And then there are all the remedies for human maladies that humans have
found in various plants over time immemorial. Healers used the natural
world to support health. Even some modern drugs come straight from nature.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Saturday, July 23, 2016 6:37 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Replanting Paradise
It's to exactly failure, it's more like side effects. Power over nature
allows humans to fly through the air in planes, but the side effects are
destroying the natural world that both sustains and challenges humanity.
Building houses protects our frail, naked bodies from the elements, but
installing heating and cooling systems causes destruction and depletion of
natural resources. You get the point. Enough with the examples.
Maintaining health and continuing to live, hopefully healthy and well, is
perhaps partially a triumph over nature, but there's also a good dose of
luck involved.
There are adversarial relationships in nature all over the place that do not
involve humanity at all. So even without humanity, adversarial relationships
would exist in nature. That's part of the whole concept of evolution.
Nature would still have meaning without humanity. Nature cannot only be
viewed or evaluated from the human perspective. And, even when it is, there
are contradictions, as you say. I think many of those come from
misinformation about a particular bit of nature, insects, for example. Some
bits of humanity look at them as pests, disgusting, creepy, other bits of
humanity eat them as delicacies and excellent sources of protein.
If the only way to "get what I want" is to manipulate reality, then I'm not
sure I want to get what I want, if that makes any sense at all, which it
sort of does and sort of doesn't.
On Jul 22, 2016, at 9:09 PM, Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender
"rogerbailey81" for DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What you are describing is the failure of man's power over nature.
For example, if greenhouse gases continue to be poured into the natural
world it may very well make the earth uninhabitable. That would be the
ultimate in nature biting back and a complete loss of control and power over
nature. However, the main contradiction that humanity has always faced
before the rise of class society is the contradiction between humanity and
nature. It is truly a dialectical relationship too because humanity is a
part of nature. For example, it is the nature of our natural bodies to
become senescent and to die. Insofar as that happens nature has triumphed
over us. Insofar as we can maintain health and continue to live, though, we
have exerted power over nature. It is nature that plagues us with unpleasant
and dangerous weather, but insofar as we have built houses and made clothing
to protect us from the weather we have exercised power over nature. Remember
that a dialectical relationship is a relationship in which the
contradictions are inherent in the relationship and cannot exist alone. If
there were no nature there would be no humanity. Without humanity there
might be nature, but its existence would not be an adversarial one and its
objective existence would have no meaning. Meaning is imbued by human
consciousness with human desires and needs. This means that as long as
humanity exists there will be a dialectical contradiction between humanity
and nature. When all efforts to exert power over nature is abandoned then
humanity will become extinct. Undoubtedly there will continue to be internal
contradiction within whatever form of nature that will follow, but it will
not matter to humanity because humanity will have lost all power over that
nature. Another word for nature is reality itself. Remember that everything
we get, everything we want, every purpose we accomplish is accomplished by
manipulating reality. Insofar as we do get what we want we have successfully
exerted power over that reality. Insofar as we fail to get what we want or
get what we do not want then we have failed to exercise power over reality.
If you want a thorough explanation of dialectics I would suggest reading
Hegel. Unfortunately, though, Hegel fails to view dialectics with a
completely materialist perspective. In fact, he tends to view it with a
distinct idealist perspective. It was Marx who combined dialectics with
materialism, but Marx was concerned with a lot of other things and never
quite investigated it thoroughly. For a more complete explanation of
dialectical materialism go to Marxists.org and search for the phrase
dialectical materialism. Right now the names of the works that you should
watch out for do not come readily to my mind.
On 7/22/2016 8:12 PM, Alice Dampman Humel wrote:
maximize man's power over nature? Sounds suspiciously like
that mandate in the Bible about be fruitful and multiply and have dominion
over the earth and subdue it, or something like that.man's power over
nature, man's ability to conquer nature and live full in the face of natural
laws, also maximized at this point, is part of the tragedy of our polluted,
tired old planet...man's On Jul 22, 2016, at 11:15 AM, Carl Jarvis
<carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Roger and All,
"as Trotsky described it, our goals are to maximize
man's power over
nature and to minimize man's power over man."
And yes, regardless of our "druthers", we all are
involved in this
eternal struggle. To those who feel the
hopelessness and drop out,
hiding behind many distractions offered by the
Ruling Class, I remind
you, your very retreat is an expression of your
involvement. No
action is actually an action.
Frustrating, huh?
Carl Jarvis
On 7/21/16, Roger Loran Bailey
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whether it is corruption, greed, religion or
a myriad other
manifestations of a class society the way to
stop them is to remove the
objective conditions that make them
possible. That is not done by waving
a magic wand nor by any other instant
method. When the formerly ruled
class becomes the ruling class it rules.
That is what a ruling class is,
a class that rules, and that opens the
opportunity for corruption, but
the mere fact of the former ruled class
being the large majority tends
to lesson that possibility. When there is a
revolution where the full
productive capacity of capitalism has not
been achieved there will be
shortages and that means that someone must
be in charge of distributing
what there is not enough of. That is the
simple explanation of the rise
of Stalinism and the rise of Stalinism
itself should be a lesson in how
not to build a socialist society. The kind
of situation that should be
striven for is one in which there is plenty
of production and what is
produced need only be administered. As Lenin
said, the state as an
apparatus for administering people needs to
become an apparatus for
administering things. The trouble is that
revolution does not and
virtually cannot work out just exactly the
way we want it to. There are
just too many variables to keep track of. So
undoubtedly there will be
corruption along the way that will have to
be fought down. We can only
plan a forward line of march and always look
to the past to avoid
mistakes that have already been made. To
paraphrase someone else, the
price of socialism is eternal vigilance. If
this sounds like a forever
war that you would not like to participate
in then remember that even if
you do not participate you will have to deal
with a forever war anyway.
Do nothing and the inequities of a class
system continue and you are
caught in the middle whether you like it or
not. Do something about it
and you are caught in a perpetual struggle
in which you are helping
things to get better and it works too.
Capitalism is a much better
system to live under than feudalism and
feudalism was a much better
system to live in than slavery. The next
stage will be even better, But
remember, as Trotsky described it, our goals
are to maximize man's power
over nature and to minimize man's power over
man. That goal does not
have an end in sight. There will always be
opportunities to get closer.
On 7/21/2016 4:06 PM, Bob Hachey wrote:
Hi Roger,
I have finally decided that there is
little or no hope for capitalism and
that it cannot serve well the
majority of us. But I keep thinking about
what would happen if we really do
achieve the socialist revolution often
referred to in the millitant. The
theory sounds great, but it seems
dependent upon no humans who will
try to corrupt the new system for
personal gain at the expense of the
rest of us. Look what happened in
Russia, China and Cuba. I know that
Cuba is not as bad as China and
Russia, but I can't help but be
suspiscious when one leader, Castro, is in
power for such a long time. Carl
speaks often and eloquently on this
issue.
It seems to me that most humans when
put into positions of ledership would
try to exploit the situation. What
sort of safeguards would you recommend
in a new system that would prevent
or eliminate this tendency?
Bob Hachey