a new understanding of today, time and space.

so let us change this a bit…

think about your environment…

do you feel safe/secure within your own environment?

personally, I feel very safe and secure in my environment…

I live in a very safe town, within a gated condo complex with
lock doors to protect us… (which isn’t why we decided upon
this particular condo… it had elevators and we didn’t have
to lug stuff up and down stairs)

at my prior store, it too was a fairly safe town…
my new store is in a little more problematic area…

but nothing that dangerous and I feel ok with my wife or daughter
wondering about that area…

so given the fact my own and my family safety and security is not
an issue… I don’t see safety/security as being a major issue
for me…and it doesn’t impact my political philosophy in any way…

so how does your environment impact your philosophy… political
and otherwise?

so said another way… our political philosophy is a confession about
how we feel about our current environment…

so what are you confessing to when you want certain laws to be passed?

what does the demand for passing certain laws mean for us as
as human beings?

what does it mean for us as philosophers?

Kropotkin

so what this all means is this…

how we feel about our environment will tell us what
our political and social philosophy will be…

our engagement with our environment will help us decide
what our goals ought to be as far as our understanding
of what is needed in the world…

so when you read a philosopher, what are they confessing to?

when you read Hobbes, you see and he tells you, that all his
efforts stem from his being afraid all his life… the goals he
pursues comes from his lifelong engagement with being afraid…

so when a politician wants certain laws to be passed,
that tells us about their thoughts and feelings about
about their environment…

a politician who demands that everyone have guns, is a person
who is fearful and is afraid of their environment…

and I for one, would trace our current fearful atmosphere
within America to 9/11 and to the climate for the several years
thereafter…

so how does one work on their fears and phobias?

I would confront them as I did with my own fear
and phobia…I had a serious fear of heights for many
years… I attacked it by doing things that challenges my fears…

I took up rock climbing and I challenged myself to doing things
that challenged my fears… I didn’t let my fear of heights
prevent me from going to the top of buildings and looking down…

for example, the space needle in Seattle… I went up it and
then at the top, despite my fears, I look down at the ground below…
it made me nervous as hell, but I did it…the only way to confront
our fears and everyone has some fears… you wouldn’t be human if
you didn’t have some sort of fears… for fear is an evolutionary
devise meant to protect us from doing really stupid things…

and once again, we turn to our old friend, the three paths to become
human…first, we engage with our knowing ourselves…Socrates
ideal of “know thyself” and then we engagement with an reevaluation
of our values… then we overcome… if we follow this path, we see
that we must first know ourselves and the reason for our fears…

mine fear stems from when I was kid and I really had no fear…
and I had many stitches to prove that… until one day, I tried to
do a somersault off a high diving board and landed straight on my back…
which hurt like hell… and that pain, over years would lead me to
having a fear of heights, not of diving boards, but of the cause of my
pain which was, in my eyes, the height of the diving board…

once I knew the reason, know thyself, the reason for my fear of heights,
I could work to overcome my fears…to this day, heights makes me nervous
but it doesn’t paralyze me like it did before…

I overcame…

so, what fears do you have and why do you have those particular fears?

can you or have you overcome those fears?

and what does all this mean for our philosophy, both political
and our regular philosophy?

Kropotkin

now one might wonder how my “philosophy” is any different
then psychology or the dreaded phrase, “Self-help”…

and I say unto you… does it matter which terms we use
if it allows us some understanding of what it means to be human
and what does that suggest to us about our goals and possible
paths into the future…

I see no difference between philosophy and psychology and “self-help”
and history or economics or sociology or biology…

they are all aspects of our pursuit in understanding what it means
to be human and “what should we believe in” and “what we should hope for”
and “what our values should be?”

those disciplines are simply tools we use to make sense of the world
and to understand what it means to be a biological being in a universe
that is matter, but not biological matter……

Kropotkin

currently I am reading “Upheavals of thought” by
Martha Nussbaum…

Her book is subtitled “the Intelligence of Emotions”

I believe myself to be a rational man… if given a first
reply to a phrase test and the word was “emotions”
my first reply would be “danger, danger, Will Robinson”
dating myself, but what the hell…

I cannot tell if it is because I’m a man or if it is the way I was
raised, but emotions are my Kryptonite…or said another way,
“I don’t do emotions” but that is simply not true…

there is a serious disconnect between my words and my actions…

but it isn’t the massive disconnect that Christians have between their
words and their actions…but it falls into the same terrain…

for many years, because of my failure to grasp or understand emotions,
I would react in the wrong way to situations around me…this type of
reaction requires some sort of emotional intelligence which I didn’t have…

and to this day, I still don’t really react quite like other people…
when people tell me news that should elicit some response like, “I am sorry”
I quite often fail to respond in the “appropriate” manner…
news or information that seems to get people to react, doesn’t seem to
affect me in that manner…

it is a disconnect I have… and as I become more aware of this disconnect,
I am better able to learn the “proper” response…….

in many ways for me, emotions, my emotions are my enemy…
I have a hard time navigating my emotions……

and yet now I get far more emotional at times, then I used to…

we need to approach emotions with the same vigor we attack
other philosophical area’s like epistemology or logic or political philosophy…

what emotions drive you?

anger, hate, love, honesty, despair, sadness, happiness, disgust, contempt…
guilt…which is one emotion that drives religion, especially Christianity…
what do you feel guilty about?

which ones would you say drive who you are?

Kropotkin

existentialism with its emphasis on emotions such as
angst and existential despair and suffering…
with suffering and despair being an emotional
reaction/feeling… to/about life…

as human beings, our responses to life are emotional responses,
not logical, rational responses…

(recall my little post about Jazz music and our emotional response to
Miles Davis being the greatest Jazz player and others think it might
be Brubeck or perhaps Coltrane with the greatest Jazz album being
“Kind of blue” or perhaps Coltrane’s “a love supreme”… the point being
that we respond to such list as the greatest by emotionalism, not
by logical, rational thought…in other words, we judge by our emotional
response to something, not by our rational, logical thought about something)

the problem lies in this fact that we still react emotionally to things
and not logically or rationally…

our first response to something is emotional, we lead with our feelings…
and later we might temper our first initial thoughts by being logical/rational…

that is why philosophers up to now have been wrong… they always began with
rational/logical thinking when we human beings always respond emotionally, at
least at first…what is needed is an archaeology of emotions…
which is something Foucault never did, but probably should have done…

in thinking about it… I would guess that rational, logical thinking is a relatively
recent evolutionary devise…emotions, instinct are the basic, fundamental
means of understanding our universe… and is has been this way for millions,
if not billions of years…at its heart, life is simply emotions being carried down
from generation to generation…life can feel pain and pain is an emotional
response to our environment…and all life can feel pain…

so in a very real sense, rational, logical thought is a higher form of
existence… it is the next step, as it were, of existence… we have at
its base, emotions, feelings… the pyramid as it were… on the bottom
is its base and that base is emotions/feelings…

the next level is thinking

and the third level is rational, logical thinking…

even today, after hundred of thousands years, we still have people,
who deny and refuse to engage with rational/logical thinking…

think about it… those who put religion ahead of science are those
who engage with the base feelings of human existence…

revelations/Jerusalem are emotional, feeling understanding of life…

and Athens is the philosophy/rational thinking about life…

and we return to this old idea of Jerusalem and Athens…

and we note that Jerusalem existed before Athens…
and Jerusalem has always existed within the history of human beings…
whereas as Athens, Athens has not always existed but came into existence
within the last several thousand years…

so in our pyramid, what comes above the rational/logical level?

I would say it is the union of the rational/emotional levels…

but that is impossible… no, no it isn’t, we have had human beings who
have successfully integrated rational/logical thought with their emotional/feeling
aspect of being human… the key one for us is Goethe…
he wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the German Language and
he made scientific discoveries… he was able to unite the two
factions of rational thought and emotional feelings…

we can do no better then to learn to follow Goethe…
and learn to unite the rational and the emotional…

Kropotkin

as philosophers, we deal with the rational/logical aspect of human
existence, but at some point and we must give existentialist their due,
for finally bringing emotions to the table…now does this human/animal
understanding of people, events and things that first come from
emotionalism and feelings, should we ignore it because it is our first
response to people, events, things?

in other words, I experience something and I will react to it
emotionally, with feelings before I can react to it with rational/logical thought…

hence we get advise like, never judge a book by its cover… which is to
imply that we must “read” the book before we can judge the book, and
reading is a rational/logical activity……

when I first encounter something, experience it, I react emotionally…
as do we all… we must learn to temper our immediate “emotional”
reaction to something and learn to bring in our rational/logical side
to our every experience………

so when you encounter something, do you react emotionally?
of course, you are human so every experience you have, is experienced
emotionally, with feelings… at first

and later we might engage with that experience rationally, logically…

so, we must learn to pause our first immediate “emotional” reaction to
experiences and we must bring in our logical/rational aspect to judge
every experience… this will take time and effort for us to finally train
ourselves not to react emotionally at every experience………but to react
with some semblance of rationality and logic… but it will take time……

now the real question becomes, why? why should it matter that we change
how we react to first experience by emotions and not by rational/logical thought?

I am not advocating renunciation… for that becomes a different story…

I am simply suggesting that we pause our first initial reaction, which will be
emotional, to thinking about it, being rational about it… this will
help temper our emotional side of existence which very often leads us
to a wrong understanding of things because we were emotional and not
logical/rational………

Kropotkin

so we approach a religious problem,
that of the renunciation problem…

so many religions demand that people renounce
their desires and emotions……

but the fact is, we human beings, a definition of being human is, a creature of
desires and emotions… we cannot escape that which is built inside of us,
that which we have inherited in our genes and in our blood…….
desire and emotions…

we do not need to renounce desires or emotions…

we just need to learn to place desires and emotions
into the mix as part of, part of the means we use
to explain and understand the world and the universe…

we human beings, we desire… it doesn’t make that desire bad or wrong
or dangerous, no, it just means we must learn to control it…
desire by itself isn’t bad or evil or wrong… it just is…
but how we answer the question of desire is where we
find out the intention of desire…if it is bad or evil or wrong…

desire quite often isn’t even what we really desire… it is quite often a symptom of
something else… I feel a loss or isolation or alienation and I substitute desire
to somehow compensate for that feeling of loss or isolation or alienation…

it might, might explain our current mania for desire by the fact that we
really are compensating for some other emotion or feeling like isolation or
alienation…

but Kropotkin…you are engage in psychology… not philosophy…
and as I have stated before, I don’t see any division between
psychology and philosophy and history and economics and sociology…….

to my mind, they are all simply different aspects of the same thing…

Kropotkin

the book I am reading, “Upheavals of thought” has
given me new thoughts about such matters as
compassion and kindness and empathy……….

I am not by nature a compassionate person…
whereas my wife is always a compassionate person…
to a fault actually…

I am forced to come to grips with my “viewpoints” on
such matters…

I see injustice and I become mad… I want revenge… on those
who practice injustice… but it calls into question why?

I want revenge more then I want those people to receive justice…

it calls into question my own understanding of who I am…
am I a “kind” person… perhaps, am I a “just” person?
I like to think so, but if I demand revenge before justice,
am I really a 'just" person or am I just someone looking for revenge?

I have been “wronged” in my life and my response has been
to dream of revenge… I’ll teach those “idiots”… but in the end,
what exactly am I thinking about?

what is the value of the pursuit of revenge as oppose to the pursuit
of justice?

is pursuing “revenge” really a pursuit of justice?

somehow I don’t think so…have I actually been able to get my revenge?
once, and frankly, it wasn’t as much “fun” as I had hoped it would be…

to engage in the pursuit of revenge instead of the pursuit of justice says
something very fundamental about me……….

am I a “kind” person? I would like to think so, but and this is important,
I can see myself and have done things that wouldn’t by any stretch of
the imagination be considered to be “kind”……

I am a typical human being whereas I have some sort of self image
but at times, at times, I even conduct actions that confirm my
own self image, but what about the other times?

what about those times, I don’t conduct myself in accordance to my own
self image? I usually consider myself the smartest person in the room,
and usually I am, but what about those times, I am not?

emotionally, how do I handle this? do I deny, do I make excuses?
do I just pretend that I am still the smartest person in the room?

well, emotions are the same thing…I see someone being kinder then
me, which frankly is just about everyone, and how do I see that
being reflected back to me? I don’t… and that is the point…

I don’t…it becomes two distinct and separate acts… my kindness
becomes one distinct and separate act and other people kindness
become another…I don’t make the equation at all… and by doing so,
I can still maintain the pretense that I am kind and loving and all that stuff…

and in the end, it is about maintaining the pretense that I am still what my
ego demands of me…my ego wants me to believe that I am a “kind”
“decent” “warm” “humane” “lovable” “justice seeking” human being…
but what is the reality? am I who I “believe” I am? the honest answer is
sometimes, sometimes…….

and the question becomes, am I ok with being the person my ego wants me to
be “sometimes”?

but let us take this even further… should I make being a “kinder” person
a value to be achieved? in other words, what values should I pursue?

“Kindness”? “humane”? “just”? “loving”? “decent”? among the thousands of
value’s possibilities? which values should we engage with and why?

why should I desire to become more “kind”?

for whose benefit does that desire help? me or the society?

in other words, what is the goal here? to what end does my pursuit
of “kindness” involve? why should I want to become “kind”?
what is the end result of my increased “kindness”?

that will depend upon what sort of society we are aiming for?
if we want a cold, angry, mean society, then “kindness” is not the goal,
for “kindness” doesn’t get us our cold, angry, mean society…

but if we want a kinder, more loving, a gentle society, then we
should and must emphasis “kindness”………

should the bottom line becomes this, what kind of society do you
want to see and more importantly, why this type of society?

you have to be able to justify any type of choice you make in
deciding why type of society you are working toward…

so the question is asked, what is your vision of what a human being is?

ultimately, what are we working for? what kind of society should we have
and why that society? and if we are working toward a certain type of society,
then what type of people should we have in that society?

Kind? mean? angry? loving? happy? just? honest? responsible? insightful?
dependable?

what values are we really trying to become?

what values are you striving for?

and why?

as always, comes the question of why those values and not another set of
values…

strip away your ego driven idea of who you are and come to grips
with the person you actually are…few, few if any can begin the
honest search for the “real” person that lies within us…take away
your ego and see the person you really are…

do you like what you see?

Kropotkin

we look at emotions and we judge them to be
“irrational” and we consider that to be bad on some
basis or grounds, but why?

we see emotions as being Irrational and we see that
as being bad, but why are emotions being irrational, bad?

emotions being “irrational” is kinda the point of emotions…

recall, everything but everything must be part of an equation,
and if we correctly understand emotions, then we
can create an equation…

emotions = rationality…

the two are equal… their role is the same…
they are two means by which we navigate and understand
the world…

I am a checker in a supermarket… I have to be able to spot
what kind of person I am dealing with very quickly…
is this person going to give me a hard time or work with me
or does this person want some “engagement” or
does this person want to get the hell out of the store?

I have to decide very quickly and I use my emotions to make
that decision… and that is the value of emotions…
we can make very quick decisions based on nothing more
then how a person is standing in line and quite often,
we are correct in our “understanding” of that person…

we make judgement based on intuition and experience
and instincts… or just a feeling about someone…

and we are quite often right…

people can sense other people… again, intuition or instincts
or whatever you want to call it… but it is quite often far more
reliable then our “rational” self…….

are we sometimes wrong? yep, recall that saying, don’t judge a book
by its cover…sometimes our instincts is really, really wrong…

but we cannot simply discard our evolutionary and quite often life-saving
instincts because we “think” that we should be “rational” or “logical” when
being “rational” or “logical” isn’t as quick or as effective as intuition or instincts…

we must learn to temper our rational/logical self with our intuition
or instincts and we must be able to temper our intuition/instincts with
our rational/logical self…

it is a balance, an equation that we must learn to engage with…

emotions aren’t bad and neither is our rational self…

an excess of one or the other cannot be of use because we need
both of them in equal parts to become fully human…

we are millions of years of instincts and we must be able to
use that because it is the reason, one of, that we human beings
have become who we are… we survived a million years of
living in nature by our instincts, our intuition… and we
need them to continue to survive… but we need to equalize
our rational/logical part…

Kropotkin

a couple of points…

should we consider IAM constant demand that we look at
“conflicting material goods” emotionally or should we engage
in it rationally?

by what means are we to understand the world and our place
within it? emotionally or rationally?

and the choice we make, either emotion’s or being rational,
will decide how the matter is settled… for our emotions lead
us one way and being rational will lead us another way…

but the goal is understand ourselves enough to the point,
where if we choose being emotional or to be rational,
we still wind up in the same place…

emotions and rationality are so attuned to each other that
making a choice for one, doesn’t, doesn’t lead us away from the other…

that is the goal, where we have emotions and rationality become so attuned
to each other where one choice doesn’t mean we deny or ignore the other
possibility…we see emotions and rationality as two sides of the same coin
and later, the same thing… simply as means to understand and, AND
as means to achieve whatever goal we are engage with… some goals
require, demand emotions to achieve and some goal require, demand
rationality to achieve…what goal we decide upon then requires us to
decide upon the means to achieve… either emotions or rationality…

if I pursue the quest of understanding math and the higher goal of
understanding higher math such as geometry, trigonometry and calculus…
we do not use emotions to achieve an understanding of that higher math,
no, the method of understanding the world via emotions will not help
us in understanding the higher math… rationality will help us, logic will
help us…if my goal is to fall in love, then rationality will not help me…
love is not rational, love is not logical…that doesn’t mean that the two,
emotions and rationality is opposed to each other, in some weird attempt
of one to dominate the other, no, we cannot have either to become dominate
over the other because we need to two, emotions and rationality, to
to engage with each other equally…and at the right times… to engage
the emotions when it is necessary and engage in rationality when it is
necessary……

so, you want to become a “complete” human being, a human being
where the emotions and rationality are equal… study someone
who has mastered having equal use of both the emotional and
the rational… study Goethe…

Kropotkin

in our understanding of the world, we base
it upon certain unstated assumptions that we hold…

the point is to bring out those unstated assumptions into
the open and then decide about them…

in other words, the conservative viewpoint is full of unstated
assumptions about the world and the people within that world…

as is the liberal viewpoint full of unstated assumptions about people
and the world…

for example, one of the unstated assumptions of liberals is that given
a chance, people will be able to make something of their lives…
if we create equality then people will be able to build upon that equality
to make “something” of their lives…

the conservative doesn’t hold to these assumptions…
if we “give” people the basics, then they have no reason
to strive to “become” something…we give people no
incentive to do anything if we fulfill their basic needs…

now, conservative believe that my assumptions
are “weak” and “softhearted” as if believing in equality means
one is weak or softhearted…

we base our “liberal” or “conservatives” values upon certain
assumptions of human beings, and we act upon those assumptions
as if they actually exists within reality… now they may or they may
not actually exists… but we certainly act upon them as if they exist…

my assumptions are based upon certain idea’s and your assumptions
are based upon certain idea’s… first of all, where do we get our
assumptions? secondly, are our assumptions correct? do they correspond
to the “reality” out there? are we just projecting the fact that
within us, the idea that we want to be “good” or a “just” or a
“kind” person influence our assumptions of what people are…

in other words, are our assumptions about us influence
our assumptions about other people?

if we want to be “good” people, does that influence our
assumption that “all” people want to be “good”?

I want to think, assume, that I am a good, decent person,
does that mean I assume everyone wants to be a good and decent person?

this question of our basic assumptions of who we are and
our basic assumptions of who people are and what they
ought to be, haunt our understanding of who we are
and what is the point, meaning of human existence…

to become who we are means we must bring out the assumptions
that haunt our understanding of what it means to be human…

what are you doing to bring out your assumptions into the open?

Kropotkin

if we have assumptions that we base our decisions upon
as individuals, then we can assume that we base our collective
decisions also based upon collective assumptions, so, what
are our collective assumptions? and is America’s assumptions,
different then the UK assumptions and different then
French assumptions and different then other people assumptions?
perhaps it isn’t the truth we should be seeking, but the collective
assumptions that we live for, by and make decisions about?

Kropotkin

now one might suggest that I should be a “philosopher”
and give my proscriptions about what a “proper” society
should entail, both individually and collectively…

but that isn’t the role I see for myself, I am simply the guy
who points out the issues, and it is for you to make
the decisions about what you want to do about it…

I can lead you to water, but I can’t make you drink it…

the battle to become human ultimately is a personal, private
one that engages us in an individual level and then after that,
can we engage on some sort of collective level…but one might
say, but my pursuit of understanding my assumptions may take my
entire life… and it might…so what?

what else are you doing that is so important?

earning money? gaining titles? getting fame?

those are just another set of assumptions that
we strive for…

are they really worth the effort we make to gain them?

you already know my answer…

but what say you?

Kropotkin

as we have so far covered our individual understanding of
our assumptions, but we really haven’t covered our collective
understanding of our assumptions…

the basic political structures we have today are based
upon long standing assumptions…

in other words, democracy is based upon basic assumptions that
people hold… and a monarchy is based upon another set of
assumptions and dictatorships is based upon another set of
assumptions…

the political process that we work for and base our lives upon,
is simply a series of assumptions that we collectively agree to…

if I, and I sincerely do, believe in freedom as the key goal to
what is necessary for a human being needs, then that belief
in the value of freedom, is based upon an assumption that I hold…

and If you hold to capitalism as the defining goal of human achievement,
then you hold a certain set of assumptions…… assumptions that I believe is
wrong… but those beliefs I hold is also set upon assumptions…

we have assumptions based upon assumptions based upon assumptions…

at what point shall we begin the task of working out our assumptions to
begin the task of holding beliefs that are not just a set of assumptions?

this collective task of holding certain political and social beliefs
must be tied into the task of breaking our assumptions…
upon which we base those certain political and social beliefs…

the battle to be human starts with us… with us beginning to
understand the basic assumptions that we hold to be dear to our lives…

“that we hold these truths to be self-evident” ……….

and that those truths we hold to be “self-evident”
are truths and beliefs to be nothing more then a set of
assumptions…

the battle to be human means we must first do battle with the
assumptions that we engage with and operate with as a matter of course
in our lives…….

Kropotkin

so let us think about the law and morality that we have
seen over the course of human history…
for example, Greek law is different then Roman law
which is different then ancient Chinese law…
and Greek Morality is different then Roman morality
which is different then Chinese morality……
but why?

we can’t we have law or morality which is uniform
and appropriate to each and every civilization?

because each civilization’s laws and morality is based upon
a different set of assumptions and because each civilization assumption
is different, we have vastly different laws and morality…

thus we cannot, at this point, have a uniform across the board law
and morality because each civilization/country has a different set of assumptions…

but could we have a set of uniform and set series of laws and “morality” if
we remove our assumptions?

possibly? but how do we achieve such a goal?

might I suggest here is where we use rationality and logic…
but even rationality and logic is still based upon a set of assumptions…

but what about certain aspects of our basic understanding of such
“ideals” such as socialism and capitalism and democracy and taxes
and the “welfare state”?

yep, each idea is based upon some sort of set assumptions…
such as the “welfare state”… we make certain assumptions
and then we follow it out in laws that either increase or limit the
“welfare state”…

how are we to know what is right?

perhaps by some agreement with what is the goal, purpose
of society/civil society… what is the point of having a society/state?

your answer will tell us your set of assumptions about what it means to
be a human being……

so what is the point, the purpose of the human existence?

we have so many and wildly different answers because, perhaps,
we operate on so many wildly and different assumptions…

we certainly have a “sticky” wicket here…

Kropotkin

and what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China?

everything………. look about our current society…we are a polarized
society, very, very polarized… and why?

because we are operating under a different set of assumptions…

the “blue” states have one set of assumptions
and the “red” states have another set of assumptions…

and what is the solution?

starting over with our assumptions…

begin with the assumptions that each side begins with…

do you believe that people are inherently “good” or do
you believe that people are inherently “evil”?

that question alone should clear some of the grounds of
polarization that exists between the two sides…

“do you hold these truths to be “self-evident”, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness”

within that paragraph lies several different assumptions…
that the point of life is life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness?

I for one, would disagree with the idea that the point of life
is the pursuit of happiness……

and the divide between “blue” states and “red” states can be said
to divide upon the very lines written in the declaration…

that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the point of, the purpose
of our existence…the liberals, who for the most part live in “blue” states
might make the pursuit of justice as important, if not the most important aspect
of life whereas the conservative might say, it is safety/security to be the most
important aspect, the point of, the purpose of life…

to say, we can agree to disagree is to avoid this basic and fundamental
set of assumptions that divide our country into “blue” and “red” states…

for the good of the country, we must and soon, agree to a certain set of assumptions or
we risk going to civil war…….and then the winners will impose their set of assumptions
on the losers……. I would rather we collectively agree upon a set of assumptions,
but we don’t always get what we want…

the divide in this country is one of which assumptions are we going to abide
by? the fundamental question of our time is simple,
which set of assumptions are we going to work with and abide by?

Kropotkin

let us approach this a little deeper…

let us take our assumptions and look at them…

for example, conservatives, generally, believe in god
and they believe in hierarchy…and they don’t believe
in equality……

let us take conservative press as the conservative belief system…

for example, we know that conservatives are against the equal rights for
women and gays and other “oppressed” people…but why?

why not equality for everyone? the usual argument lies around the fact/assumption
that everyone is already equal? but we know that not to be true…….
for if everyone was equal, then we would have women who were paid equally
as men…and that isn’t true… but then conservatives would argue that
for “some reason” that women don’t need to be or shouldn’t be paid equally
as men… that is an assumption…liberals argue that women should be
paid equal as men…again an assumption… but what is the value of one
over the other? we have the argument that women should be denied, negated
for reasons… by conservatives and we have an argument that women should
be treated equal with men…

the liberal argument is not a negative one…the conservative argument…
which is based upon denial, negation of women…that they don’t deserve
to be treated equally…is a negative argument… it is based upon a negative
assumption…

conservatives base their argument upon the existence of god and yet,
they cannot show us the existence of god… their argument although based
on a “positive” argument, the existence of god, cannot be defended…
because it isn’t true……… their is no proof of the existence of god as their
is no proof of the inequality of human beings that is presupposed in the conservative
argument… for example, many conservatives rail against Jews, the “elites”,
the “deep state” without any proof or examples of such inequality of such idea’s…
for example the “Jews”… conservatives rail against the Jews as being “somehow”
negative against society or the conservatives interest… but they never have
the “proof” that their examples actually exists…that the “Jews”
hold or dominate the world’s economy… show us how that is true?
and the conservative will launch into right wing conspiracy theories
until the cows come home and at no point will they actually reach a
fact that can be proven……… it is all about emotions and feelings…

my daughter is a conspiracy nut… she believes in the chemtrails
and the right wing conspiracies that dominate their lives…
she believe in alex Jones and other foolish souls…
why? because she believes that she is above the others sheep, like me,
and she has “researched” it… but she hasn’t researched anything…
she has simply look at things that reinforce her already held beliefs…
like a good conservative she is…she won’t reach out beyond those
conspiracy beliefs to examine other types of research because of
her already held conspiracy theories which says, anything from the government
is already compromised and therefore untrue… she truly believe this
and this is why she can’t move past any set held of assumptions…
she cannot challenge her assumptions because to do so would mean
she would have to challenge beliefs by which she identifies herself…

her beliefs and her identity are one and the same…….that is conservative
thinking…the traditional charge against liberals has been we don’t

hold to principles, that we are simply picking up views that are current
at the moment…which puts us against conservatives who hold values
and principles to the death…the conservative holds to values that
are traditional because if they have held over time, they are values
worth holding…that is an emotional response…

liberals have been accused of holding rational views over
irrational views like the believe in god or the inequality of human beings……

but the liberal argument is that the changes in environment makes
changes in one’s viewpoint, in one’s principles, a must… we must
change with the times, says the liberal…nonsense, says the conservative…

again, a different set of assumptions…….

but we can use being rational as a guide to suggest to us that
we must change our principles, our viewpoints if we are to continue into
the future…

we cannot deny that changes in the environment requires, demands
that we change how we operate… if we must change to met changing times,
then we should change to meet changing times…says the liberal…

no, no, says the conservative… we must stick to our principles with values
that carried our fathers and their fathers through difficult times…

but if the times demand we change, for example, with climate change,
then we must change or we are faced with the possibility of severe
trouble in the future……

but one might say, Kropotkin, seriously, you haven’t said anything at all…

just clichés and crap……… it all depends upon your set of assumptions,
now doesn’t it…

Kropotkin

but what if, what if one of my assumptions if shown to be wrong…
that is the basic difference between liberals and conservatives…

where I am wrong and it doesn’t damage or change my understanding of
who I am… if a conservative is wrong, it damages and undermines
their understanding of who they are… their beliefs are tied up
into their understanding of who they are… my beliefs are not…

if I am wrong, so be it… it doesn’t change my understanding
of who I am……… that is the basic difference between a liberal
and a conservative…my beliefs system doesn’t define who I am…
whereas a conservative belief system does define who they are……

look at how hard conservatives will go to defend their basic assumptions
of life… look at how hard IQ45 will go to defend his basic position…
he lies as often as he breathes and why? because his understanding
of who he is, is defined by what he believes in…he cannot separate
the two… if I am proven wrong, it isn’t the tragedy in life that it is
for a conservative……. the field I play on may change, but it doesn’t
affect me whereas for the conservative, the field of play changes how
they feel about themselves…

now one may say, Kropotkin, you are wrong… perhaps…
but it is my set of assumptions that is wrong, I am not my set of
assumptions…… I am separate, apart, different from my set of assumptions…

I am a human being… with a set of assumptions…

the idea that I am a human being doesn’t change with a different
set of assumptions…the way I might play the game might change with
a different set of assumptions, but I still begin in the same place…

I am human…with needs and wants and desires……. that won’t change
regardless of the assumptions I may make about the needs, wants, desires I have…

it won’t rock my world if my assumptions are wrong…
but it will rock the conservatives world…

Kropotkin

a paper you might like pete: pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/ag … atism.html

K: very interesting, thank you for that piece…

Kropotkin