Philosophy | Single Points of Failure
Single Points of Failure
©2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com - Posted as a rough draft to Twitter on 2/26/2022
How many of you are feeling how temporary things are, this morning? Modern technology can be used to get you, no matter how comfortable you are. Paratroopers could drop into your sleepy town tomorrow. And, even if ill-prepared to take over an entire country—before they were sent packing, back to where they came from—they could still disrupt your life forever.
Technology is the Yin and Yang of humanity. Ever, since the Golden Age of Greece—and before, it has been used both as a comfort and as a scourge. Politics too, something that is supposed to be an alternative to violence, is today—more than anything—the hand-maiden of violence, the instigator of violence, the perpetuator of violence.
I am a poor student of history, not a scholar, but from what little I know of it—here on Earth we seem to be at an historical crisis point. Can you think of any age whose sum structure was in such danger of collapse—whose fate was subject to such shaky “single points of failure” (to use an engineering term)?
Vladimir’s Folly is such a good example. Putin is a single point of failure, as is Biden, as was George Washington, as is any single fallible human being in which inordinate faith is bestowed (meaning any of them.)
Our world economy, whose control is coalescing into an ever tiny percentage of oligarchs, is even more a single point of failure—in direct proportion to the degree of coalescence.
Our own government, still being roughly, “a democracy,” would be a good place to start eroding these coalescences of power, both in politics and in matters of economics, except for the lure of riches. Those who lust after the glittering material goods, and the feeling of dominance over others that wealth can bring, will resist.
Minds and hearts need to be turned from that lust, turned from the hunger for power and status, to the hunger for mutual human welfare. Will it take deprivation, societal collapse and a virtual severe spanking of humanity to stem this worldwide drive toward material wealth and political power? Let’s hope humans are smarter than that.
Be thinking of how we can restructure our politics and economy to remove single points of failure. Share ideas, promote them, promulgate them.
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