a new problem:
how do we get human beings who are involved in their own little world,
engaged in their private search for happiness which quite often means
the private search to fulfill their desires, it is money or material goods or
homes or cars or TV’s sets…
the search for happiness is equated with the fulfillment of desires,
and in the west, that desire is for material goods/wealth…
and how do we get those fixated upon achieving their desires to
exists peacefully within a society? where in the desire
to fulfill your happiness can come into conflict with the society’s
need for order. how do we get people to give up their selfish needs
to engage with what society needs? Let us take taxes for example,
people see the taking of taxes from a selfish desire to keep money as long
as possible in their own hands…those who oppose taxes see this issue from
a personal need to have money so they can engage in their desires to
happiness…….and by paying taxes, the money they want to engage in their
own form of desire for happiness, that money is taken from them……
so how do we get people who are engaged in their own pursuit of
happiness, which usually involves money, to engage with the state, to
become willing participants within the state, thus compromising people
ability to pursue their own understanding of happiness…
“the social contract” by Rousseau is one such attempt to get people to
engage with the state even though it might be against their own self interest
to do so…….the state becomes the higher goal for the people to reach which
means that the people freely will walk away from their own attempts at
happiness to serve the state… this idea of a higher cause has been the
working theory of how we get people to forsake their own selfish engagement
with the fulfillment of their own desires…
another attempt to get people to freely deny their own pursuit of happiness
is another example of the “higher cause” theory which is the reason
that religion is tied into the state… the French revolution was a classic
example of turning the people need for a religion on a religious basis
to having the state replace the religious pursuit of god into a secular
pursuit of the goals and functions of the state…… instead of religion being
individualist, we have a collective religion of the state in which we pray
to the state…this attempt to transform the religious into the
same feeling about the religious into a state worship is quite
evident in America today… every single Politician today ends
their speech with the exact same words, “god bless America”
that is an attempt to turn our religious feeling toward god toward
an religious feeling toward the state… to pray to a higher power,
replacing the church with the state as the higher power…….
this, in part, is why the religious right has mixed feeling toward the state…
they can feel that the worship that should be directed toward god, in their minds,
is being directed toward the state… and the continuous demand for a more religious
country but in reality that is really about the demand to make god the subject of
our prayers and thoughts, not the state…
it has been said, the goal has been for the last 200 years to find some method
of taking the religious feeling toward religions and god and find some way to
redirect that toward the state… hence we see Marx making such an attempt,
turning the feeling of religiousness we have into the same feeling toward the state…
a secular religion as it were with the state being the divine power being prayed
to and with money also being prayed to… think of the father, the son, the holy ghost,
where we pray to the father, played by the state, the son, played by money,
and the holy ghost is capitalism…
we have a new trinity… a secular trinity to which we can pray to and worship
as divine… just transform the feeling we have to god, toward the state/money…
and this attempt to transform has been going on for hundreds of years and
we see it every single day in America… we see IQ45 being the new god
and all should hail this god, at least according to the radical right wing…
replace god with IQ45… that is the agenda going on today…
but one wonders, how could this take place?
the answer is actually quite evident… once a commitment to
a prior ism or ideology is lost, then it can be replaced by another
ism or ideology… for example, Christianity couldn’t have done what
it did in ancient Rome without the fact that people no longer
believed in or could commit to the old gods… that gave Christianity
the chance to replace the old pagan gods… when people no longer believe,
they turn to new religions to replace the old religions…
in other words, people in America has lost their faith in god, religion,
the state… and they are trying to replace that lost faith with a new faith,
a new religion with the worship of a supreme leader who replaces god…
we have lost our high moral ground and we feel it, and so we are trying
to replace it with something else……
“what should we believe in?” another Kantian/Kropotkin question…
being played out in the streets of America today… should we hold firm
to the old gods, the old ism’s and ideologies of democracy and freedom
and liberty… or should we abandon the old gods for the new gods,
dictatorship, security, certainty……
people must have something to believe in and this is why the attempt
to find a new religion comes into play… replace the church with the state…
“so what secular religion should we believe?”
our 21st century problem…
Kropotkin