One of the problems with the way we argue is summed up in this post – http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-comfortably-numb
Most people really don’t want to engage with the world and the consequence for argument is that full facts hardly ever become the issue. All rhetoric needs to do is engage a numb-skull mentality of people rendered docile. The zerohedge post complains that US government has been taken over by a few evil people. I agree and suspect the historical truth is worse.
The excuse for not being able to provide decent education and modern living conditions for all people is essentially that this is a dirty old world and we have to put up with gross inequalities or else end up in the doom of ash-grey uniformity and dictatorship.
Nearly all argument, in my view, is crippled by this kind of foreboding – from questions on arming police officers to whether we should teach real history in schools. The conundrum is that if we are to settle matters and direction through argument we need a populace that is skilled in argument and, of course, don’t have one – unless we place faith in some unconscious processing. Plato’s answer (in theory) was to plough vast resources into his Guardians (including husbandry) in education and life-style to create an elite that would not be corrupted (though he admitted this was inevitable in comments on human nature).
My own view is that education is a failure other than in technical areas, child-minding and soldiering. The neglected element from Plato is his communism of the free table – the taking away of the temptation of power accumulated through personal wealth. I see almost no discussion of this that does not start with some Mumbo Jumbo on the role of vast personal fortune in motivating “our best people”. This turns anything said on the issue to total bollox. Thieves have similar motivation. I would say people motivated by money in this sense are unlikely to be trusted in other human endeavours. Our societies have been gerrymandered to bring about fealty to wealth and the desire to grab it. I do not believe this is human nature at all.
Key terms in what passes as argument in the general public domain are wrong. Work is one of them – most people avoid the real thing here, as surely as pompous Greeks believed it scarred the soul and barely even bother to justify slavery for all their show of intellect. Much of what is discussed is as hopeless as speaking of ‘life-force’ rather than in the language of genetics or using Descartes’ (hapless) physics rather than the lines developed from Galileo, Newton and Einstein. We talk in ideologies and myths, not about reality.
This reality is dire. Think about what goes on in the world in 30 minutes. A child dies unnecessarily in each four seconds, an Indian farmer commits suicide and a whole load else. We like to keep our comfort by calling anyone revealing this doomsayers and by denials anything we do is responsible. How welcome it is to have high-level theories telling us such matters are just the unfortunate consequences of ‘free trade’ (now there’s another term that is never true) and things would be much worse if we organised from the eradication of such problems up.
I spent a decade of my life trying to teach British industry to plan. Even in this kind of work heads are buried in the sand. Many of our industries simply could not compete with the massive structural change to mass production and away from skilled,almost artisan work in many of our industries (shipbuilding was the classic). Work has primarily been redefined by it being taken away as a means of making a living in my adult life. We have coped better than rural India, but that’s about it.
We can grow stuff, build stuff and provide a basic standard of living for all better than the existing one in the UK with no world trade. Most of us wouldn’t miss the trinkets. So what is all this international finance about, really? The really gloomy answer is war.
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