Tuesday 29 December 2009

The common source of lawful and unlawful crime

LINK to Guardian editorial on "organized crime".

The essential thing criminologists miss about organized (or not so organized) "crime" is that it is the flip side of the same coin, on the other side of which is the "legal" exploitation of man's natural and human environments.
 
Granted, "criminal" exploitation tends to be - but certainly isn't always - more ruthless than legal exploitation (just think of the tobacco and advertising industries which have spent and earned billions encouraging people - especially young people - to smoke, despite all the evidence for the terrible harm it causes, or the oil industry's denial of its role in causing climate change), and some "regulation" is certainly better than none, but the difference between "legal" and "criminal" is not as black and white as the state (which decides what is and isn't legal) would have us believe.
 
The crime currently being committed, quite legally, against our own children and grandchildren through our continuing ruthless exploitation and spoiling of their planet - despite all the warning about the consequences - is as morally reprehensible as anything the Mafia has ever done.
 
The editor of this editorial needs to smell the air and look down at the pile of corpses which constitutes the "moral high ground" on which he or she is standing, as they pontificate about the evils of organized (or not so organized) "crime".
 
The root cause of crime (legal and illegal) is the individual's perverted biological propensity to ruthlessly exploit his environment (natural and human) in man's continuing (but rationalized and unrecognized) primordial struggle for survival, advantage and "success", now largely reduced to the pursuit and exercise of POWER, e.g. money, social and professional status, the moral high ground, etc.

Saturday 19 December 2009

The ideology of "Liberal Statism", its unchallenged claim to the "moral high ground" and political power

LINK to Daily Telegraph article, Our human rights culture has now become a tyranny, by Charles Moore.

Charles Moore
makes some very good points, but what he is criticizing are mere symptoms of a disease inherent to the state, which in the past we were generally blissfully unaware of, and even now are only beginning to wake up to. It is the state's need for moral authority, in order to justify the immense power it wields (to raise taxes, make and enforce laws, to send its men folk to war, etc.), which it used to derive from its preferred - varying according to circumstance - interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture.


Until quite recently, the people of these Islands were not free to choose their own beliefs, but were coerced into accepting Christian dogma, which the Church, through the state, that it was instrumental in creating and running, used to exercise its power over society, from the highest noble to the lowest peasant, and from which, of course, it derived huge material advantage for its, especially higher, members (a lot better to be a shepherd than a sheep).

 The precipitous decline in Christian belief in the past century has left a partial moral power vacuum, which has been increasingly filled by secular (overwhelmingly liberal-left) morality, itself virtually the exact, but almost equally extreme, opposite of Nazi morality and ideology, which, of course, its rise to power  was largely an - at the time, understandable - overreaction to, as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Apartheid and Jim Crow.

This liberal-left ideology, which Jonah Goldberg poignantly refers to as Liberal Fascism, now represents the "moral high ground", which everyone (including those on the liberal right) must accept the validity of - or be dismissed and condemned as a rightwing extremist, neo-Nazi or "racist", which are the modern, liberal-statist equivalents of the medieval Jew! Heretic!, Heathen! or Non-Believer, i.e. "not one of us!"

Tuesday 15 December 2009

The underlying cause of the Sustainability Problem is not economic growth so much as what is driving it

LINK to Guardian article, "This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity", by George Monbiot from the Copenhagen Climate Conference. 
Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, [economic] growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.
What George Monbiot says about economic growth is quite true, but he overlooks what is driving it. Yet, until we recognise and develop an understanding of this, we are powerless to do anything about it.

What's driving economic growth is man's Darwinian nature, which the existing socioeconomic order developed over centuries to simultaneously serve and exploit in a misplaced and perverted continuation of his primordial struggle for survival, advantage and "success" (largely reduced to the individual pursuit and exercise of POWER, i.e. money, social and professional status, the moral high ground, etc.) in the artificial environment of human civilisation itself.