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These are the realities of today.
The impact of policy decisions.
Policy decisions, more than any other factor, determine the welfare of individuals and society. In a most profound way, mankind's mental capacity affects its physical welfare. It makes little difference, in this context, whether the mental capacity of mankind affects policies of state, or affect the policies by which people govern their individual lives. The principles involved are invariably the same, and their effects are the same in that they both determine the physical state of human existence. They affect people's health, prosperity, comfort, even whether they will live or die. Global policies, of course, have universal consequences.
The society's actions reflect the various axioms that a society is taught to subscribe to, which invariably correspond to its rulers policies. Axioms are assumptions that are accepted to be true, that define a person's perception of reality. Axioms are much cruder than hypotheses, in that they are not necessarily based on any scientific process of investigation or proof. They represent merely opinions about what is real and valuable.
These opinions, even those that are deemed to be fundamental perceptions about reality, are usually artificially generated for political purposes, or to support religious structures. For instance, the axiomatic perception that the earth is flat and is the center of the universe, was once universally held many centuries ago as though it reflected reality. This perception also supported a certain ideology of the church which kept the mythology alive.
The axioms that were centered on the believe that the earth is flat had affected mankind's marine exploration for centuries, as well as its political/religious power structures, and thereby hindered its self-development. The more modern false axioms are usually centered on policy decisions that are totally out of context with reality.
The development of scientific perception, in later years, has challenged mankind to examine its axioms in the light of the higher proof that creative discoveries have established. By this process - a process that expands understanding - technologies have been developed that have raised the entire platform of physical existence, which false axioms had previously prevented prevented from developing.
The progressive understanding of fundamental principle has always been a powerful force in human existence, in that it enables the creation of resources for living which had never existed before. Nuclear energy, for instance, was not an option during the industrial revolution. It hadn't been discovered at this time. It didn't exist. This vastly more powerful technology that would have obsoleted coal based energy production was totally unknown at this age, and so was steam power unknown during the stone age.
Mankind's energy technologies, in turn, affect its agricultural potential, which, of course, determines the potential population density. The growth in world population, therefore, is directly proportional to the development of technological capability, especially in the field of energy production.
The reverse of this principle is also true. If the process is reversed by political, ecological, or financial imperatives, mankind is bound to experience an escalating collapse of its population size, such as we see already beginning. The current financial austerity that is decimating the world economies is causing millions of unnecessary deaths. Poverty is the major cause by which human life is being denied to exist on this planet. One scholar*(Bruce Steward of Vancouver, Canada) has indirectly urged the creation of a formal measurement, that measures the intensity of poverty in terms of "years of human life denied."
It may well be true that more people have died in the 20th century as the direct result of faulty economic policy decisions, than have perished in all previous centuries in wars. Forced underdevelopment, economic destruction, inadequate housing, hunger, crime, drugs, etc., are all potent killers. Inversely, civilization would not exist, as it does today, without the supporting base of a vast array of right policy decisions that have created the infrastructures for living that still support most of the world-population, many of which had their root in the great periods of renaissance that laid the foundation for scientific progress through which civilization was raised to new levels.
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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