I thank you for your kind words… I cannot say if I “think” deeper
then most, but I can say that at least I attempt to think about
things that should matter to people………and I respect you for your
attempts to get to the heart of what it means to be human…
let us try this…………every society, every culture, every family,
has a set of assumptions… the assumptions I was born into
were about how America is the greatest country on earth, capitalism
is what makes America great and democracy is the best thing since slice
bread and that there is a god…….
when we are born, we are born into a set of assumptions… and those
assumptions are codified into ism’s and ideologies…My parents were moderate
democrats and I was born into that set of assumptions…now someone who is born
into republican household will be born into a conservative set of assumptions…
and being white and male, I was born into the set of assumptions of white males…
we cannot escape being born into a set of assumptions, the British have their set
of assumptions and the French have theirs and the Russians have their assumptions
and so on and so forth… within each society, we have separate and diverse
cultures… in America for example, we have the Amish, and they have their own
set of assumptions which exists within the larger set of assumptions of America…
Now at no point can we say, this set of assumptions is right and that set is wrong…
we simply have no way of knowing which set of assumptions are the right set of
assumptions… now the Amish for example have their set of assumptions and it
seems to work for them, but those Amish assumptions don’t work for me, does
that make the Amish assumptions wrong? Not at all… it simply means those
set of assumptions are not for me,… now I have called these set of assumptions
that we are born into, childhood indoctrinations…….
we are indoctrinated with the society’s/family/state assumptions…
and we call them our own because we have no other context to compare
those assumptions/indoctrinations with……… ism’s and ideologies are great as long
as we don’t compare them to other ism’s and ideologies…my brother studied
economics at the University of Chicago just after Milton Friedman had left… he would call
me and ask me about communism and it’s economics because at the University of
Chicago, they wouldn’t teach anything at all about any other form of economics
outside of capitalism…so I would fill him in on communist economics……
and other forms of economics…the university would teach the students the
basic assumptions of both academics and the society……….
so we are born into a set of assumptions and those assumptions are taught to us…
as ism’s and ideologies, myths, biases, superstitions and prejudices…….
and we grow into adults with some or all of those assumptions intact…
for me, I lost the belief in god quite young, before high school…and perhaps
even before middle school…….but I still believed in some of the basic assumptions
of democracy and capitalism and the exceptionalism of America………
but as I enter my adulthood years, I began to notice that the advertising
of those assumptions didn’t match the reality of those assumptions…
I discovered millions of people were poor and starving and barely able
to survive…… and at no fault of their own…I was radicalized by the
election of Ronald Raygun…. I slowly became an anarchist…….
being a young lad of 21, I wanted to change the world… to make it
a better place… with my own set of assumptions that I was coming
into…….I outgrew my childhood indoctrinations and discovered a new
set of assumptions that I adapted as my own……….
after many years of being an anarchist, I slowly began to
lose my faith… I wasn’t changing the world and it seemed
that no matter what I did, the world wasn’t going to change its
basic assumptions… which in reality is what I was fighting…
not the society, but the set of assumptions that our society had…
it took me a while to understand the difference… when we charge after
those windmills, it is the assumptions we are fighting……
today, 40 years later, I have a set of assumptions that more closely match
who I am, my assumptions don’t match the society assumptions… said
another way, my ism’s and ideologies don’t match society ism’s and ideologies…
but then, I discovered that assumptions/ism’s were a burden as they
are artificial and can be constructed out of anything……
now I am trying to reorganize my life without any set of assumptions or
ism’s/ideologies that most people/ society has……….
how do we live without a set of assumptions or without an ism’s or ideology?
that is the question I am trying to understand right now……
at no point do I believe any particular set of assumptions is “right” or “true”
or even real……. to my ever changing way of thinking, the battle is not
to find the “true” assumptions but the battle is to learn to live without
assumptions/ism’s and ideologies……
so to answer your question, I am not engage in any particular set
of assumptions, I am attempting to engage with “reality” whatever
the hell that means, by understanding “reality” outside of any set
of assumptions or ism’s/ideologies…so it may seem like I am engaging
with “reality” with some set of liberal ideology, but I am not… I am attempting
to understand outside of a set assumptions or ism’s…
Kropotkin