snitsnat wrote:
>
>
> Good. I killfiled him. My experience with voluntary simplicity Chucklefucks
> is that no amount of talking changes a thing. They are religiously devoted
> just as much as they generally were religiously devouted to consumerism
> before they were born again. Their whole LIFESTYLE is wrapped up in it,
> they cannot give it up without one day having to be critical fo their
> entire lifestyle.
Whoa! I agree of course with your rejection of lifestyle-politics (or whatever one labels it), and I agree that Tully's arguments are not interesting. But they are arguments, which in principle could be considered in abstraction from the personality and/or intentions of any particular person who expresses them. I would imagine that some quite pleasant people have ugly thoughts, or intelligent people have stupid thoughts, and some ugly people have important thoughts. Perhaps Tully is merely (merely!) making a serious political and/or intellectual error, and we don't really know the source, in his thinking, of those errors, and we can't know wheher the following is an explanation of his error:
> And that becomes a problem because they fetishize guilt.
> It's too great a burden to bear, psychologically, and they've spent far too
> much time viewing themselves and their lifestyle as superior.
>
> Go back and read his discussion with Gar (Seattle thread). Guilt, guilt,
> guilt. ....
It may not be guilt -- it may be (and this is an error of the whole of capitalist culture) simply a deification of Choice! After all, Milton was guilty :-) of the following horror, "Reason, which is but choice." Choice is the Summum Bonum. The existentialists got into the same morass if I understand them correctly. We become human by the free choices we make in a vacuum. Tully silly politics, in other words, may be merely a bewitchment by bourgeois ideology, not any particular pathology on his own part.
Carrol