Sunday, October 30, 2005

I feel the need to explain the longdrawn silence that has been inflicting this blog. It just might die, sadly, after 3 years of expression. I'm just not spending as much time at my computer as I have done so before, and life is just so much better experienced then explained. But whatever, chances are that this blog will merely experience is shift in function as opposed to ceasing altogether.

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My big thing of late is the evils of individualism and democratization. In short, Liberalism has screwed us all by supplying us with this huge supermarket of ideas and identities that we are free to pick and choose as we please. As Elim puts is, we're constantly told "you can be anything that you want to be" when what we really need is a society that tells us "now THIS is who you are". So much so that this dilutes the concept of "being yourself". How can you 'be yourself' when you're constantly shopping for new identities and concepts of the self?

Here's the show-down between myth and imgination: neither have any reference to empirical facts as we know it. Oh what are facts anyway? Facts aren't reality at all. Whatever. Myth and Imagination have no reference to reality anyway. But while Myth gives you a sense of who you are, your heritage and origins, Imagination tells you who you can be, it creates fiction that projects longing or fear, as opposed to myth, that embodies understanding and conciousness.

Liberalism devotes a rediculous level of energy focusing on the individual as opposed to the whole. This, basically creates "the other" on a level previously unmatched, it's me against the music baby, it's ultimate alienation that can only come from the obsessive self-absorbed analysis of the tiny pathetic non-self-defining entity of the individual as apart from the greater whole of community/humanity/whatever.

The cry for absolute individualism leads to the need for absolute egalitarianism. This is a self-defeating, contradictory, existential polemic we have here and it basically leaves us all floudering for some sense of sense and direction. Basically, we all explode into a million pieces because we pour the universe into vessels that are too small to contain - ourselves. At once, Liberalism calls us to be apart and alieanted yet integrated and connected to humanity and community. Way to go, Woodrow.

Don't get me wrong (although I'm totally asking for it. It's 2 in the AM and I've spent the day cleaning a shelter for Sex-trade workers), I'm not saying that the ideals and the goals of Liberalism and a form of political philosophy is the pits. I'm saying that the institutionalization of imagination into policy formation and action is quite the diaster. The formation of the USSR might well be a strange and accurate reflection of Democratization around the world. "If only...", spawned my the imgaination, is a powerful thing, uttered by both The Soviet and The Democrat. Both Socialism and Liberialism have beautiful escatalogcial desires, but the abandonment of true, historically congugated myth for escapist, dreamy imagination is really only man swimming from one solipsistic cage to another. We're all the same.

So here we throw religion into the picture, and it's loud (albeit unacknowledged) presense in recent/modern political though.... And we get me trying to fomulate my thesis for my IR theory paper.

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So talk to me about that, Anyone, anything. Be plato, be hobbes, be locke.... But i really need to talk to God about this.

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