tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post2015457523004969545..comments2024-03-29T02:03:49.151-04:00Comments on History Unfolding: Intellectual and political problemsDavid Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-84222452810148897422019-10-13T07:25:51.899-04:002019-10-13T07:25:51.899-04:00(Cont.)
In this saeculum we started with regulate...(Cont.)<br /><br />In this saeculum we started with regulated industrial state. Boomers protested the 'fascist'combination of industry and state, dreaming of a utopia where nature and global peace were main features. The other antithesis to the consensus was a return to free markets, liberating the free American entrepeneurial spirit from the heavy hand of government regulation. Now we see that the situaton has become reversed in the form of regulatory capture. Government is controlled by business, not the other way around. Lobbyisty infiltrated, bribed with favors and jobs and took over writng of laws in their favor. Simultaneously the left wing emphasis on human rights locally(PC culture) and globally(wars and sanctions against so'-called regimes) combined with the increasing ecological consciousness dominate their mindset. So the American original dream of 'Freedom' being the closeness to nature, wilderness, ability to work and live unhindered by government interference and of course religious tolerance and escape from old world prejudices(ethnic, racial) are all playing out here. To synthesize business independence by negating democratic legitimacy seems prima facie absurd however. Lockheed Martin, Amazon, big Pharmma, banks take over decisions regardless of office holder. Unlike in gilded age these become entrenched bureaucracies like DOD, privately held Fed, huge health complex. Social security and medicare, FDA, OSHA, EPA exist to secure basic behavioural standards(even billionaires have to breathe city air, eat meat from supermarkets). Also a synthesis of love of pristine nature and environmentalism become a culture of forbidding everything(meat, plastic, autos, etc) and of human rights as being wars of conquest against countries which think differently than our narrow cultural concept and absolute policing online and in public of actions and speech for non-PC behaviour seems to smack of early puritanism. But this synthesis from left and right satisfied the elite of right and left wing boomers. Cognitive dissdence allowed an uneasy coexistence as long as both sides got what they wanted in their area of financial or cultural interest. However now the schizophrenia of the situation in total is breaking through in the following genertions poverty, due to business exploitation and repression, due to militarization, overt social control. Reality intervenes forcing a new synthesis. USA global military and financial dominance encouraged business growth into government and unrestrained Hollywood spread of American ideology, blinding us to other cultural perspectives. Lack of morally destructive defeat in a home front war blinded us to possible negative, shadow side, to our linear perspectives. The growth of foreign miitary and economic influence is throwing this all into our face as imperial hypocrisy, internal dictatorship, industrial fascism that we ourselves read as American way of life and freedom, beacon to the world. Moderation, golden rule will perhaps be the synthesis. Having the wisdom to see that we are not so exceptional after all and prone to just the type of behaviour all other nations always have been.Energyflowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14476915209268786507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-33413039782314154412019-10-13T07:25:20.480-04:002019-10-13T07:25:20.480-04:00https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectic...https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/<br /><br />A bit heavy going here on hegelian concepts from Stanford. As you say each generation rejects the parental thesis for its own antithesis, say boomer generation. Later a 3rd generation, Xers say, creatively introduce a synthesis at a higher level to integrate the seeming contradictions between the previous concepts of GI and Boomer, which is then executed presumably in the crisis situation. A perpetual back and forth between several ideas cited by you would be against Hegel, who demands an organic progression, a spiral development, evolution, of ideologies and presumably society. <br /><br />Examining the last two saeculum we see the gilded age at the beginning of the first, indstrialization being relatively new , the thesis of the war veterans. Progressivism being the antithesis, yellow press, strikes, women's rights, unionism and state regulation of the haphazardly chaotically developed sytem of mass urbanization, factory work being the thesis. Communism was not acheived, the antithesis to the perfect free market but a control by democratic oversight through the government.<br />Energyflowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14476915209268786507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-59843775723581600662019-10-12T21:25:42.305-04:002019-10-12T21:25:42.305-04:00Professor
Very interesting essay. I put something ...Professor<br />Very interesting essay. I put something on Hegel on my site.<br /><br />It comes as a mild surprise, you something of a Hegelian. I had thought I read you criticized others, here and there, for being that thing; maybe that was intramural stuff, bad Hegelian good Hegelian, I don't know. I only read enough Hegel to be dangerous.<br /><br />Farther down, you note that only a few individuals are truly superlative at certain important things. <br /><br />I find myself disagreeing with that, generally, for most purposes useful to society in general.<br /><br />But it is interesting that this was also the view of Ayn Rand too, a Right Hegelian, rather than a Left, I think. <br /><br />She also believed in supermen. <br /><br />She was famous for writing things like: "A is A, not Non A", directly contradicting, she supposed, Hegel's dialetical logic.<br /><br />But of course you and she part ways, where you would say "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", whereas Rand would have no truck with such Left Hegelian nonsense.<br /><br />All the bestBozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.com