To the Editor,
The progress of mankind has consistently been the improvement of the translation of thought into reality. We are now there with AI. A single person can now solve problems with the help of a chatGPT session in minutes rather than months and AI is growing stronger at a double exponential rate.
Our society has been increasingly decaying because it is developing technology and intelect far faster than developing, or even maintaining, wisdom.
Wisdom is achieved by the school of hard knocks. Mistakes teach us “not to try that again”.
Justice is the application of hard knocks to individuals that have made poor decisions that have hurt others. Capital punishment is the ultimate hard-knock – “you won’t do that again EVER”.
But our justice system has become so corrupt that it has enabled “lawfare”, the weaponizing of our justice system against a targeted entity by lawful attack. We see a very clear example of this happening right now with the legal terrorization of Donald Trump and Ammon Bundy. At the same time, it is failing to hold world leaders and even city councilmen accountable for their actions.
The common law embodies two great things: common sense and the golden rule. Both of these have been completly lost by the evolution of our justice system into a money driven machine of gnat-straining and log-in-my-eye avoidance.
I once attended a college class on “public policy” where my professor presented me with this amazing argument against individual liberty:
As technology increases, the power of an individual to commit a crime that threatens to destroy the world will eventually reach the point that no one can be free.
I could never come up with an adequate argument against that statement.
The only way I can see us not completely self-destructing our world and humanity in very short order is by resurrecting a common-sense, wisdom-based, golden-rule-based justice system immediately. It is the only way to stop the giant greed-driven commercial entities from marketing and building our way to hell.
Time has run out. This must be done now.
Sanford “Sandy” Staab
Kooskia