Kay, don't even start this one, unless you read the last one. Go on...
Right, so now we watch the human organism dealing with disease. The biggest infection is well represented by Brexit and Trump. We are a social species. We are not a species of individuals. Individually we are weak, ignorant and stupid. Collectively we are strong, knowledgeable and stupid. Two out of three isn't really enough...
Stupid here is judgement. Making good judgments is smart, making poor ones is stupid. Reality is the arbiter. You can make a judgement that should have a good outcome for the world, and have it go wrong because you missed some teeny little detail, and it goes in the stupid column. I've never met a consistently smart person. I've never met a mostly smart person.
A judgement that seemed a really good one for generations, but eventually goes wrong is still stupid. Rome might have spent more times as an Empire than a Republic, but the Republic was more adaptable, and might not have blown up as badly at the end. Smart? Stupid? Way too many variables for any weak, ignorant, stupid individual to make a call.
There are easier ones though. Brexit is an example of becoming less open to the human organism, and shutting off because individuals are scared of change. There are wacks of other variables in the detail on this one, but the big, dominating driver is people being scared of the 'other'. Tribal nonsense.
Trump is the same root. America has never dealt with it's original sin, and really needs to sort it out. A bunch of the rich and powerful decided the wanted to have other people as pets, and messed up African society, and their own society at the same time.
In evolutionary terms it's easy to see why the unknown is scary. If you are fighting to survive, any change that makes life harder is potentially deadly. When on the edge, a brain is going to see danger behind every tree. If there is danger behind every tree, that's a good thing! In the western society of today, having the neighbour paint his house a colour that doesn't fit the neighborhood look, is a 'danger' of lost property value.
Our wiring is outdated. We can use logic and reason to see that the neighbours's house colour isn't a big deal, but sometimes we don't. We are hard wired to be optimistic, but we are hard wired to find things that are 'wrong' that we can make better. More likely to see positive outcomes from our actions, but more likely to find wrong in any decision we don't have ownership in. No wonder we're a confused lot.
In terms to our existence, having fewer toys than the generation before us is not a big deal. Having smaller houses, having smaller cars, having less economic opportunity is not a big deal. But that moving backwards triggers the wiring of fear, of receding, that fear of things getting worse. When we're scared, change is bad.
Economic security is the foundation of civilization. Without society we fracture into tribalism. We will join and protect smaller and smaller groups when we're scared. Eventually, it's all about the blood family, and the human organism dies. The individual cells may go on, but they aren't part of a whole anymore.
The orange one who shall not be named (oowsnn - he's dropped to lower case now.) is an icon of fear. Everything is wrong. Only he can fix it. He needs to hear he fixed it. That way he is powerful and doesn't need to fear anymore. His wiring is such that there is never enough power to feel safe. Any moment he's not being reminded of how powerful he is, he is quivering in fear. He hates fear.
He's a PTSD case, where everything went wrong for him to deal with it. There was probably something sexual in his past that made him feel powerless and afraid, and everything since then has made those feelings worse and harder to dislodge. He needs help, he doesn't need to be supported, and helped in his delusions - but whatevs.
The problem isn't so much him. The problem is that he represents a large number of American people. Scared people. They see their economic position going backwards, or their perception of their economic position going backwards, which for this purpose is an identical thing. Same with the British and Brexit. Polish plumbers will work for less so are putting British plumbers out of work. That's the vicious economic reality of capitalism.
Adam Smith never said greed was good. He pointed out that using a capitalistic model, the sin of greed could be harnessed to help improve the common good. Awesome! Take something bad and make it do good things. Social engineering at it's finest. Greed remains a sin.
He didn't suggest that greed was a positive trait. People should be ashamed of being greedy. They should work hard and have a moral center that keeps them working because that's good for the human organism. The engineering advances and medical miracles that the wealth of capitalism has led to are wonderful. The industrial development and social strains caused by capitalism need to be restrained.
Reality has judged that Capitalism works as an organizing principal for the human organism. Reality is judging that without controls Capitalism will kill off the human organism. If the organism breaks into competing, individual cells, or, more likely, smaller bundles of cells - we all lose. It will probably start to develop organs and move to reestablish itself from the parts over time, but that doesn't help the individual cells that are pulling to create a functional organism this time around.
We have a window of opportunity for good judgement of the collective of man to guide us to a successful and robust organism. We are letting fear of the unknown muddy our collective judgement. There are positive signs under the headline bad signs, so we needn't despair.
The upsurge in political awareness in America is encouraging. Particularly among women. They are thinking that the neighbours house colour isn't a big deal, but the breaking apart of the human organism is. The frightened, cretinous baboon in the white house is a morally unconscionable relic of individual thinking. Of the least evolved type of man.
I don't care what religion or belief system you subscribe to, but this is a moral issue with moral solutions. Pretending that everyone in the society can have their own moral system, and have the society work is foolish. There are only a couple moral drivers that a society needs, and I'm not fussed about most of them. The two come down to 'treat others as you'd want to be treated', and 'you are your brothers keeper'. Add or subtract after that as you'd like, but those two matter.
'Everyone' agrees that helping the less fortunate or less able is a virtuous thing...unless that less fortunate or less able person is a member in some tribe your tribe is on bad terms with. Get over it. We are all part of the same tribe. The human organism. We can CHOOSE to have that organism work.
We have a time, we have a crisis. Real change is generational or through surviving a crisis. There are somewhere in the neighbourhood of twice as many people on the planet than were here when I was born. There will not be twice as many people on the planet when I die, than are on it now.
Anthropogenic climate change is a pain in the arse. It means we need to change, and people fear change. Particularly people that feel under economic pressure. Economic pressure is social, tribal, not based on money. Economy is a part of social science, not all of it. It's based on the 'other'. People are going to be under increasing economic pressure. People are going to be more susceptible to fear.
Areas of the earth that once could support populations of 'lots' can now support 'less'. So people move. A couple million people from Syria, and a bunch more from Congo start migrating, and the rest of the world devolves. It just the beginning folks. Bangladesh has hundreds of millions, and a lot of them are going to be coming to a place near you, in the near future.
India is a finite area, and they are young and growing. China and Japan have slowed their population growth, and are comfortable enough, and capitalistic enough that having a big family is expensive instead of an insurance policy. (It's one of the best features of capitalism, and doesn't get enough praise.) but much of South America, Africa and Asia haven't got their yet.
When the land can't support the population on them, they WILL migrate. We either watch them die, even help them die, or we help them out. Helping them out is going to have a short term price. If we pay it, we are most of the way to the human organism. If we collapse into regional, warring cultures, we devolve, and have to wait for the next cycle. Future attempts and bridging to the human organism will be able to learn from this one and hopefully do better...but whatevs, I'll be dead by the time that 'next try' happens. So will a good portion of the species.
Philosophy and psychology and economics collide with biology on charting a route forward for the human organism. We need to do things that work. We need to do things that move us on a path from here to there. We need to do things that the individual cells in the organism buy into. That model can't be unfettered capitalism. We can chose fettered capitalism, and that would have a chance.
If we made a habit of electing people that were focused on governing well, instead of people that hate government, as has happened too often in the post Reagan environment, we'd probably have a start. We need to get over our fear of experts. We need to have experts run our government.
Experts don't know much, just more than non-experts in their area. They need to still try things and fail at things to move the ball forward. They need to be given some forgiveness, so they can learn from mistakes. We need to be given some forgiveness so we can learn from mistakes.
Lets make being expert at running a government be a reason to 'hire' (vote for) a candidate, instead of being an expert at self promotion, and emotional manipulation. The Chinese seem to be run by a group of people that are experts at running a government. It's kicking ass. It treats some of it's individual cells as 'diseased' and treats them poorly, and that's a bad thing and hard on the cell when it isn't diseased.
But if that Chinese model works better than a freedom model, it will win. Evolution is like that. What works wins. Authoritarian government that actively strives for the betterment of the population isn't a model that has sustained itself for a long period in our species, so past reality says it won't work. Past reality says they will stop worrying about the betterment of the population, and collapse. But we learn and evolve. Maybe there is a trick they've figure out that'll make it work out.
Evolution doesn't let morality get a look in. Except we're capable of thought, and prediction of future outcomes. We are capable of planning. Abstract planning. We can choose our evolutionary path. As far as we know, we're the first species who really can. I'd like it if a freedom based model worked better. We can choose to let a freedom based model work better.
Let's choose to put restraints on the freedom model that make it work better than the Chinese model. If we can't, maybe they have a better model. If we can't, we probably have to fall back into smaller warring organisms for awhile until we reset and relearn. My lifetime is during this shot at it, and I'd rather see success, than live through another reset and restart.
Our generation will have to choose to give up some portion of our wealth, some portion of our individual best interest to have the human organism survive. This generation can set the organism on the path to success. What do you say, generation? You up for it?