Knowing Thyself, and Thy World

PERFECTLY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE who don't happen to know much about history often morph instantaneously into historians when trying to prove some point or other. Then you start hearing brilliant comments like: "the american civil war was not about slavery". It was about state's rights, right? or agrarian versus manufacturing based economic systems in conflict over economic policy, or something like that. Had to have something to do with land and money, for damned sure. Do all wars have at least a little something to do with material wealth, or the currency which symbolizes it? We begin to see, perhaps, that explaining our own actions en masse can be purely subjective, so we invent sciences like sociology and psychology to accompany history, economics, and political science. Even right now, you can either say that vladimir putin is playing with barrack obama like a toy, which is what rush limbaugh says, or you can say that obama's threats and john kerry's remark about chemical weapons were cleverly designed to trap syria and russia into doing american bidding, which they now are. Your choice, and either story will fly, depending on who's doing the talking-and the listening, if anyone. Facts and dates give us a starting point of agreement, from which we rapidly go our own directions. Some interesting current facts involve minimum wage fast food workers all over america grumbling about their wages, state minimum wage arguments all over america, people talking about the huge gap between rich and poor, and in general, enhanced sound and fury concerning material wealth, the currency which symbolizes it, and how to produce and distribute it. In large numbers the people of earth are most definitely not happy with current political and economic arrangements. When the late gore vidal was riding in the back of a limosine as a small child, sitting next to his senator grandfather, watching tomatoes splatter all over the car's exterior, he said he understodd right then and there that it was quite possible in america to have a war of rich against poor. We can either say that the oppressive economic system forces millions of people into poverty through no fault of their own, or we can say that there are millions of very lazy very stupid people throughout america and the world, who need only lift themselves out of poverty through hard work and sound decision making - but really, does it much matter who says what, or what we say? Either way, the world seems to be boiling down to a few million rich folks, and a few billion poor folks, and the anger between the two groups seems to be, shall we say, growing, with the social media, with communication, with enhanced awareness of people of their own situations, and the situations of others.