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E.B. White

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“For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God's stuff. We have often complained that the political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. We repeat the complaint. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure.”

“Richard N. Gardner, The Hard Road to World Order, Foreign Affairs, Volume 52 No. 3, pg. 558. If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis … In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”

“Now it seems that the nasty people are those who question the direction of our society, our loss of liberty, our submission to technology and domination of the security, industrial, military and pharmaceutical society (SIMP). We are living in the SIMP society and we are the Simpsons.”

“Everywhere one can see the supply of soap-opera and extension of that scripted discourse into the political domain. By devoting our attention to the mainstream systems that seem to be miraculously harmonising across national boundaries in a similar fashion without distinctiveness or variation, we give more power to the deadening mono-cultural potency of tech-collectivism.”

“We are giving power to people we do not know, for purposes we cannot prove, for exercise we cannot control while assuming they must be benign and beneficent without evidence and without scrutinising the circumstances of our blank cheque to them that we signed in the blood from relinquished control of our bodies. Giving the keys to the dungeon to these strangers in suits or jeans and white coats and expecting benevolence not evident in their belief system and rejected as irrelevant thereby, is the greatest common exercise in folly in human history.”

“When bondage is built with billions of key strokes the death of freedom bit by bit may not be so obvious. The masters hold the keys to chains or networks, to the links and sites fashioned into our consciousness. While we may browse, it is as a domesticated animal.”

“Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz (2013) The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7 Abstract Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies.”

“Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz (2013) The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7 Abstract Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation.”