(For Jeff Sachs)
I have, for some 2 decades now, inveighed against EM (Eurocentric Modernism) models of ‘society’ ( amongst other issues).
Let me repeat myself, here , for it simply cannot stale by repetition.
I repudiate virtually ALL of its variegated myths/idylls.
Let me list but a scant few…
We do not need annual GDP growth.
We do not need mass production and distribution.
We do not need perpetual technical ‘progress’.
We do not need a score or so years of costly, credentialing, ‘schooling’ robbing children/young adults of childhood , common sense, and innate shrewdness.
We do not need an adversarial ‘democracy’, nor an adversarial legal /juridical system.
We do not need armies , navies, and bases.
We do not need to toil, en masse, all our lives, at meaningless jobs designed by corporate agents under command of remote Simon Legrees, only to be periodically ‘set free’ whenever it suits the latter.
We do not need formal, empty, pledges of a specious ‘equality’.
We do not need nations, and states, and other such dubious lines in the sand, armed with decrees , fiats, and constitutions (drafted by a few , privileged, of one generation, forever, for others).
Nor ‘Parliaments’ that govern us on behalf of distal power elites.
Nor ‘elections’ where we duly ‘elect’ our oppressors.
We do not need global markets, global trade, nor ‘competition’.
We do not need giant corporations running it all, from atop their ‘commanding heights’.
We do not need organized mass media filling our minds daily with dessicating drivel.
We do not need vast, organized ‘religions’ exploiting fear , dread, and insecurity , with vain promises of desserts in the after-life. whilst propping up every iniquity of the status quo.
*
We do ‘need’ communal autonomy and self-management: albeit within small gemeinschaft (face-to-face) communities , governed by reciprocal, affective ties.
No: (and this is Imp to stress) this is NOT yet another new, arid, manifesto of ‘invention’ (like so much of EM sloganeering) .
It is simply Re-discovery of extant antic norms, drawn from our real, anthropic heritage.
.
What are these norms?
Here, but a few.
Not competition, but co-operation.
Not opulence, nor power – but conviviality.
Not a Material Economy of Interests , but a Moral Community of Affections.
Not ‘civil society’ , but communal society.
Not asocial ‘individualism’, but ‘mutualism’ (to coin a term).
Not ‘majority rule’, but consensual orderings evolving over time.
Not nihilistic ‘freedoms’, but positive enablements to better our conjoint welfare.
Not endlessly ‘doing’, or ‘becoming’, as some perpetual motion machine , but, more importantly, in ‘being’.
Not ’producing and consuming’ as though that exhausted all of human potential, but living, sharing, caring, participating in the myriad qualities of life – at times, by not producing and consuming.
Anthropic life, short as it is, is more about qualities, than quantites.
That is just how ‘we’ began our long ‘history’ before sordid empires (like EM, but not limited to it) conquered and took over.
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Such is our ‘birth-right’, a parcel of our essential species-being.
It is where we ‘belong’.
It is where we could return, IF we are to be whole and sane again.
That bears repeating: we are NOT sane and whole in this EM world of make-believe: a mere five minutes of reflection on how we live our lives under its gathering panoply of constraints (which we foolishly venerate as the artefacts of ‘civilisation’) would be sufficient to understand the inescapable madness of it.
Not to mention its callow brutishness.
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So, no: false salves won’t do – e.g., electing a Bernie Sanders or a Jill Stein (honorable as they might be) won’t cut it.
Not even as fantasy.
No, your life would be not a whit more meaningful if the two venerables , above, were to be Co-Presidents for Life.
Global ‘free’ Markets, Universal Wage-Slavery, and mindless production of disutilities to help swell the coffers of even more billionaires – even with slightly higher minimum wages and health insurance – would still give us a treadmill.
And, take note: as Shakespeare said it - a treadmill is a treadmill is a treadmill.
In fact, let me bring my Argument home , succinctly.
It wouldn’t work any better if YOU – yes, You !!– were elected Prez.
You see: it’s NOT the subjective qualities/graces of the individual (nor the lofty slogans of the Party, or Platform), running for Prez, or Prime Minister, that matters – in the slightest.
And it is quite astonishing how ALL entities on the EM political spectrum are even now, in these latter days, seriously deluded in this regard (showing how successful is its hegemony).
It is, au contraire, the (inexorably ill-founded) SYSTEM – that I term EM – as a whole that is pernicious.
Worse, we didn’t – contrary to legend – buy it all at some open , smiling, supermarket of ‘free choice’ (that EM venerates as an idyll: in stark contrast to the contrary real-life observance of it): it was violently thrust upon a hapless ppopulace by the masters of the economy and polity centuries ago in Europe – and then propagated , fiercely, across the globe – by brute force.
As it is, to this day.
[2016 © R.Kanth]