Cheung Mo
19th April 2007, 22:16
I just don't understand: How can systems that rewards entrenchment (i.e. You're loaded and don't need to do anything productive with your life or even behave as an ethical being would because some relative from 6 generations back designed a means of mass producing cars or founded a popular newspaper or something) to the extent that an overwhelming proportion of humanity are bound by material conditions for which they are not responsible to realising their full potential? How are we as a species going to realise our full potential when some 12 year-old in Pakistan capable of devising the best damn recipes and cooking the best damn food in the world is chained to the brutal toils of the sweatshop or the cruel opiates of the Madarasah while thousands of people who have contributed nothing are getting rich off mediocre fast food whose market share survives solely because advertising and other work of little material value is done to secure its illusion of superiority? How about this: Paris Hilton may be allowed 25 monumental fuck ups before her life is in shamble. I may be allowed 3 or 4. Somebody born under a less fortunate star than myself would be lucky to have 1. An overwhelming majority of us, however, have none. Any system that is not capable of offering to the entirety of humanity at least the minimum material conditions necessary is to achieving its full potential stands is in inherently and irreformably unmeritocratic and in stark opposition to our evolution as a species, as is any institution that sustains such a system. And as such, any system that disenfranchises a substantial proportion of the human race (virtually any system that is classist or whose long-term orientation is authoritarian...I sadly accept that a short-term orientation of authoritarianism aimed at breaking the system's back is necessary to achieve thos aim) will collectively hold us back.