Chuck (cgrimes at rawbw.com>) quoted me as writing: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
``...People do have an instinct for freedom, just as they have an instinct for survival, but the two get screwed up when one is being brought up in a class society.... so that a child learns to attain power by giving it away to the people who are seen as the legitimate authorities...
...As for the BIG existential turns, these occur BECAUSE people start to move history for themselves. No individual can do this alone. It's a class act brought about by a combination of a legimation crisis of the system and an ever growing number of individuals talking, acting and organizing to change...''
Michael Ballard
-------- And then further, Chuck wrote:
Yes. I absolutely agree. And I don't understand it.
******************************************************* To which I respond: I think that most people are made inherently conservative of the order in which they are born because they are brought up to be that way. Humans and other lesser thinking animals are usually only moved to revolutionary change by necessity--like, all the fruit is on the ground, why are we remaining in the trees?
Certain individuals can make it to a higher level of consciousness before necessity makes it nigh on to impossible to ignore the obivious. But before those dire straits appear on the horizon, the inherent conservatism of the human race will disallow change and go with the flow, the least path of resistance. That path now lies in a virtual accpetance of levels of sado-mashochistic dyanamics aka "lordship and bondage" rituals.
At this stage of historical development, people have been brought up in an upside down world, where the human source of power and creation has been given over in the the mass of the creators' minds to abstract entitities and to people who have little or nothing to do with creative/productive processes, but who have almost everything to do with the power to control them. A kind of cognitive dissonace, based on this upbringing, keeps people from giving credence to rational arguments about who the bosses are and who deserves recognition and applause for creating the real, material world.
Obviously this situation changes and has changed throughout time, brought about from those human explosions of consciousness and action, revolutionary praxis, if you will, where we get most of what progress we have made as a race toward greater freedom.
In the meantime, we make do, e.g. celebrating the work of Bresson or raising pints of ale with what mates we can find at our local pub or going to the demonstrations, "to get our fair share of abuse" or simply making love. Some of us actually create new paths to liberation in our own, semi-heroic, laudible, everyday ways.
Best, Mike B)
===== War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
Thomas Jefferson
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
_______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com