On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 10:46:07PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> No it wasn't. The discussion was how evident such a conception would > be to the vast majority of contemporaries. Fukuyama was arguing that > there is no alternative to the triumph of liberal democracy; in > fact, there are alternatives, in a literal sense, but very few of > us can conceive of them displacing and replacing liberal capitalist > democracy. This is fuzzy thinking. The reason the alternatives are difficult to conceive of displacing and replacing liberal capitalist democracy is because they are inferior alternatives, which was exactly the point of the original discussion. And it is silly to say that because the "vast majority of contemporaries" fail to conceive of something that the something is not part of the body of human knowledge. The vast majority of contemporaries do not know how to solve Schreodinger's equation in an infinite square well, but you could hardly claim that quantum mechanics is not a part of the body of human knowledge, nor that quantum mechanics is inferior to classical mechanics. Is liberal democracy the ultimate? The fact that no one has given an example of a clearly superior system is a strong argument that it is. Over thousands of years and billions of people, it is likely that someone would have conceived of a better way if it existed. And it is also likely that we would have heard of it, because good ideas have a way of spreading and surviving. > So what? I can imagine a lot of things, few if any of which are likely > to happen. So what? You say you lack vision. Fortunately for the human race (and SF fans!), not everyone does. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://erikreuter.com/
