Morocco, the advent of the nuclear bomb combined with the control of the world by ‘Corporate Thugs,’ like Murdoch suggests to me that humans are insane and destined for extinction!

I try to believe that good will prevail eventually, but my belief is fast disappearing.

That’s an excellent observation….a seeming contradiction that deserves to be reconciled. I have thought about, studied and researched this issue for the past decade and the link below is one of the best explanations to be found. It supports my thesis that what we are dealing with is a systemic crisis……and the only way to navigate the crisis is to address the system.

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html

When contemplating cold evil’s military incarnations we see not only the ethical consequences of distancing but also the critical role of scale. Kirkpatrick Sale has written eloquently in Human Scale about the crucial role scale plays in all aspects of contemporary life. It is also an essential problem of modern ethics. When technology allows us to deliver weapons (or energy, food, education, etc.) on a tremendous scale, personal contact and responsibility are lost. Imagine if one had to kill millions of people one at a time with a sword. Contrast this with allowing a computer to annihilate the same number of people with a few nuclear bombs. The sword, however destructive, is a human-scale weapon that has a very circumscribed ability to kill. By contrast, the nuclear bomb’s scale is almost unlimited and its consequences beyond individual or even social control.

Ethical distancing and ethical problems of scale are not limited to high-impact military technology. The behavior and nature of modern technocracies, business, and government organizations are equally illustrative of this cold evil. Witness how corporations, now working on the global scale, routinely make calculated decisions about the risks of the products they manufacture. Typically, they weigh the cost of adding important safety features to their products against the potential liability to victims and the environment and then make the best “bottom line” decision for the company. More often than not, safety or environmental measures lose out in this calculation. As for people or nature, they have been “distanced” into numerical units relegated to profit-or-loss columns. The corporations then decide how many units they can afford to have harmed or killed by their products.

We witness daily the way the modern corporation has become distanced in time and space from its actions. A pesticide company has moved to another country or even gone out of business by the time—years after it has abandoned its chemical plant—the local aquifer and river have become hopelessly polluted, fish and wildlife decimated, and there is a fatal cancer cluster among the families relying on the local water supply. The executives of a tire company are thousands of miles or even a continent away and do not hear the screech of wheels and the screams as their defective tires burst and result in fatal crashes.

The workings of the global trade and finance corporations and organizations epitomize the physical and psychological distancing of cold evil. In the isolation of their First-World offices, members of the World Trade Organization and their partner financiers and economists of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) make decisions affecting millions. This is most evident in the imposition of “structural adjustment” measures on developing countries. For decades the IMF and World Bank loaned money at considerable interest to “developing” nations, essentially to capitalize modernization and technification. The funding was often for huge, ecologically devastating industrial projects. Not surprisingly, much of the money ended up in the hands of corrupt governments or as kickbacks to First-World corporations. As payments became overdue and interest rates skyrocketed, many countries found themselves unable to repay these loans. To solve this repayment problem the IMF and World Bank implemented a series of “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs). These programs involve renegotiating a country’s loan on more favorable terms if it agrees to “adjust” its spending policies, which means reducing wages, lowering labor and environmental standards, slashing social programs (particularly in health, education, and welfare), and allowing increased foreign domination of the country’s industries…..

I have an interesting response to the post above: My experience of working at a children’s hospital for two years illustrated to me, that the vast majority of those working with patients, i.e. nurses, CAs etc. (doctors tended to be a little more progressive…), while being so gentle and kind to babies and children, giving care and dedicating their lives to sick kids- more often than not, were religious, republicans– They went straight to the polls and voted for someone like John McCain/Sarah Palin… They thought that I was insane/radical/nuts for being a progressive. See they care only to the extent that they allow themselves to… or that their empty religious beliefs allow them to … They care about babies … when they are sick…. but they don’t care about WHY they are sick… or poor … or being born in the first place …. Tell me your thoughts, I would be interested in hearing them …

Jeannie, we honour the killers, not the carers, because we have been indoctrinated to think that war is all right, is necessary, is noble! Nothing can be further from the truth. War is an obscenity and, to me, it proves that humans are not intelligent!

Kate, your empathy comes through very well. Thanks.

I’m sorry for your troubles, David. I wish I had the skill to convey how I empathize with you.

No one has to wonder which is which.

Why do we honor death and killing and give so little attention to the much more important work of caring?

Many years ago I worked as a nursing assistant, I was paid minimum wage and the work was often very hard. It was not considered very important, but without that work patients would have been left in terrible condition. Food, clean sheets, a bed pan, even a cool cloth on a fevered forehead mean a lot when you are sick and in pain.

What I remember most from those days are the heart felt thank yous from patients. I didn’t think I had done anything important.

When I was in the hospital 5 years ago for two weeks the wonderful care that I received helped me to understand those thank yous. They are the people who should be receiving the praise!

Good luck with your final treatments David, I hope everything goes well for you!

Anyway, I wish you success on your treatment and hope your life is always filled with love, peace and happiness.

~!~