Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-28-2021, 11:43 AM)Einzige Wrote: What surprising is how comfortable left-liberalism are with this social arrangement and the function their institutional allies perform within it.

Hmm.  I don’t find it surprising.  Let me go back to the values perspective that I generally rotate around.

Everyone develops a worldview and values.  How do you see the world?  What goals should one strive for?  These are very different for each individual.  They are also very stubborn.  They don’t much change unless the worldview and values have absolutely and clearly failed.  In a turning crisis, when a culture’s worldview and values change, it means a bunch of people had their worldview and values fail at the same time.  It generally takes losing a crisis war to prompt such a transition.  Hiroshima could stand as an example, though it shares many other events that led up to it.  However, the repeated depressions of the Gilded Age that eventually resulted in the Great Depression given an example of how the greatest problem facing the culture is not always a crisis war.

Now your own values center on revolution and capital, on violence and things.  Violence is used to equalize the possession of things.  It is a traditional if obsolete vantage point.  It assumes that the violent people apt to rise in the top in a revolution will suddenly become saints who care about the people after they win their revolt.  This is dubious and remains an unsolved problem.  It also assumes violence is necessary, remains the only way to change a culture.  This may have been true in Marx’s time, but not in Grandi’s and MLK’s.

This has been said many times and ignored many times.

The pertinent crisis problems I have listed many times and have not been much corrected.  These are COVID, the economy, systematic racism, red violence, and global warming.  I think it is safe to say that yours are an obscure and minor set of values, and that those whose values center on the crisis problems are for good reason much more prominent.

Let’s go though them.

It is important to live through the COVID pandemic.  It is important that the economy produce enough, that the bulk of the people get enough to survive and sustain themselves.  It is important, that regardless of one’s race or culture, that you don’t get shot randomly by police or oppressed into a subservient position.  It is important that those who believe in racial violence be suppressed.  It is important that the planet we live on is livable on and produces sustained resources.

Are any of these so hard to understand?  Can you put aside your obsessions with violence and things long enough to try to understand how other people are actually living?

I just don’t care that there are people out there that have gathered many things so long is it is likely that most people get enough and the system provides safety nets for those who slip through the cracks.  With the changes in labor, automation, the production of resources, the collection of resources, the cracks are only going to become larger in time.

Large number of people hold the crisis worldviews and values.  Few hold yours.  This is not apt to change in the short term as a trigger to a conflict that will change your beliefs is unlikely.

Now if the were a revolution, if the violent people who led it really did become saints somehow, if they really wanted to work for the benefit of the people, would they not have to do something about the crisis level problems?  Would that not have to come up with a method, such as representative democracy, to put a check on those who have power over the distribution of wealth?  Would they not have to adopt the checks and balances that were introduced in the Enlightenment?  In short, would they not have to ignore Marx and adopt a modern way of looking at things?

This does not mean the problems Marx saw with the division of wealth don’t have to be addressed.  He was great at seeing the problem.  He was terrible at coming up with a solution.  Still, the turnings address the largest problem facing the culture.  If the crisis problems are really addressed in this time, the division of wealth is more or less next problem up?  It is what the next generation of prophets could be yelling about, the central issue of the next crisis?

But this doesn’t make violence how you change democratic cultures in the Information Age.

At any rate, I doubt this note will produce a Hiroshima moment for you.  You are too locked into one simplistic perspective to learn.  Nor are you apt to say something that turns Eric a color other than green.  But you should be able to learn that other people hold other perspectives as more important than things, and that you are unlikely to change their minds.  If I am right, and that the crisis problems will be in good part addressed in the current crisis, that the division of wealth is due to rise to the top of cultural flaws, a little patience might serve you well.