Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Why? What is wrong?

When we look around we can see people being pushed to the edge and out of society.

Unemployment is rising, crime rates are rising, the environment is degrading. These and many many other problems are not new, but it seems we are not solving any of them. Seems like we are not able to solve it with the old tools.

I believe that communism and capitalism are two inverted extremes of the same evil. They both promote concentration of power (central planning or banks and corporations) which is inevitably abusing the population that is weak. The problem of idealized communism is that it squanders personal freedoms for common good. And the problem of idealised capitalism is that it squanders common good for the personal gain.

The promoters of free markets do promote individual freedom, but they forget that the profit oriented individual is rewarded for creating imbalances in supply and demand. The less balanced the system the more profit there is to make. This leads to power abuse and downfall of morality.

Many will argue that, we can prevent abuse by enforcing rule of law and high moral standards - however I believe this is a naive approach and in long term it can not work. Concentration of power is a mechanism that enables even more concentration of power, thus sooner or later those institutions or individuals are so strong that they can submit the law making processes to their own selfish goals (lobbying, campaign sponsoring) and even starts to pervert the moral values ("greed is good").

As soon as we have concentration of power (corporation, government) and dehumanization processes (abstraction trough statistics) we tend to do awful things. For example: cutting down founding for first aid emergency service which leads to "a negligible increase of unnecessary deaths". The morals used to teach us that unnecessary death is unacceptable, they used to teach us that if we know that our actions can endanger health or lives of another, we are committing a crime. Seems that moral rules do not apply to our governments or corporations.

Here is a psychologist very well explaining how and why systematic abuse happens, take a look:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html


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