Wait a minute... Who owns The World, anyway??

Who owns the material substance of world?

By what means does the world, or pieces of it, become the property of certain individuals to the exclusion of others?

For whom does nature intend her many gifts?

By what so-called ‘right’ does one person grab a piece of nature’s bounty and exclude others from the benefits that a particular piece of nature produces?

Who is it that grants this ‘right’ of ownership and privileged access to nature?

What are the ethical limits to ‘ownership?’

What are the ethical limits to authority?

At what point in the development of society does the ‘right’ to ownership of the affluent become a detriment to particular other members of society who are less affluent, less fortunate, less privileged, or perhaps less greedy?

The pacification of the struggle to survive (for the few here in the ‘developed’ world) has been secured through technological means collectively created over the epochs, advancing to a state where scarcity and environmental decline become real threats to humanity, to environment and to life in general. At what point in advanced capitalist society that claims to be a democracy does the mass of common folk have a right to demand equal share in the benefits and responsibilities in regard to social material economy?

Under such conditions, at what point does exclusion from participation (of less affluent members of humanity) and hoarding (on the part of the more affluent) of the benefits of human social and material development (including but not limited to, for example, access to medical treatment) become an essentially criminal act?

Under such circumstances, what appropriate measures or actions can the less privileged ethically adopt in a democracy?

And finally, especially for the self-proclaimed “Christian” societies, What would Jesus do?

Coming from a humanist/environmentalist perspective on the contemporary challenges of advanced capitalism-going-global, the attempt here is to formulate at least some preliminary responses to these questions, and others that may arise during our investigation. My explicit aim is to start to create an opening-up of the discourse toward a minimum engagement with the most pressing contemporary social, economic, political, environmental, and ethical human challenges.

The moral crisis that humanity now faces and chooses to ignore in favor of an overarching (if not explicit) commitment to maintaining an increasingly unsustainable status quo is one that brings us face to face with our brutality and selfishness. This same situation and circumstance presents also the unprecedented opportunity for a greater depth of human compassion and understanding.

The contemporary moral crisis is one that requires us to re-examine our social, cultural, ideological, and spiritual commitments. Our investments on all levels, from the material to the ideological to the ethical and the spiritual, now come under question. The current crisis is one that requires the leveling-out of privileged access to the benefits of human labor such that all members of the species (at least, not to mention all other species) can come to enjoy the fruits of an enlightened global social cultural civil experience. We are on the brink of building a possible world that is a ‘good place for kids to come to,’ as late comedian and social critic Bill Hicks once envisioned.

On the other hand, we may be entering an era of unrivaled systematic social cultural brutality. This will be the general social condition should the most privileged class continue to defend a chronically unfair, unearned, criminal privileged access to and exclusive self-proclaimed entitlement to an unfair share of the bounties of the earth.

When private ownership reaches a level of personal gluttony that threatens the survival of the rest of the social group, it is at this very point (if not sooner) that the people in a democracy must take the democratic process into their own hands. Those who would threaten the stability of the whole, through an extreme greediness and supra-natural drive to the fulfillment of a characteristic imbalance of infant-like impetuous desires, must be brought to stand for their crimes against humanity and put in their proper standing as members of the whole.

It may be argued that rightful reparations must be made to compensate for the unfair privilege and over-blown entitlements already stolen from the mass of humanity. The super-wealthy are super-wealthy as a result of chattel-slavery or wage-slavery, take your pick. A slave is a slave by any other name. The wealth of nations has always been secured by way of the exploitation of the less fortunate classes of persons for the exclusive enrichment of those most willing and able to impose, enforce, and maintain conditions of slavery on subordinate others as the means to the ends of power and privilege. This is the same today as it ever was. Violence, murder, deceit, and betrayal are commonplace amongst a certain class for who access to and maintenance of a position of unfair power and privilege are the primary concerns (Of course these self-entitled individuals have no need to dirty their own hands directly with the logistics and particulars of a system of human slavery, as there are plenty of traitors to humanity who can be hired to manage unwitting others to do the dirty work necessary for the maintenance of Empire).

This American Empire is currently in a state of decline that gives many of us fits of anxiety over our future and the future security of our children. Michael Parenti, in his book Against Empire, points out that all empires do the same thing as precursor and adjunct to their decline. As the demands of the requirements for domination become more and more costly, all empires rally their resources (human, material, financial, communicative, military, intelligence, ideological state apparatuses) in order to bolster and reinforce the perimeters and boundaries of the empire. The American Empire (that would never have been if it were not for slavery, by the way) is in the process of doing what Parenti predicts.

In order to maintain global dominance the United States government has systematically sucked the resource out of the core of American society to bolster the perimeter. Thus, the social, economic, political, cultural, spiritual, and material center of the Empire withers and rots simultaneously as the Empire expands its influence across the globe. This ‘spreading-thin’ of the Empire and its resources is the crucial element in the moral decline that signals the end of the American empire, just as it did the Roman empire, just as it does for all empires previous.

In a world where nature and all of her bounty is grabbed up by the most aggressive, violent, and greedy the inevitable result is a feeding frenzy in which the biggest, strongest, meanest, and most violent grab up the majority of resources and then sit back and enjoy watching the rest fight over the crumbs. This is the nature and the end result of private ownership and, as we are witnessing, the nature and end result of capitalism at its limit.

Our way of life as we have known it, here in the privileged world, is coming to an end faster than we can shit a brick. Yet, we are doing nothing (but give them more money to mismanage) to correct those who have taken us to the brink or to correct the conditions that they set up, with our tacit approval, that allow them (transnational corporatists) to steal our heritage and our right to the freedoms and liberties we thought we were building, right out from under our noses.

We are complicit in our own descent to an existence as service industry wage-slaves for the new Chinese capitalist epoch which, if it expects to proceed along the same path as the American epoch, will certainly plunge the world into a dark, polluted, collapsing environment, an inevitable dystopia that looks like an episode of Mad Max or a Voivod album cover.

Bankers, businessmen, bought-and-paid-for politicians, transnational corporatist thieves, and their pundits and supporters are all guilty of treason against the American people who they have not only betrayed, but sold down the river into dept slavery and moral ineptitude. This is the future you secure for your children every time you vote for them or any one of their representatives. We, “the people” who have done all the labor and created all the wealth and privilege that the transnational corporatist enjoys, do not have representation. We, “the people” are being phased out and replaced by a negative value place-holder that is a mere ineffectual token in a despotic regime that has gone so far beyond us without our consultation that we do not even enter into its concerns.

I wonder when we will get the nerve to start taking back our government, our democracy, our future.

The time is now or never.

It may already be too late.

…sorry 