It’s difficult to think clearly and intelligently (the way society has trained you to think), about where in the world your mind would be if it was not created by society and what everyone else does.
It’s as if you’re screwed by even trying because you’d be using the instrumentality of what society has put in you in your stance in questioning the very same general preponderance. Whatever you discover would be incorporated back into society and claimed to be useful.
You want to government to own everything instead of civilians owning it?
In a government truly run by the people for the government to own everything is for the people to own everything.
Which people?
You need to run a government, by the people, so that the government can run the people that are running the goverment?
The government doesn’t completely run the people so its not an actual paradox.
People feel that they own certain things. That is criminalized in communism. It’s not just a way to balance out the super rich guys, anyone who has a small business is also targetted. Things like owning a house or a series of houses aren’t a crime.
I would think of it as being invested in everything as if a person is a share holder in the government and thus a joint owner of all its holdings. Communism can work fairly it just has yet to be implemented appropriately with actual power of control of the government being directed to the people.
Not that I think the ideal for of communism would be one where the government owns everything though.
The main point is that we should not be afraid of sweetness, sentiment, or how we feel about things.
Even if it is not always true (or even rarely true),
it still makes the world a little more beautiful than it would be without it.
As an experience,
it can still justify a life,
as much as any ultimate or absolute truth can.
When these come naturally there is no reason to be afraid of what you can do nothing about, unless they violate societal standards. Society has put fear in you. It tells you to watch your step and then urges you to be a peerless individual. There’s a form of neurosis at work there.
“We’ve gotten so wrapped up in our own ambitions that we have forgotten that the Capitalism that is exploiting us is the source of that ambition.”
Capitalism and communism are both idealisms. Ideal capitalism is where we each get a chance at owning things and making money, without things being monopolized. Wheras ideal communism is where all resources are shared. Both of these systems are flawed and have shown much failure in their application, but it has been the case that capitalism results in less evil and death compared to self proclaimed communists.
In a very short span of human history nobody can no the better at this point.
Actually, the symbolic order of the cultured and sophisticated puts this fear in you. Out of a rejection of “mainstream culture”, we, among ourselves, have this fear that if we allow ourselves to experience anything remotely like mainstream culture, we have somehow failed our role as intellectuals.
This takes its most odious form in that of the contrarian: the one that is so fixed on being above the common crowd that they automatically assume that if something happens to be popular, it must be inferior. They’re the ones that, when a group of people are talking about a band they all like a great deal, are right there, on duty, pushing a band most of those people have never heard of and making those people feel like idiots because of their inferior taste. They’re the ones always saying: silly child, you must look to this.
Coincidentally: listening to Hall and Oates You Make My Dreams Come True and loving it. And yet another 80’s song: Where Did Our Love Go -Soft Cell.
Anyone have a problem with that?
Now, of course, authoritarian threats to freedom always come from the mainstream. Layotard does an excellent of pointing this out in the appendix of The Postmodern Condition: the accessible and easily communicated. But that’s a problem we will always have to play by ear. And we have to accept that challenge. But that is no reason to abandon the things that actually unite us.
We have to be fearless in letting it all come out in the wash.
We are already united by greatness in commonalities.
It is the holding fast to the knowledge of how we ought to live, as purported by those who claim to understand the purpose of life, that causes the predicament that we think can be solved by continuing to use the same instrumentality that caused the mess initially. It is the ‘how?’ to live that is being over-thought rather than the living. It’s saddling us with a lot of solutions to a non existing problem.
Is it possible for us to just be still in that regard, stop thinking so much and start living?
Yeah, finishedman, this falls in with my Rorty inspired point and emphasis on natural discourse as compared to discourse with the arbitrary umpire of some arbitrarily chosen criteria (Logic, Objectivity, the scientific method, etc.). I’ve got no problem with using these criteria as tools. But if they are as powerful as their practitioners claim them to be, why don’t they just show us the product, live and let live, and let the truth come out in the wash? That is instead of beating us over the head with them?
Coming from a Deluez and Guattarri perspective, I just feel like trying to force these criteria act as stoppages to the flow of energy. And that, ultimately, stifles creativity as much as any tyrannical social system has. And as those tyrannical social systems have shown, repeatedly, the stifling of creativity can only lead to the downfall. In other words, why be afraid of being a poet in the face of science?
The only real criteria we need is open discourse and solidarity: the jam. All others are little more than sub-categories.
Philosophy, as Being, as Dasein, has become sick, not of itself, but that very shift unto a misguide Epistomoligy. Sure it has become divided (kierkegaard, "this Sickness unto Death), a sickness bought about, not realised in Kant’s predictable, categorised world, but it has always been the great fear driving it on, the solopsism, divided world a mistaken world of the will, a will driven more the poetry as the engine, than certainty.
What happens between entrance and an illusion of exit(no exit) is the building of insulation, padding, and feel goodness we build around our domiciles, knowing full and well their uncertain duration. To work against that fear, we reduced the factual but not the contextual and substantial values we have learned to live and identity with. These have become like armour, and what has changed is only what’s inside the amor, and our irrelevance in terms of identifying with it. It has become our secondary nature, live in it, but there is no need to understand it. The only order that comes close to being understood in this epoche, is the supremacy of the aesthetic versus the moral God, and we need, according to Kierkegaard, a distance below which we can’t see the patterns emerging.
These patterns formed out of probable points of interest is the closest we can come to a new , other worldly evaluation.
I can evaluate you, wanting to diminish me, or me you, by the use of a probable, virtual sense I have of you, and can use this functional approximation, as. Gage, to reduce you to your intent: to minimise your appreciation of the nexus between me and you, because you have become a democratise man, while concurrently increasing your distance, safety zone, in fear of mis-assesing how we are able to understand each other.
But it doesn’t end there, the process goes on, and there are limits how to people can become estranged.
Is it going to be a function of identifying each other on the basis of a presumption of a higher order identification?, or, on a realisation of the lower order retro certainty, of excluding and projecting a possible, but improbable future? Do we have the guts to seek an uncertain future, or resign and return to a certain, singular past, where the certainty itself has to be re-e valued through new lenses?
Finally let me add a caveat, for fear of misunderstanding: the Cogito of certainty is a singular thought. It's on that basis can I be certain of You as body. From therein lies the inferential thought "You (as content of thought)=me(simiarly identified). In this sense, I am cut off from you, as the mind from the body. Descates certainty lay in the solopsistic identity I = I because I as thought= I as content. (The content of I to myself is primarily a narcissistic reflection, a pure picture, of equating the Other, as the self.) This narcissitic content is really pre reflective, and sees the other as the self, versus in Descartes, the other is understood in terms of the self. So the Other, becomes an object, a substance, a material of the I, which is pure certainty, a formal possibility devoid of any content.
Because the tools of intellect, be what they may with all their sophistication, can do a swell job at exploring, examining and evaluating, but fall short of capturing the ‘live and let live’ motion and activity of the flowing nature of life. When you take portions of life’s events – segments that have been grouped for particular emphasis and scrutiny – it is interesting to construct concepts, values and judgments about how that part of living operates. When you slice life into departments like that, look at each department by itself and analyze that specialized area without factoring in other elements that touch life, you can draw cursory conclusions along a periphery. Yet, by the very nature of life’s unlimited expressions of energy and form, it’s a practical impossibility to encapsulate the actions of life into one area of study. The specialness contained in a flux and flow cannot be given a status wherein it can be steady enough to be captured and analyzed.
We are each creations of a complex and unfathomable working of nature. When we begin to look at the life that is functioning in us, that is when we begin to be drawn to what the intellect is imprisoning us into. It’s an encasement that will forever control, censor, manipulate your life and eventually cut off the ability of your life to be expressed in its own natural way. And that is why we have released destructive forces into the world in which life exists.
As long as the ‘I’ comes into being via a common indoctrination where we all ‘see’ a sharing of knowledge alike, we will be able to communicate our experiences. But why are some experiences replicated to where everyone can see what is in the mind of man? And is that where we assign significance … to a mind that is capable of accumulation … of containing and converting? Or do we simply realize that the mind is a slave to whatever we have arbitrarily picked and chosen from experiences that have been expressed by extraordinary creations of nature such as you yourself?
Possibly because there is no one without the other!