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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kumar who wrote (49673)	10/6/2002 1:53:21 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

An interesting article, interesting premise: The Biology of Freedom.. abcnews.go.com A recent ABCnews.com poll reports that 8 of 10 Americans feel that the government's anti-terrorism efforts are not intruding on their rights. Yet, history and science show the error in this thinking. For the past 150 years, the dominant belief about man's nature has been that the individual's values and behavior are almost totally shaped by environment and culture, rather than by heredity. It held that we are born "tabula rasa" - our experiences create our values. The conclusion drawn from this premise was that malleable man could be taught to behave in whatever way the controlling political power chose. All that was necessary was for leaders with vision to design the perfect world, gain power, and impose their vision on the populace. The 20th century provided the laboratory for testing these ideas. Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung and Castro were a few of the "visionaries" who imposed such designs on their nations. As their schemes were carried out, half the population of the world was reduced to poverty, and hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered in the name of creating a better world. Social systems that require individuals to devote their lives to the good of the community are inconsistent with the biological nature of man. In fact, any systems that put power in the hands of "leaders" always fall prey to the selfish interests of those leaders. Research in recent decades proves beyond a reasonable doubt that every person is genetically programmed to seek individual sovereignty. Communism, socialism and other communitarian ideologies are doomed to fail not only because they are bad economics -but also because our brains are hard-wired to "look out for number one." The sovereign nation-state won't be overthrown by voting or by violence, but will simply wither away. Time and science are moving mankind inexorably towards a world in which individuals will be sovereign. That's the way that it looks from here. John Pugsley * COMMENT LINK * Only 1 in 5 thinks massive curbs on liberties affect them. LINK: