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  • From: "Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] The conservative/liberal story
  • Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:58:23 -0600

The book that's interesting me right now is Cracking the Code: How to Win
Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision, by Thom
Harmann. It's really about political persuasion, but it covers a lot of
interesting information getting there.



The conservative "story" was written by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan,
according to Hartmann. Because all people are equal, Hobbes said, all
people are equally dangerous. Human nature is evil and, left to our own
designs, we'll be at war all the time. Therefore, some power must be given
dominion over humans to prevent this continuous war.



John Locke, in Two Treatises on Government, wrote the liberal "story" that
Thomas Jefferson, realizing that Locke's "estate," or the unlimited
stockpiling of private property as monetary wealth, was a fundamental danger
to the public good, modified. Locke's "estate" became Jefferson's
"happiness," and Jefferson's view of humans as basically good became basic
to the liberal "story." Natural law ensured happiness as much as it did
life and liberty, Jefferson believed, according to Hartmann. It seems like
a full examination of natural law would be most helpful, to me.



So Hobbes requires the dominion of Church or State over people to avert
continuous war, while Locke requires restraining Church and State so the
individual and a self-governing society might attain balance and harmony.
While Dubya moves to defund government, generally, he increases the defense,
police, and spying budgets and turns over government social programs to
"faith-based" organizations.



The idea that we are not capable of self-governing is a conservative
conviction and nothing more. Believing it makes it true. Except it isn't
true. It's simply the conservative worldview. If we hold this worldview,
it may be time for a revisit. Conservative government and a conservative
decision-making process in general are not responsive enough to meet the
challenges of relatively rapid energy and resource descent, as we witness in
Dubya's response to climate change. We are the ones for whom we have been
waiting, as Audre Lourde, I think, wrote.



Tommy Tolson

Austin, TX







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