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Some were right good, and many nigh the best...
Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and the gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.
Thomas Hardy, "God's Funeral"
I often claim that most people believe what most people believe, meaning that most people are decent and sociable and law-abiding-- regardless of the system in place. For the most part we should applaud that. Mostly we should be thankful that most people agree with the majority most of the time. We should be thankful that most people stick to their opinions long after the facts have shown them how wrong those opinions are and how much better it would be to change them. How so? It is because revolution is a serious problem for people, causing often more harm than good, and then being very difficult to rid ones society of once in place. The Russian Revolution only took a matter of days to become a reality. It took the mighty Russian people 70 years to get rid of the Communists once in power. Most times, doing nothing, accepting things as they are, working within the system, being cautious and prudent, is the best thing one can hope for. Slow, slow, slow. A revolution throws everything upside down and then all crashes on the ground. That is seldom a good solution to anything. You can gauge it yourself by asking if you'd do that to your own mind and your own life. Chances are good that once you'd wrecked your life and rearranged it all you'd find it wasn't really that different after all. You'd still be you. So it's mostly a good thing to be calm and rational and put up with the things we don't like and to slowly try to fix what we can. Creeping socialism at a gallop in America? Let's stay calm.
And then let's look at what a mess we have. Good gravy, who made this mess? The world-at-large hates us, half our own hate us, and the rest mostly feel a need to apologize. Do I feel a need to vomit? Yes, I do. But I'm going to stay calm. I'm going along with everyone else because even if I know better than the best and righteous I can't decide for the nation even if I could. If change for the better comes it'll come slowly and from the depths, and it'll last generations. We'll still be us and little will get wrecked on the way. No revolution, just some gradual fixing. Slowly, slowly, slowly.
That doesn't mean never do a fucking thing!
We cannot allow the fools on the Hill to run our nation into the muck just because they are the greatest people on Earth, those the best and the brightest, the ones who know what we do not, ie, how to govern and live our lives. No revolution but no passivism, not lying down dying in the mud. The whole of the world's people might well hate us, and so what? Did we like them? Do we care? Do they matter? Oh, the Left are perfects, alright, being for the good of all and for world peace and pot in every chicken. On the Left we find some right good, and many nigh the best.... At least, that's what the programme reads. Looking out the window one must question the reality of these perfects, these Gnostic minders. Too many follow along mechanically, assuming the best of the worst of Men. The Left lies we hear might sound pretty, if one is enamored of "world peace" but the facts on the ground, the destroyed living beings of the socialist state, that tells a different story. The good? The best? The question is how to rid ourselves of these fools, how to do so without ripping apart our nation. We do not need another Civil War. We do not need a revolution, having had a good one already. We could use some change, and soon enough to save us from being destroyed from within to the point those without come to finish us off. Some things just can't wait. We have to rid ourselves of many of our so-called leaders, our intelligentsia.
Our gradual revolution, the one we must have to save our nation, is one of attitude, not of guns and bombs. Our attitude is one mistaken, of thinking well of the devious and dirty, of the Gnostic minders, the Left dhimmi fascists. They who take on the mantle of the good and the best are not such things. It takes an attitude change to examine them for what they are and to act accordingly. Mark Twain gets it right again: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."
The Left? They are not good and they are not the best. Bang thy head!
It's right and good that most people accept the status quo, that most people go on with everyone else in public matters. It's good that people follow mechanically the good and the best. The shame of our time is the good and the best are such evil demons. It's time for the better to gradually wake up to the fact that this is not the 19th century, that we do not live in a robber baron economy, we do not live in an era of sweat shops, we do not have lynchings. We have a highly sophisticated Modernity that improves daily, and it is under attack by our own intelligentsia who try to destroy it and our lives in the name of "social justice" and "world peace" and other pretty sounding sentimentalities. Of course most people like the sound of such noise. But is it real? Not a bit of it. People follow mechanically because others follow ahead of them. And it's good. It's good that we gradually turn around and march back to reality.
No, not all of us all at once. But some of us, and more each day, till slowly. slowly, slowly we make our way back to the light of Reason. Yes, the Leftists will howl and throw abuse at us, call us names, even fight with us in the streets. So what? What does it matter if you, maybe your friend and a neighbor, are out of step? "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
You probably don't want to march mechanically to the cemetery to bury God just because others, even the good and the best are leading the way.
1 comment:
To my mind, what this post is asking, is what is the difference between a revolution (which, as the etymology suggests, is just a circling back to what you always were, only now without something that the revolution has cast aside, diminishing what you now are) and a paradigm shift. The difference is that a "revolution" comes from people who are not being honest about what they are and about reality, as in the case of the Gnostic revolutions. A paradigm shift comes from people who really try to own the problems of their society, who don't simply oppose the bad guys, like today's left, but who say, yes, the left once had a point, like during the US civil rights movement of the 50s and early 50s, but they've been holding on to this point too long, in face of the inevitable law of diminishing returns. Now they rely on the most transparent scapegoating, e.g. of whites, as in the Jena 6 or Duke lacrosse controversy, in a desperate quest to get some kind of return.
The point being, when you try to own to the problems of your society honestly (honestly finding some basis to respect the humanity and trials of those whose politics you resent), it is only then that you achieve the transforming revelation that you *cannot* fully own these problems. You can try to take on the responsibility, but honesty eventually demands that you recognize it is shared. The moral and ethical conflicts are real. Then a new paradigm may emerge from this respect for what you can't own, even though you really try, a respect for the situation's inherent, if hidden, open-endedness, and for the revelation of a new paradigm that is the humble recognition of the need for a new kind of compromise that transcends the present terms of debate. This compromise will not be revolutionary, though it will be truly transformative, in the sense that it begins with trying to own up to your society for what it is, and that means you start with what you are and what you know and then find the way to take this to the next level, where even "the left" will have a place, as a once again responsible "liberal" alternative to the "conservative".
The American "revolution" was not a "revolution" like the Russian. The American was essentially the product of Englishmen rediscovering what it meant to be self-ruling Englishmen in a new context that demanded a new paradigm to transcend profound conflicts between an always insular Englishness/Americanness and the new context of transatlantic empire. The Russian revolution was the product of a fantasy ideology that destroyed a form of society without providing any kind of truly transcendent paradigm. It couldn't do this, because it didn't respect and own the society of the Russians. Communism was actually full of contempt, not only for the aristocracy and bourgeois, but for the plebeian too.
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