To: eenymeeny who wrote (53371 ) 2/10/2006 3:00:56 PM From: gpowell Read Replies (1) | Respond to Welcome to silicon investor, eenymeeny. The dark highlighted portion of my post was a quote from the post to which I was responding. It appears your comments are responding to the same quote and not necessarily to my comments. Aside from that, I think you might be a bit confused between classical liberal ideology and social darwinism – they are antithetical, not synonymous. And I wasn’t defending classical liberalism - I was actually criticizing it, mildly. This is classic economic ideology. Substituting an image of "nature" (the sun cannot fail, as it is part of "nature") "natural" phenomenon which is self-regulating and perfect works continuously to remove the ethical responsibility from individual and collective choices. Military domination and the threat of starvation was generally necessary to force peoples external to europe to view themselves as workers, it was also necessary to rid these people of their traditional collectivism and institute the lovely notion of "rational self-interest", the value/worldview which allows for that "externality", the suffering of the weak, to be dismissed from the conscience of the exploiter. The belief in the "naturalness" of this process (the recasting of the costs to humans of the mode of production as a healthy process of "survival of the fittest") is as politically necessary as it is arbitrary and stupid.
