[Rod_Cloutier]

I saw a video presentation today by Thomas Homer Dixon about 'Catastrophic dehumanization'. A concept about how ingroup/ outgroup situations develop, and at the end of his video; he describes how to end dehumanization by restoring social justice:

http://vimeo.com/41290064

This is a brief video, but it is a masterpiece construction for understanding events like genocide and the holocaust. (Also the likely messing coming conflict caused by massive banking fraud, castastrophic climate change, peak oil, ect)

I can't help but feel that I've "Fell off the cusp onto what he terms 'the war plane' " That I've given in to distrusting certain groups; bankers, bilderburgs, the 1%, ect, and now I view them as a dangerous outgroup that must be destroyed if necessary. I feel many other people are also developing mistrust and a sense of injustice that will eventually lead to social conflict and/or war.

It's also clear from his video that the only way back is to restore social justice and trust in society. Charge and convict the bankers, open up and prohibit secret societies for the super rich, reduce the income gap between owners and workers through society at large, and such.

This was a masterpiece presentation! I highly recommend it to anyone with an eye for graphs and mathematical intrepretation of social events.

http://www.homerdixon.com/

(If the link above doesn't work it can be accessed on the page shown above)

[dissident]

Unfortunately there is no solution to this problem. Humans need coercion to behave (i.e. to open their eyes to reality). During the pioneer era, you had to rely upon your neighbours to survive. They were not merely competitors in your way or something you could ignore as you went about your shopping at the mall. So naturally the concept of community was profoundly different from today, where it is all about me, me, me.

I guess you could call this the life cycle of civilization. It grows from "primitive" roots and eventually decays as it loses the cohesion that created it in the first place. This is why I believe there can be no sci-fi utopia or dystopia lasting for millenia. The basic state of the system cannot be maintained and is constantly changing. This is aside from exogenous shocks such as depletion of concentrated and easily accessible energy and climate cataclysms.

[Kristen]

Not everyone is selfish in this country. We have been hypnotized that without Product A or Product Z, we will be unhappy; this is how our society is run. Using suggestion, advertisers are masters in behavioral psychology. We are mere mammals after all.

Like other species, our purpose is to procreate irrationally. Even the masters are prone to this weakness...

[Ibon]

Not everyone is selfish in this country.

This is true. There seems to be however a powerful meme at work in the USA that Americans have all lost their sense of community and common good and that once our toys are removed we will dissolve into children in the sandbox yielding semi automatic weapons.

Most other countries whose citizens discuss the winding down of industrial society do not draw these same conclusions.

Why do Americans see themselves as communally so wretched?