Ecologically and Socially Friendly and Sustainable, Anarchic Civilisation
I’ve read several people recently claiming that “poverty is the natural state of human beings”, and I’m not sure if this is new bullshit or just old bullshit being rehashed, but I am sure it is bullshit … allow me to explain.
Humans are just another mammal, that’s all we are, and prior to the invention of the gun and the industrial revolution, lets have a look at what was going on with our various species of sentient mammalian cousins.
This article originally came to me as an idea about how to simply distinguish the differences between property/trade/currency vs. non-property/trade/currency based economic systems – being that the former manufactures scarcity, while the latter removes it ( where possible ). Which in turn was inspired by a debate on social media about whether or not the world is over populated, what we mean by that, and how/why we justify such a statement.
It then occurred to me that for people to understand these issues, they must first understand what scarcity is, and how it occurs – ironically, the people who understand this the least are often the ones who should understand it the best ( economists ), and yet it’s quite apparent that many of them haven’t a clue. The reason for that being, scarcity is an ecological issue, but not an economic one within the confines of the capitalist economic paradigm ( though it should be ).
So let’s start at the beginning and look at what scarcity actually is.
After recently writing an article about the inefficiency of capitalism as demonstrated by the leaf blower vs. broom, I felt compelled to write this brief follow up.
Apologies if anyone tried to read the first link ( I hit post by accident ), this is now the real thing *ahem* … so without any further ado, let’s get cracking.
In my life experience the greatest cause of arguments I have seen ( by far ) is misunderstanding, and it seems apparent to me that the most common cause of this, is the lazy and incorrect use of language. For which reason I’ve started to put some definitions of terms into the wiki.open-empire.org subdomain ( though so far this is only a handful of terms relating to economics ) … but I wanted today to share with you my thoughts on language, the failure of online dictionaries, and people’s common misuse, misunderstanding, and lack of concern about how they use language. Continue reading “Thought for the Day: language and semantics”
If there’s one thing I’m really fed up with about society, it’s all the victim blaming that goes on:
Continue reading “Thought for the Day: Capitalism’s Blame Game”
I thought perhaps another approach to defining Open Empire would be to talk about what it isn’t …
So Open Empire ISN’T the following things:
There’s a fallacy presented to the world which states that all species must compete for scarce resources. This is taken to be true because it is assumed that all should – in the interests of fulfilment, self preservation, and survival – fight for the greatest share of all resources … but is this actually true?
The prevailing “wisdom” would say yes without hesitation, and this is what I wish to challenge.
Continue reading “Competition Fallacy: Capitalism vs. Relativity”