Complex Confusion

The old reactions are now disasters

Writing this is not pleasant. In addition to our planetary disaster, a significant contributor to this mess, we have no idea how to deal with our entangled social disasters.

There are no paths forward for the dominant American imperial civilization. Our ideals, as they once were, now produce the opposite of our intentions.

I realize that I and everyone else with some form of social democratic ideals now experience those ideals being used as weapons against their implementation. Representative government becomes helpless in the face of authoritarianism because principles must be universal, and authoritarian systems recognize no rights or principles beyond greed.

The principles are built on rights that must be accepted as fundamental. Principles, in this sense, are rules that implement rights. The entire European Enlightenment was a process of establishing a foundation of rights that would dictate the principles of government and social organization.

The American experiment was the earliest national attempt to build a government on such a foundation. Without disappearing down the rabbit hole of history, success in this process has been elusive and was brief in the original attempt in Classical Greece.