After the point where the first installment --to be found at www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=676-- left off, that reader with whom I was having this exchange responded in this way:
I never agreed with you more than in the preceding post. Nevertheless I still say that you are a conservative, although, as you indicate by the quotes, it is not an accusation. You have essentially the same view of powerstates as Scott Ritter, also a conservative and a courageous and admirable man (now a fireman). Nevertheless we are class enemies.
That is because you (and Ritter) blame the people, not the power system. I am not saying that people are good;; merely that people are. There is nothing else, no saviors, no Heroes, no saints. It is the people who must be mobilized, so one cannot begin by blaming them.
It is quite true, as everyone can plainly see, that the American people are corrupted consumers, political idiots and apathetic activists. But Why? why has this happened? Toqueville stated nearly two centuries ago that Americans were famous joiners, that we formed organizations of every kind for civil society to function. This has atrophied enormously, as a book BOWLING ALONE details. People do not interact with people for any reason. How did it happen that we got so isolated, so individualistic, so competivie, so distrustful of each other.
We were systematically guided and indoctrinated by the power system to be so. People watch TV four or five hours a day. Is what is purveyed condusive to fixing the ills of society, to illustrative the importance of activism, to displaying the spirtual values of people at their best. To ask these questions is to answer them.
But why not? TV stations are supposedly controlled by the government that supposedly is controled by the peole. Why is it so mindless and soul destroying. To ask is to answer.
Because the ruling class that largely controls the powerstate wants us to be mindless boobs lost in the trivial entertaiment of the moment. they do not want people to interact with each other in communion but want each against all. They want us devided in enumeralble was to seperate, isolate and alienate us from each other.
And consequently people are starved for meaningful contact. Everyone needs to be a part of a community of some kind in which he has some respected place. Wherre are such communities? in the churches which delude people into identifying with Divine and earthly power;yes. In the Dem party? Please. It is a vote getting machine that does not even have its own media like the European parties.
The power system systematically prevents people from communing with each other; it sponsors individual competition. The streets of towns are not blocked off to allow people to wander around with each other; public transportaion is sysstematically destroyed, the schools and universites are production units, not communication events.
Americans tend to think this is normal and natural because we have no historical sense. This is in fact pathological. In Barbara Ehernreich's latest, and best, book DANCING IN THE STREETS she details throughout history how people, and women especially, costumed themselves and often masked their faces, and interacted in festivals, often religous festivals, in dancing, feasting, and other joys.
This institution was destroyed, deliberately as she documents, by capitalism, or more generally by power. Because when people get together they begin to exhibit a common anomosity to their rulers, and the parroding of the powerful was a commen element in these festivals.
Solidarity was created through joy against the rulers who were oppressing them.
there are a few of these festivals in the US but they are skimpy. You blame the people for not having these festivals. How about their leaders? Are such festivals sponsored by the Dem party? ACLU? Unions leaders? Church leaders? school leaders? Encouraged in the mass and learned media? No. in fact they are incompatible with secular humanism.
What we need is a spiritual humanism that gives people a sense of community that we can pass on to our children. this is incompatible with the institutions of Democratic capitalism, as well as current conceptions of socialism. We must create these institutions out of what exists, and for this we need a people's ideology that is rational and understandable to the popultion. What we need is the simple truth about political and social reality that combines the political, the scientific and the spiritual. This is the only way to make ourselves fully humnan.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
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