Let us enter the great offices and shut the desk lids and cut the telephone wires. Let us see that the skyscrapers are empty and locked, and the keys thrown into the river. Let us break up the cities. Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar's pride, starving with the crusader's fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.
Election day, 2020. First, adding some detail to yesterday's post, here's a post I made in 2009 about property, against the concept of non-occupying ownership, and suggesting a distinction between sustaining and extractive ownership.
Eric comments:
My current reading of 'Right' vs. 'Left' is that both serve the primacy of property, but the Right sees no reason to restrain coercive hoarding, while the Left has some notion that ownership quantities should not exceed some arbitrary ratio. No wonder the Right is more effective -- they are following their undiluted core principle, while the Left holds most of the same principles, but just wants to restrain them a little.
I agree... and yet, why should we even care if one political faction is following core principles more purely than another?
Our whole culture has fallen into a bad head-space about public policy, and it happened through two mistakes. First, the mechanisms of the state have been turned into a performance, a show, which we call "politics". Second, we look to that show to give meaning to our lives.
Put them together, and the actions of the state now follow the rules of myth-making, instead of following the practical interests of the people. That's why rural Americans enthusiastically support a TV host who reflects their culture back at them, while cancellation of farm debts is not even on the radar.
That's why social thinkers who should know better, like me and David Graeber, have critiqued the Democratic party for not having a compelling vision. I've deleted yesterday's final paragraph, because I don't want politicians to be for anything that's dumb enough to be inspiring on television.
The duty of politicians is to boringly arrange the mechanisms of the state to serve individuals and small groups pursuing their own peculiar visions. Mass media has made that impossible. Enjoy your civil war, America.