It's like asking an obese kid if he likes candy.
Or sitting two lions and a lamb down to vote on dinner.
People [...] should be taught discipline and they should be happy with they have.
And how do you expect to teach them that while a government stands over them to protect and serve them? What better way to alleviate the burden of responsibility? How comfortable has your life been knowing that your government is keeping you safe from all kinds of peril at the hands of other people, and never questioning that you might be in any danger due to its incompetence?
All roads lead to anarchy.
Doing what's 'right' just takes us back to the Dark ages of religion.
You mean those ones we never actually got out of? We just advanced technologically, is all.
The implication is that I mean everything I don't outright say I don't mean? That's broken logic and you know it.
Gee none of us were going to figure that one out until you said it.
Everyone is ultimately egocentric.
Well obviously. The opposite of selfishness is self-destruction. Things that destroy themselves don't tend to exist because when they do, they destroy themselves. The question is what composes your "self." Case in point:
Lower right represent!
Obviously I am going to ally myself with like-minded people because I believe them to be more grounded than people who are less correct on things. You could think of it like an exclusive club. You could draw lines, or construct walls. You can do this on multiple levels, too. Family, friends, colleagues, co-workers. As Google puts it, your "circles."
There are those who believe human evolution has ended. Maybe it's the advances in medicine, maybe it's the advances in technology, maybe it's the advances in agriculture, or maybe it's just the plain fact that evolution takes millions of years and trying to see it happening on the basis of a human life span is necessarily wrong. Whatever the case, to say that we've been as intelligent as we are now for thousands of years is both accurate and inaccurate. In terms of our physiology, we haven't changed much, if at all, in so short a span of geologic time. On the other hand, what
is intelligence? What causes us to be intelligent? Is it determined genetically? Or is it too complex of a neurological concept for the mere DNA that constructs the brain to control?
Drawing from the lessons we learn from feral children and those born deaf, of a human grown in a most unnatural way; unable to communicate with other humans, it seems fairly straight-forward to conclude that our ability to form the kinds of thoughts we do is rooted in the effect that complex, abstract language has on our neural circuitry. While all our brains have this capacity, without being raised to communicate with other intelligences, much as we may use our capacity to create tools in the wild to help us survive, there will be certain subjects we could never comprehend in a brain so developed. I am convinced that the girth of our intelligence is a collection of ideas that gradually arose as someone, somewhere, cognized the concept, and in an effort to communicate with others about it, created terminology to solidify the concept.
And that that intelligence is a concrete structure, apart from us, that exists in our ongoing communication.
And that each of us is a neuron within this vast structure.
And that the lines we draw to divide us slow the "thoughts" that this structure "thinks."
And that the only barrier to entry is the ability to communicate.