Why can't we have a society where the sick, the depressed, the lonely, the broken are sheltered? Why is this anathema? Why are we actively thwarted in establishing a polity, a Commons, where a a person who is clinically depressed receives care as a priority? Why must society be arranged so that the cruel, the hard and the domineering receive all the social benefit, where people who can use others and dispose of them have all of the machinery of state and culture and advancement at their disposal, but where a child who cannot explain her sadness is just supposed to shut up and get tough in order to prove her moral worth?
Why is that men who rape and abuse are routinely forgiven their transgressions, in a set of networks organized to isolate their pasts as off-limits to their present, but a woman who "experiments" once is a whore now, was a whore then, and always ever after will be a whore?
How is it that a relatively small cabal of people who treat others as mere tools can order up and maintain vast armies, exploitative systems, niche polluting power systems, alienating transportation grids and whole continents as rent extraction regimes, but basic survival for the rest of us is a drain on the system?
Is this natural, inevitable, the consequence of merely being human, or is it in fact a history imposed from above, enforced with violence and privation, and therefore subject to alteration?
Well?
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
9 comments:
I take it that's a rhetorical question in which case allow me to deconstruct: both.
Hobbesian situation: Check. Alpha individuals permeate nature. But, then again, so do cooperative and egalitarian societies.
History & Impose & Above: Pathetic fallacy. Social relations are fluid, not linear. At times, though, more exploitative. So: Check minus. And, yes, subject to alteration, especially as humans learn to work sustainably within Malthusian conditions of scarcity. Learn to get over the false consciousness of zero sum society game. Process is slow and not always progress. The question is whether Process will keep up with necessity.
Malthus was wrong. Nature is not Malthusian. Scarcity is not natural. Populations are not merely algorithms. And "above" accepts as observational and demonstrable that we have rulers. That rulers exist does not suggest (a) that they ought to (b) or that must necessarily and obviously be thus.
I'm also not asking a rhetorical question. Or set of questions.
Since this is a descrtiption of western culture it is a natural outcome, among other possible outcomes, but it was never ever inevitable. That cultures less cruel have existed in the past is proof that this is so. To conclude that this is the only natural outcome because this is what the west is would be absurd. In my opinion I should say since I am no expert
Since the impulse most easily conjured to battle this dynamic more often than not contributes to it, and when not mustered, allows by default or enables with apologetics?
To briefly expand on my previous motion (and as you were so generous in extra-linking a line that brings me to this nexus):
Maybe the most complete way to challenge this order would involve an admission of guilt that is too damaging for the average rube to consider, but at any rate, involves work. The paradox being that it seems easier to wage-slave away or - if I might use Devin Lenda's recent box-supporting analogy - to put more effort maintaining the status quo than into the effort it would take to supplant it.
The reality is that we are part of an aristocracy of sort. The very space where this conversation is happening is shut off to many. This silent population is where true change will come from.
To admit guilt as part of an oppressive system is one thing, but to attempt to change it in a long-lasting way is quite another. Over-educated first-world lower-classes like us have proven capable of the former, while the latter eludes us more than ever.
As our status of first-worlder loses its meaning, our minds will migrate from mass-mediated political scandals to actual person-to-person organizing.
he pens jack , you seem well enough to write and live a little .., so i/we need to get back to why and how you misunderstood something here , back- oct 2, cause .. and / after i wrote the comments here on that one and got such an unseeing ,un hearing ..response ..to my voice/voicing , something of this went out in to the streets here a little ,and it was clear to all the varying of the out here that you were unseeing,misreading on something of my commenting , i put a hold on til summer to taking it further in the streets and out beyond these roads/atwood'.. . because i need to fin. up on something else of work , being the most extreme of a feminine womb, means that i never leave a job undone , and in that of so gentle and kind of nature .. always done in the fairest way .. .
i believe it was wittgenstein who said, "dude, s?!t's f?!ked up"
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