09-07-2016, 07:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-07-2016, 07:55 PM by Eric the Green.)
(09-07-2016, 03:47 PM)Copperfield Wrote:(08-30-2016, 10:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:Quote:I could drop you off in wild places where you wouldn't make it back to civilization alive. You don't understand power or nature. You certainly aren't ready for the responsibility that comes with it. You've barely even left home in your lifetime.
Maybe; maybe not. How would you know?
Quote:Your politics have chained you to the to the arrogant notion of wilderness as just another human resource to be controlled rather than understood and embracing your connection to it. That's a big part of the problem. As I've often said, when you folks run out of water don't bother coming east.
My politics has not caused me to have a view about Nature; Nature causes me to have a view about politics. I know that your anarchist, pro-business philosophy is the greatest threat to Nature that exists. It's the corporate world that looks at Nature as another human resource to be controlled; not green, semi-hippies like me.
Frankly it's pretty easy to tell the difference between life-long urban dwellers and their rural opposites.
Semi-hippy? I was raised by total hippies. The family farm was essentially a hippy commune in the 70's. My grandmother was fond of collecting strays (both people and animals). It made for an interesting childhood. It was never a political thing and still isn't. It was a family thing. Politics is just an arbitrary construct used to derive power from the many for the few. The resulting divisiveness is an important part of the bread and circuses you so desperately cling to. Funny that while you grew up during the time of hippies, all these years later you clearly never got it.
Safe to say you're not a hippie now. Hippies are NOT gun-toters, and they don't shoot animals. Or so I claim.
Politics is not necessarily a hippie thing, I do get it, actually. It was dropping out. Some of us boomers did that. I can see that influence in you, clearly. Hippies were utopians who didn't believe in institutions; that it could all just "happen."
I had a different background though; my parents were definitely NOT hippies, but politically-inclined liberal materialist pacifists. You have probably read my essay on my Dad. But my observations make it perfectly clear that it's not true that "Politics is just an arbitrary construct used to derive power from the many for the few." It's quite the reverse. Unless we all become spiritual hippies (and you are not one of those either), there's no hope whatever that just letting things happen will work.
You know my point of view by now. Without politics of a liberal progressive kind, the people are left at the mercy of the greedy and powerful. There's no doubt about that, whatever anarchist or libertarian arguments you might try to muster. The facts are clear that we need to state to protect us from outlaws, brigands and big business. They are the ones who derive power from the many for the few. The alternative is always barbarism, unless we all become like Jesus and his early communes. Even then, organization of some kind is needed and inevitable.
Art historian Kenneth Clark famously said, "one doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions" (referring to us boomers in our youth). "But the dreary fact remains that society must be made to work." "A great many of the horrors (of the French Revolution) were simply due to, anarchy. It is a most attractive political doctrine" he said. Reluctantly, I came to agree with him, when he said, "but I'm afraid it's too optimistic. The men of 1793 tried desperately to control anarchy by violence, and were destroyed by the evil means they brought into existence."