vision parrhesia
You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs.
We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts.
We’ve begun to eat our own limbs.
The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable.
What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India. The secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.
It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere.
They’ve managed to commandeer the resources , the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines – super toys for the new super citizens of the new superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. Roy
via.
posted by Tom Matrullo at Tuesday, April 03, 2007
7 Comments:
Thanks Sushil. I'm not sure I agree with the statement, "a thinking mind cannot feel." But perhaps that depends on what one thinks thinking is.
I gather (from the above and following the links) that you associate thinking with any scraps of verbal processes that stagger through someone's head. Noise of distraction and media infiltration, etc.
Perhaps we need to distinguish that claptrap from whatever concentrated or meditative or un-quite-identifiable events occur when the mind actually does do its thinking.
None of which in any way invalidates your larger concern.
awe-full star-lings
The person who was then taking the auspices waited for the favourable signs to appear; but it was necessary during this time that there should be no interruption of any kind whatsoever (silentium), and hence the word silentium was used in a more extended sense to signify the absence of every thing that was faulty. 1
Tom, thanks for pointing to Roy. I trust her to think carefully and write clearly in ways that set out lines of connection between oberved phenomena, and I will read carefully that which you have pointed to.
But in what you've posted I've probably got the gist (?) and am not surprised that this is the path that seems to be unfolding. The Indians and the USians have been mutually congratulatory at their success in holding down knowledge work wages, with different but realetd consumerism harvesting at either end.
Jon: what he said
We are, all told, a thoroughly emiserable lot. (Lot, or not a lot. That is the question.)
Thanks, Tom, for the pointer to Lohmann's reference. And thanks to Lohmann's always-thought-provoking explorations, I read Sluka's book in a couple of sessions at the library (comfortable chair) a couple of weeks after reading the post.
I sense vaguely that the complexity of future troubles increases greatly the more that the pursuit of money and the rapture of consumption promenade in front of us disguised as the vision of progress offered by those who are ostensibly leading the implementation of that progress. The tools being used to implement are growing more horrific and anti-human all the time.
That vague feeling bothers me deeply ... if there is to be any significant unravelling or undoing of the hegemony of money, resource control and state-sanctioned terror, the ensuing battles will I fear be unlike anything that has previously been experience on this planet (yes, I do understand that there have been very large social movements and genocides and slaughters throughout history as socio-economic limits of tolerance have been breached, but I am not certain that there has ever been such a set of interlinked and divisive conditions of social control built on the foundations of capital markets and large regional or global conrtrol of resources).
Just an opinion ...
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