A World that Is not Make-ing Sense

How do the social theories of the past affect the present?

We are creatures of our intellectual theories and ideas, and the way to face the basic problem of a world that is not making any sense is to go back to those theories, see what they were like in their own time, and interrogate them. If we respect the social theories of the past it gives us something to compare to current thinking. Maybe we can find the spot where the gears shifted, where mankind began to lose it way. We need inquiry; my hope is to see where -or how -we took the wrong turn. How did we end up where we are today, of all places?

Rousseau, for example, had a turning point. He pointed out a specific turning point. He said that the given society can either stay in the “savage” stage (which is not bad necessarily) or is may move on to “civilized,” although you need to give up some of the benefits of the earlier, so-called “Noble Savage” stage. This might not translate very well to some people of today; but, in any case, Rousseau says that you have to give up the “savage” stage when you to go to the “civilized” stage. It seems pessimistic about the notion of progress (since the “savage” life sounds just as desirable as Rousseau describes it). But our modern view of progress was just emerging at that time so why expect Rousseau to be in one stage and not another? Why expect him to write from the perspective of our era, just because he helpe d tocreate it…

He was standing right in-between the static world and the moving world. There is also a different question: When did we take the wrong turn (if that is what it was) when we made that fateful decision to enter a long story that involves deciding what it means to become civilized? (Read your Will Durant book!)

That is a really remarkable insight of Rousseau: to suggest that when the world loses its touch with Nature, that is the big downhill sign and it is only a matter of time…

Yet, how can human beings remain “in touch” with nature? You either have the situation of noble savage or of civilization; this is how it seems. Civilization outsources everything by means of artificiality and materialism. You are no longer in direct contact with nature nor are you doing your own labor. As Marx would later explain it, labor power becomes a commodity. The idea that labor is exploited by someone else seems simple enough. And not very controversial.

How could mankind have intentionally kept itself from sliding down the slippery slope? Try to stop yourself from sliding down a slippery slope. It is not something that is so easy.

Was it simply a matter of time? Are we all machines? Now that we are like machines, if there is a crisis government is frozen and cannot respond. They show that they are incapable. They cannot protect us, and we are the public, the People, under the American order of democracy. Today, who is the gov? Do they want us to vote? Are they interested in us? Are they in favor of democracy at all? How interested are they? I don’t suppose they are very interested.

Maybe now the time has come and governments cannot protect their own (Ukraine and Russia together have just got done killing half their males). This means that the basic premise of government has broken down utterly. Governments are liable when they abandon the people. This may be based on the same principles enshrined in the Declaration of 1776. But this is worse. In the original American founding the conflict was that the colonists,who were under the domination of the English King. What happened was that during the 1760s, persons were engaged in protests with the result that in a process encompassing at least twelve years Americans developed a theory of independence. These are the underpinnings of a democracy.

Big government is the failure or breakdown of government responsiveness and there should follow the correct, and liberatory, result. Then there will be the discovery of alternative means of social organization, which I think should be responsible capitalism. At this stage a nation’s progress must entail moving from from an old system and to a new one. What we have today is that the government includes the universities and corporations. Also, the many ngo’s whould be mentioned. All those encompass the government, that which rules us. Government should go back into the hands of the people, not the big corporations.

What has harmed us is the artificial-ness. If there is a new society it should be “back to nature,” to liberate from the artificial madness. That will free people from the madness that is involved in domination by ruling class elites. The fundamental definition of a “revolution” in the old Marxian way should be reconsidered. The “old social science” involved take-over by the poor, or working class or something of this nature, whereas what we see now are the “Marxist” college dingbats. This does not mean to say we should adopt any version of “Marxism,” so I am not saying that. This is usually excessively ideological and even quasi-religious, but rather it should conform to the very basic idea that at some point the ruling class, the elites, will have disqualified themselves. They need to step down, even as they attempt to exert ever more totalitarian control over the masses. The idea therefore, similar if not exactly identical to Marx, is that the ruling elites must be vanquished.

So, the old schools of social thought, i.e. those of Rousseau and Marx, may be referenced as a barometer of whether we are doing the right thing today.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization url. OK, well this fleshes things out a little. Wow, this was a life work, an eleven volume set. What is the difference between “story” of civilization and “civilization”? Is there a “civilization” separate from our stories? Will and Ariel Durant probably wanted to be the last word on civilization. If mercifully the world had come to an end in 1975 it really would have been the last word! But, ooops ~then the cockroaches would eat it … . . . .