Democracy
Just thought I would share yet another
observation with you, do you remember the last
German
election, the one that re-elected Mr Schroeder. I remember this
because of how much it upset both the US and some other European
member states. It upset them because Gerhard managed to get
re-elected because he promised not to send German troops to Iraq,
anyway the people voted and he got back in power. I thought hang on,
how can these other democracies be annoyed at this behaviour, after
all, surely in a democracy, it is not up to politicians to
decide what the public want, I always thought it should be the other
way around, how about you?
Democracy =
the
will of the people, so for a change the will of the people won.
Nice to see democracy still works in some
countries.
On a more fundamental note, capitalism and
democracy are basically two
ideologies that are at odds with
each other, democracy has been hijacked by big business for it's own
purposes (once again). We live in an
unequal society because, capitalism can not work in a true
democracy, so the two ideologies have in effect come to an uneasy
compromise. Democracy can be seen as the will of the people,
capitalism on the other hand can be seen as the will of business, so
who controls business, this is the problem, because after all,
business is not a democratic process.Remember it
has been said, that Hitler saved capitalism. You see during the
political turmoil of the 20's, wealth for the few, was rebelled
against and was seen as the wrong way to go, at least by the
majority. But capitalism and fascism found within each other, mutual
bed fellows, they where both in effect hierarchical systems in which
the majority found themselves at the will of leaders. This led to
unchecked global weapons development and proliferation. The
capitalist ideology seen a business opportunity in fascism, in other
words cheap labour, high profits and an ideology that was not
dissimilar to their own.
The capitalists, have always
supplied the weapons, the little people have always done the dying.
The diplomats and the old men do the lying, whilst the young men do
the dying, an old phrase, for a modern age. The young, apathetic and
the sycophantic, managed to let the Nazi Ideology lead the German
people to their destruction, the human race is currently following
the capitalist ideology, I wonder where it will eventually lead us
all?
Anyway to leave
business in charge of the future, makes no sense
(at least to me), because capitalism in effect works towards
creating wealth for some individuals, rather than the good of us
all. If we leave business in charge then it will probably try to
sell supercomputers, nanotech, A.I or even
net plugins (see
Ubiquitous Computing), so as to allow
anybody connected to have access to all of
the processing power, storage etc, they
could ever want and all
invisible to the user. Thus
leading to unchecked and global
proliferation of such technology, so quite possibly leading to the
downfall of us all. This is just like before WW2,
where the capitalists seen in certain political ideologies a new and
lucrative money making opportunity, i.e. sell arms to anybody and
everybody, at the end of the day, who cares about the consequences.
To leave the world in the grip of big business and capitalism
as it works today, I'm sure, will lead to stock market meltdown and
mass unemployment, that's if this technology is introduced by such
forces.
Big business plans obsolescence into it's
marketing strategy so as to keep the production lines going, but to
apply this philosophy to certain advanced technologies will more
than likely lead to the human race, becoming obsolete itself. The
problem is, that after Roosevelt and his new deal, an economic
nightmare in-sued, so ever since, most governments have been
reluctant to mess with big business. But I think in the case of A.I
./ nanotech and computing power etc, then
governments should be at the forefront of these issues, tackling
them head on. Otherwise capitalism and the greed
it promotes, could once again lead us all into war, this time WW3 a
war to end all wars. If the world can set up the
World Health Organisation, then
why not a similar organisation to monitor, track and even eradicate
certain types of software / technologies etc, that are considered
too dangerous. This would obviously represent a monumental
undertaking and really would require global co-operation, because it
would take only one smart A.I. or self replicating nanotech system,
to cause serious global problems.