The Millenium Goals the world’s nations set themselves in 2000 turn out to be all talk and very little achievement. TelePolis put together some facts in a short article illustrating the world’s shortcomings. ¹
I’m really interested in the particular failures our system is suffering from. I was too young to understand why the Soviet Union folded. From what I heard, the regime had very peculiar ways of failing; and these days we are discovering that our own governments are suffering from similar systematic failures. (Maybe this is old news to people older than me – it took me more than thirty years to realize this.)
So the question is: *Why* are our governments often so inept? Do people genuinely like fools? Or are they doing their job well and securing our wealth by keeping the rest of the world down? Are people like me then fools without wanting to admit it? Why are the media so full of crap? Yet, eventhough they are mostly crappy, they still are important in some cases. But which ones? All of these questions have had answers in some way or another.
All these answers involve lengthy arguments, all of their supporting points again need more evidence, there’s no short and elegant explanation open to empirical verification. I guess I’m still a scientist at heart wanting to find that underlying principle that explains it all. I really want to understand it. How could we ever dream of changing the system if we don’t understand it?
(I’m a big opponent of burning it all down just because we don’t understand it. Some revolutionaries have suggested that route. I agree with KarlPopper, here. We need small incremental changes.)
What frustrates me, I guess, is reading the WOZ, the MondeDiplomatique, and TelePolis, and agreeing with so many articles, and realizing that not enough other people seem to care to make a difference, or if there are and if they do, they obviously still can’t make a difference because of the inertia of the establishment.
The again, I don’t want to destabilize the establishment for fear of the people I oppose seizing the opportunity to make matters worse. What I’m not seeing is signs of reform.
Or is the red thread tying all these issues together some form of leftist/humanist pessimism?
#UNO