Uploaded on Jun 4, 2008 Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive. https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes https://www.ted.com/speakers/susan_blackmore Published on Nov 27,… Read More
I would like you for a moment to forget everything you have learnt and the interpretatations of all the experiences of your encounters. I would also like you to imagine there are no nation states, no religions, no money and no schools of thought or any other concepts that usually divide us, like race, ethnicity,… Read More
Dear Earth Citizens: I came across this video yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z5py1098RA Original video was made in December 9, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQIRr4Y1180 Also this date of 28 May 2016 is popping up on many alternative sites. What is so special about this date? Is the build up of military power around China and Russia and the destabilization of the Middle East… Read More
ABSTRACT This analysis maps the deepening global crisis and the principles of its resolution by life-value analysis and method. Received theories of economics and justice and modern rights doctrines are shown to have no ground in life value and to be incapable of recognizing universal life goods and the rising threats to them. In response to this system failure at theoretical and operational levels, the unifying nature and measure of life value are defined to provide the long-missing basis for understanding the common interest, human rights and social justice—that is, the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them. In contrast, the treaty-imposed corporate rights system miscalled “globalization” is structured to predate life means and support systems at all levels with no accountability beyond itself. Only the logic of life value, human rights and life-protective law, it is concluded, can comprehend or govern this inherently life-blind and cumulatively eco-genocidal regime.
Reproduced from: https://artsonline.uwaterloo.ca/rneedham/sites/ca.rneedham/files/needhdata/McMurtry-1.html How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of Private Property and Money John McMurtry College of Arts Department of Philosophy University of Guelph The most fundamental principle of the market doctrine is the grounding of human right and freedom in private property. This principle is foundational because one… Read More
Published on Jun 2, 2016 http://moneyandlifemovie.com/synopsis SYNOPSIS MONEY & LIFE is a passionate and inspirational essay-style documentary that that asks a provocative question: can we see the economic crisis not as a disaster, but as a tremendous opportunity? This cinematic odyssey connects the dots on our current economic pains and offers a new story of… Read More
Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has defined the terrain of political philosophical debate concerning the principles, scope, and material implications of social justice. Social justice for Rawls concerns the principles that govern the operation of major social institutions. Major social institutions structure the lives of citizens by regulating access to the resources and opportunities that the formulation and realization of human projects require. Rawls’ theory of social justice regards major institutions as just when they distribute what he calls “primary goods” in a manner that he regards as egalitarian. Hence, the subsequent social justice debate has been shaped by and large as a debate about the meaning and implications of egalitarianism. While on the surface a debate about egalitarianism as a distributional principle seems to uncover the core problem of social justice — how much of what everyone should get as a matter of right — the entire history of the debate has been conducted in abstraction from what matters most to people’s lives. It is as a corrective to such abstractions that the life-value approach to social justice has been developed…
http://itsourmoney.podbean.com/e/it’s-our-money-with-ellen-brown-–-you’ve-been-strip-mined-–-042716/ (McMurtry’s interview starts at 28:00) Economies are life forces – interdependent systems built upon the facts of life and living. “Life capital” as Ellen’s noted guest Dr. John McMurtry says, is at the heart of true economic reckoning, and money is merely one derivative. McMurtry describes Capitalism as being in a cancerous stage in which… Read More
Reposted from: https://www.scribd.com/doc/79475313/Sahtouris-Jan-2012-Capitalism-in-Crisis-FT-My-Response-1 Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. 23 Jan 2012 contact: elisabet@sahtouris.com Solving the Crisis in Capitalism Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D In the FT’s series on the Crisis in Capitalism http://www.ft.com/intl/indepth/capitalism-in-crisis what I read, even when purporting to hit the deep issues, takes on isolated aspects or surface features of the problem rather than truly getting at root causes. For example, in the… Read More
Human beings are integrally natural and social creatures, dependent upon natural life-support systems for their physical existence and socio-cultural life-development systems for the nurturing and realization of their emotional, cognitive, and practical-creative capacities. Societies whose developmental dynamics become alienated from their natural conditions of existence face inevitable doom. Oblivious to the ways in which their reproductive dynamics undermining the physical foundations of social life, they collapse the very basis upon which their institutions and value systems depend. Let us say that any society which unsustainably converts scarce natural resources into tokens of social power (as, for example, capitalism converts natural systems and elements into money) faces a material crisis of life-reproduction. The manifold environmental crises unleashed by capitalism, crises which persist even in the midst of on-going economic stagnation, are evidence that capitalism will ultimately face a problem of material life-reproduction. Yet, this material crisis is not the only crisis that capitalist civilization faces. Since human beings require not only life, but meaningful, purposive life, societies can also fall into what I will call spiritual crises of life-development.
Spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society becomes alienated from citizens’ need to feel that they belong to a socio-cultural whole which values their contributions to its reproduction and development. More precisely, spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society actively alienate citizens by treating them as mere tools of its material reproduction. When people are treated as mere tools of system-reproduction, their moral being as intrinsically life-valuable centres of experience, action, and interaction, cognizant of the social conditions of their freedom and well-being, and desirous of enhancing the social foundations of their individuality, are attacked. In these alienated circumstances social problems are presented to the populace as technical problems to be solved by political and economic experts working in the service of the established asymmetries of wealth and power. Spiritual crises thus arise when ruling classes attempt to solve a material crisis of social reproduction by treating subaltern groups not as participating members of a social whole, but as passive objects whose life-interests must be sacrificed to the health of the system understood as a reified whole indifferent to the life-requirements of the people who live under it.
Source: Holt-LunstadJ, Smith TB, Layton JB (2010) Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine 7(7): e1000316.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
