Luther wrote...
The only belief I allow myself are that people are inherently good. I have to come to this based on our response to crises in spite of the popular media's portrayal of human savagery in disaster time.
There's something within every highly competitive person to love others, trying to present itself. Greed is an accidental disease.
Thank-you so much Luther, it is good to be prudent in our beliefs.
Excellent painting of a larger context TBS.
The Black Sheep wrote…
Don Quixote can be read as a critique of the modern outlook of striving towards that idealized (or 'romantic') vision of the world, completely oblivious to the fact that what is being pursued is a mere phantom. I said that this book can be taken as post-modern, because that outlook is very much what has come to pass as a result of the disillusionment with the idea of progress and the attainability of perfection by humanity.
The date for that shift of consciousness is generally taken to be around the time of the second world war and sometimes pin pointed around the creation and use of the atomic bomb, which symbolized for many the potential horrors of science rather than a hope for the attainment of a perfect state through the means of human and scientific potential.
The idea of progress might be fine if we did not institutionalize the idea of inevitable progress behind a bulwark of manifest destiny and the racism of western exceptionalism. As to the hope for the attainment of a perfect state; this would seem to require the ability to apply the rational to all events (another WE conceit), a vain hope at best. Besides which, life is found in learning and relationships. If so, then the greatest favor we could do ourselves is to switch from ordering our perceptions around objects and toward ordering them around relationships. Right now, external representations drive our psyches and this, I think, sustains our ends based mentality.
This sort of gets at one of the roots of despair (or existential angst), a feeling like our actions cannot really amount to anything worthwhile, so there may not be any point in trying. In "pre-modern" eras there were formalized superstitious beliefs to fall back on, like religion, wherein we could tell ourselves "it's all in god's plan", and so circumvent the feeling of despair. It is characteristic of the post-modern age again that we do not have those beliefs to fall back on, so we are stuck in this feeling of despair, or stuck with an unfillable void, the result frequently being a drift towards irrationality.
The void is only unfillable in the context of a split model of reality. Art plays a role in trying to ‘stuff the gap’, but as long as the gap is a feature of culture it will never be filled. The answer then is to collapse the gap by declaring allegiance to a model of reality (nature) that takes as its initial assumption the notion that the spiritual (subtle realms) and the physical are fundamentally the same thing.
Admittedly, even still a theory of elite influence does beg some potential questions about human nature, namely that even if certain events are the result of "elite" influence, there is still potential implications about human nature regarding how these people were able to attain their current status and why they would ever stoop to such actions in the first place
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Exactly, these things go hand in hand. A ‘theory of elite influence’ might be nothing more than an accurate representation of our current cultural structural framework. Say for instance, folk are easier to manipulate if the different layers of an individuals psyche are not well integrated. This provides motivation for elite types to provoke tension between ones conscious modeling and ones subconscious knowing. So if someone, in the right position, says; ‘you are either for us or against us’, a powerful disincentive is being created that keeps most from integrating subconscious knowing into ones conscious model. While this example may be directed to a different crowd than the one here at RI, other conscious affiliations are cultivated for any number of personality types. From my POV a key element here is that the elite or the PTMB recognizes the how, why and wherefore of the maintenance of our split model of reality, while the rest of us do not understand the value of or how to integrate various layers of our psyche. (We play checkers while they play three-D chess)
My two cents tossed in this direction is to suggest that aspiring toward balance between order and liberty helps minimize the influence that unbalanced representatives of either order or liberty might otherwise exert.
Our really big trouble stems from the fact that the opposing ‘camps’ within the WE mindset both accept the assumption of a split reality. Religionists and secularists kill indigenous society with equal vigor because they share the same insecurity regarding the value of the ‘merchandise’ being sold.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37941The Fold Behind the Knee: Kopenawa and Albert's "Falling Sky"
This is significant. Many of us are persuaded that science and industry are the key driving forces in life. The shaman, on the other hand, believes human society - the resolutely complex and logic-defying ways we treat ourselves and each other - is more significant to our well-being than is our "merchandise."
jakell, in regard to the time question; if one thinks in terms of process rather than ends or goals then there is no telling where we might collectively be at any particular moment in the future. Your fear of resource depletion seems probably magnified by your lack of belief in ability for humans to change the content of their mentality. Whereas I feel we can change this current situation where invention is the mother of necessity, into its healthy mirror, showing us the pointlessness (and unending agony) of trying to stuff a gap that is an artificial construct to begin with. Then we may even find the time to recognize the necessity and the way to stop turning wants into needs.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
