From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: RE: sideways - incapacity Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 08:13:15 -0600 Hugh, I hope you are in better health today. I recognize that in speaking of the capitalist social-economic system as a form of artificial life, I'm using a metaphor, but think it is necessary to develop concepts such as these in order to address the current situation more completely. Certainly I recognize power and money tends to be concentrated in the hands of small elites - real life individuals made of flesh and blood - as you put it. What this doesn't explain adequately, in my opinion, is the various ways in which the current apparatus of social control is used to manipulate other people into acting against their own self-interest. Your argument tends to be a generalized variation of that old saw - 'guns don't kill, people do.' What this argument misses, however, is the very way a gun changes the dynamics of the situation. Someone who would never be capable of killing another with his or her bare hands now possesses the means to do so. Just as the invention of gunpowder and firearms forever changed the ways in which wars are conducted, so the development of such cultural apparatus as the church, school, television, radio, newspapers, film have forever changed the ways in which we relate to each other, and, as the development of the now all-pervasive electronic media has shown, there has been correspondingly a dramatic increase in the possibility for greater social control. The media doesn't distort, people do? Not really, in my opinion. That just isn't the way the game works. As the ecologists pointed out long ago, if we just choose to focus only on the discrete organisms, and refuse to pay attention to the underlying mechanisms of the shared environmental field in which these organisms interact, we can only attain a partial understanding of the real situation, its ecology. This seems even more relevant today when we are talking about a very dynamic and autonomous global ecological system such as capitalism, in which humanity perilously attempts to adapt itself to a runaway mechanism. eric
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