Survival of the fittest

"A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals."

~ Michael Pollan ~

This is the pervasive nature of democracy and globalism, two of the dominating ideologies for the past 20 something years.

Democracy is an irony in itself, practising dictatorship of the majority while encroaching the rights of the minor. On the other hand, you allow too much freedom to the individuals and in doing so empower them. The result is a handful of the minor imposing their will on the majority. For example, I was discussing with my friend who is the director of Century College and he was relating to me that they have a class taught by two gays on homosexuality. Well, they managed to get that special vocation through a court order as they sued the college for homosexual discrimination. As you can imagine, the number of students taking this college course would be meagre considering its popularity, and now the two teachers are asking the court to issue an order to make the course mandatory. This creates a power distribution dilemma that determines only one thing - You just can't win.

Globalism has unified the economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces of single societies into a whole. As a result, we have the convenience of all the information in the world with a click of a button, and the creation of International Court and other global agencies made up of members of different nations. Things are moving so fast, it is easy to get lost in the progress we have made in the past two decades. But the real consequences of globalism are just starting to surface specifically inequality and environmental degradation.

Globalism builds on the competitive idealism of capitalism which when broken down is nothing more than the exploitation of the poor. The under-developed or the poor are at such a competitive disadvantage in this system that it is near impossible for them to change their plight. As a result, the rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer. This creates a vortex of increasing disparity between the two.

For the longest time, there has been few or no environmental regulations on businesses. They were able to pay little attention to the consequences of the actions to the environment which eventually lead to the public paying the bills for to cleanup their mess. With increasing public awareness, there has been significant improvements to environmental regulations in recent years.

All in all, both democracy and globalism has promoted vast growth as well as scientific and technological advancements. But they have also created many of the compelling problems we face in present time as suggested above. I believe that the two ideologies need to evolve so as to adapt to our present time and this is the task of our future generation.

Sidetracking. There is nothing more important than education we can give our future generation. Lately, I have been challenged to define the foundations of a good education. Kids nowadays have been subjected to these pervasive ideologies at such a young age, it is understandable that they lack the capacity to fully differentiate between the good and the bad. Not to mention that there are enough distractions and misrepresentations to confuse and corrupt the pure hearted.

I guess it is time for me to think hard about what I want to teach my kids and how.