re: #284 freetoken

Right now, I’m trying to study tribalism, which I think is behind the divisions not just in this country, but around the world. If you look any any country’s internal politics, you’ll find those divisions weaving in and out of various political positions, but there nonetheless in all their viciousness, even when a country is a fairly homogeneous entity and there aren’t many racial or ethnic divisions.

The worst barrier to equality, though, in my view is not so much the factors we generally attribute to divisions within communities, but that of the tremendous income gaps and class divisions we seem to be seeing more of than we were 50 yrs ago, once you adjust for things like race, sex, etc. One of the more tribalistic memes from the ’80s when a lot of Wall St. engineering was going on among traders, investment bankers, etc which changed the face of the stock market itself in modern terms, was “The guy who dies with the most toys wins.” And that “guy” is the one who funds the think tanks, the political campaigns, the media, etc, either directly or indirectly. We’d just better hope he or she is on “our side” in our own personal struggles.

This doesn’t mean that I support “communism” (whatever that means anymore), statism, etc. The basic flaw in Marxist thought is that there will ever be “proletarian rule”. Substituting one kind of “rule” for another isn’t good and we’ve seen the kind of praxis that developed in countries that tried it. Greed, for lack of a better word (and to paraphrase), takes over no matter what the political system is named.