NEW & COMPLICATED PROSPERITY

>Anyone who has ever toiled in a garden has sooner or later learned that if a weed is not uprooted it will simply grow back again.

Who will decide the weeds from the flowers? Can we ourselves be trusted? The first requirement is for testable tools of evaluation -- better gardeners & better gardening schemes are needed.

>Why does this happen? Is it a lack of intelligence? No, not really.

By "society" we mean a power that is either (1) variably responsible, or (2) utterly irresponsible. To improve or to replace our inherited schemes of social organizations requires that we exceed them in the accuracy of our knowledge of the world's habits and the potency of our ability to compile this information. "Intelligence" is the precondition for "capacity."

>Conversely, a truly free society has little interest in trying to maintain the disequalities that are foundational to the breakdown of order and are the main generators of violence. A free society organizes itself to maximize prosperity for everyone, not just a few at the ‘top’.

Kurt Vonnegut writes in CAT'S CRADLE that the great mistake of America's Founding Fathers was their failure to provide a legal limit upon incomes. The general power of wealth fails as long as its pressure is always drained into deep, narrow wells.

Most likely a flexible "target" level of wealth is desirable, incentivized by our regulatory frameworks. If animal bodies get too hot, or too cold, in any of their parts, they quickly sicken and perish. This wisdom is the heart cybernetic self-regulation but it is everywhere opposed by the oligarchs and their simple-hearted popular supporters.

>The solution then, as i have been advocating throughout these posts, is the restructuring of society along deliberate, radically free, values-based lines.

First we must have agreements upon the categories for the new values. We need to decide the groups, their inter-relations, and then -- how to test them.

>... no sane populace should feel under any obligation to continue to support or validate such an utterly corrupt system.

If we could find an utterly corrupt system this would be the correct course of action. However we find only relatively corrupt systems -- which we must simultaneously oppose in their inefficiency and support in their struggles against less efficient systems. The Perfect and the Not-as-bad will live together or die apart.