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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News June 3, 2008
The lip service given to concepts of human and civil rights,
democratic rule, and the universal and equal application of laws over
the last few centuries has obscured the persistent and overwhelming
issue of class privilege and the concomitant need for violent
suppression of the mass of people to protect that privilege.
In
spite of apparent advances, the fact is that the plight of the mass
of humanity has steadily worsened. Fear is the daily bread of
humanity. Fear of starvation. Fear of violence. Fear of |
dispossession and expulsion from ancestral homes. All these fears are
underpinned by a basic fear of terroristic attacks sponsored or
directly implemented by privileged minorities.
Social and economic privilege for a tiny minority of a society can be
maintained only by the continued use of terror against the less
privileged. Putting aside, for a moment, consideration of all the
political theater and propaganda that surrounds issues of social
justice, and ignoring the spotty advancements of the idea of
universal justice in defense of the weak, an objective big
view of social relations across the globe reveals that little has
actually changed for the better over the last few millennia.
This
persistence of effective impunity on the part of the powerful and
privileged, over the course of hundreds of generations, has led to a
general acceptance of inequality as an inescapable fact, as well as
an attitude of fatalism about the inevitability of the continuance of
the spectrum of crimes perpetrated against the weak to maintain this
inequality.
Class-based violence has come to be seen as a normal aspect of human
life. There is no evidence to support the position that the
domination of the many by the few is either normal, inevitable, or
justifiable on the basis of a scientific understanding of our
species. Quite the contrary is true.
Scientific research has
revealed that ours is a social species evolutionarily determined by a
strategy of cooperation and mutual care, rather than by the ruthless
competition that we are now witnessing. The social Darwinist view
subscribed to by the dominant elite of the world is not scientific.
It is merely self serving propaganda in pursuit of privilege.
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Scientific research has
revealed that ours is a social species evolutionarily determined by a
strategy of cooperation and mutual care, rather than by the ruthless
competition that we are now witnessing.
The social Darwinist view
subscribed to by the dominant elite of the world is not scientific.
It is merely self serving propaganda in pursuit of privilege.
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What we have been witnessing for such a long time is an aberration,
brought on as a side effect of technological innovations that put a
tremendous capacity for inter-class violence in the hands of a
sociopathic minority. This unnatural situation is unsustainable, as
the advent of awareness of world threatening consequences of resource
depletion and climate destruction has demonstrated.
At this point,
either the mass of people will find the courage to confront their
exploiters and jailers and thereby eliminate the phenomenon of
violent domination in pursuit of wealth and privilege and refocus
human creativity on the need for sustainable social arrangements, or
events will take their inevitable course, and dominator civilization
will destroy itself and much of life on earth, possibly including the
extinction of the human species itself. We will become each others
keepers or we will be each others pallbearers.
Key to this transformation will be an understanding that we all share
a common genetic heritage, that enemies and friends alike are humans
and entitled to live lives free of the fear of domination. To see an
enemy as deranged, rather than demonic, enables the most effective
resistance to injustice. Stopping crime is better than eliminating
criminals.
If we have the courage and creativity to reorganize
social life on the basis of respect for universal human rights rather
than on the adoration of ruthless competition, our species stands a
chance.
© by the author.
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