Dollar a gallon gasoline

[Bruce Bostwick]

On Jul 23, 2008, at 8:31 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote:

>> For every Marx, there's a Stalin.
>> (Which was one of the many examples I meant by "it's been tried".)
>
> I was not aware that either of those was associated with a movement
> to convince everyone that they must love each other as much as they
> love their family members or indeed  themselves.

Marx's theories relied heavily on people acting on cooperative and  
altruistic motivations and taking ownership of their own  
responsibility to pursue those collective goals.  As noble as that  
appeal is, it's idealistic in ways that don't take the darker and more  
destructive aspects of human nature into account.  (And Marx was,  
arguably, describing ideal conditions, which the nominally "Marxist"  
Soviet system glossed over in many ways.)  And there is a very real  
tendency in our species to find ways to game those "noble" systems for  
personal benefit, which in that case left the door wide open to the  
wholesale corruption and power-brokering that gave Stalin his  
opportunity to seize power.

My point is that there is no such "noble" system of organizing a  
society that will not be under some degree of attack by people whose  
only motivation is to steal as much as they can from it and live like  
little kings off the spoils, or do their best to destroy it out of  
sheer spite, and the moment such a scheme takes shape, people like  
that are already working out strategies to game it to their benefit.   
The most frustrating thing for me is that they often like to leave the  
*appearance* of the more noble system in place as a handy camouflage  
to hide their manipulation, and adopt the language and trappings of it  
as a code to further their own agenda.  This is almost a constant of  
collective human behavior, and it's part of the paradigm shift that  
will have to take place before we're ready to be ruled strictly by our  
own consciences and our wilingness to cooperate and love each other as  
much as we do our family or ourselves.  We have to walk before we can  
run, and we haven't gotten much past the crawling stage on that scale.

"If we go two lines without using the phrase 'unimaginably large  
military arsenal' we're out of our minds." -- Toby Ziegler