Time to go after the real shock jocks...
From LRC
Though I find her pseudo-defense of Imus to be more ridiculous than apalling, Lila Rajiva's point about the real shock jocks, the ones who actually have influence on policy in Washington and elsewhere, is well taken.
Some examples:
"I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way ( Read more... )
"Nearly everyone who influences public opinion - from social leaders to politicians -uses syllogisms to arrive at incorrect conclusions, and it is difficult to believe that this is usually by accident. After all, the conclusions nearly always “prove” the point the person wants to make. I’d go so far as to say that never before, in the history of this country, have citizen’s been so jerked around logically to the point where they have become incapable of making reasonable decisions. This has begun to evidence itself in incredible jury verdicts. By using every logical error known to mankind in an effort to further one or another special interest, we have begun to reap what we have sown - the seeds of intellectual weakness and mental disorder."
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Right, our so-called leaders wanted a nation of frightened children whom they could lead around by their noses. They wanted a nation of muling babies absolutely dependent upon the state and the market for everything---incapable of doing anything for themselves.
Read Ivan Illich's Toward A History Of Needs---in fact, if you have trouble finding it, I'll send you my copy---to see different examples of how this works, and various ways that individuals and communities have resisted it. Illich is a true conservative, in the sense that he does not believe in progress (i.e., as a force or engine that exists outside of human values or human effort or human history, and which propels those things forward---that is one of the greatest lies of our age! When Robert Moses brought the freeways into New York City, some (those who made money off it) said, "Well, it's progress, and you can't stop progress! Ha ha ha!" Everyone of them should have been shot as traitors. But, I digress.), rather he believes in the human mind, and its ability to adapt and overcome adversity, left to its own devices, and unmolested by the "citadel of expertise."
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I don't think America happened out of the goodness of anyone's heart (the fact that T. Jefferson et al. had a certain kind of mind and philosophy is incidental). It's just so happened that thanks to technology like the printing press, it became too difficult, just too much of a hassle to control the slaves, err, I mean peasants, oop err, I mean "citizens" the old fashioned way, with Kings and Lords. The bankers said, "hey man, we can still be Kings, but we need to change our people management style, no big whoop... we will no longer use words like 'King' or 'Lord' or 'servants'... from now on we'll use words like 'job opportunities' and 'freedim of relijin' - the peasants, err, I mean the citizens will eat it up!" The few still rule the many, and there's no way to change that unless someone invents the Replicator or genetic engineering alters humanity itself - neither of which is going to happen tomorrow.
Now watch, tomorrow it will be announced that someone has made an unexpected leap in the field of genetics.
My alter ego is Edmund Blackadder (or I've been the alter ego of my real self, I forget which). I like Blackadder because he knows why he's greedy. He's not greedy for the sake of being greedy. He's greedy because he took one look at humanity and was smart enough to realize that humanity doesn't know how to be any other way no matter how many artsy movies you foist on them. He abuses Baldrick because Baldrick HAS NO IDEA HE'S BEING ABUSED. Blackadder doesn't tell himself that he wants to be rich because it would represent great success in some noble endeavor, like starting a company that makes things people need, or selling a book, or inventing something... all the things successful people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett tell themselves. Unlike Warren Buffett, Blackadder isn't going to dump a billion dollars into a charity in order to assuage his own guild and cognitive dissonance at not having to live like a wage slave like the rest. Blackadder will give away a billion dollars because he still has two billion dollars left over and he'll make a snide remark about what purpose it will serve - but he won't say, "ah, this is how we help people". He knows better. He knows it's bullsh*t and he also knows he doesn't want to live down in the street where people throw their toilet water. He sees people as they are; some are good, but most don't know their cod peice from a tiger's bum. Blackadder doesn't waste time feeling sorry for people. Try feeling sorry for Baldrick and he'll just stare at you and fart.
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No, apparently you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about feeling sorry for anybody. If there's one thing our poor, frightened, downtrodden, ignorant, welfare-addicted, television-addled fellow citizens have had too much of it's pity. What they've never had---or, anyway, never had enough of---is self-respect, and that can't be handed out, can't be purchased, and can't be stolen; can't be injected, smoked, or drank; you can't pray for it. It is earned, it is self-created, always within the context of building something for one's self and for the people one loves. It is always, I firmly believe, achieved in concert with mutual aid and solidarity with others. It has nothing to do with politics in any traditional sense of the word. It has to do with culture, in the best sense of that word. The achievement of it has little or nothing to do with genetics or any sort of conception of "inherent worth".
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By self respect... I assume you mean people wanting better for themselves than wage slavery.
Absolutely! No wage slavery, and an end to the "commodity fetishism" that almost always goes along with it---i.e., an end to the almost-mystical process whereby people try to find self-respect in the commodities they buy. It never works, of course, or the feeling doesn't last very long, so they just keep buying. As the saying goes, "He who is not busy being born, is busy buying."
I do not think that a new culture will magically come along, and then people's thinking and behavior will change. I think that people can alter their thinking and behavior, and as this spreads, the culture changes, which encourages further rethinking on people's part, etc. One thing that has to change is the idea that people are merely receptacles for the culture created by others. By our every action, every day, we "reproduce daily life," which is to say we reinforce the culture we have learned since childhood. I define culture by using the subtitle of a great book the anarchist theorist/Gestalt therapist/and anti-education activist Paul Goodman wrote with his architect brother Percival: Communitas: Means of Livelihood & Ways of Life. I think that describes culture fairly well, it's not the complete picture, but it's a start. People have choices, they make decisions every single day, and we must have an end to the theory that they are merely automatons. Tell people they have no choice, that all the important decisions have already been made by others, and you rob them of the very possibility of taking responsibility for their lives.
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I think if people could be better than they are, they already would be. Humans don't have a natural craving for liberty; but there are naturally exceptions to the rule, and those of us who are the exceptions didn't need special help to be who we are. We're already here! I think some of us make the mistake of assuming everyone else has the same capacities, the same tendencies, but somehow they've been sabotaged. They need art, or to be rescued by enlightened law makers, or to be raised right. These things may make dents in the way traits are expressed, but they can't get rid of the traits, or make new ones. The movies make humans out to be these creatures who have a deep in the bone craving for freedom. It's a heinous error. Few things are farther from the truth. This thing that some of us have is a gene that is sprinkled around here and there and is entirely missing in about 60 or 70% of humanity - such that if you even offer it to them they resent you for it. They don't want it. They want slavery. They don't want to be uncomfortable, they don't want to be whipped, they want a reasonable cap placed on the amount of personal abuse they think they're getting from their masters, but you can't offer them anything other than slavery.
I think the novel, "Animal Farm" is a description of the human condition. It's the nature of the beast. They can't be any other way. To change things you'd have to be a God and remove the unscrupulous smart pigs from the game board, or decrease the innocence of the animals on the farm, which would require changing their dna. Foisting poems and art or revolution on them in the hopes of getting them to change their minds is like making kids with Down Syndrome watch an artsy movie with the aim of inspiring them to read more. It just isn't going to happen. The wet ware isn't there. Give people civil rights, they oppress themselves some other way (or delight in oppressing someone else). Give them libraries, they drop their kids off at school to have the love of reading torn from them. Give them freedom and they let a banker tell them that being able to drive and take out a loan means they're free.
The only reason human life is better now than in the Middle Ages and the ancient world is because of technology. Someone invented a farming tool and that gave some ppl. free time to do astronomy and write laws and count money. Someone invented paper and ink and the printing press and boats and lending libraries and solid state electronics and central heating and plumbing... But the few rule the many. Humans can't be any other way. There's nothing here to redeem. I'm with Francis Crick; change the dna or "Animal Farm" will be the reality on Earth, forever.
I'm just thankful to live in a time when humans have central heating and plumbing and toilet paper and showers and Ibuprofen. The rest of it I just have to cop a Blackadder to in order to live in the middle of the absurdity.
So, how was YOUR day!?
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Well, obviously, you and I have a fundamental disagreement on this matter. And, quite frankly, I do not recall your being this pessimistic when we were friends down here, all those many years ago. What-in-the-hell happened to you there in South Bend?
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I'll change my mind in a nano-second upon being shown a single tiny peice of evidence that a craving for liberty is a common human trait.
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Part of it could be that it's easy on the internet to talk past each other.
That could very well be the case. Which brings to mind a question I asked some time back: when are you going to come down to B-ton, so's we can get a pint at the Irish Lion, and have this conversation in person?
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