kryptonitemonkey | Quoted from Blog and Mablog (Reply)

All this change is the result of the sum total of our actions as individual humans, but there is no lawful decision-making apparatus available that will enable us to do the slightest thing about it. Any attempts to create such an apparatus will only create various despotisms, and will not achieve their declared aims. Imagine an agency created by the United Nations dedicated to solving the problem of the sun rising in the east -- the consensus among scientists these days being that it would be better to have it rise in the north. The end result of creating such an agency would not be a sun coming up over Canada, but it would result in a bunch of human beings regulated, enslaved and hassled to death. As C.S. Lewis notes somewhere, the power of men over nature is not really power over nature -- it is the power of some men over other men, with nature (or the name of "nature") as the instrument.