The Social Contract
Without accountability, does the social contract exist?
Wikipedia on the Social Contract:
Social contract describes a broad class of theories that try to explain the ways in which people form states and/or maintain social order. The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up some rights to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. It can also be thought of as an agreement by the governed on a set of rules by which they are governed.
Social contract theory formed a central pillar in the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed. The starting point for most of these theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any structured social order, usually termed the “state of nature”. In this condition, an individual’s actions are bound only by his or her personal power, constrained by conscience. From this common starting point, the various proponents of social contract theory attempt to explain, in different ways, why it is in an individual’s rational self-interest to voluntarily give up the freedom one has in the state of nature in order to obtain the benefits of political order.
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Current world order: Market Contract. Farewell middle class :S
Kinano, I looked up market contract on Wiki, and in Google, and can’t find what you are referring to. Help me out, please!
oops! I was just making a pun of the “social contract” given the capitalist-driven world we live in. My bad! 🙂
I just think the old theories of governance have no place in today’s world any more. The social contract idea stood its ground for a while, but it has become more and more irrelevant.
Yep. You’re moving too fast for me. I need to live around more young people who can keep me up to date, not only with trends in thinking, but the nuances of humor!
I disagree, BTW, with you assessment. If you read history – and I know you do – I don’t know how you can think we are any better or any worse than we have been before. The discouraging thing to me is that while we invent and gain information, we refuse to evolve in terms of how we manage power.
I do not necessarily think that we are worse than before, in fact I think that the world today is much better than it ever was. What I am trying to say, though, is that nowadays it is difficult to know who holds the power, let alone manages it. Evolution of the media has shifted some power to the general public, the evolution of the economic and financial systems shifted most power to corporations; our governance systems (which are based on dated 18th and 19th centuries modes of thought) need to accommodate these changes. So far, no governance system seems to have realised this yet. Or at least, that’s what I think!
Hmmm. Yep. Excellent points.