From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Tue Apr 16 2002 - 09:14:51 MDT
I hesitate to try to break my thinking down into percentages. I have a few
principles, and I figure let the rest fall where it may.
1) Free Will. Humans have free will, and any political party/solution that
fails to take this into account and respect it will fail. If a State has to
exist at all, it should be mainly an institution of helping folks accept one
another and get along, rather than of forcing folks to follow rules.
2) Violence makes people mean and stupid. When you confine and physically
abuse a dog, it becomes a fighting dog. It's unethical, of course, to do
this to a dog, but the pit bull trainer has a mental leg up on the
'corrections worker.' The corrections worker does this to -people- and even
though every scientific observation indicates that this 'confine-and-beat'
strategy would make most carbon-based life forms more ornery, tougher, less
communicative, less social, and more likely to strike out at anyone or
anything, the 'corrections worker' must persist in the delusion that such
treatment is having the opposite effect: making troublesome people fit in
and behave better. So next time you criticize the man who keeps a fighting
dog on a three foot chain and pokes him with a stick, understand that guy
is less deluded and does less overall damage than every cop, every judge,
every DA, every prison guard, and every citizen who believes in 'law and
order.'
3) Marx was right about a lot of things, wrong about some others, must be
understood -within- the judeo xian moslem tradition, as someone said 'the
Last of the Jewish Prophets,' and the whole range from the flowery and
utopian to the murderous within Marxism has got to be understood as the
latest version of an age-old ideology, that of the 'Imminent Reign of the
Spirit,' in which the high would be brought low, the first made last, the
meek inherit the earth (after the proud have all killed each other off, I
presume,) etc. It appeals to the same kinds of people, and it frightens
the same kinds of people, whether ancient, medieval, modern or post.
4) Gandhi was right when he said 'You can't invent a system so perfect that
people don't have to be good.'
The whole business of tweeking the law or the election system, or even the
eduaction system this way or that to obtain a better human is just stupid.
No system is better than the people in it. But I think people have
to -decide- to be good, and that if they do that then 'the system' works,
and does not in itself prevent any good thing. In other words, I don't
think revolution against the institutions is necessary. They aren't the
problem. We are. The problem with Congress is not that it's 'worse' than
the average person, but just that it's not any better. Look. The average
person is in debt to the usurers, sold out to the corporate boss, and keeps
a straight face while telling his children america is a democracy.
Congressmen are the same.
gonna stop here. getting long winded and starting to like this too much.
Matt
I come not to praise caesar but to bury him.
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