The organizers of the forum suggested naming my today’s speech “Setting the Right Priorities”. They are probably not satisfied with the way how the priorities are set now or they suppose that I am not happy with it. They are right. I am not happy and will try to explain why.
Current priorities do not fall from the sky. They reflect our way of looking at things, “die Weltanschauung”, which characterizes our era. Its formation started decades ago. I see it in the culture, philosophy and ideology of the 1960s and 1970s which in many respects opposed the traditional way of looking around and which brought to the fore – among many other things – the idea that the world is a single entity, one gigantic global system which deserves to be globally governed. This “system-engineering” viewpoint was, more or less, generally accepted. Everyone suddenly discovered interdependencies, interconnections, externalities, interdisciplinarity, general systems theory, metasciences, etc. It became politically correct, progressive, for me only progressivistic, to think in terms of global issues, global governance, and global solutions.
It was – not surprisingly – also the birth of environmentalism. The man as a free and dominant individual entity disappeared. The world, the earth, and the planet replaced him as the relevant frame of reference. That led to a radical switch of priorities.
[..]
We should keep insisting that the undergoing internationalization of human activities doesn’t ask for centralistic solutions, and that the failure of communism to organize – sometimes even small – countries from above should tell everyone that it’s much less possible to organize the whole world. We should keep insisting that it would be sufficient to liberalize, deregulate, desubsidize, deorganize the world we live in. This is the only priority worth discussing at our today’s conference. Everything else is of minor importance, if not basically wrong.
[..]
Another example is the ambition to combat the so called global warming. This ambition is also based on the pretence of understanding global issues and on the belief in the possibility to control them centrally. It is not necessary to repeat the already well-known more or less technical and scientific counter-arguments here this morning. They are available to anyone who wants to listen to them. The problem is that the propagandists of the global warming alarmism do not listen and that the majority of rational people does not pay attention.
More @ http://klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=311J7mG2DLNY