The Difference Between Capitalism And Feudalism Is

We Are Usually Told That Democracy Originated In Ancient Athens - Like Science, Or Philosophy, It Was A Greek Invention. It's Never Entirely Clear What This Is Supposed To Mean. Are We Supposed To Believe That Before The Athenians, It Never Really Occurred To Anyone, Anywhere, To Gather All The Members Of Their Community In Order To Make Joint Decisions In A Way That Gave Everyone Equal Say?

Capitalism Is Like This Fractal Thing Where Anything That Contains An Element Of Capitalism Anywhere Inside It Is Just Something That Turns Into Capitalism. It Is An Incredibly Defeatist Attitude. If You Choose To Look At Reality That Way, I Suppose You Can, But You Have To Do Enormous Violence To Reality To Do So Consistently.

The Question We Should Be Asking Is Not Why People Are Sometimes Cruel, Or Even Why A Few People Are Usually Cruel (all Evidence Suggests True Sadists Are An Extremely Small Proportion Of The Population Overall), But How We Have Come To Create Institutions That Encourage Such Behavior And That Suggest Cruel People Are In Some Ways Admirable-or At Least As Deserving Of Sympathy As Those They Push Around.

Meanwhile, The U.s. Debt Remains, As It Has Been Since 1790, A War Debt; The United States Continues To Spend More On Its Military Than Do All Other Nations On Earth Put Together, And Military Expenditures Are Not Only The Basis Of The Government's Industrial Policy; They Also Take Up Such A Huge Proportion Of The Budget That By Many Estimations, Were It Not For Them, The United States Would Not Run A Deficit At All.

We Have Become A Plague Upon Ourselves And Upon The Earth. It Is Cosmically Unlikely That The Developed World Will Choose To End Its Orgy Of Fossil Energy Consumption, And The Third World Its Suicidal Consumption Of Landscape. Until Such Time As Homo Sapiens Should Decide To Rejoin Nature, Some Of Us Can Only Hope For The Right Virus To Come Along.