@michael: So you trust governments to engineer us systematically into what they consider civilized behaviour?
@Jan Jal: The idea that a competitive capitalist social system, national or global, can or will 'breed out' poverty is ridiculous - reformed to eliminate extremes of poverty ('absolute poverty'), perhaps, but it's based on the idea that there must be winners and losers, and that those who 'win' do so at the expense of those who don't - once life is secure, poverty all becomes relative, and those in power are the ones who sit on those who are not.

Anyway, what does that have to do with the subject of the forum?

@JanJal: For the most part, I agree about the mixing of surveillance/social credit scoring, at least for the present and immediate future. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to automatically accept new norms which drift down from above somewhere and soon become just another part of one's 'necessary' subconscious kneejerk adaptation to any social environment or engineering plan.

We will next meet on May 9 at 6:30 at The Park to discuss Thomas Pynchon's seminal novel, V.

All nuts. Don't call it socialism - other terms might apply, but some have dark connotations and I wouldn't want to repeat them here. At any rate, terms only mean what we make them mean through what we do or don't do.

Becoming a person who can do divination, become a shaman, etc., is often a result, in many cultures, of emotional or mental 'instability' or other serious illnesses that occur at some point in the person's life, and traditional medical systems are very often associated with religious beliefs.