‘None of the usual cohort’ protesting outside White House over Afghanistan. The silence is deafening, especially from people who value women's rights.

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[–]StillLessons 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you for the considered response. I always appreciate the rare opportunities when a conversation like this actually yields ground for - as you say - "looking at the problems more so than looking at those who are manipulating the problems." I fully agree this is the only strategy that can ever yield actual motion in society rather than just revving up the established gears even faster.

I'm mildly encouraged by the news the past couple of days. I'm seeing multiple examples of individuals gathering into groups, yet the purpose of the groups is "Just Say No" to centralized control. People are getting loud about taking control back into our own hands, such that when some government or corporate authority says Jump, we are beginning to say No rather than how high? I'm particularly interested - as a good example - in the reporting that the Chicago Public School system now faces a crisis of student transportation after the city told employees "Vax or quit", and ~90 bus drivers quit. This is an excellent real-world application of the principles we are talking about. These concrete decisions will be where the concepts you and I are batting back and forth here will be fleshed out.

Thanks again for the thought you put into your response.

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

the metaphorical masks are off, power is showing itself for what it is, and the truth of it all is only deniable via cognitive dissonance-- which our schooling was always meant to create.

If I may get "religious" for a moment ...

We have freedom of choice as a God-given right, if one believes in God and all that stuff that goes along with it. I don't pretend to understand in a rational way any of the details, but I think we can agree that we have freedoms, limited only by our physical realities. We can't fly like birds, we can't breath under water like fish. We can go anywhere and try to eat anything nutritious or poisonous. We can love or hate each other, we can help each other or we can hurt each other. We can even lie to each other. People look at two of the earliest biblical stories and wonder "how can a God allow that?: when talking about the eating of the fruit of a tree he forbade and the killing of a brother. I see the first story as very allegorical or metaphorical and I don't pretend to understand it except by analogy. I won't go into that here. I will say though that if it is the first story of what humans did, and it refers to a place we were banished from, then maybe we can not really understand it. Our analogies and metaphors requires us to have a shared sense of reality and of the dynamic between individuals. But, this is a story from before that could be established. I'm OK with not getting it and avoided thinking about it. I've seen so many very different and contradictory interpretations of it anyway. But the first murder, I think is an event we can understand. We have the freedom to even do that bad of a thing.

Rights then are not something high-minded officials grant us out of their progressive values or their enlightenment. To see them or to see our freedoms as something "we" protect for each other or our government balances in an enlightened manner, now looks silly. We've allowed the idea of free inquiry and the drive to investigate everything and demand reproducible results to be turned into the authoritarian oxymoron of "THE Science". We have allowed very slowly over time to allow the idea that freedom and enlightenment and rationality and the knowledge and the expertise, gained from the free exploration we're told to accept those other things have allowed, have all been the fruit of human endeavor. This is the root of the myth of progress. The idea that some great future is right ahead of us if we only be rational about it and we ignore all the lying and cheating and brutality that has been rationalized along with all the "opps, I guess we were wrong" (dust bowl, WMDs both in Iraq and in general, DDT which probably is at the root of polio, AZT for aids patients and possibly the blaming of a seemingly harmless retrovirus for something that might not be well understood at all, the relationship between the "Spanish Flu" and an early vax, and we pretend away the guy who admitted lying about the data in the study that supposedly refuted Wakefield, etc. )

I love science, I love engineering when done well. The issue is authoritarianism and our meekness in the face of dishonest and big claims with no or completely fabricated backing. I also don't like people who take credit where it is not due. At the very least we should all see our natural or actual or God-given freedoms are unrestrained, and we instead need something better than our selves to not kill each other and not do horrible things. Handing power over to the most ambitious of us is clearly not the answer. Freedom exercised wrongly should have consequences, we also should never let it get to that point. We are each other's keepers. We are each other's friends and care takers and shoulders to lean on when things go wrong. Or we kill each other. This might be why Jung called early Christians the first depth psychologists. I don't know what that means, but I think he was referring to the practice of confession. Like if Cain had unburdened him self over being miffed about Able being the cool kid, instead of stewing about it and killing his brother, that would be better. If Adam had been a man and not say "she made me do it!", maybe we'd be a little better off. Some Eastern Orthodox Christians see the idea of original sin as the problems left unsolved and passed down across generations, or at least the most obvious manifestation of it. I like that version.