Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Money 01

Power runs on it, governments run on it, people kill daily to get it - or to get MORE of it - and guess what? It doesn't even exist. It's money.

Dismal, the world of money - for me. If you are normal, money is simply the quest you follow in life. But there may be some of us out there who, like me, find money to be the province of thieves and swindlers.

So - in this blog intended for improving my own thinking - and which too often functions as a valve to let off my endless steam as it boils up - I am going to try to put the whole issue of money in perspective.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Pluralism, in Spite of My Prior Post

A Conservative, reading the prior post, will probably roar in indignation, lash out at me for not "understanding how the world works", and then accuse me of irrelevance. Whatever; I'm still trying to figure them out....

My earlier post brings up the whole question of Pluralism. Can natural enemies live together in society? Can they (more or less) cooperate? Or must it always be Rule of the Ruthless, & the oppression of the Other?

Do people, as people, have any value in a society existing here in the physical world of adversity? It seems to be a natural law that life is only fodder for other life -- that nature and God are indifferent to our lives and our pain. (Hence, in protest, the Liberality of Christians, who claim that Christ came to fix that and who claim that each soul is indeed precious.)

Rulers have traditionally ignored the question. Affairs of state or political expediency tend to trump individual's lives and affairs. But, if enough individuals get angry, the individual and his freedom can become an issue, whether in a good way -- as it was in Liberal administrations from FDR forward -- or in a bad way -- as in the French Revolution. Yet the rulers more often pass over the individual's freedom in favor of war and panic and crisis and money-making.

Actually, and despite being anti-individual, the Tea Party runs on this same sort of assertion: that living individuals DO matter. They see the "Free Market Economy" as being somehow supportive of individual people. They don't see money-making, corporate gangsterism & swindling of the poor & middle-class as properties of their Free Market Economics; they seem to believe that society runs best on a certain kind of organized greed, on the one hand, and on family, on the other, but that any other social organization is restrictive of Man's natural bent. So, despite their commitment to foreign mayhem and domestic misery (wars and wealth), they are actually acting from an urge to re-assert the individual and his or her family.

But this brings us back to Pluralism. Can these Free Market people co-exist with the "Free People people", the non-authoritarians and others who believe that life is open-end-ed, and that it can be a happy thing? And can either or both of them co-exist with the anything-goes Robbery people, who infest both parties?

I think, in fact, they have co-existed for a long time, historically, and are the Yin and Yeong of human society. I think it is incumbent on both the Free Market people and the Free People people to continue to do so, for a civil war on these lines will not end well for anyone. Even with the recent elections, and the nation apparently turned toward an increased militancy and an increased concentration of wealth, it is important to try to preserve both the U.S. Republic and, with it, the memory of Humane Good Conduct. Despite the corruption and brutality and short-sightedness that informs common human nature, we need not be lost if we can continue to promote rational thinking, the appreciation of good conduct irrespective of cults, and can avoid initiating bloodshed.

REPUBLICANS & THE TEA PARTY

REPUBLICANS & THE TEA PARTY
(& Their Friends the Communists, Islamo-Fascists, NAZI's, whoever)

As I see it:
These people will always control the rest of us. They love their business suits, their intrigues, their power-plays and their backstabbing; they consider force and abuse as meritorious habits, and reflection and apprehension as failings. In any society aiming at "progress", they will inevitably usurp the positions of power and make progress an exercise in domination and control. They are as attracted to money, control and superiority as dogs are to meat. They will claim to be simple men even as they despise simplicity; they will claim to be defenders of freedom even as they systematically eliminate it wherever they can. They are what they are, and that is who they are.