Shane Mage wrote:
>
> Doug wrote:
> >
> >Cynicism is the worst kind of conformity, as Max Horkheimer said -
> >unlike >the naif, the cynic knows things are rotten, but plays along
> >anyway.
>
> When Diogenes told Alexander of Macedon "stop blocking my sun"
> was he "playing along anyway?"
It was rather more than getting along; it was close to active collaboration. A point I made about the movie, "Lost in Translation," catches something of what goes on in such episodes:
*****It sounds like an excellent movie -- but if you take it to another level of abstraction, it is as deeply imbued with capitalist ideology as a Fox newscast. Alienation, it reveals, is NOT a necessary and "objective" property of capitalist relations but the result of the (isolated) individual's failure to be "wise enough" to seize on the unalienated life which is available to all.
It is, then, a complicated manifestation of the ideology of blame the victim.*****
The implicit premise of the incident of Diogenes & Alexander is that tyranny is merely external, and the truly free man (woman?) remains free under Alexander as in Athens of the democracy. Slaves have only themselves to blame for allowing their master's shadow to block the sun. The 'lost souls' of the commodity jungle can individually rise above that alienated world.
Isn't there a Roman comedy in which a philosophical slave (who in his soul rises above his status) is briskly put on the block and sold?
Carrol Carrol