I actually think that it would be a useful thing to go back and look at some of the knowledge and wisdom that humans had before any of the ism's were developed.

The enlightenment was a wonderful thing in giving us the idea of reason, science and the idea of human rights but it didn't really take into account the full reality of human nature. I think this was because the enlightenment was developed by a very select group of men who lived in a very specific type of society that formed their human nature in such a way that they really believed that people can and usually do behave 'rationally'.

I think we should look further back and look at the way other cultures or societies conceptualised human natue and that we might see a wider range of possibilities upon which to establish a decent society.

I think we 'reason' all the time and we do it well but we don't do 'rationality' all that well because the emotional areas of our brains are more influential than our cognitive ability and so our emotions are much more influential in most decisions we make.

I think it is important to understand that there are large differences between us with some of us better at emotional reasoning and this is a very useful way of thinking, and some are better at rational reasoning.

The idea of 'individual differences' is the big growth area in psychology and even medicine, with researchers recognising that the differences between people in such fundamental things as the way drugs are metabalised can be very big.

So for me the message is that none of our current 'isms' really recognises that we will not all react in the same way to the same things. I think that we need to accept that we aren't all motivated by the things that Marx thought we were motivated by and we aren't all motivated by the desire for wealth as the capitalists assume. We are more complex than economists assume we are.

Mollydukes

Well said.

To which I would add that those who place their perceived rights and freedoms above all others to remember there are consequences to all.

Thanks for the thread, Poirot. Just a few meditations from me.
I think Marx was right in almost everything, at least right in terms of the materialist paradigm we occupy and he substantially helped to create, theoretically. Materialist/idealist paradigm's are both ways of making sense of life (heuristically rationalising rather than solving the riddle), but they're incompatible with each other. Marx's materialism occupies the cusp the two paradigms share, making his philosophy poorly and mis-understood, and objectionable to proponents of both.
I'm persuaded not merely that capitalism "can" destroy itself, but that it's inevitable. Marx's predictions have proved uncannily accurate, the only error being that it has lasted longer than he predicted. Marx had nothing complex to say about utopias (long since a popular genre) and he didn't see a transition to socialism/communism as part of some inevitable material dialectic. He correctly (for mine) identified the means of production as the main dynamic (but not the only one. Fortune also plays a part) in human history and inferred his calculations from that. But these are social dynamics that however accurate, as they've proved to be, for plotting human progress, do little to elucidate the human condition at the level of the individual.
I think capitalism must collapse, as it must grow and cannot be confined, and the planet cannot support it. But it will probably just re-emerge and again evolve viciously from barbarism to government and regulation, the geopolitics being altered and so with variations.
It seems to me that until humanity takes stock of the conditions and physical limits it encounters, and learns to cut its cloth accordingly, it will just continue pointlessly from collapse to collapse.
Life is too short and current generations have grown complacent, having no lived-experience of world war or famine; we've coddled a childish optimism that all will be well, though human history is littered with examples to the contrary and we shall become another. Future generations shall emerge in a different world and have different experience of what's normal; hopefully they'll learn from previous mistakes.

Tor Hundloe in his book, "From Buddha to Bono: Seeking
Sustainability," tell us:

"All the fantastic inventions we have put to use have
delivered the middle-classes (wherever they live) a
lifestyle far beyond scarcity. A major tragedy is that
most of us do not recognize our success. Some of the
most eminent economists, psychologists, and philosophers
have made it clear what should be most obvious: we
don't become happier if life is led in search of the
next material object, in conspicious consumption.

What happens in the hypothetical world where we are all
"the Joneses" on top of the pile? Is that the end of
striving, of incentive, of the drive that is essentially
human?... Whatever the answer, the truth is that the
middle class has overcome scarcity - and should focus on
the best use of the real scarse resource. Time!

...The inconvenient truths of our economic system are the
fundamental flaws which need to be exposed.
The promise of sustainability lies in the balance. Do we fall
downwards over the precipice or take our boat out onto the
peaceful ocean? That a few have overcome scarcity means
little if the majority live in poverty...it will not be
sustainable with an expected world population of over
nine billion. We will overshoot - and probably seriously -
the globe's carrying capacity. We will then suffer for
ages, as will the natural world, until we can reduce the
human population and return our ecosystems to
sustainable health."

Does anybody think that the indigenous Australians did develop a totally sustainable society? It lasted pretty much unchanged for thousands of years and it wasn't because they couldn't change or develop more complex technologies; the archaeological evidence shows that they actually rejected advances in technology from their northern trading partners in Asia.

The more I learn about this culture, the more impresed I am by the way they managed to put limits on human desire and I think that the main problem with capitalism is that it makes no provision for the limitation of human desire.

I'd say that people of all political persuasions see that the level of materialism in western society is a problem. But it has only become a problem now that capitalism has brought us so much wealth.

Throughout most of our history as a human species, there was never too much and the desire for more and more stuff was functional. We haven't changed, we still want more and more, although reason should tell us that it is not good for us.

As my faviourite ex-politian said once and was ridiculed for it; "life wasn't meant to be easy".

But back to my hobby horse, the human brain and the way it works;

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11009379/

The above link is to a study that shows how political bias prevents us thinking clearly and rationally. But bias of any kind, because it is emotional, will work in the same way to prevent us taking all the facts into account.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is usually blamed on mismanagement
and the financial drain of the US Star Wars program.
At the risk of boring you all, the soviet union collapsed because
their oil production peaked and the depletion crashed their economy.

There is an author Dimitry Orlov who was there.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259

On the energy bulletin you can find his articles.
I just picked that one but there are several on the subject.
From what Dimitry says the Russians did not realise the cause and did
not import oil thinking they could sort it out internally.

The GFC was predicted as early as 1995 and with less accuracy as long
ago as 1956. Colin Campbell and others predicted in their books and
articles that oil production would peak in 2005 +- a couple of years
and that there would be a financial recession as a result of the peak
in oil prices.

Every recession except one has been preceded by a peak in oil prices.
The dot com recession was the exception.
I can't find the article that contains the graph but I do have the graph here.
Pity we cannot include graphs