Who is dreaming these dreams? I don’t see it. Our cultural elite are a bunch of smug, entitled, whiny, intellectually incompetent bitches.
I supposed the New Agers are, but by and large they are completely complacent, and politically disconnected. Maybe some wave of positive energy is going to sweep us all into a better future, but I’m not willing to put my faith in it. It’s not working at the moment. And to belabor the obvious, most of them voted for Obama.
Then I thought “why not focus on dreaming into existence things which have never been, but may yet be?”
And then I got to thinking about this word “revolution”. To revolve. To turn. To be able to stay in motion. Is a life well lived not a constant process of reinvention? Is it not “revolving”, from one state, to the next, only to return anew to the first state, with a childs eyes? Do we not in some respects “roll” through life?
Revolving is evolving, and evolving is what we are meant to do.
And I got to thinking that the task of the creative is to ask “what could we add to make this system better? Better: how can we transform this system into something qualitatively higher, something more beautiful, something more welcoming and loving? How do we MOVE this system, or guide this system, in a qualitatively good and better direction? And how do we do this over and over and over?”
And the task of the socialist is to ask “what is here that we can REMOVE to make this system better?” And it occurred to me to call this “Contractionism”. They don’t add, they take away. They take away initiative. They take away responsibility. They take away the family. They take away cultural traditions. They take away everything which might make life more interesting, more vibrant, more real, and more useful.
Like the word Liberal, the word “Revolutionary” has been corrupted, or redirected. We are glad to claim the American Revolutionaries, but not modern ones. This word, in modern parlance, has come largely come to mean someone working to foment a Communist coup which will nearly instantly work to oppress the very people it promised it would liberate. This, of course, exists in a clear paternal line back to Robespierre and all the other lunatics of his age.
Seen in a big picture, it is a reversion to an older age of humankind, with the added unpleasantness of combining the violence of old, with the very modern need to justify it as in the interest of those being harmed. Even that, I supposed, is old: All the witches burned at the stake were “saved” for God, or so I think it was believed.
No, for me the word revolutionary is the one who wants us to ACTUALLY advance one qualitative step in the direction of our infinite future growth, the one who calls on mankind to grow up, and assume its spiritual responsibilities.
This work, that of creating chances, that of creating holes in the perceptual walls preventing us seeing into a pleasant and congenial future, is part of my own recovery. You have to have hope. I have to have hope. I am learning that.
Survival mode is good for surviving, but it sucks for thriving. You need wings for that.