Benevolent Direction (While Discussing Peak Oil)

All this talk about "benevolent dictator" misses the point.

What we need is benevolent direction.

Patience makes the point that people will not "get it" until it is too late. Is that not a self-fulfilling prophecy?

It is true in countries that at least profess and/or desire to be "economic democracies", that there is more continuity in leadership. That continuity in leadership exists in at least part due to a consensus among the people relative to what that leadership represents.

Allowing Obama to serve for the rest of his life, for example, would not extricate him, or us, from the dominance of the for-profit, acquisitiveness, standard of living, military and economic hegemonic Capitalist Dictatorship mindset that governs the resources of the United States and dominates the culture into a ravenous swarm of lemming consumers.

Obama's (or someone else's) "seeing the light" and becoming a benevolent consistent spokesman for the improvement of education in the United States to make "the world more cooperative" (as opposed to his claim for the need to make "the Nation more competitive" would not require that the man become a Dictator. As a matter of fact, any attempts to act like a Dictator will be summarily rejected by the people of the United States. Yet, we truely do need a world spokesman, one that can speak to national interests, in perspective, a continuing ministry of education that is radically different from the Capitalist propaganda machine under which we now suffer.

We need not only an economic paradigm shift so simply stated as "cooperation not competition", we also need an economic and cultural shift that fundamentally changes direction away from the National Highway Act of 1950, and away from one that places the automobile (a world annihilating super-nova) as central to the economy and culture.

We need a paradigm change around the issues of community, human needs, and community betterment including the desired principles of equity, inclusion, humanity, quality of life, peace, and SUSTAINABILITY (both economic and in relation to finite natural resources (e.g. peak oil)) and away from domination of of a self-serving, manipulating and dominating Capitalist minority.

Mike Morin