Opus 2025-529: You Pick, part 1 of 2

I don’t know if you’ve ever been driving through apple country and seen the signs that declare that you can pick your own apples.  It’s rather ingenious because they still charge you as much as the store, maybe more, but they don’t have to do the harvesting.  I guess it’s fun for some people.

But I’m more concerned about picking our future.  If you are paying attention, and I assume you are, you noticed that things tend to be going downhill in our culture and our society.  More and more we see what we could call a peasant class rising to the surface. It’s not a matter of cream rising; it’s a matter of the dregs being stirred up until that’s all we can see.  I am not talking about social or economic classes but a group with atrophied mentalities.  

We are constantly at a crossroads.  That’s part of the human predicament.  At the present I think we are going to have to pick one of three courses we follow.  I would suggest that the three are revolution, reform and revival.  There’s a bit of overlap and all insist that there must be change.  That’s nothing new.  Again it’s the human predicament.

If you look at history, there is no one political system that has survived the test of time.  There is no one economic system that continues to deliver.  What has survived is the basic human character of self-centeredness and shortsightedness.  There is a certain hubris built into the human mind and personality.  We see it in those claiming that real socialism has never been tried and at this time it will be different.  I’m not sure how many of them actually believe that or how many of them are simply convinced that they are more clever than their ancestors and will find a way to put themselves on the top of the heap this time.

There are three general approaches to government.  You have the general category of monarchy.  This is the rule by one strong man.  They embrace different titles.  You can have a king, a dictator, a tyrant, a president for life.  A second type is the rule by the elite or upper class.  I think oligarchy fits into that and the idea of having an aristocracy.  Then the third type is a general form that is often mislabeled democracy.  The word itself is good because it’s a compound word of “people” and “power”.  This has taken two general forms.  The first is a pure democracy.  We have never actually seen this, although some people think we have.  They point to ancient Athens as being a pure democracy.  Not so.  Only a limited number of people were allowed to participate in the process of voting and assuming power.  Still it was an attempt.  Then we have the concept of republic.  This was demonstrated in Rome.  Again, it was not perfect because it did not include everyone.

To be continued...

homo unius libri