To: epsteinbd who wrote (91250 ) 4/8/2003 5:19:28 PM From: Sun Tzu Read Replies (1) | Respond to It is not a lecture. It seems that some people think I am running a moral contest between US-bad-Islamists-good. There is nothing of the sorts in my mind. I am just letting you know what I think the lure of those movements are and why. Here is bits of a previous post which went mostly unnoticed. It was comisioned by EC initially as part of a communication project (read TV, cell phones, etc). It is directly related to the issues we were discussing, i.e. terrorism, technology, and cultural backlash:...A Wild West frontier mentality has characterised the last 30 years of cyberspace colonisation and trade globalisation. As on any frontier opportunity is the initial driver, not human values. In this 30 years aid to developing countries has halved and the level of inequity both within and between countries has doubled. The extremes have diverged, with more suicides and more conspicuous consumption. Given the weak correlation between standard of living and happiness and the positive correlation between equity and happiness the average quality of life in the West has hardly changed, a depressing result for so much hard work. Those caught in the no-mans-land between traditional values of the populace and the western values of the ruling class become alienated and resort to terrorism and even war. Growing inequity is a characteristic of any lawless frontier, not just the digital one. But our deeper human needs for fairness and equity, law and order, shine through as settlers move in. We could be at such a turning point now with the IST infrastructure shifting from the master-slave paradigm of lawless frontiers (and 500 channel one-way television), to the peer-to-peer paradigm of democracy, regulatory frameworks, trial by jury and two-way broadband multimedia communication with anyone, anywhere. Rapid culture change risks destabilising global society (already a serious risk if global inequity continues to increase). Thus it is essential that the implications of future immaterialisation switches are modelled, simulated and tested in advance. This modelling must be based on the new understanding of the dependence of adult personality on attachment processes and belief system development in infancy that is now emerging from large scale longitudinal studies in the human sciences...
