Thanks

Why do you keep going?

Go there yourself and stop bitching.

Thank you auntiebuna: your encouraging comment just brought a little tear to my eye. ¡no pasarán!

Big B: This article was inspiring to me as Andre Vltchek’s writing always is but I have to tell you that this comment stream has given me hope that there really are others out there who are ready to burst out of rusty old paradigms and work out solutions to the overwhelming problems in our global community. I continue to be astounded by the depth and kindness and international brotherhood demonstrated in many of the comments here. I really had thought we lost.

“People already speak a lingo, and their lingo at some level expresses values to which they adhere.”

True, only whose lingo do they speak? As you touched on in another comment: without introspection …is it necessarily our own?

There are three main conclusions, so far, from modern cognitive science:

Cognition is embodied
Thought is mainly subconscious (rule of thumb: 95% subconscious – 5% conscious)
Language is metaphoric

From Lakoff and Johnson: “Metaphors We Live By” – I’ve picked a few ontological metaphors to illustrate why I do not think we can frame 21st century politics with redundant 17th century metaphoric thinking …we need a new emergent political discourse to flow from our reframed conceptual metaphors for our time. A new understanding of ourselves as connected and inter-dependent naturally reinvigorates the dialogical process.

The 21st century dialogical dialectic will necessarily expose and reframe the Philosophy of Mind that generated the old stagnant (political) discourse as evolutionary redundant. This is not a denial of authentic historic political discourse, only a recognition that it was current and culturally relevant mainly to its own time and conceptual framework. An emergent discourse must be conceptual and current to our own perspective to be progressive. Tempus fugit and all that…

…of the millions of quotes attributed to Einstein on GooTube – “You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that caused the problem”?

I would identify as an Enlightenment meta-ontology:

MIND AS MACHINE: Poor old Rene …anyway, he pretty much conceptually framed the “Age of Reason”: and that is pretty much the way we think today. It certainly is still the language of power. I take his name emblematically as a framing of the classic mind-body problem that is now a culturally-given ground and necessity …and pretty much the root of all evil?

Rene saw us as ‘God’s machines’: unique among the universal mechanism as having Reason – a “concurrence” with God. Following from this comes the metaphor:

REASON IS ABSOLUTE: our idealisms, if rational, are objective and can be known certainly. Following from this:

REASON IS MATHEMATICS: thought is formal, logical, and absolute (…and authoritarian …and dictatorial)

Ergo: the conception of self as the essence of thought – the res cogitans – is objective and absolute …”I think, therefore I am”?

Because thought is essence, the basic character of the dominating culture is introverted and involute. People are encultured as cut off from themselves and their environment in a filter-bubble of personal preference – the individuated homeworld …personhood thus becomes machinehood?

Ok, that was a quantum leap …but maybe you could see how I can draw that conclusion from a more detailed exegesis?

I wanted to expose another core metaphor as to how the political (and other) debate is framed: viz a vis capitalism v socialism:

ARGUMENT IS WAR: it shouldn’t be too hard to expose that the objectified machinehood of the authoritarian politician conceives of the opposition as the ‘enemy’; to be ‘vanquished’ or ‘conquered’; for their views to be ‘destroyed’ in a ‘battle’ of wills …a linguistically ritualised violence to dominate the opponent and capture the moral high ground.

Entering this skirmish and trying to seek a truce (ok: stop it now) …via trying to redefine terms – such as ‘socialism’ – that the political capitalist machinehood has come to dominate over 150 years could well prove self-defeating? I do not want to claim their language of violence back from them: not when we can create a lexis of liberation of our own. How about:

DIALOGUE IS PEACE: for nonviolent communication and listening? A pre-requisite of meaningful dialogue is that we lose the capitalisms and imperialisms of mind and meet on common humanitarian ground. The internalised values of hierarchical dominance negate dialogue. If we can disarm the authoritarian militancy within us: are we not already free?

Freedom will not be granted. Freedom cannot be granted. Freedom is ours to embrace.

There is more than one way to fight a ‘war’, Norm. Quite clearly, what we have been doing for the last 150 years (tackling power head on) has not been working. I’m trying to think outside of the capitalist culturally constructed box. Maybe we need to take them unawares, start a new debate that renders theirs a post-Kuhnian redundancy? The disembodied voice of authoritarian reason needs to hear the embodied voice of humanitarian enaction: only, it won’t listen if we scream at them in their own language of violence?

And if we redefine ‘socialism’ for us: all they will hear is 150 years of negative connotations they have dismissed a thousand times before. The trouble with trying to persuade the absolutised machine-age mind is that they think they have a divine concurrence with Reason …they are always certainly right: even when they are certainly wrong.

People already speak a lingo, and their lingo at some level expresses values to which they adhere.

What some people describe as ‘capitalism,’ is really closer to what people like Marx and Engels and other progressives in their tradition had in mind when they spoke of socialism; likewise, what some people describe as ‘socialism,’ is really closer to what people like Marx and Engels and other progressives in their tradition had in mind when they spoke of ‘capitalism.’

Is the problem, here, that we need a new terminology to describe what has already been described in depth by the rich and varied intellectual traditions on both sides of the capitalist-and-socialist divide, or that people require some basic and elementary tutoring in their manner of using the already adequate lexicons of both capitalist and socialist tradtitions?

In addition, whether one adopts and develops a new terminology to describe a reality that has already been adequately mapped out in conceptual terms, one will still have to tutor others in the proper use of the new lexicon.

In my opinion, whether teaching people the old terminology or the new, the time and the effort will approximate to about the same thing. But if you have to teach both, well it goes without saying . . .

Furthermore, by adding new terminology to describe a reality for which a more than adequate store of expressions already exists, I think that we confound more than we clarify because we thereby multiply the lexiconic rules of general discourse.

Discourse should, in my opinion, be simplified and not made more opaque by adding to its complexities.

Learn the language. Master the concepts. Make them your own. And then teach them to others, who will in turn make them their own. These things are a cultural legacy to us from people who “are us” in so far as they experienced the same reality that we ourselves now confront. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, but to reclaim what former generations learned and that remains pertinent to us.

On the other hand, times have changed, and it may well be that previous generations have nothing to teach us about this or that circumstance, either because the reality then was other than it is now, or because they simply did not address that particular aspect of their lives. In that case, yes, perhaps we would be advised to invent a terminology of our own.

You write that capitalism re-invents itself “by recuperating the radical and redirecting it in the service of its own dominant hegemony.” And that is indeed what it does, but it will do this regardless of the terminology in which that radicalism will express itself.

So whether your lingo is old or newfangled, the “redirection” will happen.There is no way of preventing this, with or without a new set of expressions.

Then you write: “This is what has done with the language: socialism is a dead-end 19th century concept that has been redefined by power to defeat us …dare I point out the capitulation of Corbyn to the Red Tories on the right?”

Well, dare I point out your own capitulation by declaring ‘socialism’ to be “a dead-end 19th century concept that has been redefined by power to defeat us.”

Certainly, the powers that be corrupt its meaning whenever they speak of it, but then you are free or not to insist upon what it is that you yourself mean when you speak of it. This battle will never end, no matter what words or lexicons radicals use or invent. Power will always try to take “our” language and turn it against us. The point is not to give in to the corruption of “our” language amongst ourselves.

A dead-end concept, eh? All those words and all that ink, wasted by Deng-Yuan Hsu and Pao-Yu Ching.

(There was more I wanted to address, but my name is being called, and rather impatiently . . .gotta go.)