I think the following pretty much sums it up for me, except that I'm a TV junkie, and I rather like detective novels in the vein of Carl Hiassan...if you're looking for grounds, Habermas is the obvious choice. He's spent his entire career trying to establish legitimate and universal grounds for a leftist project. He gets labelled a liberal a fair bit, but this isn't all that honest, he's not. On my charitable days, I suspect Habermas is one of the most radical thinkers around... but enough about Habermas, whom in seeking grounds and identifying them as part of a biological-pragmatic-utopian dynamic Castoriadis observes, 'Habermas has made an enormous logical blunder.' ...
"I desire and I feel the need to live in a society other than the one surrounding me. Like most people, I can live in this one and adapt to it - at any rate, I do live in it. However critically I may try to look at myself, neither my capacity for adaption, nor my assimilation of reality seems to me to be inferior to the sociological average. I am not asking for immortality, ubiquity or omniscience. I am not asking society to 'give me happiness;' I know that this is not a ration that can be handed out by City Hall or my neighborhood Workers' Council and that, if this thing exists, I have to make it for myself, tailored to my own needs, as this has happened to me already and as this will probably happen to me again. In life, however, as it comes to me and to others, I run up against a lot of unacceptable things; I say that they are not inevitable and that they stem from the organization of society. I desire, and I ask, first of all that my work be meaningful, that I may approve what it is used for and the way in which it is done, that it allow me genuinely to expend myself, to make use of my faculties and at the same to enrich and develop myself. And I say that this is possible, with a different organization of society, possible for me and for everyone... I wish to be able to meet the other person as a being like myself and yet absolutely different, not like a number or a frog perched on another level (higher or lower...) Of the hierarchy of revenues and powers. I wish to see the other, and for the other to see me, as another human being. I want our relationships to be something other than a field for the expression of aggressivity, our competition to remain within the limits of play, our conflicts - to the extend that they cannot be resolved or overcome - to concern real problems and real stakes, carrying with them the least amount of unconsciousness possible, and that they be as lightly loaded as possible with the imaginary. I want the other to be free, for my freedom begins where the other's freedom begins, and, all alone, I can be merely 'virtuous in misfortune', I do not count on people changing into angels, nor on their souls becoming as pure as mountain lakes - which, moreover, I have always found deeply boring... I know, of course, that this desire cannot be realized today; nor even were the revolution to take place tomorrow, could it be fully realized in my lifetime. I know that one day people will live, for whom the problems that cause us the most anguish today will no longer even exist... I am not, under this pretext, going to spend my free time watching television or reading detective novels" (91-93). - Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society
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