Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Wobbly Times number 58


HUMANS ARE ANIMALS, NOT VEGETABLES OR MINERALS
There are no animals who prefer to be tied up, caged etc. as opposed to being free. I think the instinct for freedom is tied to our being animals and that getting more and more political power is the key to getting in tune with that instinct. Of course, in civilised class society, we're socialised in ways which tend to make submission to our rulers look more and more attractive by satisfying an even more powerful instinct: survival. After all, THEY have armed bodies of men on their side. We must break this link because it ties us down; it keeps us in cages. We can do that by making political power equal for all individuals; but that means we have to create a classless society.


The ability to think critically is what Marx promoted which is the opposite of dogmatic memorization of concepts frozen in time for all time--idee fixe. Humans create ideas. This is fine. Reason is our great adaptive characteristic as animals. When the ideas, which humans create using their reason, begin to rule i.e. take on a personality of their own, we get the upside-down thinking, which dogmatists adhere to and rulers use to keep their flocks alienated from their own power. For dogmatists, self-emancipation self-empowerment become associated with memorising fixed ideas, true for all time. I think the first step towards making a dogma out of the utterance or writing of a person is to give those notions the sort of finality which attaches the person's name with the suffix 'ist' or 'ian' or some other such designation e.g. Buddhist, Marxist and so on.

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