The essay has been moved to my personal website:
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
The Great Misfortune of Society: It's Ruled by Freeloaders
The essay has been moved to my personal website:
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The essay has been moved to my personal website:
I just finished philosophical novel Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn) that centers the same problem as you Stefan. After reading it I wondered, if older generations are bothered by these problems. I had You in mind respectively. And the day after finishing a book I see your article. It felt good, but I feel like everybody around is apathic about the topic, considering it as nonsense. I wonder if people ask themselves in what world they really live. I know they do, and I know they feel alone and mightily helpless in their thoughts. I wonder how a child would grow up if being told the truth about the earth's society strait as it is? I guess the child would feel resentment towards its parents and bad things would happen to him/her.
ReplyDeleteThere is one thing that I am confused about. I like living in the world where I have myriad of possiblities about activities, beliefs, opportunity to travel and see beauty in form of nature and architecture and have access to all the knowledge we posses et cetera. What I don't like is to realise that this "luxury" (in quotes, since I am not talking about cars, big houses etc) to have and feed its existance, it requires so many victims. At least in the machinery of society that we astablished. I feel privileged every day, but still I feel like I have to partly sacrifice my soul in order to have above mentioned supreme privileges. If I don't see victims of society, that doesn't mean I should feel ok about them, right? We carry such a big responsibility, and we refuse to acknowledge or even ponder and discuss openly on it.
I'm not sorry for writing a long reflection on your words. This ignites a cathartic process in me that I fest on :)
Regards and congrats on your writing. I admire your effort on topics addressed on your webpage. You are true and open hearted. That is success my friend.
Aleš, it's indeed sad that most joys in life - accessible to a minority of the human population - are possible because of the great sacrifices forced out of so many, usually themselves unable to enjoy the fruits of their labor. A double injustice.
DeleteFor you being a somewhat knowledgeable about Plato's writings, I'm suprised by your post. Is that not envy? Is not one of the commandments "Thou shalt not covet"? Is not also pertain to somebody's station in life?
ReplyDeleteIs not your "injustice", envy?
Is not Plato's Republic all about "Justice"? That all things are created to do ONE thing. One must work, one must pray, and one must fight. Plato's Republic is based on the caste system of the Doric Greeks in the separation of the fighting class from the mercantile class and the agrarian class. Nature obeys this. Not all people are leaders. Do you ever watch the working poor at the factories, Stephan? They get off from work, walk over to the bar and drink for a couple of hours. The priest does not do this nor does the aristocracy. Wisdom requires leisure. Poor must work. Nature creates this pyramid shape. Nature creates a huge class of poor and about 20% of any population is the intellectual class that has what Nature gave it, the ability of leisure to come to wisdom and the arts. Righteousness, or justice, is all things are constructed to do one thing. For the poor, it is to work. The Monarch and the priest and the soldier are NOT freeloaders. If you see that, then you are a Marxist, full of envy.
I recognize neither Plato nor society in your description. If anything, it reminds me of social darwinism.
DeleteDear Sir, as you know; words are the labels of Concepts and the definition of the word is the concept. Also,that some concepts have a basis in Reality and that some do not. There is the concept of a tree and there is the actual object in Reality that we conceptualize. Our perceptions and concepts regarding a tree may differ but there is "something" in Realty that at least partially corelates to our perceptions.
ReplyDeletePlease bear with me because this does relate to what you say in your blog. You and most of the readers recognise that there are also concepts that are only in the mind of the person and not in Reality. Some of those "false" concepts may be useful but it is imperative for everyone to realise their solely mental existence.
One of the problems with the solely mental concepts is that they become a part of the persons "Worldview". We do not visually see objects in front of the body. Our brain/mind organizes and interprets the data from our sense organs and "projects" an image of an object in front of us and does it so well that we think it is real. The problem with that in this context is that is that the Brain/mind also projects the persons world view and this distorts how the brain/mind analyses the sense data.
What I have trie to do is to present the background which colors your analysis of what may or may not be real. I attempted this approach as I disagree with you in so many of the things you wrote that they were too many to write about. Suffice it to say that you see things through the concepts of the worldview of a Socialist/Communist.
You define "Justice" as everyone getting their needs met and also in the same extent as everyone else. I define "Justice" as each person being allowed to keep the fruits of their labor and not have part of them taken away against their will to give to someone who may not have labored at all.
Dear Smartasawhip, what you say in the last paragraph would be true if everyone had similar opportunity.
Delete