*What Do You Identify With Most?*

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Funny, I'm neither capitalist, nor hooknosed. Will I be spared in this almighty purge of you-know-whats, or does my bloodline and culture betray me no matter how un-beaky my nose?

There are a few pertinent reactions that come to mind after reading this:

1) What would you replace (coporate) globalism, liberal democracy, and capitalism with?
2) "The ends always justify the means" style ideology always leads to Spiralling chaos, dismay, and internal purges. Even a man initially as compassionate and well-meaning as Robespierre could be turned into a monster by following drastic “for the future good” style thinking.
3) A public uninformed about social justice issues will be highly resistant to ideological radicals. Massive public awarenesscampaigns seem to make a lot more sense than violence.* Once the people have really internalized specific injustices, pressure will come from the bottom-up for change. It happened with the apartheid regime in South Africa (People in the US were informed of the cruelties and despite conservative apologetics trade restrictions were implemented and the regime fell).
4) Violence turns everyone into monsters and releases the worst, most primal, impulses of human beings. It is dangerous to try and channel the worst of human nature towards the cause of a "perfect world".
5) You lose all perspective when you value your ideals more than the people your ideals are meant to protect.

NOTE
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* And do you really think that you can take on the state and win? You'll end up decimated like the Weatherman Underground. And if not jailed for life, you'll be a laughing stock for years to come. More importantly to the selfless yet misguided ideologue, your policies, or even less radical cousins of them, will lose all credibility.

Problem is not lack of public awareness.

Middle class in typical western country knows perfectly well about starvation in Africa. About prostitution in Russia and Thailand. About slavery and exploitation.

That is not problem. They are aware.

But moral fibre has been wrapped up by civilisation which glorifies form before content. People look up to celebrities and capitalists.

If they are middle class, they want to become doctors, lawyers or stock-brokers.

If they are working class, they want to be rock stars or gangsters.

They do not care about society, for society is not.

All which we have is chaos. Individuals searching for group to align to. Individuals who have visions about themselves, but not how world should look like.

Even christian dogma is superior to current world order. Christians have at least traditionally recognised social problems. Libertarian personalities do not give damn.

Current capitalist system is system where everyone will have freedom to starve to death, engage in sexual orgies and smoking marijuana.

People who do not see anything wrong with that are sick in mind and need mental care.

I am not for violence for sake of violence.

If goals could be accomplished without violence, I am supportive. But I will not hesitate to use violence if Motherland is in need of it.

I have beaky nose myself. And my mother's mother was "you-know-what".

Race do not matter for me, though I identify with Slavic ultranationalism. What matter is character and opinions.

If you are pro-cosmopolitanism, you will probably be sent to labour camp.

Ah! Motherland. That's a clue. If you had said fatherland it would be a completely different paradigm.

Wondering what factors determine the "thing" we will most identify with.

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Interesting question. I've never identified by my body. It has always been a "possession" or place where "I" live. Over the years I identify less and less with my mind too. My sense of identification is becoming more nebulous and diffuse; there are times it is not even associated with my own body but with other people, animals and even nature itself. Hard to describe. I sense there is no one thing I identify with, yet I identify with many things. Even the sense of "I" has lost much of its traditional, accepted meaning. (Hence my location tag and signature line).

Yay! I'm going to labour camp!

Have you noticed how often the Motherland eats her young? Probably not. You suffer from Collectivist Brain Rot. You believe in Something Greater Than Yourself.

ruveyn

How truly "aware" are they of the issues? You would be surprised at how many well-educated professionals are utterly ignorant of current affairs or general knowledge. To supply an anacedote, I recall a Communications Director (with a Bachelor Degree) for a joint public-private organization who didn't know what a "Wiccan" was when mentioned in conversation and needed to be explained, in a very crude way, that they were "good witches" (a ridiculous oversimplification of a nuanced issue if I ever saw one).

Similar statements hold true about current affairs. A professional class family may know, the vague and context free fact, that "children are starving in Africa" but they no next to nothing about the political, socioeconomic, and historical reasons for that situation. They also no next to nothing about which NGOs to donate to in order to help alleviate the problem (so, for instance, your aid donations don't go into a self-serving dictator's Swiss Bank Account) and which solution would work (whether greater regulation or some "market-based solution", both chanted by opinion leaders as the answer, and lack the media analysis skills to find out. True, education does help, especially post-graduate education.* After the horrors of the Twenty First century people are far too weary of well-intended but misguided action. And, while sarcastic, there is some merit to Adam Curtis’s notion of “Oh-Dearism”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKHQZobymg[/youtube]

Peter Singer, in One World: The Ethics of Globalization, discussed how a majority of Americans believed that the US was giving too much international aid, yet when asked what an appropriate amount would, they chose a much higher percent value of the GDP than the US actually provides. Again, intellectual dissonance, people simply do not know the specific facts.

The public, even some professionals, are ill-informed of the essential details of many important issues. Chomsky eloquently discusses why a boycott on Israel would be a naïve move here, stating that the public simply does not know the specifics of the issue. The media outlets give a very fragmented and childishly simple image of issues, it takes enormous efforts. Quite simply, most people do not have the encyclopaedic long-term memory of a verbal logic thinking Aspergian or the preoccupation abilities; it simply is not solid in their mind compared with everyday matters.

To illustrate this point and to give you a sense of how someone can know a fact like “children are starving in Africa” or “I have to be at work by 12:00 pm”, without the fact being on an operational level, let me give you an example from this morning.

As I deconstructed and read your posts, hyperfocused and enjoying the act of analysis and refutation, I realized “I have thirty minutes to work”. Normally, I would be panicked and frantically showering than jolting to work. But so much of my concentration was simply on what I perceived as flaws in your ideas and how they contrasted with what I perceived as the truth of the matter. So I ended up being less than punctual.

This same “losing track of” happens to the statistically average person. Except, rather than what is lost being an everyday matter (like the proper time to get to work), it is an issue of current affairs like the starvation of children in Africa. They know the fact but it is not at an operational level, it is not prominent in their consciousness. Other matters have to be juggled.




Form is a lot simpler than content. Plus the fact we live in a televised society has some affect on how preoccupied we are with form, because content is better expressed via written word than television screen. Neil Postman (Amussing Ourselves to Death analyzed that issue.

For some reason I think if you got rid of this problem (recalled everyone's television set), your revolutionary government would be very short lived.



Lawyers, especially the socially conscious or consumer protection ones, are quite capable of striving for the public good. Ralph Nader was a lawyer. True, the profession has tenfold as many bad apples as good ones. Still.

As for doctors, do not quite a few develop a Messiah Complex? Does that not indicate some genuine altruism from the vocation? Heard of "Doctors without Boarders"? Quite a few are well-intended people. I would say, for places with single payer healthcare systems (like my native Canada), they are public servants.

As for stock-brokers, you got me there.



You still open pandora's box.

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*Rob Aronson, in his book “Living Without God”, highlighted how bachelor education was just ramming immense facts at an individual: the person has no real “grasp” or perspective of the facts, their knowledge is not coherent. Only after graduate education does one feel the meaningfulness of the knowledge and gain general critical thinking skills. This may help explain the socially conscious attitude of many Post-Graduate professionals: Doctors without Boarders, people who take extra (if miniscule) financial pains to buy fair trade products, and professors who instil an attitude of social consciousness into their students.

I identify most with what I do. Watching TV, going for a walk with my dad, computer, hot tub, swimming, bowling, listening to music, playing music.