let us see every age as an attempt to solve the “crisis” of
that age… what is the crisis of our age?
whereas the “kids” around here believe in conspiracy theories
and pedophilia, I hold that the “crisis” of our age lies in more
normal terrain…
we can see our age in terms of several different types of
“crisis”…
one: in terms of understanding how the individual and the collective
fit into each other?
two: we live in “nihilistic” age where systems like capitalism
and communism and Catholicism/ which stands for religions like
Buddhism and Hinduism… promote nihilism that undermines
the values that we should be seeking… which is the positive values
of love, hope, justice, peace, honor… etc, etc…
whereas the current nihilistic systems encourage the negative
values of hate, violence, anger, injustice… etc, etc…
part of the nihilistic systems is the pursuit of negative and false
goals like money, titles, fame, material goods… seeking goals
like these leads us down the nihilistic path… kinda like in Star Wars
where anger leads one down the road of the dark side…
our internal values should dictate to us our actions, not our actions
dictate our values…and this is important…we need values to
dictate to us what our actions should be… so if I hold to love,
then my actions should conform to my value of love…
if I hold to justice, then my actions should conform to the value
of justice…the values decide the actions…
but in our nihilistic society, our pursuit of baubles like wealth
and titles and fame and material goods, decides our values…
such baubles as wealth and titles are empty, valueless…
because they have no goal to reach, no direction that
engages us…they are simply actions that have no goal…
to seek wealth is to seek wealth… there is no other point
to wealth… to seek titles is to seek titles… there is no other point…
to seek material goods has no other point… you simply seek other
material goods and so on and so forth… what is the final value of
seeking material goods? it has no end or point to it…
so we are seeking the wrong thing and that might be another “crisis”
of our age… as I see it to be…
but we have other “crisis” we must face… for example, our
nihilistic system of the pursuit of baubles means that we
have become alienated and disconnected from others
and ourselves…in our seeking this individual goal of
wealth and power and titles and material goods,
we discredit any pursuit of the collective… we speak of
of one, me… instead of pursuing the collective, us…
and once again, what is the proper relationship between
the “me” and the “we”?
in seeking the “ME” instead of the “WE”, we engage in
a form of “Solipsism” that makes the one, “ME” the primary
focus of our attention… we forget that “ME” does not and
cannot be our sole focus of attention…
we survive because of our existence within society, within the “US”…
we cannot survive alone… that is a fact… alone we die…
and so we cannot engage in the mental game of “I” that
separates us and divides into “ME” and the “others”
we need the “OTHERS” to survive… and so we must in some fashion,
include “OTHERS” in our understanding of the world… hence,
we cannot hold to such “SOLISISTIC” values like capitalism and communism
and Buddhism and Catholicism…
It is about “US” and not about the “ME”…
Kropotkin