[tirsales]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Cultures change at glacial speeds.

Or in a single step. Societies can change within a single war - and culture with them.

It's possible for the environment to change in such a fashion that a practice can be anti-survival, but the practice became a cultural pattern which persists long after its value no longer exists.

Or for a practise to get "over-evolved" or specialised.

I think your Chinese acquaintance is qute right. The critical social unit in China is the family, and the society is tied together by relationships between families. China as a whole can be viewed as a family of other families, and the Emperor is the father of that family, who should try to do what is in the best interest of the family.

And when a culture is based on the family - and the family as a political structure is destroyed - what remains? A system not anymore based on the culture?

It's the old conundrum of authority and responsibility. A society needs people in authority to make decisions that affect the society. The problem is making them responsible to the society so that authority doesn't become simply a means of securing their own power and furthering their own interests, with a means of removing that authority from those who aren't responsible.

Correct. And that is the risk of giving authorities too much power - if you had "the perfect system", the perfect ruler, etc there would be nothing wrong about Despotism. But - there can never be a perfect ruler - and even if the ruler was perfect, the whole system would need to be. That is not possible - thus Despotism cannot be functional.

@Steve: Again the problem remains of the first step. Who will make the first step? Publishers will have to realize that society, that the market is changing and evolving even as we speak. This change cannot be stopped or slowed. Thus they have to adopt to the new situation.
I agree that society has to be aware of the situation of e.g. the authors - but not through biased (and unpopular) companies that are doing it today (sorry, forgot the name in the USA), but through single authors stating the nature of their problem directly and unbiased.
And authors have to realize that demands for a control that tries to stop every single copy are simply unrealistic - and counterproductive. You simply have to accept a given level of "loss" in order to keep the normal market going.
Perhaps you even have to accept the Darknet (and similar) as advertising platform or as a chance - not as a danger?

Changing laws (or the internet or similar) wont change the problem as it is. It already is forbidden to copy books.
There is no technical approach that could possibly stop the darknet from working - apart from a total control over every single network-connection and computer-system, which again is neither feasible nor possible nor acceptable.