perhaps the greatest evolutionary advantage of society is not so much logistical but emotional, not in that it feels good, but that collectively the awakened mind can be taught that death is not an option; that the desire to survive is not something to be questioned. perhaps it is this advantage that allowed this race to so take over the earth?

perhaps world peace is only possible when it co-exists with an invisible world war, operating at a nano scale through information and technologies that are potentially able to disable peoples and countries to the extent where a conventional warhead is no less destructive than a nuclear warhead.

The 3 R's are said to be Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

But I think it's more lip service than anything. Cos to really think about ecology, one would need to consider all the factors involved in the reduction, the reusing, and the recycling. No one formula can fit it all.

I believe that the true answer to ecology lies in another set of 3 R's:

Reduce, Reduce, and Reduce.

Reduce Consumption
Once food is bought and cooked, it doesn't matter if you actually finish eating it or you throw it away. Once you have bought it, you are already responsible for having created the demand for that item. And it is demands that drive industries, and industries that really suck up resources. Yes, granted it will drive down the GDP. But GDP is by no means a measure of what makes living worth the while. If we want to really think about ecology, we need to re-access what we think will make our lives worth the living.

Reduce Advertisement
There will always be those with opinions and those who just follow. Advertisements are what make the latter follow, creating market demands where there is none, fulfilling desires that do not really exist. It creates profit by making people pay for what they do not really need, justifying resource usage through an artificially created demand. it's called "market trends", but if it were not advertisement, trends would have been very different. Digital electronics, luxury goods, branded goods, foreign goods - if the demand for these can slow down, "market trends" could possibly better reflect what people actually need to have, than what industries need to sell.

Reduce Population
I think the key factor to our collective environment footprint is simply our population. If we could cut population by 50%, we would cut emissions by 50%. Yes, it would cause a lot of social distress in the short term - but that is the same pain, we are currently inflicting on the environment! A larger population makes it necessary for structure in society, and therefore makes it more possible for people to exploit both the work force and the environment more systematically. If we simply had less people, the environment would probably be more forgiving. A smaller population does mean that we can specialize less, and our sciences would not be able to advance as quickly - but i think we've reached a level of specialization that has removed us too far from what is real - that isn't a problem in itself, but the fact that real-world limitations exist, is. If we had a smaller population and our current society can continue into such a world, we can put more of our energies into agricultural and medical sciences instead of military technology and consumer electronics, into solving social and existential problems than twittering and stock exchange.

And yes, it would mean that I should reduce my blogging too.
But for me, writing is part of the bare minimum that i need to stay alive.

The downside to any system is vulnerability to exploitation.

That would apply to computer systems, systems of reasoning, judicial systems, political systems, philosophies and religions, sciences and arts. In short, everything. Systems necessarily require that we take a certain approach to categorize and rationalize phenomena so that at various levels of detail, it becomes possible for one single person to grasp - or rather, to think that he can grasp - the whole picture. This would necessarily imply that the way we look at the whole picture, may or may not be in line with the "certain approach" used to form it. When it does, we become heroes of the system, allowing us to make it better by searching out inconsistencies. When it doesn't, we become the inconsistencies - we reveal how the system is incomplete, but the system is unable to come to terms with us, because it is unwilling to acknowledge that someone abused the system to create such systematic discrimination, or that the inconsistency does not lie in us, but in the system itself.

We have thought that a system of checks and balances would help to steer systems, but after half a century of democracy, corruption hasn't gone away.

There are two forms of exploitations - internal and external. Internal from those who are in line with the system, and external from those that the system works against. Both ways require an intimate understanding of the system. And both ways need to play the "game" as set by the system to come into conversation.

What about those of us who don't want to play the game?

Is there a way to opt out of the system?

Leaving a religion at some point in history must have been unthinkable.

As must be leaving a country.

Is it possible for a society to offer alternative societies for people to live in, if they decide that the main machinery cannot understand them? What are the sub-societies that are present in the big machinery of society?

Perhaps it is in this lack of alternatives that organized crimes and underground societies exist. In this light, the underground society is but a mirror-image of the high society, which too, uses the society for its selfish gain.

What if we established a world order where society and non-society exist side by side? In between countries, we have a stretch of territory that is no man's land, where every man lives for himself.

but even if we were to separate order from anarchy, those who live in the wild, will find ways to organize, so that he can too, exploit a new system. order and chaos are two sides of the same coin. remember that the outlaw knows the system as well as the governors. of course, if there were a limitless supply of territories, people can keep on moving out and refuse to be part of such systems. but we live in a closed world.

What we need then, is not a system, but a framework where different systems can exist together, allowing people to move from system to system. War and peace and everything in between, would exist at the same time within such a framework.

While such a framework too, will suffer the same problems, but I would like to think that such a system could possibly give people enough systems to work with, that it never becomes necessary for anyone to want to opt out of the whole framework altogether.