Glenn, thought you might find the following passage of interest. it is a quote from Stan Goff, who spent 24 years in the military, primarily Special Forces. the interview is in the November issue of The Sun magazine (i was happy to see that it is available online, so i don't have to type it all out :)...
I have been reading a book by Swedish anthropologist Alf
Hornborg, who looks at social development through the lens
of entropy: the notion that disorder always increases within a
closed system. Hornborg says that, within the closed system of
the world economy, energy is transferred from peripheral nations
into the high-tech, metropolitan core. What’s left behind
is immense social disorder. The environmental-justice movement
focuses on one aspect of this: the way rich communities
make a lot of toxic trash and dump it on poor communities.
The rich gain order in the form of resources and export their
disorder elsewhere.
Reading Hornborg, it occurred to me that as we increase
our dependence on higher and higher orders of technology,
we not only increase social disorder elsewhere, we’re also increasing
the probability that some unexpected event will come
along and create an avalanche of disorder here. For instance,
twenty-one power plants in the eastern United States shut
down on August 14, 2003, leaving millions of people without
electricity. And nobody really knows what caused the blackout.
Or terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center, and
the whole global geopolitical architecture is transformed.
thesunmagazine.org
btw, Goff has a website: bringthemhomenow.org
it is interesting because it publishes anonymous messages from GIs and their relatives.
bringthemhomenow.org |
