What is missing to me
I have come here in order to reason about difficult things. I want peace and justice, not empty political promises.
To that end, I want to debate the core identity of the United States. That is not enough - I want to reverse engineer the entire social framework, lay bare the blueprints, so that the weaknesses are exposed and exploited.
I want to rescue my English language from the debasement it suffers at the hands of the ignorant and those paid to speak ignorantly, and use words the meaning and intention of which they neither understand nor wish to understand, except for the purpose of childish bullying.
I want a comprehensive, axiomatic system which provides a robust tool for analysis that leads to clear, decisive, action. The most elaborate economic theory is totally insufficient for this task.
First off, economic theory, no matter how minutely quantized, does not account for the creation of value other than as a commodity relative to exchange. This is a convenient point-of-view, with assumptions rather convenient for those who profit from imposing value from a position of power.
Those who stand with attempting to construct an open analysis of human behavior and political action can be humiliated, but will not be denied except if they stop this exercise. Not to give in to one's own self-deprecation, to come across as clever, means to persevere in an honest attempt to understand and to seek explanations, which are the best tools for arguing for and building a world of peace and justice.
I want to be taught by those who think and who dream with equal facility.
While every society is a collection of personal and social identities, logic and the brute force of elegant explanations are incorporeal and have no identity.
Most important, I want there to be long, difficult examinations of things as they are, and not how we wish to perceive them. This is as much self-analysis as analysis of what is deemed to be "outside" the self.
This urge toward a complete calling-into-criticism of society is the beast that any talk of "political revolution" unleashes. Neither "I" nor "we," rather "it," that difficult thing that the human intellect and the will must together create: a just peace for every person. It is a necessity for our survival, neither an ideal nor an empty exercise, even if the way appears fruitless and self-absorbed.
It is not enough to study history in a clever way, we have to be willing to engage in the ideas which hold the United States in a trance. Everything must be examined critically, down to the unit of the neuronic ensemble from which our thoughts and behaviors originate. No science can encompass all of this. Economic theory, psychology, neuroscience and any other self-limiting system of inquiry quickly stumbles against the limitations of their axioms, adapted through trial and error to fit the assumptions which have not been falsified through experiment, or out of which the entire discourse of a discipline arises, irregardless of their soundness.
Comments
Love your tag
Almost as much as I love your post.
In their own way GOS and trump are kindred spirits. Both will bring down their hammer against someone after a real or perceived difference of opinion. I doubt that either of Em have the capacity to understand what you wrote.
What you say you seek may seem like a dream to some, but aren't dreams as important as the path we take in this bizarre journey of ours? And without a dream, a lack of direction can lead to dead ends, false trails, massive time wasting, or worse.
If I am called a dreamer, and I have been called such, I feel proud.
Great to see you here.
Dreams
It is my pleasure to meet you. Thank you for reading. I am replying here to all those who have commented as of the time of this message.
Here is a facile quote about dreams and ideology:
"The tragedy of our predicament, when we are within ideology, is this: that when we think that we have escaped it [i.e., ideology], into our dreams, at that point, we are within ideology."
As for massive wastes of time: every one of us wastes massive amounts of time according to some set of criteria. The question is, who gets to impose the criteria? Tongue-in-cheek answers include my boss, my spouse, my children, the dog, Milton Freeman, etc. However, the notion of "waste" involves a judgment of value. Here we run into a potential contradiction of the commodified society. On the one hand, for exchange to be free, nothing has any worth before the market assigns it, in whatever form that may be, and in that sense has no inherent worth: objects, actions, things, persons have an economic ontology that avoids all judgment outside of the idea of monetary value. We are all equal. On the other hand, to declare that someone is wasting her time implies a judgment of value before the market, because time itself is another commodity. Ultimately, the statement "this is a waste of time" means "I do not value what is being done in this span of time, or I do not value the consumption of this time on some activity." We do this even to ourselves: "I am wasting my time here" can mean, "this person - perhaps even the subject - is of low worth." Yet that judgment is based on a set of criteria which cannot be reduced to a transaction, because there is no specified trade-off. Something can only be a "waste of time" compared to something else, but what?
A hundred worthless points to anyone who names the person who spoke the above quote, if more than one guesses correctly, then there will be a caucus to decide who has the most persuasive truth.
Woot! Another quality thinker migrates.
Thank for this, Aardvark. Deep thoughts, these. And deeply necessary in these troubled times. Nice to see you write here now too. Cheers, feather fall
Resilience: practical action to improve things we can control.
3D+: developing language for postmodern spirituality.
Terrific post
This is exactly the type of posts I hope to see here...ones that make me think and hopefully will expand my mind. Keep posting!
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Ah. My favorite things. Looking at the real.
It's a shame that speaking plainly about the personal powers every individual has causes folks to panic and hide.
For example, when Americans are ready to write a constitution for this generation and the twenty-first century, as other nations do, then they will be ready to move forward and engage meaningfully with one another. This is the root structural flaw causing most of the anxiety in the US. Until they deal with this, they are circling the drain whilst clutching their unreadable and moribund slave-owners constitution, which was apparently written by Jesus Christ, himself. The people believe they can't. They're afraid of bullies. They don't deserve anything better. Change is too hard.
"What better way to enslave a man than to give him the vote and tell him he's free," Albert Camus, observed. That's what I'm seeing. There are certainly other profound obstacles that prevent Americans from self-actualizing. They live in a neo-genocide nation where they are not indigenous; that shadow has not receded by any means, and it can't until it is redressed. Geography is another huge obstacle. The US is completely isolated from the rest of the world by two vast oceans. It has only two neighbors that it discounts as weak and inferior. The American people have no experience living within the boundaries of the populated world of over 190 sovereign nations, most with continuous histories in place reaching back thousands of years. And most sharing several borders with one another.
In their minds, the American people are outsiders, with all the exaggerated problems that grow from this mindset. At the moment, the US is considered to be the single greatest threat to global civilization. It is a terrorist nation. A Pew Global Poll from a couple of months ago nailed those stats in place.
I think this can be remedied. Shattering the media monopolies into a thousand pieces would neuter the government propaganda narrative that makes the people dumber and more savage every day. Everything else will flow naturally once they wake up and start thinking critically. Forced to cull through all the facts and information themselves, they will learn discern the truth based on the reality surrounding them.
Now, those are the people I really want to talk to. Only younger Americans want to have this conversation, because they are not yet fully brainwashed. But by the time they are 45, they'll be clinging to their slave-owner constitutions, too, and their corporate owners will smile down on the United Plantations of America.
Would Gov-Co. allow a visionary like Bernie Sanders get anywhere near the White House? Sanders, the one-man sleeper cell slipped through the net. What's his fate? That's a conversation the people should be having for pre-emptive reasons, if nothing else. We could call it "current events."
Hey, Aardvark, nice to see you.
Pluto.
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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato