Thanks for sharing your insights.
These are frustrating times to be living "in the belly of the beast."
Frustration is, I think, the core cause of anger.
It is true, as you rightly point out, that people are "caught up" in their lives and most have not been taught -- either by fortunate family circumstance or by "the authorities" -- to engage life as a deep-learning process.
And so, my "finger-pointing" is largely futile and perhaps both wrong and counterproductive.
As a young man I was impressed by an observation by Carl Jung -- who, opposinng the main thrust of Christian moral theology which holds that people are not responsible for what they "didn't know" -- argued that we are responsible for not becoming conscious. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
I am unable to track down Jung's reference now, but I don't think he was talking about "finger-wagging" responsibility.
He may even have implied that it was the moral responsibility of "the authorities" to state the "obligation to become conscious" and to state it clearly and often.
Traditional "chains of command" are designed to keep people in the dark.
This systematically-imposed benightedness is shockingly clear in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's "The Vietnam War" wherein we learn -- through the spoken words of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- that all three men knew (and acknowledged "out loud" to their advisors) that Vietnam was unwinnable but they had to keep fighting -- chose to keep sacrificing tens of thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives in a lost cause -- because their re-election depended on deliberate invocation of Darkness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series)
What would it be like to live in a society where "the authorities" consistently taught - at every level - that everyone was morally obligated to learn how to think, to expand awareness and to conduct research by the rules of "intellectual rigor?"
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research As Adoration"
If I recall Jung's "gist" correctly, he was saying that we are responsible for all our actions just as we are responsible for the paraplegia that results from jumping off a bridge... as an acquaintance of mine did in the hippy heyday.
Doug was driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge under the influence of LSD when he decided to park his car at the edge, exited, and - certain he could fly - jumped off the upper deck only to be blown back onto the lower deck where his spine snapped.
He may not have been responsible "from the inside out" but he was obliged to accept full responsibility for what happened "from the outside in."
I still don't know where this line of thinking leads, but there you have it.
The following quotation by H.G. Wells impresses me as true.
Love,
Alan
I choose to belief that the all-too-human desire to crave consoling falsehoods can be un-done.
On Sat, Jul 7, 2018 at 9:26 PM, JB wrote:
Dear Alan:It felt good to read this - maybe because I shared the "sentiments".The only part that I thought twice about was the following:According to "the masses," it is not necessary to study, to acquire factual information, or to think things through in light of learning.I think that the masses are absorbed in their daily rituals of making a living, taking care of kids and pursuing their ideal life of pleasure, materialism and consumerism (the American dream that has been the the gold standard of the society)) etc and believe that they pay the government to take care of things so they do not realize that they have to think things through and the leaders have not empowered them with these perspectives. I also think that we are lucky to have had family, upbringing, environment, education and a mindset that facilitates thinking things through, learning about the world and trying to be responsible members of our societies and the family of man.I lament the lack of leadership that does not empower "the masses" with information that would lead to a better understanding of the world and how to be in it so that all lives are improved.Love,JOn Friday, July 6, 2018, 8:54:26 AM EDT, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Jimbo and F,
The link below provides a pdf of Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of The Masses."
Pax on both houses: "The Revolt Of The Masses": Is Ortega y Gasset ...
However, before reading the text, it is useful to explore my three posts about this notable Spanish philosopher.Jose Ortega Y Gasset's "Rebellion Of The Masses" - Pax on both houses
The Revolt of the Masses - Wikipedia
José Ortega y Gasset - Wikipedia
In his prefatory note to "La Rebelión De Las Masas," Ortega y Gasset says: "My purpose now is to collect and complete what I have already said, so as to produce an organic doctrine concerning the most important fact of our time."Although I cannot confirm Ortega's absolute accuracy identifying "the most important fact of our time," the "revolt of the masses" is a leading contender, and - in my mind - his analysis is precisely predictive of the social (or shall I say anti-social) political milieu that has resulted in the ascendancy of Trump with his boorishness, ignorance, contempt-for-knowledge and gleeful cruelty.It's Time To Replace The Phrase "American Conservative" With "American Cruelist"
In a nutshell, "the masses" - starting in the late 19th century - became unconsciously contemptuous of cultured people, people who actually "knew things," people who used their well-of-knowledge to create the material advancements craved by the uneducated "masses."
Newly-inebriated by the discovery that they could sell their labor to the highest industrial bidder, the masses were, for the first time in history, able "to take care of themselves" without a workplace patron, and soon disregarded the previous social hierarchy.
Too poorly educated to understand the depth, breadth and critical importance of trans-generational culture, the uneducated have come to threaten "ordered society itself" through inordinate focus on purchaseable pleasures without any overarching sense of cultural or historical meaning.Increasingly skewed by a way of life intent on material gratification, the "social" citizens of yesteryear morphed into isolated "consumer units" dedicated to continual enhancement of their personal "pleasure domes."Welcome to Xanadu."Education" And "Instruction" Are Antipodal Enterprises
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo t.com/2018/04/education-and-in struction-are-antipodal.html
Not only were "the masses" devoid of intellectual accomplishment and intellectual rigor, they quickly became hubristically proud of their ability to be self-provident and, as a corollary of their single-minded focus on - and pride in - their ability to provide for themselves, they became implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) contemptuous of any social order that pretended to know better than they did.The upshot has been the ongoing decline and threatening collapse of the social order.
'Bring on the six gun" and laud every man or woman "courageous" enough to "stand his ground" - even if mostly dark-skinned people end up dead.
Who can argue with the dimwitted proposition that "common sense" demands self-interest to the exclusion of The Common Good, The General Welfare and a Social Contract?
According to "the masses," it is not necessary to study, to acquire factual information, or to think things through in light of learning.Similarly, there is no longer need to understand human life in light of paradox, irony and historical perpective.
"Default myopia" is enough.
It's "just common sense."Enter any populist or fascist capable of muttering these three "magic words" and intelligence itself ends up on the trash heap of history.
In the absence of education, bluster, bombast and bigotry win the day.
I hope my rough summary does not do grave injustice to Ortega y Gasset.
Pax vobiscum
Alan
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