in thinking about Kant’s three questions,
what can I/we know,
what should I/we do
and what ought I/we hope for…
the second, what should we do is really a political question…
the first is a philosophical/scientific question
and the third is a religious question…
( recall that in Kant’s age, there wasn’t the split between science
and philosophy that there is now… science was philosophy
and philosophy was science) it was called Natural philosophy……
anyway, back to the the second question, the political question of
what am I/we to do?
what is the goal of life? that is essentially what the question
is asking, what is the goal of life… and that goal gives us our
actions as needed…once again, I bring up the idea of taking
a journey… without a goal, a destination the journey cannot
be completed until we have a goal/destination…otherwise
we are just aimlessly wondering around the land… which is in
fact exactly what American has been doing these last few decades because
we haven’t had a goal or destination to aim for and it is preventing us
from us accomplishing anything… we have been aimless wondering
about with no goal to aim for… that is precisely what has been the
problem with America these last decades… and the role of the partisan
followers in this biblical wondering the desert for the last 40 years?
their role has been to prevent us from creating a goal, a destination for
us to reach…their partisan bickering has prevented America from
coalescing around a goal from which we can then begin to move forward…
one of my major beefs with Obama has been he didn’t form or create a
grand vision to us to travel toward… he presidency was an ad hoc one,
where they went from one crisis to another without any master plan to
get ahead of the every increasing crisis… he went from position to
position but never connecting the positions into one master grand plan which
created a goal/destination for us to try for or reach…
begin with a master plan and then treat the following crisis under
the master plan…… so, the way forward is to treat any event or crisis
as part of the master plan and subsume those events into the destination
we are trying to reach…
so we have a terrorist attack… instead of treating it as a separate
and individual event, it becomes part of a overall, overarching plan
in which the terrorist attack is becomes part of the overall master plan…
instead of treating the terrorist attack, ad hoc, as a single individual event…
we treat the terrorist attack within the confines of the master plan…
we simply react to it as part of a comprehensive already created plan…
our response is one of, this has been expected and is already accounted
for in the master plan…… because we know what our destination is going
to be, we can simply overcome this and continue on to our overall goal……
9/11 didn’t need to become the clusterfuck it became if, if they had
simply had a plan in place to overcome it…… in other words, the 9/11
American response was far worse then the actual attack… the attacks
damage was not physical but mental, psychological… it damage our
psyche far more then it did physical damage………and it needed to be
treated that way……. it wasn’t the physical damage of 9/11 that was
the problem, but the damage to the psyche was the problem…
and by having an overall, overarching plan that had such events like
9/11 within them, we could have easily overcome such events…
if we had a plan, a goal, a destination to reach, 9/11 wouldn’t have
been such a deal… but because we didn’t, we simply reacted ad hoc
and by doing so, overacted in such a way to severely damage
America in the short run and the long run………
if you have a plan, a goal and you hit a setback,
that is exactly how you can say it, ah, we hit a setback but
it doesn’t matter because it is a small setback that won’t prevent
us from reaching our goal……. if you have a goal of saving
a million dollars and you have a setback of your house burning down,
that is a setback for sure, but it doesn’t have to stop you from reaching
your goal/destination… you simply take it as a setback and continue on
building your wealth to a million dollars… it doesn’t become something
that is permanent and stops one from reaching their goal/destination…
no, it is just a temporary setback and that is what 9/11 should have been…
a temporary setback… not an end all, be all………….
so what should I/we do… is really a political question and requires
us to think about and decide upon a goal/destination…….
so, what goal/destination should we try to reach for or decide upon?
and how does that goal fit into the question of “what are we to do”?
for the one answer tell us about the one question…
so, what should our goal/destination be?
Kropotkin