the mists of history, which means that Sport has been helping individuals and nations release their aggressions for a very long time. And given the billions of dollars [...]
Thursday, October 27, 2011
In the previous series of blog posts we explored the question of why unemployment is so high, which led to the ways in which Consumerism is coming to the end of its usefulness as an economic engine. That in turn led us to evaluate War as alternative manufacturer of employment. Although War initially seemed to [...]
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tenth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work After reading last week’s post you may be thinking that War is such a wonderful thing that we should just forget about peace and just promote nonstop full-time worldwide warfare –and then no one need ever be out of a [...]
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ninth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work I’m a huge hippie pacifist. But with all due respect to those great Motown songwriters, Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Strong, the answer to the above question cannot possibly be “absolutely nothing.” In every generation, in nations across the world, in [...]
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Fifth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work Don’t jump off any tall buildings yet. Despite the abundant Direness, things are less bleak than they appear. The problem may present as though we’ve run out of a scarce resource –namely jobs, particularly meaningful ones –but viewed from the [...]
From this point moving forward, the goal of this blog is to provide cogent, practical answers to some of the biggest problems facing humanity, and to provide those in easily digested, bite-sized pieces. Starting next week will be a new series of blog entries around the subject of how to fix the global economic crisis. [...]
Thanks for your question. In many ways, you could say that “making the world a better place” was the explicit or implied aim of a large majority of philosophers throughout history; from Plato to Confucius to Marx to Singer. The big disagreements, of course, come from different ideas of what a “better world” would look [...]