At your average college campus, there are posters and people behind official-looking tables encouraging students to “get active in politics.”
You can see the same message being broadcast from the media and popular entertainment figures. It’s important that we all “get involved,” they say.
Of course, they don’t note what might be a necessary precursor to involvement, which is some knowledge of the subject matter and some prove ability to make decisions in it.
The result is that the people around us function as a giant distortion layer, with every person trying to “get involved” without a plan, thus either parroting existing dogma or “inventing” new dogma.
What is forgotten is that politics is like all reasoning an adaptation to reality.
We humans, with our giant brains, get into huge amounts of trouble when we start imagining that the conjurings of our brains are necessarily related to reality.
Thus we create political concepts, two opposing parties, issues, etc. without asking ourselves whether any of this is relevant other than to the social process of politics itself, namely cheering for our team and not their team.
Most people would be surprised to find that politics could be a source of its own dysfunction. However, all human endeavors have pitfalls which are, like optical illusions, areas where our minds and reality don’t quite match.
During the election season, the insanity ramps up as people treat the contest like a football game. They direct personal ire at the other candidate, who they want to prove is evil, stupid, bad, selfish, etc.
This mistakes the nature of evil however. Evil is not an external thing; it is the result of our mistaken decisions, like those optical illusions, except we act on them.
Very few people get up in the morning and say, “I intend to do evil today.”
Instead they do what they thing they ought to do, which is serve themselves. In the absence of a higher guiding principle, this is all they have, and en masse they have roughly the same effect as a swarm of locusts, a bloom of algae or a panicked mob.
When some political party is clearly on a bad path, we view their ideology as the cause. What if instead they as people were on a bad path, and the ideology just became a convenient vehicle?
Others spend their time looking for the mythological conspiracy that explains why humanity is off-course (and it is, if you look broadly enough at it). They find the NWO, The JewTM, the Bilderbergs, large corporations, any number of religions or cultures to blame.
This misses the point. If we were truly caught up in forces so polarized that they cannot control their impulse to destroy, then there would be no struggle. The battle would be won and us enslaved in a literal sense.
Instead, what we’re seeing is an ongoing process of the blind leading the blind. Unlike a bad single leader, however, in this case it is a giant mob of people who essentially unintentionally troll each other with bad information, bad logic, and unrealistic notions.
This enables each person to feel as if they have “done something” and “gotten involved,” but to what end they don’t know. This sheer chaos allows whoever or whatever might be in charge to continue doing what it does, unmolested.
Like all disciplines, politics has its gotchas. What seems obvious often isn’t, and what seems to be the lurking truth is often more deception. As we go into this election, what defeats us most is our sheer inability to reach any kind of rational conclusion.
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Politics is all-consuming in modern society absent solid REM sleep or an especially tranquil visit with God. And because we “politic” in a finite paradigm then the “politicking” becomes a zero-sum game of maximizing one’s autonomy by minimizing the autonomy of others. Those that then take their politicking to a “professional” level become radical autonomists. They seek radical “freedom.” They seek a radical autonomy which necessitates a submission and subservience of all those that surround them (they have minimal autonomy). As a collective force, the radical autonomists exercise tyrannical control and form a “default elite.” They sell a more subtle and less threatening form of radical autonomy to the masses. Absolute freedom through deracination, secularization and homosexualization, i.e., A Self-annihilation. This then acts to reinforce their “default elite” status.
Like Mr. Stevens said… Don’t be a cheerleader. They wear short skirts.
The best explanation of liberalism ever, explains why all of the ‘reform’ movements end in heaps of dead people and a new Great Leader.
And then this leads us to the question of what is ‘autonomy’ (…freedom, liberty, equality…) and how can government grant it? I don’t think it can, because autonomy is a responsibility we take on ourselves, but a government or society can take pains that people without good intent do not interrupt people who are actually doing something that has good intent and results.
‘Self-annihilation’ is the elites convincing everyone else to die off, so only the elites are in charge, but this doesn’t work because the elites are only in power because the herd wants them there.
My selfish desires take precedent over any of your claimed “long-term” thinking. You posit that I should exercise self-control and somehow sublimate my desires for what, you claim, are long term results and effects.
I am not able to see these long-term effects, but my vote is just as important as yours. Should I somehow change my vote for what you claim is relate (which I can not perceive) when my – supposed “less-intelligent” – opinion is just as important as yours in society? Should I really neglect what I *know* for what you claim? I know I want more money and more sex and more enjoyment out of life – and the liberal party proposes that these are just and good desires, while conservative republicans try to claim I am perhaps sinning or wrong simply because I like getting high, practicing sodomy and selling gay porn to make money.
Assuming you don’t somehow convince me to change my vote and acknowledge that I may be wrong, even though I am incapable of realizing it, what will achieved? Society will continue in my direction and away from yours as it progresses to greater individual freedom and destroys the last vestiges of old and boring mores.
Your society cannot sustain itself because it consumes everything including each other. Nor do you have greater individual freedom when just yesterday, a ban was put in place for anything over 16oz beverages in NY city. In effect the government just told everyone there they are too stupid to make decisions.
Problem with progressives is you ban everything to make up for a lack of self control while spending everything to subsidize it. And in the end, you end up with not only less freedom, but a society that is in shambles.
It’s also a totally soulless place where people are obsessed with stupid egodrama and forget about the important things in life, which are not in the individual.
Imagine that all “boring mores” were destroyed and everyone had an ultimate freedom of “getting high, practicing sodomy and selling gay porn to make money”. Or maybe rob for money: it might create even more fun and “enjoyment out of life”.
I doubt you would subscribe for such a society: too hard to sell gay porno if everyone does it and nothing else. Because this “else” has gone with boring mores.
Now, now. People like him who want a ban on guns because they expect the criminals to obey the law. While morons like that “believe” the encroaching laws “protect” them and thus the responsibility to be aware and responsible, others will simply ignore it and take advantage. It’s like the slut walks. Women dressing no different than street walking prostitutes then taking offense when they are treated as such.
Jacob asks an interesting question: “Why?”
And there is no good reason, unless one is able to entertain the concept of personal responsibility.
Why should he forego his personal desires, for something as abstract as a stable society? The young are always selfish, self-immersed and overflowing with desires. And by ‘young’ I mean anyone whose youthful appetites continue on, regardless of age.
There is no good reason. Unless the individual sees one. And individuals generally don’t.
I hated my old, boring, restrictive society, when I was a teenager, and wanted only to escape and have adventures and experiences, in far-off places. Which is exactly what I did.
What I didn’t suspect, or expect, was that when, eventually, I returned, my society would no longer exist.
I had always assumed I would, in advancing years, be able to return to it, my adventuring done, but this was not the case.
Now I am stateless, cultureless, and in a sense, homeless.
Not my doing, of course, but I certainly bear some oblique responsibility for this state of affairs, by not actively subscribing to a society that – at the time – I could see no value in.
The basic question of a philosophy: How does it answer the question, “why should I do anything my fellow human wants me to do?”
Some people answer “because it feels good on some level.” That is a philosophy.
But I look at something like my marriage. I feel constrained and unhappy in it sometimes. Why should I commit myself to a lifetime here? Out of convenience? Yes, sometimes. But on another level, this is the only way I will learn a lifetime’s worth of love and how it plays through to the end. I want to learn that lesson. It’s not a feel-good one. It’s my challenge to learn how to act so that I place myself in an equal yoke with someone who is in many ways the opposite of me and can’t see things in quite the same way. There’s no reason to do this unless your philosophy is different from “because it gives me pleasure on some level.”
My philosophy says something more like “we do things other people want us to because that’s what we’ve chosen for the long term, and that choice is what the meaning is made of.”
Unless we believe in something larger than ourselves we are destined to become empty people. There is nothing inside except that which is able to learn from its mistakes, adapt and create itself anew. ‘Pleasure’ is an empty measure, because it puts a sensation before its meaning. If you repeat pleasures infinitely you end up just as bored as infinite nothingness. That is what relativity taught us, it’s just that most people are infantalized and haven’t caught up with the lesson.
Because if he thinks it through all the way, he’ll say that a stable society is the only chance at real happiness. Pleasures fade and really aren’t even that pleasurable, they’re what people do when they need something to compensate for not having a life with meaning. If you’re out there conquering the unknown, you don’t need to be sloppy drunk and promiscuous or on drugs. But if there’s nothing for you, might as well shoot up heroin and rape a barmaid. Prole drift.
I go in and out of cities. I try both, I couldn’t do well in either environment for a prolonged period of time, or so I believe. Have grown eternally frustrated with that kind of life, but then I don’t want to part with it, either. Damn.
But do they take precedent over reality?
I thought your way, once, before I knew how things worked. Now I find your view appalling because it destroys good things and replaces them with a legion of self-fixated, selfish and greedy people who lay waste to nature and replace it with more typical strip-mall globalist ‘culture’.
A simple and logical short-term lesson:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddganos/2012/02/17/why-socialism-doesnt-work/
What a story!
There are couple of additional inferences from this amazing experiment:
1. These students made a great mistake when agreed on the terms.
2. They studied for the grades, not for the knowledge.
3. They weren’t organized as a group and haven’t even tried to succeed as a group.
4. They all, including the top performing students, got what they deserved. Because they all decided there was no reason to study.
I have a possible technique for dealing with the crust of political nonsense. Learned it in linguistics school.
When people speak they are using language as an act to try and make something happen.
What if instead of responding to the content of what someone says, we take an extra few moments and look at the act they have made and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Sometimes a person just wants to stimulate their own endorphins by repeating a witty point they heard someone saying, in response to key words. Then it might be a good response to address it that way.
Sometimes a person is really trying to find common ground even though you know they won’t agree with you. Then it’s good to smile and say something like, “I see. That’s how it seems.”
When someone makes a personal attack, they’re trying to fend you off.
And so on. It’s really, really difficult to do this, though.
Or just treat them as talking points for your own agenda, which is what most people here seem to do.
Of course these people are on a bad path.
A good metaphor – “a convenient vehicle”.
Riding a bus with others who believe it will reach the destination.
As long as there is no demand – no route. At the same time, while having demand is necessary, it is not sufficient. If a required route is not offered by the transportation company, we ride an existing one. And we use to it.
Regarding ideology as a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society, we get the circle: people are on a bad path and create ideology that defines this path.
Can the course be right or wrong?
Aren’t we on our way to be enslaved in a literal sense?
http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/index.php/blog/239_seul_au_milieu_de_tous/
And read about “web 2.0″, “web 3.0″ and the evolution of internet.
Do you believe that Trotsky, Gates, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg etc. are blind? Do they really know not what they’re doing?
Yes, i agree we should work on ourselves instead of blaming someone.
The weak blame “the unjust”; the strong neutralize them.
Should we work on those who are usually blamed, or just exclude them, as if they are of little importance?
Don’t know. A set of new questions arises when i’m trying to answer this one.
Still, in general, “working” on someone is probably better than shooting / gassing him or ignoring him.
I feel doomed. Then what?
It’s strange how you’re similar to me, Brett, yet we come to rather different conclusions. I don’t know whether to support you or not. I like many things you say, but I find you somewhat homeblind. You speak of imagining things yet you’re political. You talk about objectivity but you’re subjective with your political opinions.
If I give you crap, even justified, I become hypocritical. If I support you I support not just objectivity but opinion aswell.
Damn division of things.