[pillowhead]

[/quote]I've just got to say though, these various kinds of leaders arise quite naturally.[/quote]

I would have to disagree with that as well. Those who make it to the upper echelons of the hierarchy are not there so they can just express their desire however they feel like (even if they are insane) and the decisions they make are limited and must serve certain interests. (We know this from the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment). They have goals and a path that they cannot deviate from; otherwise they wouldn't be where they are. If the population gets too difficult to control they hire one half to kill off the other (one reason why WWI happened). Energy is directed at a target that has no meaning, like Jews, or building the Pyramids in order to unify and keep the social order from destroying itself.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pillowhead', '[')Those who make it to the upper echelons of the hierarchy are not there so they can just express their desire however they feel like

[pillowhead]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', ' ')The point is, these things have always been around one way or another. 'sall I'm sayin.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pillowhead', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', ' ')The point is, these things have always been around one way or another. 'sall I'm sayin.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Back to the other half: Michener's novel Chesapeake. It's about Virginia and Maryland from the late 16th Century to the 1970s. I'm up to the early 18th Century now. This writer is known for his historical sweep and I think he does it very well. He presents the various threads of people and shows how the world looked to them. You see the Puritan point of view and the Quaker point of view. You see things as the various Indian tribes saw them and the early Virginia settlers. There was a Quaker woman who forced her husband to get rid of his slaves and we read how he did so very reluctantly; then the sold slaves are carried off by pirates and sold in Haiti to die within a year. From his point of view, and those of his fellow Virginians who had so often started out as indentured servants, it was all perfectly natural. The poor Englishmen and women who came to America were sold to buyers at the dock to the highest bidder to work for seven years. This was how the owners of the vessels recouped their expenses and turned a profit. So these people started out as legally bound property, and when their years of servitude were over they were quite accustomed to think in these ways. Then, when the Africans were also brought and sold, it was merely an extension of this way of doing things. What they did not see, evidently, was the long term implications of permanent servants whose children and whose children's children would be legally bound as their grandparents were. I'm looking forward to see how Michener treats this as I'm only at around 1700 thus far. Great reading.

[TWilliam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'E')xplain to us your bold vision where the arrangements of millenia, the way the world is and has always been is fantastically transformed.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', 't')here does exist the possibility of an emergent genuinely anarchistic society. Anarchistic in the true sense of the word, meaning a society of self-governing individuals, without the need for external leadership.

[TWilliam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'P')erhaps that's true. I don't see much more now though than a trend of people wanting this to come about. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it would ever happen in reality. Probably because of tensions between individuals and the collective. Here's what I mean by that: The ego, the individual, has it's own interests. The collective has different interests not necessarily aligned to those of the ego. But the collective can't "think for itself." So individuals, in one capacity or another, have input into this collective, to it's direction and decision making. Hence: Politics - the art of influence. Every permutation of this imaginable has probably already been tried somewhere at someplace at sometime or another. But it always involves the same idea: individuals practicing some form of politics to gain influence according to various channels and traditions regulating how this is done. Those who gain such influence over the collective life are leaders. It seems to me that an anarchistic society is an oxymoron in this sense that since the collective can't think for itself, someone is always required to provide the needed direction. It may be diversified and power/influence is widely distributed (as it is in modern liberal democracies) but these various disparate decision-making centers are still ground for the same political realities that have always existed.

This is my argument, TWilliam. What do you think an anarchistic society would look like? How would decisions get made? How would the self-directed individuals coordinate to make these decisions without some form of delegated authority? Oh, and another question about your remark regarding the "less-than-illustrious" human past: do you look around you and see signs that we truly are about to evolve to a higher way? The past was messed up and the future is worse the way I see it, primarily because of Peak Oil.

[pillowhead]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'h')umans have always selected individuals to represent the collective in one way or another

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', '
')Oh I agree, there certainly doesn't appear to be much evidence to support the idea, not when one looks around at the present state of affairs anyway. But one of the salient characteristics of an emergent phenomenon is that nothing that precedes it gives any indication of it's nature

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pillowhead', '
')


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', ' ')Explain to us your bold vision where the arrangements of millennia, the way the world is and has always been is fantastically transformed. Can you do that or are you just projecting some ill-thought-out resentment of authority?

[pillowhead]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'w')hy did I guess this was coming?

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pillowhead', '
')How long have you been alive? Weeks? Many, many, many, many weeks?