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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 5/17/17

A Review of "Being In Time: The Post-Political Manifesto" by Gilad Atzmon

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Firmly rooted in the Western intellectual tradition, Gilad Atzmon's "Being In Time" opens doors to shed light on the particular ideological constructs that influenced the schools and movements of left and right political wings that have produced a world in poverty and war, offering a matrix of controlled opposition embedded in modern, Jewish, secular politics to distract and destroy from within. Atzmon's analysis, written like an intellectual jazz composition, celebrates Athenian philosophical calls to reason while urging the unpacking of political ideology to reveal the con-game being played to keep power in the hands of those who already have it.

In the first half of the book Atzmon offers a brilliant decoding of left and right wings of the Imperial Houses of Domination. On the left, he gives the reader Marx, Adorno, and the Frankenfurters defending principles of utopianism and what ought to be. To the right, are Breitbart, Murry and Hernnstein, playing Johnny one note for conserving the structures of power in hopes to hold on to their piece of that pie. Atzmon suggests that, "instead of looking at the world through the lens of the Right/Left dichotomy, or a particular ideological perspective, it will be more instructive to impose a meta-ideological method that juxtaposes 'the humane' i.e. the human condition and the political spectrum as a whole. Instead of imposing any particular ideology, be it Right, Left, Marxism, Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism and so on I want to examine the relationship between a political system and the human condition."

Atzmon engagingly utilizes the controversial Bell Curve of the Right Wing to show how a Jewish "cognitive elite" attempted to separate itself from the rest of society's "unchosen" through selective breeding conflating genetic determination with heritability to fit what scientists call a power distribution so that a small group of exceptional performers overtake the rest. Atzmon poses that rather than increasing the performance of cognitive elites, the ideology of the curve has actually been constraining how all people perform.

A Return to Athens

In the post-political neighbourhood in which we live, much of humanity has been reduced to serving the interests of big money, mammon and oligarchy, with Left and Right, those two familiar poles of politics as we have always understood them to be, now indistinguishable and irrelevant. The freedom to think openly and speak clearly are but nostalgic concepts. Our Western Liberal Utopia has turned into an Orwellian dystopia. Gilad Atzmon

Atzmon, taking philosopher, Pierre Hadot's advice, models the determinate individual separating himself from the All, be they Left or Right, by adding a difference which, as Plotinus says, is a negation. The best life depends upon becoming one's true self via the intellect, which means to step away from identity politics, which teaches us to identify ourselves by our victimhood and oppressions in a competition for least powerful giving us an excuse not to act.

"Being in Time" is a peripatetic walk, from the man who brought us The Wandering Who, through the present post-political narrative. Intended to make the ideologies driving the narrative available to all, thereby depriving it of its power, the book takes us on path to build moral courage. The chief consideration is how to popularize the walk of "being in time", and to provide the individual, in a time of general confusion and dissolution, with a living and breathing moral basis for practical life.

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June Scorza Terpstra, Ph.D. is an activist educator and university lecturer in Justice Studies, Criminal Justice and Sociology. She has founded numerous programs for homeless, abused, youth and oppressed people in the USA. She is presently teaching (more...)
 
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