Naomi Klein has recently pointed out that good old market forces, instead of helping to save the planet, as neocons would have you believe, are channelling money into a protective industry which will protect the uber-rich when the rest of the world goes belly-up. Kind of a metaphor for capitalism generally I guess.
But it brought me to another thought. The astonishingly irrational reaction by gun supporters to massacres, has much in common with the reaction of climate change deniers to melting ice caps. To gun supporters, every massacre of children in schools, of shoppers in malls, of patients in emergency rooms, of drivers in cars, is evidence that more and more guns are needed. Arm the teachers, arm the toddlers, arm the nurses and doctors, arm the grannies. Arm everybody.
And arm them with more and more powerful guns because the killers have more and more powerful guns. This bizarre inversion of logic (a rational human being would come to the conclusion that, just as more and more guns bring more massacres, so fewer and fewer guns would bring less) is trotted out after every massacre, just in case the public should begin to question the truthiness of the gun lobby.
To a climate change denier every glacier melted, every drought, every super storm, every climate record broken, every piece of bleached coral, is a sign that we need more and more unbridled capitalism, more and more population growth.
And more and more oil found or gone to war over, more and more refusal to act until some other country does first; the more capitalism we have, the more nationalism, the quicker we can solve any problem that emerges (not that any have yet of course). This bizarre inversion of logic ( a rational person would come to the conclusion that, as unbridled capitalism and nationalism have caused the disaster, so a world community acting together under socialist principles is needed to solve it) is used just in case anyone should question the truthiness of the corporate energy lobby.
Ah the gun lobby, the climate change deniers, the evangelicals - the less evidence for their beliefs the stronger their faith (or as Cheney said about Iran, the fact that there was no evidence for a nuclear program made it even more certain there was one - laugh? I laughed until I cried). Ain't human psychology a strange thing?
Like John Stuart Mill, on the Watermelon Blog we treat "Conservatives ... being by the law of their existence the stupidest party" with all due respect.
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Oh how cogent a question! The more we learn about the evolution of mind, the more strange it seems. The world can be summed up thusly: A Pleistocene mind creates an overly complex world that that mind cannot comprehend. So it goes schizophrenic.
Merlin7 proclaims that "devolution continues".
I suspect that what we are witnessing is actually evolution in action. The evidence is mounting that suggests humans are actually evolving rapidly. That is to say, variations in subpopulations appear to be accumulating at a rapid pace.
My own thesis is that in the case of high mobility and sufficient mixing within and across generations, as has been the case in the western world for several centuries, a form of sexual selection known as assortative mating is starting to concentrate the conservative proclivity traits and the progressive (read not just intelligent but also creative and real moral judgment) traits so that we are seeing a bifurcation of Homo sapiens right before our eyes!
Given enough time, we would see at least two species of Homo emerge. One species would be intelligent but uncreative and hardassed. The other would be creative and morally concerned for the welfare of all. I would like to believe that if ever given the chance to compete the latter species would out pace the former just as Homo sapiens sapiens out paced Homo neanderthalis 60 thousand years ago.
Unfortunately we have screwed up and unintentionally launched selective forces in the form of climate change and diminished energy resources so that conflict is the most likely future scenario. No one wins and no new species will emerge. In fact the current so-called sapients will go extinct. End of high sentience on Planet Earth.
V.
Sorry for the downer tone. Today I witnessed some very 'smart' people make some very stupid decisions and I have to wonder how this species survived this long.