so we have tried to understand modernity as the
difference between, compare and contrast, the lives
of people before say, the French revolution and today…
but that compare and contrast lies in only one direction, the past,
what about the comparison between today and tomorrow, the future?
is society moving in the right direction? is my life “better” off then
my created person described in my last post, as Rene, is my life better
off then Rene? Depends on what is the standards used?
I am economically better off then Rene, I am not faced with possible
famine nor will I starve to death… but and this is important…
I can fall a great deal further then Rene… he is basically one small step
from complete poverty and homelessness whereas I while solidly lower
middle class, within missing three paychecks, I could face poverty
and becoming homeless… I have further to fall then Rene…
and that is another experience Rene will not face……
but the question still remains, how are we to face the future?
the conservative demands a return to the past, but we cannot
go home again… we can never return to the middle ages or
even the 1950’s… for better or worse, we are here, right now
in 2019 and we must decide how we are to engage with 2020 and beyond…
so much of our thinking is engage with ad hoc thinking… that is to say,
we deal with, focus on fighting the fires of our times with solutions
that are meant to solve those small scale problems…we see homelessness
and we answer with increasing the budget to better improve their lives…
but that is a ad hoc solution because it doesn’t engage with the reasons
we have homeless people… a solution must deal with a small scale
immediate solution when we must really create a large scale, comprehensive
solution that is a sociality solution for the homeless arise from
issues and problems within our society… homelessness is not
an isolated, individual problem, but a problem that stem from
our system and our choices within that system……
every problem I can think of that plagues society stems from
society in some fashion and every single problem must
be solved from a sociality standpoint. we cannot create small scale
ad hoc solutions for problems that stem from sociality issues…
homelessness is a problem because of the way society is organized
and arranged and can only be solved on a sociality level…
the same is true with every single problem we are faced with, from
poverty to homelessness to children’s lack of food to climate change
to pollution to overpopulation to income inequality and so on……
we cannot simply use an half ass a solution and call it a day…
we must be prepared to rethink and reorganize our entire
society if we are to successfully engage with and solve our
myriad problems…
but one might ask why? if you ask that you have failed to understand
the entire point of society and government……
the use of society and government is to find solutions to a problem
or problems facing a people…society/government is a problem solving
method for individuals… we use government to solve problems that
are not possible on an individual level…for example, on an individual level,
I cannot successfully live my life without the various solutions that
the government has provided me such as police, fire departments,
sewage plants, road and hospitals… these governmental solutions
to problems free me up to engage with my life and my own search
for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”………
without these governmental solutions, life is as Hobbes describe it, is…
“Life outside of society would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
it is society/the tools of problem solving like the government that
has created our “modern” way of life…….
and then we are still faced with the question of the future…
but the conservative demands that “government become small
enough to drown in a bathtub”
and the conservative works for and demands a small government
all the while ignoring the fact that it is the government as a solution
that has created our modern and somewhat successful modern world…
so it becomes a question of what problems, issues that currently
bedevils us that we must find solutions to and we must engage in
all the tools, science and technology that we have along with
that other tool, government to find solutions to our problems…
for that is really the path into the future we must engage with…
what are our problems and how do we find solutions to those problems?
that is the path into the future or a least one possible path into the future…
we can go into the future with the understanding that our engagement
with the future is about solving our problems and what tools do we use to
solve those problems like global warming and poverty and overpopulation…
that is one possible answer to how are we to face the future…
but there are always other possible answers to
this question of, how are we to face our future…
Kropotkin