Dear Rick,
Your essay is interesting. I attach below this paragraph my reply to your comment on my blog page. I generally wait a bit before scoring many essays to see how they fit in with each other. I tend to copy the cover page and enter potential scores before doing the actual entry.
The intellectual attraction of utopias is pretty low these days. Utopia = no place, is a sort of fiction meant to advance an ideology or agenda. Recent history has sort of rubbished up the attraction of utopias.
The irony of these things is the reason they fail is that once they are applied the application of them changes human behavior in ways not predicted by the system. This is what happens with economy theories, the application of the economic theory changes behavior in ways not predicted by theory.
We humans have been very good at exploiting our environment. Our ability to figure out problems, learn, and communicate this information has permitted us exploit our world in new and more complete ways. As a result we have increasingly taken our selves off the fitness landscape. It probably began when Homo erectus took themselves off the menu by throwing rocks at leopards and using fire at night to keep them away. This has lead to the current age where there are over 7 billion humans and we exploit our world in ways no other animal ever has, such as petroleum, uranium, metal ores, and ... . With a population of 7 billion and total mass of around 400 million tons no animal with comparable size and dietary requirements in the natural history of this planet has come even close.
In the environmental debate it is interesting to ponder the idea that the conservatives are in a certain perspective right. The continual expansion of human power, our increased use of resources and the wasteful damage done to the environment has been the human program from almost the start of our species. They are right in the sense that we have always managed to press on this way. For most of our natural and recorded history the exploitation and demolition of the world has been very slow and comparatively small. Now of course the problem is that as this trend is exponential it appears there is a prospect that this will lead to finis Homo sapiens. To rein in our growth and exploitation of the world is out of character with our species. On the other hand failure to do so means we will inevitably reach certain limits. If nothing else our world is becoming bewilderingly complex and we may at some point be no longer to manage this growth in scale and complexity.
Largely political leaders do not exist to solve problems. We sometimes call political leaders "problem solvers," and this is really only true from a certain perspective. Political leaders largely serve to protect or expand the wealth and power of those in the most elite positions. If you are in that exclusive class then in one sense political leaders are "problem solvers" if they permit you to keep business as usual or to increase your share of the pie. The idea that power structures of any sort, whether government/political, or business/corporate and we might as well include military and religious, exist to actually solve problems in the world is a bit of a delusion. We tend to focus on the rather exceptional occasions where there is leadership that does actually solve problems, where the normalcy is really a banal form of management that greases various palms.
So the future will doubtless prove to be interesting if nothing else. The odds frankly do not look in our favor, and between dystopia and utopia I would tend to say the former looks more likely. It really should not be looked upon as something that horrible. In 50 million years the Earth will be doing just fine, but we wont be there. The world will no more cry for the loss of our species than it does now over the loss of Tyrannosaurus rex.
LC
