to create a better America

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

as I am still engaged in my reading “The icon and the axe”,
I have some ideas… when we think about, the rare times we do think, when we
think about reform or making our lives better, we think in terms of
improved material status… how to make people richer, or
have more materials in their lives, like cars, or houses or bigger TV sets…
but we don’t think in terms of what can we do to improve ourselves,
mentally, morally, intellectually, culturally…so I want a better world,
what actions would, should I take? Should I engage in improving the
financial status of people? no, I should make an engagement with
who I am and how I can become a more ethical/moral person…

the answer to the problems of life isn’t just a matter of economics or
political but it lies within me…in other words, to solve the worlds problems,
I need to solve my own issues… I can help society/the state best by becoming
a moral/ethical person…I can heal the state/society by healing myself first…
with every person who heals themself, comes a better society and state…

finding the kingdom of god isn’t going on a quest like searching for the holy grail…
it is more like seeking that which is inside of me… not the worse I have to offer, like others
around here, but in seeking that which is the best in me… to seek out what I can best do for
myself, others and the state… you want to fix what is wrong with America and the world?
you must then seek what is best inside of you and make that your gift to others, the state,
be it America or Great Britain or whatever country you are from…

hate and anger of the conservative can only bring about more hate and anger…
that is the only possibility of hate and anger… bringing out more hate and anger…
it is a dead end… for all concerned…UR once wrote a thread suggesting that it
is by hate that America can survive… I say, it is only by love that America can survive…
and by our work on becoming the best person we can become… the battle is against
dragons or evil boogeyman, no, the battle is against our lower side, the part of
being human that is of hate, anger, lust, despair, malice… the fight to remake
society and the state isn’t political, but lies within us, within our battle to
become fully human… not just animal or animal/human, but to become human…
which means we engage in the positive values of love, peace, hope, justice,
charity, honor… values we can only find by seeking them within us…
to become a better American means to become a better human being…
and that is the goal of being human… finding out and bringing out
that best part of us…

Kropotkin

2

This is the “better America” these Communist bugs and Marxist insects want for the country:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZr9mcPKkY[/youtube]

3

annnd back to reality…

when faced, as we are today, the question of what
is wrong within our society/state/culture/civilization…
as many have been faced with that exact same question…
one can see, quite clearly something is wrong in America today,
so what are the solutions? we have a couple of solutions possible…

one: we can react as UR has reacted and turn to violence…

two: we can try to change the rules of society, politically,
which tends to be the response of the left/liberal…

three: we can hide and pretend there is nothing see here…

four: we can claim, as the right/conservative does, that there
is no possibility of change… a man cannot change their spots…
I.E. a person is born evil or good, and they cannot ever change
that thus the possibility of change is not possible… what is, is
because we cannot change who we are…

five: we can engage in social/cultural change… change the society we live in,
but not by political laws, but by changing our culture…

six: we can hold as the conservative does, that the society is fucked up
because of this group or that group…if society is a mess, it must be someone’s
else fault, so we have the conservative begin the blame game, it is the liberal’s fault,
or the Jews fault or its the feminists fault because there are feminizing men…
whatever the hell that means…the conservative in search of a utopia, needs
to blame someone…thus the various wars, the war on drugs for example, is
an conservative attempt to find blame for a failing society…
the Iraqi war beginning in 2002, is another attempt to make war on someone
to seek correction of the supposed ills of society… there are many
problems with number 6… one of those problems is that this is
simplistic answer…it is nothing different than saying, poverty
is bad, and all we have to do to end poverty is to remove all the poor people…
a simplistic answer to a complex problem… the conservative loves
giving simplistic answers to complex situations… the “throw everyone into
prison” is one such simplistic answer to a complex problem of crime in America…
a liberal will ask, ‘why is there crime?’ and the conservative will say, “who cares”
someone must pay for there being crime in America…

seven: what if change is to come, not just in changing the conditions of life,
but in changing the conditions of one’s existence… to use the Socratic method
and maxims by an engagement with “to know thyself” and “The unexamined life
isn’t worth living” instead of rushing to making changes in the laws or within
the society, perhaps we could begin by changing who we are… the path to
the evolution of society really begins with one person asking themselves,
“What do I hold to be true”… or “What am I to do today?” “What should
I believe in?” “What can I know?” here we use the philosophical questions
given to us by Socrates and Kant to explore who we are and what are we
to do next? Despite UR insistence on violence as a method, we cannot
travel down that path… for all violence brings about is more violence…
the conservative’s path of hate, anger, lust, violence, following the
lower-level animal/human path can only lead us to more hate, anger,
lust, violence…the use of violence or hate or anger can never lead us
to a more just society, a more peaceful society, a society worth living in…

if we ask, what can we do to improve America or improve the American
society, and the answer is, as UR says, violence, hate anger, lust, fear,
then those who propose those answers are wrong…for those animal/human
values can only lead us back to those values…

so let us take a concrete situation and ask yourself, who was the bigger man
here? so on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded by
Mehmet Ali Agca… in 1983, the Pope visited Agca in prison and forgave him…
who is the bigger man here and why?
which action has created a bigger impact in people’s lives? the violent act
or the forgiving act? You do know the answer, but are you brave enough to
acknowledge that answer and then also engage in the “correct” answer?
anybody and everybody can engage in violence, hate, anger, those
emotions are easy to engage with, they are right there, always lurking
very close to us… all one has to do is bring them up and bingo,
we have reached back to our animal side, we are nothing better then
animals…but to reach into our soul and forgive? that is the higher,
more human path of existence… and that path is far tougher then
any random act of violence…violence is an easy answer, but to rise
above violence to reach forgiveness, love, peace, hope, charity,
these values are hard to reach and even harder to act upon every single day…

violence is the easy path, love and forgiveness is the much harder path of
existence…so are you going to take the easy path of the conservative
and act with violence, hate, anger, lust, greed, or are you going to
reach to your higher level and engage with love, peace, justice,
hope, charity… the higher values?

and the answer given will lay the path to either a better America or
to a failing America…if you want to create a better America,
you have to create a better person within you…

are you taking the easy path or the hard path?
for most people, the easy path is the path the will take,
but if you actually cared about America and where it is going,
then you will make an engagement with the hard, higher level
existence of life, which is love, peace, hope…

so today, “do not ask who you are?” but ask, “who can I become?”

Kroptkin

4

Right. A sound echo of something really great said back in the early 60’s:

“Ask not what your country can do for You, but ask what You can do for your country.”

5

K: that is certainly part of it, but it is more than just that…
the 60’s had the right idea actually, it was an engagement with the self
that drove the 60’s… the phrase that says it all is:

“Tune in, turn on, and drop out”

best shows us this working out for ourselves, what it means to be human…
this best sums up what has to happen in America… to become aware,
to engage with your possibilities, and then disengage with what
the civilization/state/culture is doing to work out your own values,
your own meaning… to make a better America begins and ends with
us making ourselves better…that is the path to a better America…

Kropotkin

6

you want to create a better America,
that begins with the question,

“Who am I?”

to know thyself…

Kropotkin

7

the conservative desires a return to the “glory” years of
yesterday…and what is stopping that is the Liberals/democrats/
atheist that holds different beliefs then the righteous conservative does…

the conservative wants, demands that everyone holds the exact same beliefs…
to believe in god, the Christian god, to hold to the exceptionalism of America,
to believe in “Rugged individualism” that “created” America…

want proof of this demand to the unitary nature of our beliefs,
note that if one doesn’t hold to the divine nature of IQ45, they are
demonized by the GOP/TFH party… I point to Liz Chaney who was removed
from party leadership for her failure to hold to the divine nature of IQ45…

the republican party demands one unified voice from the party…if one denies
one of the primary tenets of the modern GOP/TFH party… from the orthodox
belief of abortion, to belief in god, to the exceptionalism of American,
to the absolute rightness of conservatism…in the faith of the hierarchy of
human beings, to the notion that the only people who matter are white men,
everyone else is (at best) a second class citizen…

there can be no doubt or debate or indecision of faith about these matters
of religion…and that is how the conservative approaches the political,
with the faith of the religious person…

it was said for decades, by conservatives, that liberals didn’t actually
stand for anything… they had no “faith” in anything…but the problem lays
with the fact that the conservative cannot change or adapt their beliefs
because to change or adapt one’s beliefs means that the belief wasn’t
held with religious faith… if you receive the word of god, it was
blasphemy to change even one word… and the republicans hold that
their beliefs are from god…and one cannot change or adapt even one
word from god…(and yet they do it all the time)

or this can be thought of another way… think of the shrill, discordant
yelling by UR about liberals and violence… the entire thing is made up
in his head but he acts as if it were reality… it is a matter of faith to him
that the left engages in violence and the right does not and yet,
he still denies the Jan 6, 2021 violent attempt to overthrow the
government… we all saw the violence on TV and still he holds
that it was a picnic at the capital building… literally a picnic
at the capital building… while hundreds of right-wing terrorist
have been sentence to jail over the Jan 6 attempting overthrow…
which he has never acknowledge… but I ask, how can one hold
to this disconnect between reality and this illusion of the mind?

how can one hold to a completely different understanding of reality
that has no relationship to the truth? read the various post he makes
and note that he is the only one talking about committing violence…
no one else here is talking about violence… just him…and there is
that disconnect between reality/truth and his faith in “his”
version of reality…

so where is all this leading to? simple, we cannot create a better America
if we hold onto to false or distorted truths/realities as UR is doing…

we must engage in understanding reality as it exists, not as we wish it to be…
or wish it to become…do I hold that I have no flaws? not at all…I am as
flawed as anyone on ILP or anywhere else… but I do engage in the Socratic
maxim and I engage with the Idea, “to know thyself” and the second
maxim, “The unexamined life isn’t worth living”, every single day…

and I explore what it means to be an ethical/moral person, every day…
and where I best explore it is at work… my actions and interactions with
my fellow workers, management and customers provide me with hundreds
of opportunities every day to practice and engage with ethical/moral
behavior…and what have I learned?

that honesty is the best policy, that there is no point in cheating anyone
as that leads to the “pangs of conscience” I feel bad if I even attempt
to cheat someone…and so I don’t… and I feel a whole lot better about myself…
my goal is to treat people as human beings, not as something to be used and abused,
or something to be mistreated or as something to steal from… for I cannot reach my
goal of becoming human, fully human if I treat people as animals or as animal/human…
I treat people right not because there is some reward or something to gain by it,
but because it is enough to treat people as human beings… that is reward enough…
and frankly, I feel better about myself in doing so… so there is that…
I try to do the right thing even if, even if no one is watching…
so I return the shopping chart to its proper place even if no one is watching,
even if no one else cares… I hold myself to a set, higher standard of existence
then I hold other people to…and what values do I practice in this practice
of holding myself to a higher standard of existence…

I don’t judge people, I try to treat everyone equally/fairly, I don’t play favorites,
I treat every single person I meet with an equal amount of concern and attention…

Do I fail? quite often… but I am aware of my failure, and I take each interaction
with others, as another opportunity to get it “right” so I might not succeed in my
goal with one customer, but I have hundreds in which to make good of my goal
of treating everyone with dignity and understanding…

and that is my, one of my paths to create a better America…
but teaching people how to treat each other better…
and by teaching myself how to treat people better…

the point is that I am aware of and try to practice every single
day the betterment of… me… and in that goal/practice
of making a better me, I improve America at the same time…
one person at a time…

Kropotkin

8

ok, let us try a different tack…

how are we to become whole, unified people?

We are divided, fracture individuals in America…
how are we to become whole again?

the right/the conservative claims we can become whole again
an engagement with god/religion…or an engagement with
the values of the past, nationalism, white is right, the violence of
the gun, of upholding rugged individualism…of America first…

these values were once values that people held, but a changing
environment, a new world of technology, of machines, of
news getting around the world in split seconds, of being able
to travel to any part of the world in less than 24 hours…
if we have a new environment, a new climate of thoughts, believes,
faiths, and understanding, how can we hold onto the old beliefs,
the old values?

a new world requires new beliefs, new values, new faiths…

we are about to enter a new phase of human existence with our
ability to travel to other planets… we cannot hold old values if
we are engaging in new actions… think about it this way…
the journey of the old world, Europe to the America’s, wasn’t just
a physical journey on boats, but a journey of new beliefs and values
that made the physical journey possible… Columbus didn’t just make
a physical journey, but he also made a mental, emotional, psychological,
journey… that is why the new world wasn’t explored until it was, 1493…
because the mental state required to make such a journey wasn’t there…
the Middle Ages could have traveled to the new world, but didn’t, why?

Mentally the old world wasn’t ready to embark on the physical journey
that Columbus made…in other words, we cannot make a journey of any type
until we have worked out our mental, emotional, psychological state
to engage with new values… our physical journey requires us to make
a mental, emotional journey first… and thus we have the exploration of
the new world only once the old world was mentally and emotionally
ready… every single journey we make, be it to another country or to
to become a better person, requires a mental/emotional/psychological
journey first…

any journey, be it mentally, emotionally, psychologically or philosophically
or physically requires us to be ready for it…so to create a better America,
requires us to be ready to make that journey… and I am… that is because
I am not married to or have my values fixed in stone… as the conservative does…

my values are values that can and should change with any new information or
a new environment that I engage with… values I hold in my current job,
should and must change if I ever change jobs… because the jobs are different,
the values underlying them are different… but that is the point…
to create a unified whole, a unified me… I must hold values that
will suffice during this job, the next job and into any retirement that I
might, in 30 or 40 years get… I should be able to adjust my values to
any new situation and still have values that unify me into one person…
I am aware of the conflict between the necessity of changing values as
my current situation changes and yet, still have values that
that unifies me as a person… how do I deal with this conflict?

by being clear as to my values and what they are and what they mean…
I hold to honesty because it is a value that works, past, present
and into the future…and yet, I cannot be so inflexible to hold to
honesty in every single matter… because a situation may arise that
requires, demands that I must lie… and I cannot hold to being honest
if a lie will help a life…so here we see that the situation determines,
in some part, the values we hold and how we use them…

it is a tricky path we engage with as human beings… and the values
we choose and the values we practice…

Kropotkin

9

is the path into creating a better America lie in social reforms,
political reforms, or economic reforms, or moral/ethical reforms?

the answer to that question will decide how the next
100 years will go…

Kropotkin

10

in thinking about pure, unfettered capitalism, as imagined by
Adam Smith, one realizes that to make it work, we can’t have
men who are easily influenced by greed and hate and lust…

for pure unfettered capitalism to work, we
we have to have saints as the leading capitalists,
and who among us is a saint? certainly not me…
and thus we have the failure of capitalism, the lack of,
or perhaps even the complete failure to have any saints in
leadership roles in capitalism…who has been a saint and was
still the CEO or the COO or even a vice-presidential role?

no one that I can think of… in fact, thinking about it further,
for capitalism to work at all, requires everyone to be a saint…
and the few that are saints, don’t engage with capitalism…
we can now see the failure of capitalism… we need saints for it to work…

Kropotkin

11

the path to a better America lies in the questions we ask
about America…

“What does it mean to be an American?”
''What exactly are we trying to do as American’s?"
''What future are we trying to achieve/accomplish
as American’s?"

the understanding needed to move into the future requires us to
first of all, see America and American’s historically… what has been our path
till now, and what is our path going into the future?

it seems to me that everyone engages in America as history, in
5 minutes before and 5 minutes after… we have CEO’s who think
as far as the next quarter and politicians can only see as far as the next election
and the average American until the next paycheck… so who is thinking about
where we are and where we need to be in one year, five years, ten years,
twenty years, and even one hundred years… and the answer is exactly, no one…

and therein lies part of America’s failure… our inability to think into the future
farther then 5 minutes… we might, individually think about our retirement
in some distant future, but that is the rare person… most people start
thinking about retirement and even after, way too late…

we don’t think about who we are and who we want to be, historically…
we don’t consider the past, we don’t consider the present and we certainly
don’t think about the future…the movement into the future is done “ad hoc”
as a temporary solution, and not as a permanent solution that we think about
and work toward… where do I want to be individually in 5 years? and where
do I want to be collectively in 5 years? questions people simply don’t ask themselves…

and in the creation of a “better America” requires us to think about
where we want to be in 1, 5, 10, 20 and 100 years and then to work
for the future we decide upon… both individually and collectively…

it will only happen if we think about who we are and what we are trying to do,
historically… yesterday, today and tomorrow…

Kropotkin

12

The only way to make America great again is to end the division and unite, which isn’t possible anytime soon. A whole lot of people need to die, or the country needs to experience total collapse. Until then, the country is fucked and on the continuous descent.

13

Start with yourself, faggot.