Will Corporate Capitalism be Fading Out?

Now before we get all political, let me make a few points: capitalism has done some pretty good things. It's gotten us where we are today, roughly, but it has developed mankind at a huge rate since the Industrial Revolution. The corporation model has provided vast amounts of resources so that aspiring academics could develop many of the great technologies we have today, either by hiring scientists, engineers, developers, etc; or by creating the economic basis by which our government was able to support such research, take NASA for example.

However, capitalism has its dark sides as well. As an entity that focuses more on profit than progress, the development it has created has also been hindered by the same model as competition stifles cooperation amongst researchers. Also, the profiteering model is a very clear breeding grounds for corruption, and companies will go to great lengths to protect their markets from revolutionary designs that will be more ethical but challenge their positions at the top. A particularly gruesome example of this is when some major medical company attempted, and thankfully failed, to copyright strings of human DNA that could be used for research to fight disease.

So capitalism has some good, mainly in that we needed it to get this far, past tense. But the playing field is changing now. We live in a world where kids can build nuclear reactors in their garages, and the dissemination of technology and information is only increasing exponentially. We live currently on the brink of 3D printing technology, which in the next decade might be so accurate as to reach the molecular level. That's the technology I want to talk about today.

Anti-Terrorism, a Message of Postulation

War has been ever present throughout most all of human history. The first pantheons of human religion typically contained some god of war, or at least a god with a strong hand in war, if not more than one. It has for so long been matter-of-fact that only just recently has war come under attack as unnecessary for human development. What changed was not just our nature, but our technology. (Sociologist James Henslin writes in his textbook Sociology, that human culture is directly based off the society's available technology.) With the globalization of the world, our interconnected network of world-wide communication via the internet, and enough physical means to develop the ideologies of tolerance and acceptance, we have had the exposure needed to realize that most humans are alike. Prejudice and racism and all their facets and dogma (historically common sources of justification for wars against other countries) have, in at least the first world and much, much of the third world, become wide spread symbols of evil. We can no longer use a people's nationality as a sole justification for war, many of us at least, as racism still prevails in all countries to such extent, America by no means an exception. The insightful of humans need an ethical justification, true reason, one clear to a reasonable being; as it should be.

The side effects of such a shift in culture have become evident by a few things: the UN and international community uses several peaceful means to deter acts of war, the most common of which is economic sanctioning, hence you don't see too much "Made in North Korea" at the store, although it's still there. Also, after the World Wars, war has never looked too pretty. There was a day where heroes, in the age of sword and bow, would go out, get beat up, and have a decent chance of suffering only survivable wounds, from which they could heal and go out again. When we added the additive of high powered explosives and poisonous chemical agents, and guns that can kill hundreds of men before running out of ammo... Well, I need not cite the world's sufferings from this era.

We realize war is bad. But we, humans, are far from eliminating it, in a sense at least.