Oliver North
Junior Member
So, I've kind of backed off dealing with Dolos, largely because his blocks of text span topics from the nature and causes of violence, human nature in general, sociological and anthropological attitudes and uptake of technology, physics and some lame attempts and philosophy, all of which neither he, nor his sources, are ever qualified to talk about, and in general, it shows.
But I think there is a fundamental issue here that Dolos has never addressed and is really only being talked about in the peripheries of these convos: Technological and scientific progress are not the drivers of social change, they are a reflection of the society in which they are developed. Science and technology, themselves, cannot solve a problem, especially something like violence [really, I mean seriously, c'mon], rather, they are instruments a culture uses to express what are already core values and inequalities that exist in that culture.
There are numerous examples, but the most obvious one to me has to do with food scarcity. Technological and scientific advances in agriculture and genetics have given us a situation today, as we speak, where food, in terms of demand and supply in aggregate, is no longer scarce. In theory, we produce more food than necessary to supply the caloric needs of all 7 billion people on the planet. What prevents this is an inability or lack of motivation to distribute the food to those with the most need rather than to those who can pay for it. It may feel nice to say "**** the man" and try to blame this on Capitalism, but (aside from Sym's excellent points above) Capitalism is also the only reason why such a surplus exists. Look at the state of agricultural science and technology in Communist nations if you need further proof of this point.
The point becomes even more pronounced when you look at the Green Revolution in India. The introduction of modern farming technology a) exacerbated already existent stratification between wealthy farmers who could afford to adopt the technology and already had the support of state irrigation infrastructure and those without said means b) created a stratification between farmers willing to adopt and those who chose not to adopt the technology in favor of traditional methods. While the Green Revolution did increase India's caloric output, the vast majority of the farmers who benefited from this new technology were also employed by multi-national corporations, and the food was set to see foreign markets, which lead to situations where vegetables rotted in storehouses while people on the streets starved to death. Again, you could try to blame capitalism, but again, capitalism is the only reason the Green Revolution could have happened in the first place. This issue isn't with the "-isms", nor is it with the science or the technology, it is about how cultures decide to distribute their resources, and no amount of technology or science is going to make people more egalitarian without some other underlying ideology.
My assumption is that I will get nothing approaching a meaningful answer to this, but I did want to participate in the cluster-**** this thread is becoming.