Unconforming, Unindifferent Thinking & Acting for yourself & other beings

What drove Marx to his theory and praxis (this puts a new light on a word that seemingly can do no harm in contemporary alternative academic excellence), and his huge influence on Russia and history? Why is there still so much dehumanization and lack of respect for life in American Society today? And how are these questions related? (Hint: It’s not that I think we need socialism–far from it).

These are my thoughts, a little disjointed due to them coming from my recent contemplation notes:

Subjectivism-everything related to the perspective of a self. No objective, real, world. Although there are others roles of the real world in variations of subjectivism, this is the one that is hindering and does the most practical damage to the realization and experience of a public political realm, in my opinion.

Marx visualized one, universal personification (on most cognitive levels, a seeming oxymoron or mutually exclusive concepts). I think he visualized an ultimately safe world where no one would be violated in their personal identity. He must have interpreted every personal wounding coming from an arbitrary, tyrannical (had not been given authority) external non-necessity.

In his ideology the subjective self becomes completely revealed; creates a coherent reality; totally overtakes and defines any public and private realms (and eventually melds the two into one public realm that is private in structure and composition); becomes formalized and then enforced (this is obviously where the ideology becomes an inconsistent and impossible utopia) because of the ever dynamic and unpredictable human experience (acting and speaking, creating one’s own story) where every human will invariably stray or err outside of the universal personification that he visualized and would concretize.

But even more seriously, and germane to our current failings in how our predecessors and we have shaped American society, in his theory, the external world is completely invalidated and dissolved.

I had always wondered how Marx got to his ideas (Not in the sense of what body of knowledge had he learned from, although I believe that they especially included Aristotle and Hegel, but what had driven him to create such a unique and forceful political experience in the world. I was even more puzzled since he was so demonized in America, I mean, of course for the atrocities that he set the stage for and aided and abetted, but it seemed that his theories were demonized as well, again, of course for having led to the atrocities, but I detected a distinction and a muddying dynamic going on that did not jibe with my feeling that my intellectual curiosity was transparent and honest and my feeling that something was being glossed (or blackened) over. It was also like he was being intentionally avoided and obscured, while I had learned that if we don’t understand something we are vulnerable to falling into it ourselves (the danger in this particular case is that even a person who is highly gifted and has great compassion can become completely wrong, unbalanced and tyrannical, and sometimes it goes worse because of the greater start).  My sense, my gut, my intuition, tells me that pure vengeance can not create such sustained and powerful radical evil. And I don’t buy that it is as simple as power corrupts. The only response to that is don’t give power to anyone. This would make life absurd (as existentialism holds). Just as in the French Revolution with Robespierre, the man who was co-father of the revolution only a year later guillotining those who were opposed to the ‘rights of man’ illustrates that it is usually the most noble of causes that creates the greatest violations of effect, so too, Marx parallels this phenomenon. Additionally, compounding the difficulty of getting to the essential is that his theories, and he, are complex and hard to understand. So what went wrong?

But I think I got it. Marx’s great compassion (obviously, like every one who suffers, it starts on a personal level and then gets projected onto the world–becomes empathy), coupled with his high intelligence, lost the world’s natural spacing between individuals. He wanted so bad for the world to be a good place, eventually working to the point in his life where he wanted to make the world a good place, correspondingly wanting to remove what he felt made it a bad place, which was everything outside of the personal part of each human–the world out there… (because it was the personal part that got hurt-so obviously the personal part was good. He did not see the possibility that the external part, the world-the seemingly impersonal part–could be hurt). Even Hitler, obscured like Marx in American analysis, started out from a compassionate motivation; as a boy, he caught his original vision because of the exclusion of the German people from a nearby section of the country that had been given to another country, they were not accepted, but those that were already resident were oppressed for their German identity and in their German culture. It was this–I think French–occupied area that popular opinion held had been unfairly handed over in an arbitrary treaty, and in the dehumanization that he felt and saw while growing up (kind of similar to the Palestinian-Jewish occupation conflict), Hitler vowed that he would someday find a way to right the situation, eventually leading to such atrocities that, I believe, the scripture “it would be better if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than for that man to have ever been born”, applies.

Utopian ideologies, including Christianity (It has its good and bad sides, the bad here being that it minimizes the real, present world with its associated needs, responsibilities and enjoyability and tends to maximize the after world just as all world alienating ideologies say sacrifice now for the good of some future reality), all do this; that is, they lose the real world and the natural spacing that it puts between men, giving us a place to have in common and a place to be distinct (”The Human Condition”, by Hannah Arendt). But how does this work.  Upon contemplation I came up with this: The real world mediates our individual perspectives, is the real, existent place we live in, amongst others, that dynamically (as opposed to any static ideology that we fixate on for a greater good) and continuously readjusts us; and even, readjusts ideologies, movements, governments, countries, economic theories (the current failure of supercapitalism’s Laissez-faire principle & including Ann Rand’s Objectivism); progress at times becomes regress, and productivity becomes useless (these are the two greater goods of our American society–the carrot on a string of the modern age, hanging just beyond demonstrative reality and realized payoff, but moving at an ever increasing speed to prove its value, even audaciously, increasing value and to support its intrinsic need to increase or die and to entrap us more to its pursuit through increasingly surfacy, less fullfilling meaning–which, like junk food, just makes you want to keep eating, and individual and societal fatigue that precludes questioning and analysis).

Just as Marx needed to, today, we need a balance between looking out for number one and seeing and looking out for the world; we need to give the world the equal place it needs to have in this age where the self has become the end all of all things. This means that we would be concerned with more than our own comfort and safety; we would be concerned for those around us, and for the world we live in. It is only by having this concern that we will have in place a philosophical, intellectual (which lead to a practical) balance that will keep us from, otherwise, inevitably dehumanizing people, disrespecting animals, and environmentally ruining our planet, all, in any one of countless ways. If we fixate only on ourselves, we become super-selved, super-sized, very satisfying to anticipate and when going down, but leads to horrible health problems. If we take care of our common world, and one-another, we will have the elements ‘in play’ that will keep us from straying too far in one direction, and will give us the resilience and encouragement to weather what comes our way; we will experience well-being.

Any nation, historical or contemporary, (I think of Germany, Russia, or America), that has a society based on a philosophical tradition (actually, all nations in Western Civilization) that alienates the world (a place we have in common to relate in) and makes this the human condition is existing in and maintaining a half-truth culture; it is a-lie-nation (alienation). Are we living in a half-lie culture in America?

Stated another way, there is some kind of serious lie going on in a society where people (plurality in one world) are so alienated from one another (merely connected to accumulation and comfort in duplicated singularity–rugged individualism–which is the ultimate depersonalization of Capitalism). The world is a home for the soul, not just a place for bodies to survive (in perfect biological rhythm–the ultimate depersonalization of Marx’s Socialism). It is our place to know meaning by experiencing our unique and distinct singularity contrasted with the moderating effect and enjoyable revelation of plurality (keeping us from the depersonalization and dehumanization of both Capitalism and Socialism–sisters in the original game of national expropriation which, in parallel with Utopian ideologies’ ill effects, both had their own progression to becoming societies constituted by world alienation).  Are we evaporating and dissolving this place? Can we support and develop this public space and create new forms of this space? The steps we can take are contemplating and understanding the need for such a space, valuing it, discussing it with others, creatively initiating various forms of the space, being involved with others in these spaces, being courageous to disclose ourselves and our stories to others, while helping and guiding one another to learn a neutral, non-harming, mutually accepting and mutually hearing approach (a positive example of praxis). In a-lie-nation, what truths do we need to keep, and what lies do we need to question?

“World alienation, and not self-alienation, as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age.” from “The Human Condition”, by Hannah Arendt, page 254)

P.S. The law, as in the legal system, needs to be adapted to include the concepts of natural and use value. At present it only includes exchange value being, as it is, based on property, supporting expropriation of all exchangable goods (which includes everything, including people and societal values), and the accumulation and protection of wealth. But that’s another blog…

~ by hoorob24 on July 30, 2009.