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These evil clowns are about ready to melt down to their over-sized booties.There's an old saw in the journalism business that the strongest urge a man has is not for sex, love, power, or else, but it is to rewrite someone else's copy. The strongest urge a man has is to tell another man how to live his life. For many, that is the sum of their religious life, which for some is life itself. Look at the religious fanatic, and see that he is determined to tell everyone on earth how to live-- or else go to Hell. That's just fine so long as the proclaimer is some goof shouting on the sidewalk. but when it's close to half the population and a good part of the nation's civil service and public employees, damned near all of the "elite' and our politicians, then it goes beyond annoying to the point it becomes a matter of serious need for "climate change."
So far, we have a right to vote out the religious fanatics who demand that we repent and follow their plans for a perfect world even if it kills us. Woe to those who publicly disagree with the religious fanatics, but we can once in a while secretly vote against them in elections. We can do that in less than a week. If, as looks likely, the evil clowns posing as our saviours and the saviours of the world lose their positions of power in politics, we must expect them to act in character, flying into frenzies of hatred and hurling abuse at those sinners who refuse to live the way they would demand we do. Some will even be upset that the religious fanatics are scolding. Some will take it personally and think the fools have a point and that they might be ashamed of tossing the evil clowns out of power. Some will be hurt that these moralistic teenage religious fanatics are upset at being contradicted and even tossed out of the game.
But there's a fair chance that the nation's people are finally fed up with the antics of clownish children making absurd demands that the world abide by their fantasies. Who cares what these teenage fools think, any more than we would care about the equally clownish street preachers screaming on the sidewalk.
The world is going to end if we don't obey the demands of street-preaching children? Well, nice knowing ya. And for me that's the end of this story.
See you on Wednesday, a big smile on my face.
2 comments:
It would also be fanatic to assume man can exist without other men acting as models. But a proper model, i think, is not so much telling us how to live as sharing with us signs (i.e. the symbolic distillation of events and experience) whose use and multiplication preserves knowledge and increases the bounds of our shared freedom.
The curious thing is, the more you try to copy exactly another, or the more he insists you do so, the more likely you are to make mis-takes, as happens when we are overly conscious of trying to get things right. And freedom grows from errors, many of which are forgotten as useless but some are genuine voyages of discovery. We learn from mistakes. But nothing can happen without an attempt to do what someone has done before, only better (or the same, but then it can never ever be just the same... or just like but different)
The kind of religious fanatic to which I object isn't simply the one who wants to show me a good model, for example the Christian who sincerely preaches Do What Jesus Would Do. He is the one who sees in some sign, as figured by some model, the essence of knowledge and power itself, some magical key to capturing or controlling reality; he doesn't appreciate that the sign or model is simply the means by which we gain knowledge of reality - each time in a somewhat different way for reality always exceeds the literal sign.
But I will say this for fanatics - it's they who teach us, by seeking the Gnostic power of the signs and demanding conformity to them - what bad (and hence good) religion is. As man is religious to his core, it's worth exploring just what a religious fanatic is.
I like to think about "individualism" in terms of other people, not as lone people, in that one cannot be oneself without others creating what one is not, and therefore what one is or can be. I call it "interdependent independence."
Fichte, among others, looks at the formation of the person in terms of language, which is as good a place to begin as any, and without it, one is hardly anyone at all. If we can't share our minds, then our minds aren't able to form individually, I think.
The problem is control, that when there is only a determined legitimacy and nothing else, that we get a fanaticism and collectivism that destroys the independence of the person in favour of an ersatz conformity. In the collective, regardless of how determined they might be to follow slavishly all orders, there is what Freud so nicely describes as "the narcissism of small differences." There is no "conformity" in practice. But the limit set is important. Thus, we see Islamic infighting and Left infighting as more savage than individualists arguing over massive differences.
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