you me and the elite

Our society is a complex maze of interaction and insular activity in front of the television or the computer screen that is engineered to maintain the status quo and butress the elite's hold on power. Social institutuions and the media play pivotal roles in this daily manipulation in which our thinking is channeled in specific directions by the blatant and subtle suggestions of advertizers, politicians, journalists, educators,and clerics. They all have behavioral agendas they want us to adopt, and their work is litterd with visiual, verbal, and written clues about where our behavior should lead us.. From the images they show to the vocabulary they choose, they are reinforcing social structures and framing debate in way that will allow us to reach only conclusions that leave us subject to their authority. This directional control is obscured by by an apparent wealth of social and consumerist choices. You can be a Democrat or a Republican, a conservative or a liberal, a Catholic or a Baptist, a worker or a manager, a student or a teacher. You can drive a Honda or a a Ford, eat at home or at Olive Garden, listen to rap or country, watch the News Hour or TMZ. In the end all those choices lead to the same place...safely within the boundaries of extant social constructions. Limited disorder can be tolerate or even encouraged to vent growing frustration or resentment, but all the behaviors society positively sanctions serve to enhance the control exercised by the elite.
Social manipulation that directs us to insular activites such as consumerism or the pursuit of economic statis serve to short-circuit collective thinking that could endanger the status-quo. A veneer of "rugged individualism" and "enlightened self-interset" serves as a mechanism that divides collective thinking by focusing thouight on personal agendas. The aquisiton of material status serves the dual purpose of enriching the elite who profit from consumerism and curtailing the recognition of shared needs and desires. Moving forward as a group towards a collective goal usually means giving up some individual desires and initiatives in order to support a broader agenda. Engineered self-interest and desire are an effective damper on the necessary compromise inherent in group actions.
For the elites of society then, "character" is subservience to the social institutions, and belief in the overall wisdom and good intentions, if not ethical goodness, of the system. Genuine criticism that coulf lead to real change must be co-opted and marginalized or repressed as alien and dangerous. Substantive change is not possible friom within the system. Any attempt to do so will inevitably run into the legal and philosophicalconstraints promulgated by the system for its own survival. Real change must start with a change of viewpoint and an effort to think outside of institutional limits.
Like Roosevelt a generation ago (for me anyway) Obama and congress seem bent on rescuing what was. I have little interest in that. We need a social system that considers the needs of all its members on an equal basis and acts on them before even considering rewards for innovation or excellence ( those do need to recognized, but there must be limits). A sustainable and innovative economy doesn't need to be one that generates increasing wealth for an elite. A stationary economy can sustain a burgeoning poulation...it simply needs to grow at a pace that can absorb the new levels of need...a balance of need and resources is going to have to come...the sooner the better...the alternative is misery and death for billions...and that may happen anyway if the climate ceases to be supportive...but it shouldn't happen because we can't...or won't... discard unsupportable patterns of thought about what is important.

hope?

i'm hearing this word alot recently, and there's nothing wrong with hope...as long as it's tempered by a good deal of realism...barak's a step in the right direction as far as changing perceptions of ourselves as a nation and other's perceptions of us...better (less unilateral and exceptionalist) relations with the rest of the world will be something of a relief...but as far as substantive change goes...good luck...cosmetic changes, sure..the tone of voice will change, but the system will not...career bureaucrats will change style to suit the new boss, but the rules won't change much...barak's a lawyer and a politician...a smooth talker who has peopled his adminstration with cronies and washington insiders...moving towards the center since his election...he is part of the system, and will stay within its constraints...it is not neutral...it favors wealth, and they will have their way or there will be a new president in 2012...old bill clinton was supposed to be good for working people and all we got was nafta and bad judgement about office etiquette...in the end barak will not change the system, it will change him...i hear a lot of parallels drawn between obama and roosevelt...both inherited economic messes and fdr had a co-operative congress to a point, but there was always resistance to the new deal and as time went on it stiffened...that resistance was premepted by ww2, but as soon as it was over and roosevelt was dead the foes of the new deal began to dismantle it until virtually all that's left is social secutiry...ask a consevative how they feel about that...the system can't be fixed because it isn't broke..it's functioning as its designers intended...to protect wealth from the mob...read the federalist papers sometime...barak won't win if he tries to undo it...his time in office is limited ( another reaction to roosevelt) the system's is not.

opportunity

there is a good deal of economic chaos going on...the herd mentality on wall street has no idea where to turn...they call it volatillity in the market...i'm inclined to call it panic at the realization that all those pompous pronouncements by market analysts, politicians, and economists are unfounded speculation and wishful thinking ( economics seems to me to be nothing more tham an academic search for a rationalization for greed...which is pretty much what's brought us to this pass in the first place) the govenment handed the oversight systen to greed and it took advantage of the laxity to all our detrements...no-one is in control, and no-one can be because no-one can understand all the variables involved in causality...they can only convince themselves they do. there is an opportunity, as we try to understand what has happened, to re-think our priorities and try to move in a more sustainable direction. profit will have to count for much less than common good if we are going to provide for the nine billion people due by mid-century. franklin roosevelt helped to save capitalism in the last century by forcing it to accept that it couldn't have things all its own way...the lesson obviously didn't take. barak obama will not succeed either. he is a politician and as such constrained to work within a system that has had over two-hundred to entrench its methodology and mores. its reliance on the market and the profit motive are the problem. individualism has a place in many aspects of human life...crative self-expression demmands it...but not in decisions that impact us all. the way we feed ourselves, how we are houses, how linited resouces are alloted, the organization of the system that looks after our health...these are things that should be above profit...it could be done. it would require some education...a set of principles defining commual good and a methodology to re-enforce its acceptance as an imperative...but it is completely do-able with the proper mind set. we are all responsible and accountable...somewhere along the line we need to accept production for use as a first principle and learn to measure progress as something other growth in gdp and the number of billionaires we can boast.

oops

i forgot willam t vollman...there is no way to adequately describe his writing...check out rising up, rising down...if you can find it...there are more i've missed i'm sure, but you get the idea

dystopian or anti-social?

maybe both...i was thinking about authors whose books i re-read on a regular basis ( all, or a portion, on say a yearly basis, if not more often) and as far as sociabillity goes they are a scurvy crew at best...so here's a list (in alphabetical order not by favorite) and something of a reason why...sam beckett...because death renders life absurd and there's nothing funnier than unhappiness...isaiah berlin...because he loathes a teleology and says why...hank bukowski...the only real poet--ever...anthony burgess...he's hilarious because he wants to be orwell and can't...william s burroughs sr. & jr....they know dependency and its issues like only insiders can...celine...he is the most theraputic writer, when i am sick of life all i have to do is open "journey to the end of the night" anywhere and start reading and i will feel much better about myself...crates the cynic...all social conventions are synthetic...thomas homer-dixon because he taught me that people will kill for water just as quickly as for oil...thomas de quincey..."confessions of an english opium eater" might be the closest thing to a bible i have, he goes the burroughs boys one step better...epicurus...for the difference between kenetic and katastematic pleasure and the enjoinment to live simply... gunter grass for bring a fearless social critic...robert kaplan for being a conservative with a realistic worldview...g.e.moore for telling the philosophical world to cut out the dualism and get a grip...fred nietzsche for being difficult about everything...george orwell for distrusting intellectuals and being true to himself no matter how wrong or unpopular he was, he loathed a teleology too...mark reisner for "cadallac desert" and reinforcing my views about water and people...bertrand russell for making me think out if my depth and expand my horizon ( the anthropology faculty at iun gets kudos for this as well)...hunter thompson for being so acidically right when he wasn't out of his mind...kurt vonnegut for being so damn funny...ludwig wittgenstein for saying philosophy can't explain anything, just describe...yevgeny zimyatin for loathing a teleology ( sense a pattern?)...and jan svankmajer the czech surrealist film-maker for being so surreal

eqanimity

there isn't any...well...not much, and that's to be expected when you're trying (please emphaize trying, i don't really know how much success i'm having...may never know...then again may discover altogether too much) to deconstruct a system of beliefs that have accumulated over fifty odd years...descartes says that to be a true seeker of wisdom (and let's not assume i'm going to find any of that in the end either...or, perhaps it's philosophy he's talking about) you have to make the attempt to question everything you know at least once....take your beliefs down to the bare bones of what's there just to find the basis...what if you find nothing? then there's the question of what is troubling me so much that i find this necessary...i have some idea, but i am not prepared to go public with them...so there will be a barrier of lies by omission between us...there are others involved...some don't know they're involved so i have to protect them...and by logical extention myself ( or, perhaps, it's the other way round) so the level of psycological discomfort is fairly high...i have a basic grasp of what's up intellectually...it's the emotional part that's difficult...i look around at all this stuff i've accumulated and wonder why...it's fast becoming apparent to me that the bulk of it is unnecessary...that it's someone else's idea of a cultural norm...i don't use half of it...but there it is anyway...and i'm damned if i can explain why except that i've been as conditioned by the advertizing and aquisition norms as anyone and that just makes me more unhappy...we all have unclear pictures of ourselves i suppose....i would like to think i'm above this...but i'm not..sucked in like everyone else...so i'm getting a clearer picture of what i'm doing wrong...am i doing anything right? well i don't know, and that's the crux of the problem...need to do more housecleaning to see if i can find out.

so...what do i own?

world financial markets are pretty much collapsing, and no-one can get a calculator out and add it all up beause: 1.) no-one really wants to, and 2.) there's so much obfuscation going on about financial instruments as those who run the economy try to dodge responsibillity for all this that no-one may be able to. i could be deeper into my austerity program much more quickly than i thought...i'm looking at contingencies...i have enough to pay off the oustanding balance on the house, and i was thinking i'd at least be out of the elements...but then i thought about taxes and the distinct possibillty that local government might take the house if i defaulted on the taxes (how would they sell it?)...from there i began pondering about exactly what it is that's truly mine...all the big investment items i have ( the house and the vehicles) are subject to taxes...failure to pay those taxes ends with the seizure of ther real-estate, and the vehicles are rendered useless by increasing levels of negative sanctions in the form of fines and possible jail time for continued driving with expired plates, false and ficticious registration, etc. so the catagory of things i "own" are contingent on my abillity to continue paying for their use even after the original "seller" has been paid-off and i hold the "title" to them...i "own" them, but the government can take them away if i stop paying taxes...odd...so what constitutes ownership? in a broad sense i own nothing material because i won't physically be here forever...it's more like i have exclusive rights to their use until then...so what do i own? what do i control? we're left with thoughts and actions- how i relate to others and how i think about those relationships...this is ample enough to satisfy me and keep me busy...i'd better start paying more attention.