At one time I described my own political philosophy as "radical pragmatism". I didn't care if it was necessary to tear the whole damned thing down to a pile of parts and start again, but the criteria had to be that what was built works. I still hold that general attitude, but have realized that it is more complicated than that. Our social order has to function at a fairly high minimum level or lots of people start dying. So we do not have the luxury of tearing society down and rebuilding, and, especially, of doing so repeatedly, unless we can keep people alive meanwhile.

But we are always in process with reordering of our societies, even if very few people are involved in bringing this about. Many more realize that things are changing, but have no idea why, or have ideas that they cannot substantiate or justify. Most don't have time to be bothered with such questions. But the problem is that the process of change has been controlled, typically, by sociopaths and psychopaths who are utterly ruthless and without conscience in the use of what ever power they can access and, apparently, equally facile at convincing themselves and others that they are only doing what is "best".

It has to be a positive sign that so many ordinary people in so many countries have realized that the existing order of things is not working, that the direction is towards even greater dysfunction and that they have to risk their very lives to protest the ongoing process. I can only hope that they, and we, if/when it comes to that, can sell our lives very dearly, for the direction in which social change proceeds MUST be governed by the needs of sustainable survival of the greatest number of the population that is possible. If we cannot do that we are likely to see world population decline by one or more orders of magnitude over the next century, and not by any orderly or planned process.

The Greeks, especially the Athenians, effectively ruled themselves, especially on the local level, for the better part of a millennium by participative democracy and are the leading example of democracy in history. Let us hope that they can rise to do justice to their heritage and that the rest of us can follow suit.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."