Youth, Gender ,The Environment And The Separation Of State, Religion And Business

DAVID RALPH MACKERETH

dmackereth@canimac.com

Democracy provides all eligible voters with equal influence in elections, as the esteemed Rousseau outlines in his 1762 ‘The Social Contract’, “Each of us places in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will, and as one body we all receive each member as an individual part of the whole. […] In a State of truly free, the citizens do all with their own arms and nothing with their money.”

“About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.” Protagoras (481 – 411 BCE) essay, On the Gods

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space, everything else is opinion.” Democritus (c. 460 – c.370 BCE)

“Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth; for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide though all time; for wisdom alone of all possessions is imperishable.” Isocrates (436 – 338 BCE)

“Everything is known, not according to itself, but according to the capacity of the knower.” Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c.524 AD).

“There is a world of creatures […] in the smallest part of matter. Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants […] But every branch of the plant, every part of the animal, every drop of its fluids, is another such garden […]” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714).

“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.” Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957). “As the writer Toni Cade Bambara put it, the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.”” Mary Annaise Heglar, Here’s Where You Come In, Wired (April 2020). “Industry without art is brutality.” John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), a leading Victorian era art critic.

“Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure upon organized lovelessness.” Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945).

“I derived all my knowledge of media from people like Flaubert and Rimbaud and Baudelaire.” Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (1964). “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600). As was done already in the past, information on the ‘Present’ and predictions for the ‘Future’ may best be presented by the more creative and imaginative among us, who dedicate time and effort observing aspects of humanity that could influence the democratic process. Utilizing the thoughts of previous profound thinkers I will address the links with youth education, gender inequality, and humanity’s impact on the environment. We will also explore how voting could be affected by a further separation of Church and State: making Business a separate faction. “True and false are attributes of speech, not things. And where speech is not, there is no truth nor falsehood.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Voltaire (1694 – 1778). “Scepticism is the first step towards truth. […] What has never been questioned, has never been proven.” Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784). “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies (1927). “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard (1844). “History repeats itself – first as tragedy the second time as farce.” Karl Marx (1852). “Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) “Just as we regulate emissions in order to control air pollution, should we regulate voting in order to control voting pollution?” Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (2016) “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein (1901). “As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.” Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1943). “I see genes and ideas as homologous; mutations appear in both, some useful and some harmful.” Jonas Salk (polio vaccine), An Evolutionary Philosophy For Our Time (1990). The following 1900 statement by Lord Kelvin may apply to those who believe that the current forms of Democracy and Capitalism provide for the ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” – Speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. More than likely, humans in 2100 will evaluate our recent Government and Business Leaders in a manner similar to how modern-day quantum physicists look back at Lord Kelvin’s comments.

YOUTH

We find at www.unesco.org, “At the beginning of 2012, the world population surpassed 7 billion with people under the age of 30 accounting for more than half this number (50.5%). […] 89.7 % of people under 30 lived in emerging and developing economies, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.” “One extreme speaks of an “information explosion” as a feature of our time, without apparently noticing how much of this information comes in pre-packaged ideological containers. […] ideologies grow in proportion to man’s realization that he is the dominant animal in nature.” as stated in Northrop Frye’s, Words with Power (1990). Our governing systems carry tremendous responsibility for educating and preparing these 50.5 percent for the increasingly unmanageable world they are inheriting. “I was struck by the large number of falsehoods I has accepted as true in my childhood.” Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). “Men may be taught fables, children require the naked truth.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762). “All our knowledge is but the knowledge of school-children. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955). “The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.” Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860). “The power of a fresh mind taking a fresh look at a problem is one of the wonders of the world.” Lee Smolin, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (2019).