populistindependent wrote:Are there hidden agendas behind modern liberalism, and is that a source for much of the confusion?
I have been debating with people about gun control and organic, among other issues, in recent days on various boards. I have argued that in each case we need to look at whether or not the advocacy of the positions can actually achieve the purported goals. Can the organic movement actually achieve the goals of safer food and improved sustainability? Has it?
Who knows, it definitely tastes better tho.
Can the gun control movement actually achieve the goal of less gun violence? Has it?
Unlikely.
Worse yet, beyond the undeniable fact that the methods are not working to advance the alleged causes, in case after case the wealthy and powerful – the perpetrators – skate and are untouched by the movement, or are even able to successfully co-opt it, while the working class stiff is left to bear the brunt of liberal wrath.
Yeah definitlely.
What I am running into is a deep resistance on the part of liberals to critical consideration of liberal causes as methods and examinination of their relative effectiveness at reaching the purported goals. The methods – the tactics and strategies – are defended as though they were the goals, or as though criticizing them were tantamount to attacking the underlying principles and ideals. For example, all who are opposed to the slaughter of innocent children by madmen must then therefore be in favor of gun control and support the gun control movement and anything it proposes, and those who are not in favor of gun control are then presumed to be in favor of the slaughter of innocent children by madmen. All those opposed to people being poisoned and the environment being destroyed must therefore support the organic movement, and all those not supporting the organic movement are therefore presumed to be in favor of people being poisoned and the environment being destroyed. The ends and the means are to be seen as one and the same. One means, and only one means is to be considered. All those objecting in any way to the means being employed is subject to being smeared as the enemy of all that is right and good in the world.
Modern people have a curious inability to see themselves as causative agents in a world where objective reality can be recognized and analyzed and they increasingly rely on a sort of second hand activism of “think positive” mysticism – “visualizing results” and “changing their mantras” and “being the change they wish to see.” In other words, if a person has the “right” spiritual stance in the world, that will mysteriously produce desired results.
Afain I agree. But I wouldn't blame the spirituality itself. Its the lazy application of the spirituality as an excuse for inaction rather than anything in and of itself. Those sorts of spirituality are supposed to teach rejection of desire, not action. They are supposed to teach action without lust of result for the purpose of generating more effective action. Not sitting on your arse gazing at your navel.
"The only way to change the world is to change yourself" we are told.
Perhaps that should actually be something those people take to heart. Change themselves and they might get something done.
Much of liberal advocacy is couched in the language of mysticism, by the way, and mysticism is inherently anti-democratic: only the few achieve enlightenment and the many must rely on the guru or wise one to interpret truth for them and so settle for second-hand wisdom. It also requires arcane and specialized training or gifts that are not available to all.
Rubbish. Enlightenment is available to everyone and ultimately means sweet FA anyway. Only unenlightened people hold it up as something special.
Why might there be so much resistance to critical analysis of the methods and approaches – the tactics and strategies – used ti promote the liberal causes? Why are the methods defended as though they were the causes themselves rather than merely means to an end?
Cos its a lifestyle choice, not an imperative driven by an actual need. If something was on the line for those people then what you say is absent wouldn't be. IE If it mattered then teffective tactics and strategies would be sought after and current ones subject to a full on critical evaluation to see what worked and what didn't.
There is one very simple and obvious explanation. If there were a hidden agenda – if the purported goals were not the goals at all – then critical investigation and discussion about the methods would reveal the hidden agenda. What are the hidden agendas? Attacks on working class men, under the guise of feminism, attacks on farming and other traditional community activities in which men have meaningful roles under the guise of organic and environmentalism, attacks on the working class under the guise of gun control, and at all times promotion of the interests of the ruling class.
Its a bit uncomfortable to admit you might be right there, tho you are definitely right with those last 12 words. Personally I think those things you claim are attacks are also valid. However they way they are often used does disempoer men. Well the ones that aren't up to the challenge anyway.
New Age pseudo-Asian mysticism is the perfect context for these attacks, since it makes people turn inward and ignore objective external reality while it separates and divides us and taps us all in isolated Hells of personal experience and encourages blaming people for their circumstances, makes the goal posts easy to move should the working class start catching on to the scam, and creates power positions for supposed mystical gurus – enlightened ones to keep the flock in line through ridicule and bullying.
The main problem, as said before, is the focus inward without any outward ... thats like wayyyy to much Yin and not enough Yang. (BTW Yin means absorbtion, softness, acceptance, breathing in, not anything to do wiith feminity. Yang is the opposite and more like breathing out, not anything to do with masculinity. It says more about people cultures and systems thats it interpreted that way.)
The post:
Let's take a sober look at the issue of gender equality in modern American society. We have every working stiff male half driven to distraction about what he says, what he does, what he thinks, lest he fail to be ever vigilant at rooting out every last vestige of the dreaded “sexism” virus.
Is that really the case tho. It isn't with most of the blokes I know. Certainly isn't with me. Might be different in the US tho. or in cities.
We have the erosion of the traditional male identity as sole bread winner.
In really traditional societies, indigenous ones, both genders are "bread winners" even in many farming communities. The sole bread winner bullshit is an attempt to invoke the "man the hunter image" in some heroic way. I am pretty comfortable in my traditional oe not, male identity, but don't ask me to define it.
None of that is meant to deny the abuse and discrimination faced by women, anymore than saying that working class whites are exploited is a denial of the existence of racism. Rather, it is to say that class warfare – an assault on the working class – lurks behind feminism and drives it and informs it and controls it. This shouldn't shock us or come as any surprise at all. The complete aversion over the last 30 years that liberals have for any hint of class analysis necessarily and inevitably leads to ruling class agendas permeating and dominating liberalism. Class warfare doesn't disappear because you ignore it, and all of the liberal causes are carefully tailored to function as ersatz substitutes for class analysis. “It isn't the wealthy and powerful who are exploiting you, it is your working class boyfriend and yahoos like him.” There is presumed to be something about maleness that is evil and not to be trusted.
Funny that working class males often support the right wing too. Unlike 70 years ago (in Oz at least) where they were proudly working class, unionist and in it all together.
Oh you noticed.
They see what the smart people, blinded by their own arrogance and intoxicated with the intricacies of their own convoluted arguments, and bought off with status and prestige and trinkets, stubbornly refuse to see.
BTW My old girl (mum) is not exactly a feminist, tho she would be the sort of person feminists look up to. She did her own thing (first women to get a PHD in science at her Uni, back in the 60s in Tasmania, which was still in the 20s in the 60s, and the first white woman to marry a black man, at least openly and in full view of society. It happened in Tassie, but never got acknowledged.)
Tho lots of men treat women like shit, it doesn't seem to be limited to the working class.
And what is it that working class women now have the freedom to do? Cast off their working class partners, and make themselves available to potential ruling class partners in the giant harem known as corporate suburbia.
For the most part ruling class families, marriages and relationships are stable and working class families, marriages and relationships are floundering and in disarray, with much attendant suffering.
While I agree with everything you said above, and before that, it doesn't actually fit with my experience. Most families marriages and relationships i know of are based on something that keeps them together, as much working class (dunno that many ruling class) or underclass as anything.
Organic? A spectacular windfall profit making opportunity for the ruling class, while working class farmers are placed under suspicion and attacked.
How so? Every organic farmer I know is not ruling class, but something about the fact that they have lower overheads, less money spent on ferts and pesticides, contributes to them making money. What happens after they sell their produce doesn't take away from the fact that they spend less in monetary terms than "traditional" (as in traditional oil age) farmers, and as a result get more cash back. (Mind you they also work harder, well not actually harder, but use smaller plots and are more labour intensive on them. Every farmer I know works bloody hard.)
The means have become more important than the ends, and the means will never achieve the ends.
Corporate agri business sucks, and destroys lives. No question at all. Agri business run by people (organic or not) are nowhere near as bad.
Why would that be? The ruling class wants the women, can use the women, and does not want the men. That isn't progress for women.
First you get the money, then you get the power...
Men throughout history and in every culture, also thrive on danger and adventure, while women are more pragmatic and security oriented. Men were dominant in what could be called the “foreign affairs” of the family and the village, while women were dominant in the domestic affairs.
I think the priginal premise of this tread is that perhaps we need to have women running things primarily because the world has become a domesticated place, a global village, and all that other stuff. I am communicating in almost real time with the other side of the world, this is not the situation that male aggro was evolved for. It was evolved for for travelling there (the other side of the world), beating the crap out of you and taking your stuff, or maybe resisting someone else trying to do that to me.
I dunno if that was your point tho..
In modern society, the women are freed from the curse of bearing children, while the men are not free from the expectation to be a protector and a bread winner. In fact, the relative worth and value of modern men is judged more than ever on how materially successful he is. It has become almost a case of men being judged solely on their material success. Men are also still expected to do the dangerous and unpleasant tasks as they arise. Yet the ability of men to perform these roles in undermined and sabotaged at every turn, subject to ridicule and suspicion, and the opportunities to succeed more and more restricted and suppressed.
Not if you play footy and fight bushfires.
I see it on the farm. The young men want to stay, they want to farm. But the young women want to go off to college and move into corporate jobs and live in suburbia. Yet it is one in a hundred of these women who can express any career goal, any mission, any burning desire to a career. They are seeking “better” husbands, and the men are forced to follow and abandon the farm, go to work in some cubicle for some corporation, and try to become Alan Alda – neutered, tamed, gentrified, feminized. This is a function of the de-valuing and destruction of traditional male occupations, ...
While there might be some truth in this, specifically the leaving bit, I find it hard to credit that every woman that 'leaves" does so to find a better husband. There is more to this than your analysis. Women, like many men are sold the idea that there is "something more" to life, and it ain't on farms...
However that serves the ruling class agenda as well as anything else.
BTW spot on about black communities too.
Why does modern liberalism call upon us to turn inward in search of “bad” things that are supposedly deeply rooted somewhere in our make-up, so we can “improve ourselves?”
er, cos its actually there.
Why are we to look into the heart and psyche of the poor working class people to find the “roots” of our social problems, which we are then to attack by conjuring up various New Age spirits to help us against the evil that lurks within, in pursuit of mystical personal enlightenment, which is then postulated as not only the best, but the only way to approach social problems?
Its called bait and switch, if we looked at the real problems then the "ruling class" would be in shit.
Ever heard of Stanford Research Institute and "Changing Images of Man"?
Thanks for a thought provoking post.
Quote:
My main point is that we need to be alert to the very strong tendency to look at everything through a modern and decidedly upscale social filter.
Then your main point is outstanding
You should have left that in too.
Also much of modern culture is imposed by the ruling class, especially mainstream modern culture...
