Quote from: evoorhees on July 17, 2011, 04:17:28 PM

Quote from: flug on July 17, 2011, 03:47:08 PM

Perhaps it has worked for the most part of human existence, and it's been the last few thousand years of human history that's been the aberration.

It's also the last few thousand years that we had an economy in which wealth was growing.

It depends how you measure wealth. If the whole world was shared by the whole human race, everyone would have the whole world as a playground. As it is you can barely take a step off the road without infringing someone's 'property rights' (at what point was the land stolen from the common people, and under what just law?). Yes, I do believe the patriarchal systems of the last six thousand years have accelerated technology incredibly for the good, but I also believe that these systems have reduced the perception of wealth to the finite and measurable rather than the infinite and immeasurable, and our enjoyment of the world is the poorer for that. Now that we've mastered the planet from a technological viewpoint, we need to get to the next stage before we do too much more damage.