XPost: alt.politics.economics   
   From: Josjoha@market.socialism.nl   
      
   Humanity is extraordinarily good at farming.   
      
   Humanity doesn't have a clue about farming.   
      
   These are both true. While humanity has learned how to work the world   
   around them to create unprecedented wealth and luxury, we have failed to   
   work on ourselves - our thinking, wanting and behavior - to match these   
   new circumstances which we have created. While we where doing farming,   
   we remained thinking, hoarding and fighting like a hunter gatherer,   
   sometimes like an animal.   
      
   The life of a hunter gatherer is quite similar to the life of all kinds   
   of animals. Even the fighting within the same species can help, if it   
   helps select for bodies more able to fight off predators and conquer   
   prey. If there are no weapons or simple ones relying on the body itself,   
   a stronger body makes for a stronger weapon. This is no longer true for   
   the most powerful weapons which humanity is currently making.   
      
   Farming however is about balance and peace, giving productive crops and   
   animals peace to develop fully for a good harvest, and maintaining a   
   forced but healthy balance between all of them to gain a varied   
   production to fullfill different needs. Farming also allows humanity to   
   make things far exceeding of what a hunter gatherer could carry around   
   on their never ending wanderings. This now includes weapons and other   
   technologies, too powerful to be in the hands of a warring species.   
   Serious long term abuse of these technologies may have disastrous and   
   permanent consequences for humanity and even the Earth in general;   
   perhaps even beyond the planet.   
      
   The essential problem is that humans did not adjust themselves to peace   
   and a healthy balance between each other. We do not treat ourselves, our   
   entire culture, in the way a farmer treats his farm. Young people are   
   not given free space (land) for life as a right. Crops get land. Cows   
   get land. Humans do not. When the potatoes start growing in the wrong   
   patch set aside for grain that year, they will be removed to keep the   
   balance. When one person gains more and more land while others go   
   without and/or have to pay higher and higher prices, nothing is being   
   done about it.   
      
   Humans know how to farm on the outside, but have not become farmers on   
   the inside. They are hunter gatherers, and due to the violence involved   
   in such a way of life, humans are playing with tools they are unable to   
   handle correctly. The choice is: adapt to farming, or face disaster and   
   perhaps worse.   
      
   With farming is meant everything including computer programming and   
   flute playing or being a Judge or ambulance driver because everything   
   happens on land, uses what is produced on land, requires land and   
   eventually returns to land. To fidget about it you could argue that a   
   fair amount of things also existed for hunter gatherers, such as fire as   
   such, or having a dog, which is true. Even so, it seems just about   
   everything has been touched by the practice of farming and what it has   
   caused.   
      
   Humans changed the survival "niche" from roaming hunter gathers like a   
   band of monkeys in the forest, to settled productive life such as ants,   
   but are still generally failing to succesfully adjust to this niche. The   
   current time frame with mega weapons (nuclear bombs), nano weapons   
   (biological) and everything in between (such as currently being created   
   robotic weapons) represents a crisis of adjustment. It could be seen as   
   a choice moment.   
      
   Do humans want to have the power of farming ? Then ... choose peace and   
   justice. What we are doing now is not good enough.   
      
   Do humans want to be hunter gatherers ? Then ... have a series of   
   disastrous wars, face near extinction, and perhaps your great grand   
   children will be telling their children about a world which once was,   
   too fantastical and strange to believe could exist.   
      
   The problem with the latter choice, is that farming will likely come   
   around sooner or later again, and then humanity will face the same   
   choice. If humanity survives itself that long. The latter choice also   
   includes the danger of a high technological hell like tyranny   
   establishing itself, a dystopian end to a world which once seemed   
   promising.   
      
   --   
   Economic & political ideology, worked out into Constitutional models,   
   with a multi-facetted implementation plan. http://market.socialism.nl   
      
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