If flow is the paradigm for the way of life in the Fourth Dimension, what have been the predominant paradigms of the old Third?

The scientific paradigm is empirical materialism. And we’ll return to that in a moment.

The prevailing social paradigm for perhaps the last 150 years has been Social Darwinism.

What are its tenets?

Social Darwinism is the view that life is a struggle for existence. It sees there as being scarce resources for which we compete. And it predicts that only the fittest will survive.

It sees nature is red in tooth and claw. That is, nature is neutral and favors the strong. Whether that tenet is true or not, its implication is that the social environment is also red in tooth and claw.

Predation does exist in nature. To that extent it may be red in tooth and claw. But even nature is weighted toward the good and the benevolent. That is, while life forms may prey on each other, the natural order, the universal law, etc., though impartial, tends to favor the good. Here is Lao Tzu making this important observation:

“Impartial though the Way of God may be,
It always favors good men.” (1)

The fact that the natural order, or divine order, can be impartial and yet favor the good is a mystery that the spiritual student needs to solve. For free will to be allowed, impartiality has to be the case at the level of the Divine.

But for the purpose for which life was created to be served – for us to travel from God to God – the Good must also be favored. If life were not purposeful, this tendency toward the Good might not be the case.

So the mere fact that nature may on some level and in some ways be red in tooth and claw does not invalidate its pointing and tending towards the Good.

And the mere fact that the animal world features predation is no reason for the human world also to do so. Spiritual evolution lays down that it not be so. The human level of existence is there, I believe, to promote the ability to love one another, not to promote the ability to prey on one another.

The notion of spiritual evolution is what’s missing from the Social Darwinist interpretation. It emphasizes the physical but leaves out the spiritual.

Life forms evolve to higher and higher levels of divine existence. Human society is not and never was intended to be red in tooth and claw. That applies to its first tenet.

Its second tenet is that only the strongest survive. The weakest go to the wall. This tenet has never been observed in human society, although there have always been people who’ve tried to make it prevail.

Any kind of care-giving in our society – care of the young, the sick, the disabled, the poor, the old, and the dying – is a refusal to live by this merciless interpretation of life.

The weakest seldom go to the wall. The young are protected. The sick are tended to. The disabled are assisted. The old are cared for. And the dying are made comfortable.

If we knew that the dead live on in circumstances much preferable to the living, we might give them a joyous send-off. (2) I certainly ask for one myself.

I predict that access to the medical and hospital care system based on wealth is not a system that will last. Universal medicare is practised in many countries and is seen as an “enlightened” social approach. All citizens who live under such a system, when general economic conditions are not limiting, would never live under any other.

Education, roads, bridges, electrical, telephone, and water systems – all manner of projects are in whole or in part paid and provided for by society at large. If not these projects, then others.

The elites of society preach rugged individualism and free enterprise only as long as they’re winning. When they’re losing, they look to government to bail them out.

The bank bailout of former years is one example of this “free enterprise” while the rich are winning and “government assistance” when the rich are losing. They extract wealth from society while attempting to pass the costs along, which is one way the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Until now.

Chinese air their cases by petitioning White House

BEIJING (AP) — The poisoning of a college student 18 years ago recently re-emerged as a hot topic inChina, but censors soon squelched the politically sensitive online discussions over whether the culprit may have eluded punishment because of Communist Party connections.

Chinese looking for justice found another way to keep the issue alive. They took it to Washington.

Appealing to a White House online petition page, they soon gathered the 100,000 signatures required for an official response, and — although there has been no response from Washington so far — news of the request revived talk about the case in China. Beijing police issued an explanation after weeks of silence, and state media chimed in with editorials.

"The Chinese public went to a foreign site to vent off their frustration, and that speaks of the loss of credibility of the Chinese government," said Shen Dingli, professor of American studies at Fudan University.

Started in 2011 as a project in open government for the Internet age, the Obama administration's "We the People" site is a work in progress that already has spawned unintended consequences domestically, prompting updates of the ground rules for a successful petition.

Though clearly intended for U.S. citizens, the guidelines on gathering online signatories remain broad enough to hearten activists overseas who — frustrated with their own governments — hope to raise the international profile of their cases. The site does not ask for one's nationality, and one only needs to be 13 or older and have a verified email address to create an account to initiate a petition or sign one.

Malaysians have complained to the White House about election fraud in their country, drawing more than 222,000 signatures within a week to become the site's second-most popular issue. Other petitions ask President Barack Obama to secure the release of two abducted Orthodox Christian archbishops in Syria and to urge a recount of votes in Venezuela's presidential elections.

And in the past week, requests have poured in from China, where petitioning the central government in Beijing dates back to imperial eras, but where nowadays the tradition is usually fruitless and sometimes perilous.

Some of the petitions are serious, and some silly — as with many of the U.S.-generated requests, which include a demand to build a "Star Wars"-style Death Star.

The Chinese petitions have asked Washington to disclose assets held by Chinese officials' children residing in the U.S., and have urged remembrance of the bloody Chinese government crackdown on the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square. Others have asked for adjudication on the official recipe for Lanzhou beef noodles, and on the debate over whether the flavor of bean curd stew — a Chinese breakfast staple — should be sweet or salty. The petitions often are written in bad English, and some are in Chinese.

The White House says that, for now, it will give equal treatment to petitions from overseas.

"'We the People' is just part of the administration's commitment to open government and the code powering the application has been made available to anyone, including other countries, who wish to set up a similar system," White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said.

The current threshold for White House response is when a petition gathers 100,000 signatures within 30 days — up from lower thresholds that allowed for too many frivolous petitions.

The Malaysian petition crossed that barrier, but has drawn no response yet. Any hopes for U.S. condemnation of the election results evaporated this week when the U.S. State Department recognized the polling results, while acknowledging allegations of irregularities. Still, supporters feel they accomplished something.

The petition "spoke out the dissatisfactions to the international communities successfully," virologist and the petition's apparent organizer, Kuan Ping Ang, said on her Facebook page.

Shen said the White House page is one of a kind. "No other Western democratic country has a site where the government promises to respond to a petition with 100,000 signatures," he said.

It has rapidly become popular in China, where the tightly controlled media and Internet put politically sensitive topics off limits. People who bring their grievances to the central government as petitioners are routinely harassed, beaten and sent to labor camps as troublemakers — or locked up in what are known as "black jails" in a kind of extralegal detention.

Enthusiasm for the White House site shows the lack of avenues at home to vent frustration, said David Zweig, professor of social science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"There is no mechanism for the Chinese citizens to really express their views. It's really as simple as that," Zweig said. "The citizens are looking for any strategies to make their grievances known."

It started with the case of Zhu Ling, a woman who was paralyzed for life from thallium poisoning during her third year at Tsinghua University in Beijing. No one was held responsible for the crime, and the cold case resurfaced in April in the wake of another poisoning at Fudan University. The Chinese public demanded an investigation into one of Zhu's roommates — who had long been considered a suspect. They questioned whether the original investigation was squashed because of her family's political ties.

Before there was any satisfactory answer, Chinese censors began to remove posts and shush online commentators, effectively ending the discussion. But then someone started the petition on the White House page early this month, and by last Monday it had garnered more than 100,000 signatures in about three days. Since then, about a dozen more China-related petitions have appeared.

Shi Shusi, a well-known media commentator, sees black humor in the flood of petitions to the White House.

"For a very long time, the Chinese government has responded too slowly on social incidents. It has exhausted its credits," Shi said. "The public probably just need a place to vent their resentment."

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