Surviving Capitalism (Not) : ‘March of anger’: Thousands of cops protest in Paris over working conditions, pension reforms & suicides

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, October 3, 2019

‘March of anger’: Thousands of cops protest in Paris over working conditions, pension reforms & suicides

Click here to access article and videos posted on RT.

French cops are protesting about the neglectful treatment by their government. This is another variation on the fatal flaw that I temporarily referred to in my abortive post on 9/28/2019 (I intend to finish this and post it under "General Information" in the upper right-hand corner of my website.)" Before I decided to abbreviate the post and to develop the idea further in the future, it read (in part):

I've reached the conclusion that the human species are largely ruled by [individualistic] materialism in the sense that they follow their instincts toward pleasure or positive reinforcement in the short term future. This is a fatal flaw that condemns this species to extinction along with many other life forms on this planet.

This morality has not only infected the thinking of the current ruling capitalist classes, but all class structured societies when they began some 10,000 years ago when humans settled in agricultural communities and there was a surplus of wealth produced. Class structured societies began to be developed whereby ruling classes appropriated for themselves and their families the surplus. They abandoned the morality of survival of the nomadic band and replaced it with the morality of what's best for the extended family, and this new morality passed down through our species' relatively brief history to our current ruling capitalist classes. This new morality was very well expressed by Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister who said:

...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

Now in the present day, humans are increasingly threatened with extinction by their excessive alteration of the climate and environment. To survive, the relatively recent morality must be abandoned in favor of the earlier one and expanded to the human species and toward life forms in general. Humans must realize that they are an integral part of the web of life that exists on this unique planet Earth. The cops in this post demonstrate the current dominant morality. But cops, and humans in general, don't have much time to move to the earlier morality. So, will they succeed, or perish along with many other species? Stay tuned, but better yet, stay active in favor of survival.