Interesting enough, Michael.

However, war. The "military-industrial complex" has been a driving force behind strategic decisions by the UK, USA and others including Japan, over the ages. Need for resources drove the Roman imperialist campaigns - and they didn't invent that.

Indeed, now that I think of it, I'd be interested to know of major examples of armies bringing peace. Quincy Wright's "The causes of war and the conditions of peace" (1935) argued that the causes of peace are inversions of war; and Blainey's "The causes of War" (1973) contains this gem: "The conflicting aims of rival nations are always conflicts of power. Not only is power the issue at stake, but the decision to resolve that issue by peaceful or warlike methods is largely determined by assessments of relative power" (page 150); and elsewhere.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12531#216672

Frederic, interesting comment & article.

the last paragraph contains the real issue, "universal education". We used to have that system in the land of OZ, which kept the electorate informed enough to cast a valid vote.

That was until the mid 1960's when closet communists "reformed" it into an ignorance manufacturing system designed to indoctrinate communist spinganda weasel words.

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"Reification ... the treatment of abstract concepts as realities."

The way religions work. With an appeal to abstract authority. To thwart good governance.
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Interesting article Michael. However your article itself contains a number of errors.

The first is the idea of “our ability to survive as a species over the long-term”. We don’t survive “as a species”. Evolution doesn’t happen at the species level, nor even at the level of the individual, but at the level of the individual gene.

The second error is the idea that the market is somehow intrinsically limited to short-term information inputs. You make no attempt to prove that, and you do not say relative to what?

The third error is the idea of “the market” exercising “power”. State actors use power in obtaining their revenue, because if you don’t pay tax, you’ll be locked up, or have your property forcibly taken. However “the market” is just another way of saying voluntary exchanges. Using force or threats is illegal in market transactions, so strictly speaking there is no such thing as “market power”. If a baker sets up shop and you want to buy a bun, that doesn’t mean he’s using “power” against you. Everyone has complete power over whether he enters into a market transaction.

I take your gist, which seems to be this: “Any environmental considerations are lost in the pursuit of competitive advantage for short-term profit.”

However you don’t say why or how you know.

The implication is that human use of the environment should be more focused on the longer-term. Since it would be fallacious to attribute to environmental values a supernatural status, we must confine ourselves to the issue of the utility of the environment in satisfying human wants now, versus in the future. But again you make no attempt to prove why people should prefer longer-term to shorter-term satisfactions, to say how you know, or to prove it.

“The more democratic a governance, particularly tied with universal education, the more chance there is of us understanding and coping with reality.”

No there’s not. The values of democratic government: taxation, inflation, government debt, compulsory indoctrination, forced redistributions, and war, all consume capital and therefore tend to promote less sustainable resource use.

Evolution happens to populations and their entire collection of genes, by a number of mechanisms.

McReal, have a read of "the Selfish Gene". Populations are no more than an emergent property of genes. The gene transcends species, even genera and families, since the same genes can be found in many different species. The speciation is a fairly trivial phenotypical expression of the gene's urge to reproduce.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12531#216679

McReal, sentence #1, correct.

S#2, half correct, many religions like the gospel according Mao, Marcuse, Lenin & Marx. other religions like feMANazism, econazism, etc.

S#3, correct.

S#4, correct.

Except "enlightement" protestant christianity which started democracy, but of course you knew all that before you wrote, didn't you?

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12531#216702

McReal, also correct, except that is what was happening up till the mid 1960's, evolution of our society/culture, then the loony left began promoting DE volution of our Society/culture/species.

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

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AntiSeptic,

Speciation, in a macro-evolutionary sense, may be "a fairly trivial phenotypical expression" of the continuum that makes up biology, but it is *DNA*'s urge to reproduce, via its accomplice close-relative-RNA, that is significant. To laud "the gene" seems to be reductionist.

Populations and sub-populations reflect the frequencies of the various *alleles* that make up genes. Variations amongst individuals in a species are a function of allelic variation. Variations amongst generations of a species, as occurs with evolution, reflect changing allelic frequencies.

I do not subscribe to such explanations as being of much significant for evolutionary psychology, especially for changes in higher-order human thinking in recent millennia, so I ascribe to and commend more general application of critical thinking, especially diversity of collective, governing critical thinking, as outlined in this excellent article by Michael Paton.

It is applicaiton of some degree of that critical thinking that has dismantled the communism that FormerSnag remains immersed in and thus fogged by.
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Mark Paton,

The more I read from Academics the more I advance toward the conviction that Universities are walled domains where perturbed gentry keep well away from the rigors of real life and conduce a discourse bound to be introspective and, terminally, inbred.

As a teenager I was told that wars are unavoidable. I took it to be the lie of that fascist hierarch who said it, and, for over seventy years, continued to believe that he would some day come to reason.

After many experiences save that of dying, I had to realize that war is not, as he said, unavoidable, but living is essentially a continuous war, with some brief truces necessary to contrive new motives for its continual.

I understand that war is not extraneous within Universities walls either, as papers coming from there do not exactly tell of serenity nor they smell of incense.

There is one question of relativity between beast and Homo sapient that I noted in my young days i.e. the beast is sated after a meal but man wants more than is necessary for his survival.

Strangely such necessity of over-providence that has conduced man to civilization is now is pointing to his extinction

Or you could simply abolish parliament, and make each ministerial office (environment, science, education, immigration, treasury, commerce, traffic, etc) a separate office to each other, where candidates must declare which ministries they are running for, and must get the most votes in an election to qualify for running them.
That way, people that are relevant to the field are more inclined to apply for it, and must also demonstrate that they are credible candidates- so their relevance exists in more than just their own mind.