Jul 31, 2020
Should the citizen follow the rules?
Currently in China, Russia and the US, you can see that following the rules is for chumps.
Everyone has philosophy. Maybe not everyone can talk about it educatedly but everyone understands what philosophy is one way or the other. China, Russia and the US all have philosophy.
That is, we understand that all social humans work on a basis of pretension. And pretension is the result of philosophical inquiry within the self. The greater the pretension flourishes, the greater the self can act. Some pretension is acquired through maturity, through scientific inquiry, indoctrination. If we go from Plato’s allegory of the cave, we can also work with an understanding that the cave signified a context for meaning (a particular method) and that the escaped prisoner understands that meaning is not dogmatically attached to context but rather meaning happens when context happens and vice versa. Us being inquirers, the way we inquiry contextualizes our inquiry into method. It’s like a necessary feedback loop as you slide into identity. You don’t really notice any change in your identity but you’re just conveniently reacting how you’ve been conditioned to. However, at any moment you can pause, reflect and re-condition how you previously contextualized everything and can reach a new meaning. Regardless, we move forward understanding that our pretension can change, it plays a role in how we experience live and pretension can be vary in quality and ability.
What’s the philosophy of the US? It’s fragmented into various contradictory subdivisions. You have people that relate because of social class, race, education career, where they grew up. I would say that other places are more certain of their history. Other places are homogeneous. The great American experiment is against homogeneity, which makes it special. You have all these abstract, sometimes barely related points of identity and it just creates a discordant conversation. This is preferable to dogmatic national identities where you have people bitter about shit that happened 800 years ago.
Truth comes from humans. It comes from the dialectic. Without a dialectic revolt against reality, we wouldn’t be able to understand Reality. Dialectic means something like, as soon we you experience something, you’re entangled with that experience via judgment or assessment (via misreadings of Hegel) and how you act in that entanglement plays a role in what happens, what you experience. If you’re conscious of this, then you can try to discriminate between various possibilities until you find enough truth within your discrimination to create a dogmatic system that doesn’t require the same amount of effort/reason that it took to create it. At any moment, however, you have choose to think critically and deconstruct/rearrange the dogma to form new conclusions to go on.
Whatever happened, China, Russia, and the corrupt side of the US got ahead of all the good people that meant well and meant to spread love and peace. The good people failed, re-branded themselves as intellectual neo-liberals and joined the corrupt republicans.
Where does that leave the rest of us?
Look at that. They called that praxis and it’s the asshole doing it. Where’s the good person making right by this?
What could be the arguments that justify such corruption from the GOP? Whatever their arguments are, they’re good enough for praxis. The arguments probably depend on corruption or intimidation. Kushney and Trump got here spending all their lives out maneuvering other people. Sure, they had an advantage of a political and social climate that lend itself to their victories but it doesn’t mean the people they out maneuvered were not capable of acting differently. Our objective now is how to foster a society that allows everyday citizens to not be out maneuvered by corruption.
An objective argument could be that the way world civilization is going is not based on our invented pretense but on something that was meant to happen and that we don’t have free will. Thus whatever pretense we decide to accept in an effort to understand the world, make it a better place or at least to enjoy it, in this objective argument, whatever we decide is just based on indulgence; since our pretense wouldn’t affect the outcome in the world, just our own reception of it. But this is nihilism and rather immature.
However some us feel motivated to try and play role to allow for certain events to transpire in an attempt to experience a liberation from whatever may be holding us within tension (maybe method/function/logic). We consider ourselves action but we also consider ourselves a part of the medium we try to analyze. As part of the medium, we’re interfaces for other people’s experience of reality like any other object in the universe. This is precisely what we need to focus on if the citizen is to be a possibility. The focus has to be pro-method, anti-dogma.
The citizen should be pro-method, not just follow rules. Method meant in the sense that if we go back to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The cave was the initial method you’re born into. You’re born interpreting the world the way you’re mentally fed. Eventually you rebel against this method and find your own. Plato’s allegory, I think, aims at destroying method as a whole and rather focuses on the escape slave enjoying the freedom of moving between methods.
Method relates to how we psychologically consume experience and what we make with this experience. By being anti-dogmatic, we don’t pledge allegiance to the shadows we grow accustomed prior to without critical thinking. Rather, we pledge allegiance to the investigation of method and movement between context and meaning.
Since we previously talked about how truth comes from human activity, human discourse, human dialectic, by being anti-dogmatic, we focus on the dialectic/discourse/activity in its moment of occurrence.
The trap that is always present is that humans must accept certain shadows to live in a society. We see the shadows differently individually but when we’re with the herd, the shadows are recognizable by all. How can we be certain of how others see the shadows? Can they use the shadows against us?
