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There is no such thing as cold.
When a person dies, freezes to death, let’s say. It is not because cold creeps into his or her body, it is because the heat necessary to sustain bodily functions creeps out.
Heat is a one-way street, heat flows in one direction, when we say something “cools down”, what is actually happening is the heat it contains is flowing out of it, and into something else.
Hot and cold are therefore not a true dichotomy, they are words used to describe relative values along a single continuum, that describing the presence of heat.
There is really no problem inherent in our use of a false dichotomy in everyday discussion of the weather, but there is a problem in our political discourse that flows directly from our clinging to a perspective based on another false dichotomy;
The problem as I see it, is that we, who find ourselves so deeply troubled by the results of our government’s activities, are stymied in our efforts to affect change by our own tacit agreement that that change might be affected by participation in the supposedly legitimate dialog between the ‘two political parties’.
We are encouraged at every turn to understand that our politics can be described as the engagement between two parties whose ideologies represent opposing sides in a legitimate argument over the proper role of government, each side holding opinions that reflect their legitimate understanding of the Truth; that is, the “way things really are” and the logical decisions that flow from those understandings.
What I’m saying is there is no real dialog of opposition happening in our politics.
It is not necessary to prove, and enumerate the lies and deceptions, is only necessary to face the Truth that by this time should be burned into our hearts by the fire of disappointment;
There is no party of ‘Family Values and Fiscal Responsibility’ just as there is no party of ‘Peace and Compassion for the Poor and Powerless’.
What we have witnessed, but do not fully comprehend, is the one-way flow of Truth, and that out-flow has resulted in an almost absolute deficit of Truth in our politic discourse.
The single most important illusion resulting from this deficit is the false understanding that our politics is held hostage by an ideological stalemate.
Contrary to this almost universally believed illusion, we are not engaged in a dialectic between two opposing ideologies so much as a one-way battle between those who would like to make political decisions based on Truth on the one hand, which I would describe as “the way things really are”, and those who insist that we also entertain all sorts of ideas completely unrelated to observable reality; that is, various fabricated opinions and arguments whose only purpose is thwart the natural political impulses of those whose decisions are based on Truth.
The very most important thing we must come to understand is that the people who agree with those of us who wish to make political decisions based on the Truth, are by and large excluded from the two-party system, the government and thus the political process, and that our politicians are by and large those who have agreed ahead of time to confine the political discourse to those arguments whose only purpose is thwart the natural political impulses of those who prefer decisions be based on Truth.
The only opposition that actually exists, is between we, the 99%, utterly excluded from the political decision making process, mainly because our world, and thus our political aspirations revolve around what is real and true, and the 1% whose absolute control of our political discourse, our government and the M$M has resulted in the conditions we find ourselves working so hard to endure.
40 Comments
Tip ‘O’ the Hat to perris for reminding me to focus.
Most excellent post, Watt4Bob, thank you.
Recommended to the consideration and conscience of the entire FDL community …
DW
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for the kind words.
I had begun to think my only skill lay in thread-killing, which gave me pause to consider an even lower profile.
I’ve no idea what might cause you to think that you “kill” threads, Watt4Bob, as I am always interested in what you have to share. Frankly, I consider you to be among the most thoughtful and considered of those who comment, here.
Perhaps, it is a question of “timing” …. or even of exhaustion?
Many of the best commenters seem, of late, to be election weary and tired of rancorous and gratuitous assault.
Sometimes, it is not the truth which cannot be “handled”, but rather the unrelenting bull-shit, both “professionally” inspired and amateur …
DW
Good post.
It’s tough to rattle people away from the ideological assumptions and positions they have been trained to take up. It’s difficult to convince them that many of the viewpoints they considered ‘just’ and ‘true’ are really based on illusions and the manipulations of the elite.
It seems to me that what this should tell us is our governments are too complex and too big, making it impossible to effectively oversee. The ancient philosophers as well as the founding fathers warned about this.
To get free we have to reject the 2-party system and the left/right paradigm. It seems to be a means of keeping the people confused and divided, allowing elites to rule and transfer wealth without oversight.
Getting away from left/right thinking and the whole burden of “leftist” assumptions can be bumpy at first but eventually it feels liberating.
Contemporary technology might be a game-changer when it comes to overseeing representatives and their lobbyists. But to really get control of our government we would to develop CIVIC VIRTUE, contempt for parties, patriotism, etc. Both right and left would prefer the rule of law to plutocracy, but we won’t get it as long as we squabble drinking the cable news kool-aid.
And to do that we have to begin by considering the possibility that there’s a problem there.
You’re right about the Civic Virtue thing too, they used to teach us Civics in school, then came the whole “Government is the problem” meme.
Government wasn’t the problem when St. Ronnie first said that, and though it has become something of a twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy, it doesn’t have to be.
I’m hoping that Grover Norquist’s recent difficulty in selling his BS is a sign of things to come.
Excellent comment, Green Liberal, worthy of a “recommend” on its own merits.
DW
A text relevant to the discussion…. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor….
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm
For the Grand Inquisitor, ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ are related, in the sense that the masses can handle neither. By taking away the freedom that harms them and giving them illusions instead, the Inquisitor pretends he is serving the greater good.
It seems to me that (for either good reasons or illusory reasons) elites will arrive at the Inquisitor’s conclusions over and over again. So it’s difficult for anyone who values truth and freedom to trust them.
A related problem is how difficult it is for lovers of truth to see the truth, when we are in fact chained in Plato’s cave. Even at universities truth is served up in degraded, partisan packages. The difficulty the masses have at achieving truth gives elites even more reason to subscribe to the Inquisitor’s view—namely, that their rule is preferable to the masses having their own freedom and suffering as a consequence.
A more evil related text is “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Of course, the Protocols are a fabrication–a literary creation that could just as easily be about Masons or Muslims or Lutherans or Jesuits as Jews. It’s about how a conspiracy of amoral monied elites would use liberal democracy to establish global domination.
What makes them interesting is that the reasoning contained in the Protocols was so convincing to conservative skeptics/nihlists….propelling them to create appalling mirror ideologies in the early 20th century. For those subscribing to the authoritarian conspiracist view, where liberalism and democracy are illusions to confuse and divide people, the greater good for humanity can consist in lying, manipulation, war, illusion peddling, etc. It’s possible for the Jesuit/Communist/Fascist/Neocon/Theocon type to engage in all of these things while firmly believing they are serving the greater good of humanity.
The potential for human evil is immense. We must invent means of disempowering evil (basically, desire enabled by ideology and unconstrained by morality) via true separation of powers and truly balanced institutions. We need a (clear) code of international law so elected representatives have tacit norms to go by. We need to develop useful moralities that encourage contempt for fraud and usury.
But before we get the above, we will need some kind of moral/spiritual renaissance. Hopefully it’s coming.
The survival of the human species, Green Liberal, depends upon such a renaissance, quite literally. And the premiss of that renaissance must be an appreciation of life itself, and the awareness that, for human purposes, we happen to inhabit paradise … humanity has its very own version of “heaven” if we might find the wit and wisdom to appreciate it.
Momentarily, we are bemused with the thread-bare “notion” that “money” is all that matters … when, in fact, it is the possibility of life, and not merely our own …
DW
I have to share this recent find which is one of the inspirations for my post;
Emily Dickinson on the subject of honesty:
It’s going to take some finesse to achieve our aim, and by finesse I don’t mean tricks.
I really like your post, Watt4Bob, and loved the ‘cold’ analogy.
This part of one sentence troubles me a little bit though, even though I think I know what you mean by it:
“…we are not engaged in a dialectic between two opposing ideologies so much as a one-way battle between those who would like to make political decisions based on Truth on the one hand…”
It’s my understanding that neither party exemplifies what so many ordinary Americans *value* in the end. That list would vary a bit, but not so much among those of us who believe that the earths resources are gifts not to be abused, that all of us deserve civil justice, health, housing, economic justice…and also help when we can’t help ourselves, etc.
Rec’d. And I love the Dickinson. We’ll get to the Promised Land and the best world we can imagine…because we must.
I can’t really agree with your premise or your supporting arguments. It’s true that the Democrats and Republicans do not represent a true left-right divide. They merely represent the opposite poles of the very narrow continuum of political/economic thought among the elites. However, there are real ideological divides between the right and the actual left. The left has been denied representation or a voice in the media for several decades now since “moderate” right-wingers and corporatists, purged from the Republican Party have taken over the Democratic Party. That’s why the right-left debate as presented by the media is a phony one, not because a real right-left divide does not exist or is not important for the left to preserve.
I also don’t see how the size of government relates to this point. Large, complex governments can be built by left-wing or right-wing actors. Did the Nazis have a small government? And the size of government is neither good not bad. It’s the relationship of the size of government to the size and complexity of the society it governs that’s important. Clearly you don’t need a government the size of the US Federal bureaucracy to administer the Maldives or Andorra but the converse is also true.
The fact that there are right-wing parties like the Libertarian and the Constitution Party that are at odds with the Republican Party does not make them natural allies of the left. True, there are some specific issues on which there is common ground and there is a clear case for a tactical alliance on issues of electoral reform so that these minority parties can get a fair shot. However, those aspects fall far short of making a case for the formation of a populist party drawing from bothe the actual left and these far right-wing parties.
Wendy, you have a profound gift for understatement.
I agree with you, we’ll eventually have no other option but to fix things, because we must.
My heart to your heart, Watt4Bob. I hope and believe that it’s written in the stars just so.
wd
Sometimes I’m in a better place than other times to handle the truth.
A little preachy to my ears, but recommended non the less.
Thanks. It’s important to me to hear different voices, and I thank you.
Thanks demi,
The opportunity to hear different voices is what I enjoy most about the time I spend here.
I’m working on the preachy thing.
I don’t think the issue is differences between the political parties so much as it is between the people (the 99%) and the power elites (the 1%). In this case not so much the money divide but the power divide. I sense that in the present discussion for all intents and purposes that the diarist and others on the thread are more in agreement that the power elite are conjoined in untruth to maintain their status at whatever cost through the fiction of the two-party system and while the fringe parties try to poke at the edges of that system, the ideologies of the two-party system are not so much about the politics as about the power itself.
I agree with you that the left/Dems have been the less-dominant force for several decades and we can all agree on why that is. I think that the ramifications on the over-reach of the right/Repubs in this latest go-round may have caused some real damage to their “brand” for the forseeable future. Or maybe not. But the fact that the Green Party only got 400,000 votes showed us that stick wasn’t very sharp, and that the right/Repubs retained the House, well that too.
It is, after all, about the power anyhew.
In a certain sense Money = Power for the purposes of this conversation, but you’re right, in the end, it’s power we’re talking about.
Those with the power/money enforce the rules governing the discourse.
If you want to be politician, in order to get funded you have to assure the power brokers that you won’t go off the reservation and talk about those topics they don’t want you to talk about.
Eventually, you rationalize your silence and even the lies.
You are correct about Money = Power in most cases. But in some others that isn’t all of it. Romney is a perfect example. He had more money than one person could possibly spend in a lifetime. How did he respond? By wanting power – and the most power one man could get, POTUS. He was willing to quite literally sell his soul to get it. The number and size of the lies was absolutely breathtaking and that is in a field (politics) where lying is the essential name of the game. He set the bar so high for doing this – and was so brazen about it! And even when challenged and fact-checked and proved he was wrong, he never backed down. This was not just about the money.
Contrast this sorry excuse of a person with someone who is equally wealthy – Warren Buffet – but who feels no need to do the kinds of things that Romney seems to. So the money does not translate into the same thing here. They are both bona fide members of the money 1%. But I would seriously argue that they certainly are not both members of the power elite 1% – at least not in anywere near the same way.
Hopefully we all work on that. It’s challenging, which is a good thing in my book.
I like your analogy very much, watt4bob. In the past I have fallen into the trap of saying that we are having the wrong dialogue because all that the politicians have to say is based upon the wrong premises, but your explanation is much better and to the point. There is an emptiness in the political dialogue because its purpose is to deceive and deflect from behind, casting shadow images upon the cave wall.
I’d love to know what you have in mind with the term finesse, though. It seems to me that truth comes all at once, and once you see it there is no going back to the way you were, so I’m not sure about the poem though I admire its gentleness. Many of us light upon it in a telling situation, like the stolen election in 2000, and we follow its thread back over the years, maybe taking half a lifetime to discover what we should have seen all along – at least as far as politics is concerned.
The finesse would come in, maybe, remembering that we ourselves were unenlightened for so very long, so we are not so very different from our neighbors who still cannot see.
As someone who once was a very involved election reform activist, I would like to point out that we have no idea of how many votes anyone of the third parties received. The election matters and registration regulations are put in the hands of the states, and the states put the power in the hands of the Registrar of Voters in each county.
Having met more than my share of those people here in California, I can say that most of them are rather vile. (Although none of them appear to be so.) Unlike the cigar chomping, shifty-eyed ward captains of my Chicagoan childhood days, these people are well dressed, soft spoken, well mannered, and mostly corrupt. Two exceptions: the Republican Registrar of Voters here in my Northern California County. And of course, Debra Bowen who is the Secretary of State. (Although Bowen seems a bit out of touch, or maybe overwhelmed? now that she is in charge of a system that handles 37 million people.)
Exactly what I was thinking.
Confrontation is just what the liars want for us, and will prolong the misery.
“It seems to me that truth comes all at once…”
What you’re describing I might call a Gestalt, when a single truth, probably a personal psycho/spiritual truth, is so profound that it causes a wholesale shift to all one’s Awareness Cards, as it were, and they reshuffle themselves into a whole new deck that causes us to see ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it differently. That can either be painful, beautiful, or both.
It’s often said that in the realm of the socio-political, that once 10% of a population believes a new thought (and for the sake of this discussion, let’s call it a realistic one) very firmly, it’s a game-changer…a tipping point. ‘The Truth’ is a slippery customer, imo, and on this thread different of us may be speaking of scientific, mathematical, observable, what have you…truths, meaning we come to that word from different angles.
The Occupy democracy movement has illuminated the fact that wealth owns power, used for good or ill, and that 99% of us have had little power to change policy, especially as the political machines have determined which candidate even gets nominated: No Populist Candidates Need Apply, at least on the Dem side now.
As that fact permeates more citizens, and they suffer increasingly from a government that doesn’t have their welfare at heart, more awareness will come, imo, and even leak into their surety that *their team* doesn’t champion their needs, either.
Remember that candidates, and now even whole nations or political groups within nations all have PR firms that in effect *sell them* to the populace, either domestically or globally. They sadly know who their *marks* are, and how to convince them that their clients are the good guys. The firm that sold us Obomba even got an award for their advertising, remember.
All of which took me far too many words to say that the truth can come to us either way, but my hope is that the process may be accelerated soon, either through direct experience or the coming revolution of consciousness many of us anticipate is coming soon. Liken it to Hundredth Monkey awareness, whale song distance-learning, the noosphere acting as a megaphone…the thought forms are out there now for people to snatch…if they will, or if they are even thrust upon them for their own survival and that of their loved ones, which increasingly may be their neighbors and the larger community (she says hopefully).
With personal psychologies, asking the right question or saying a truth can be tricky to facilitate. For most people, it’s most useful to try to reach under defenses and slide in so a person won’t push back. For some. it takes communication that hits them right between the eyes, but it sure has to be the right question or…truth.
I don’t have the link at hand, but I read a piece recently that said a large group of climate change scientists are meeting to try to figure out the best way to educate the public about the critical need we face to change almost everything about our energy policy in order that the planet and humanity might survive at all. Finesse, not between the eyes, I guess.
Anyway, sorry; too early and too much coffee, I guess. ;o)
Yes, and…
…Waiter, bring this woman another cup of coffee.
Very much agree with this, elisemattu, as one of the many tools in the disenfranchisement box is a corrupted system for vote verification. We all voted I think with this in mind, and whilst we have the doughty pro-Obama camp voicing fealty hither and yon, that system of who says what is also extremely vulnerable to infiltration. Considering that, and considering the numbers who have consistently opposed here and elsewhere, with no skin in the game other than righteous indignation, your comment seems totally appropriate. Were it not so, something would have been done to make sure we all had confidence our vote was being counted by hand and with a paper record, verified by independent international analysis, which it is not.
When you consider the parties are identical in their fealty, this election takes on the mantle of oligarchy.
It has been my past fond wish that we set up a parallel electoral system that is done the old fashioned way – I for one wouldn’t mind filling out two ballots, the one to be the verification of the other. At least that way we could see what was going on without obfuscation. With no money in the second ‘backup’ system, and it done correctly and on a volunteer basis, we would have something to base our challenge upon.
LOL! Or: ‘Cleanup on aisle four!‘?
Excellent, wendy. What is a hard thing for the general public (and some of my own family) to do is give up former virtues which have now become habits. That is, you must as a good citizen trust your government to have your best interests at heart, and whoever tells you otherwise has left such honorable status and now takes flights of fancy and cohabits with the disreputable. One has to be an extraordinary character to be able to still have appeal for the ‘tried and true’ and reach them either by gentle humor or by unswerving affection, very difficult to do. Yet, our young Occupies did a lot of that in their outreach and it was infectious – the whole country leaped at the chance of being gentle and all-inclusive, until the regime cracked down.
The avenues Occupy has explored and undertaken since then are worthy of that initial exposure – OccupySandy and the Debt being prime examples. These are game changers because they not only help who they help but they educate. You can compare the story of Jesus – the number of blind who were made to see, the number of lame healed, dead raised, were indeed very few in the population at large. It was a corporeal lesson being taught, as he himself emphasized, as being more important than the actual physical good people saw happening. Occupy is like that. It is a new way of doing the vocal megaphone, so the debt jubilee is far larger even than the actual people it helps, because it answers the system that has been foisted upon us in such a dramatic way.
Really, the regime is purposing its own demise, since more and more folk out of work, homeless, in debt simply means more hands to the plough, and that’s one way of recognizing a truth – it has a way of insisting on being recognized sometimes.
IN A GLASS OF CIDER
It seemed I was a mite of sediment
That waited for the bottom to ferment
So I could catch a bubble in ascent.
I rode up on one till the bubble burst,
And when that left me to sink back reversed
I was no worse off than I was at first.
I’d catch another bubble if I waited
The thing was to get now and then elated.
Robert Frost
Yes. Your last paragraph was what I meant by the demonstrably true thought forms being thrust upon them if they don’t choose themselves before then. I started a section on Sandy acting to focus more attention on climate change and its dire perils, and yes…OWS serving additionally to show that the MOTU Emperors are seriously becoming undressed before our eyes. The same might be said of the CENTCOM Generals…*if* the MSM ever focuses on more than the sex scandal. (Petraeus is testifying as I type, whether it goes anywhere at first or not.) By the by, the downside of Watergate style hearings might be that it could provide cover for Obomba *not being able to __’ (insert X, Y or Z cool thing), so, I dunno about that exactly.
And yes, the Frost gave me the ‘now and then elated’ giggles; thank you, dear one. You bring the best things to threads.
“However, there are real ideological divides between the right and the actual left. The left has been denied representation or a voice in the media for several decades now since “moderate” right-wingers and corporatists, purged from the Republican Party have taken over the Democratic Party. That’s why the right-left debate as presented by the media is a phony one, not because a real right-left divide does not exist or is not important for the left to preserve.”
1) I don’t disagree there are authentic ideological disagreements out there, but as Jon Stewart has argued, I think the issues where there is disagreement are less than half of the serious issues in contemporary politics. As you note, ideological disagreement should not preclude common action. The whole point of a political coalition is not to form a cohesive religion but to get something done. While left and right do have disagreements about legit issues like austerity, health care, education, the environment etc., they tend to agree on issues like rule of law, militarism, banksters, drug laws and the prison complex, transparency etc. The point is that on some of the most important issues, the people are in agreement on what needs to be done, but the partisan divide and corporate control of media/money/government prevents meaningful reforms. Yet the mass media divides the people and encourages them to hate each other more than their oppressors.
Segwaying back to the OP….it is important to pay attention to how the media portrays difference and tries to build up difference. I think if we did a study of the media’s portrayal of the Tea Party and the OWS, we would find that the focus was not about covering the movements and the reasons for their formation. Instead, the focus was finding examples of these movements most likely to inflame partisan passion and displaying them on TV as a kind of 2 minute hate program. So while both movements espoused non-partisan causes and pointed to legitimate abuses, the media exploited them to reinforce partisan divides and partisan hatreds.
“I also don’t see how the size of government relates to this point.”
Well, to be fair I think contemporary technology is a game-changer when it comes to government oversight.
But my point was that the government is too large and too complex for citizens to oversee effectively. Hence you get abuses, distortion of information, and lack of balance. This is why ancient philosophers felt empires were doomed to despotism, and a republic that promotes virtue ought to be about the size of a city-state. In a city-state, it’s easier for citizens to make accurate observations and criticisms about what is going on. But when you have a massive government where information is controlled and channeled by the powerful, the citizens have less power in that they have less information and less control.
The argument for a unified populist party is that any kind of “Left” or “Right” party is easy for the mass media to smear and marginalize, and easy for the 2-party system to co-opt. But if every person of conscience in America joined a unified reformist party, echoing the non-partisan rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, then that would present a difficult problem for the establishment. To reiterate, the point of such a party would be re-establishing the rule of law (ie constitutional law)—the concrete ideological differences I alluded to above would have to be put on the shelf until better democratic process can be established.
juliania
My “metanoia”, too, was a result of the 2000 election. So disheartening to see the truth in so many other contexts since then. But once you’ve opened your eyes, can’t shut them again (except for those days where I have to disengage to keep myself sane).
I have deep admiration here for the many that keep asking, keep learning, and share with here with us.
Wendy
Just noticed your “Gestalt”.
Metanoia (me above) – Merriam Webster online:
“a transformative change of heart”, “a spiritual conversion”.
Often used in theological discourse.
To me it means a fundamental change in worldview which comes on suddenly.
After much reflection green, I find myself leaning to your view.
I think it is no accident that the issues we may share with the right -
civil liberties (although where infringing on women’s control over their own bodies fits there, not sure), the drug war, financial oversight (this mostly got buried in the larger Tea Party agenda when it got astro-turfed, though), and possibly the environment- are all mostly absent in the discourse, and certainly in the media coverage.
They are issues that impact directly on the corptocracy/plutocracy, and hence are effectively buried by both parties happy to promote
divisive group-against-group politics.
War on – women, “illegals”, the poor (safety net cuts), etc., pits group against group and makes it impossible to focus on the larger underlying issues.
Another reformation of self brought on by a major ‘Aha!’ moment. ;o) (My Gestalt definition wasn’t common usage, but given me by teachers of that brand of dream work.)
To your #34, I share a similar view, while understanding its limitations for some of the people involved. It is *not* an altogether popular opinion. ;o)
You’re still missing the point entirely. The true left-right divide is not about the number of issues on which they may have common ground or disagree. It’s about core philosophy and that is where the train does not, and never will, meet.
Actually, no – they don’t. I don’t know any far right, libertarian types with whom I would agree on any of those topics (and I’ve worked with card-carrying Cato Institute members and in organizations run by Libertarians). The closest fit is probably with the drug laws.
Oh, do you mean a city-state like Rome? That wasn’t exactly small or friendly to the plebes. This sounds like a classic, delusional libertarian anti-state argument. There’s no way that the city-state model scales up to the needs of a modern industrial or information-age society. Limiting government in this way is nothing less than a prescription for oligarchy.
Huh? The mass media can easily smear or marginalize any party that it doesn’t rely on for access. It’s a matter of power, not ideology. As for the co-option argument – so what? What makes you think the kind of party you advocate could not be co-opted by the Republicans or Democrats by playing one faction off against the other?
Leaving aside the improbability of this happening this argument sounds like it was lifted right out the Tea Party manifesto or the “originalist” doctrine of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. No thanks.
Outstanding, W4B!
A working class cognizant of its own interests would not need to agree with other factions (much less agree with itself) on “core philosophy” in order to cooperate with them towards shared goals. Core philosophy is relevant to religion and ethics but less directly related to politics. IMO a rational political platform must respect diversity and that means tolerating a great deal of ideological variety.
Did you watch the video of various 3rd party candidates agreeing on a common platform in my other thread? The various factions don’t have to agree on every detail, but there is enough commonality on the issues I mentioned to unify around a concrete set of demands.
You don’t get it and you never will.
See ya.
Thank you, glad you stopped by.
It’s something that has been sort of simmering for a while.