[sunnyrap]

This is an interesting thread worth the debate, imo. I just watched Alex Jone's response to Addendum. He made some good points, but a good bit of what he said comes from his well established distrust of almost anyone offering any kind of new solution-system--and validly so. Alex is predisposed to do this because he's created a strong position for himself doing it. But I felt like
this distrust/skepticism is a double edged sword, and he could be throwing out the baby with the bath water with Addendum. I felt that the core concept behind Addendum is valid: service to all over money-power. Translating that correctly is going to be the job, and involve all. Watchdogging decisions running the technology will be very involving. (Isaac Asimov's future visions come to mind).

Any system/solution does not work if there is no intentionality of service to all behind it; and all 'systems' followed blindly will fail a good bit of the time when not supported/checked by personal responsibility. Even staying with the founding father's system had holes in it, because lack of individual responsibility and blind faith in the American system allowed some clever bandits to use our trust in it to hijack it.

Alex seems to want to stay with the original system, minus the elements of The Federal Reserve. But the information on how banking and profit structures work that has been disseminated lately, once everyone is exposed to them and understands it, seems to me to make returning to the profit/free enterprise system almost impossible. Because, according to what I've seen anyway, it ALWAYS leads to inflation and separation of people into haves and have-nots.

His point about Capitalism and Communism being two sides of the same coin is valid also. Communism doesn't really work because someone has to assume control, just like in capitalism. Still the pyramid structure.

It looks to me that we almost need to be freed of the NEED for interdependance for survival, so that we can just join up for the pleasure and stimulation of working on projects together. If there is no survival need to do so, then you are never enslaved. People who enjoy work and accomplishment will still have plenty to do. People who don't needn't get in the way of people who do out of necessity. If plenty can be created for all--no one's coming after someone else's house or stuff... They'll be ignored as uninteresting human beings if they do nothing and don't contribute, so they will quickly find some place to plug in. We are social beings, after all.

Therefore, I don't think Alex vision of people sitting around doing nothing because they don't have to work--therefore being subject to sociopathic behavior is valid, either. It's only valid in the current paradigm.

If you and your fellows have the resources to be out there joyously creating things of interest to them,
and doing whatever you wish is freely available, the array of entertainments we now have will pall very quickly for all but the most immature people, and a desire for new, more exciting frontiers will call, or the intrinsic social instinct will inspire joining some group trying to create something.

I also didn't like Alex' across the board panning of religion. The ancient roots of religion were a training system for teaching universal spiritual concepts and the values--something we must have to advance as a species. How far this training needs to be taken is for better minds than my own. But like any other system unquestioningly followed, it allowed the unscrupulous to take advantage of it. I optimistically believe there will be a point where there is enough spiritual learning absorbed by a critical mass of people that worry about spiritually deformed people doing mischief will evaporate.

There is a Zen aphorism that 'ethics is the best survival'. That's been absolutely reliable in my experience. Unethical behavior eventually leads to the extinction of those who refuse to give it up.