We - those who could be the spokespersons for the Left (and we are the only missing ingredient in a successful political movement) - have traded that opportunity and duty away for the counterfeit item - New Age spirituality and self-actualization.

The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned, they're activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than other Americans. However, because they've been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life. Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century.

Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson tell how people departed from Modern or Traditional cultures to weave new ways of life. Three Americas are struggling to define what the country should be: Traditionals, Moderns and Cultural Creatives. The authors show how each one emerged historically, and how the Cultural Creatives in particular grew out of the social movements of the Sixties right up to Seattle's WTO demonstrations, and from the consciousness movements in spirituality, psychology and alternative health. They conclude that all the different kinds of movements are converging now, with the Cultural Creatives at the core.

What makes the appearance of the Cultural Creatives especially timely today is that our civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught between globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetary ecology. A creative minority can have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renaissance instead of a disastrous fall. The book ends with a number of maps for the remarkable journey that our civilization is embarked upon: initiations, evolutionary models, scenarios, and the elements of a new mythos for our time. The Cultural Creatives offers a more hopeful future, and prepares us all for a transition to a new, saner and wiser culture.
http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki ... +Creatives (http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki-index.php?page=Cultural+Creatives)

The pervasiveness of the doctrine outlined above in liberal and Democratic party circles is why people vote Republican – in opposition to that doctrine.

That doctrine is why we have no political Left – it steers all of the potential spokespeople for the Left into a narcissistic and unprincipled dead end of political irrelevancy and impotence.

could you possibly say 'we' only when you do indeed mean, or include, those of us who are here? We here are currently a small, homogenous group, so when you say 'we' I can't help but think you really mean 'we here'. It's very disorienting! :)

How can it be that there is no left in this country? What would it take to cause that, if you set out to do it?

You would need to make sure that it had no "head" - no thinkers, speakers and writers. Everyone who shows the slightest ability or inclination toward analytical thought, historical analysis, and organizational skill needs to be neutralized. They mist be given extra perks – more material resources, more prestige, and a sense of specialness and exceptionalism must be cultivated among them. They need to be kept separate form the blue collar people, set aside into ghettos of the intelligent. Anything that dramatizes the differences between them and the less verbal and analytical must be brought into stark relief, as though it were the only thing that mattered.

New Age spirituality works well to achieve that goal of marginalizing and isolating intellectuals, and making sure that they don't challenge the ruling class. It focuses people inward, it transforms all social issues into personal issues of “choices” and personal spiritual stances.

No New Age spiritualism promoters will be honest about how selfish it all is – people would reject that. So, instead, we have convoluted logic that tells us that by improving ourselves first and foremost, we are through some sort of mystical alchemy also improving society.

I would also be important that the general public never listen to the intellectuals, and while this is accomplished to some extent by the cultivation of a viciously anti-intellectual climate, the main way this is achieved is by making sure that the things intellectuals are saying are all nonsensical. Injecting New Age spiritual babble into the discussion at every opportunity is very effective for this.

To prevent there from being any political Left, people must be kept dispersed and atomized, discouraged and frustrated. “What is true for me may not be true for you” as a doctrine ensures that no possibility of shared consensus can ever emerge. “I am on my personal path” ensures that there is never a “we” on a shared path.

Those on the New Age path must be continually told that choosing this path is a matter of moral superiority and exceptional intelligence and perception. Since only the chosen few have these qualities, and since having these qualities is presented as a prerequisite to improving social conditions, we have the perfect set up for co-opting intellectuals into the agenda of the ruling class. The ruling class says in essence that people are not worthy of running their own affairs, and need the guidance and discipline of strong rulers running their lives. The New Age “Left” agrees completely.

could you possibly say 'we' only when you do indeed mean, or include, those of us who are here? We here are currently a small, homogenous group, so when you say 'we' I can't help but think you really mean 'we here'. It's very disorienting! :)
No, I need your help to be able to do that. I have thought and thought about this, and haven't found a solution to it.


on edit - Mairead, cite the particular use of the word "we" that confuses you and I will explain it.


on edit again - I did define "we" - "We - those who could be the spokespersons for the Left (and we are the only missing ingredient in a successful political movement)"


yet again - it is not possible to define "we" in a way that satisfies people's demand to identify with one group or another - in a good guys versus bad guys way - and still be able to say anything intelligent about politics. Since the identification with the presumed good guys is the sum total of all political thinking for moist modern people, reinforcing the identification compulsion precludes talking in any but the most narrow and predicable circles. If we keep thinking in the same circles, we will; keep getting the same results.

yet another addendum - I think I will start a thread on this subject of "we"

could you possibly say 'we' only when you do indeed mean, or include, those of us who are here? We here are currently a small, homogenous group, so when you say 'we' I can't help but think you really mean 'we here'. It's very disorienting! :)
No, I need your help to be able to do that. I have thought and thought about this, and haven't found a solution to it.


on edit - Mairead, cite the particular use of the word "we" that confuses you and I will explain it.


on edit again - I did define "we" - "We - those who could be the spokespersons for the Left (and we are the only missing ingredient in a successful political movement)"


yet again - it is not possible to define "we" in a way that satisfies people's demand to identify with one group or another - in a good guys versus bad guys way - and still be able to say anything intelligent about politics. Since the identification with the presumed good guys is the sum total of all political thinking for moist modern people, reinforcing the identification compulsion precludes talking in any but the most narrow and predicable circles. If we keep thinking in the same circles, we will; keep getting the same results.
Okay, you say

We - those who could be the spokespersons for the Left (and we are the only missing ingredient in a successful political movement) - have traded that opportunity and duty away for the counterfeit item - New Age spirituality and self-actualization.

Somebody's confused here. Who are you talking about? I 'could be [one of the] spokespersons for the left', but I goddamned sure haven't ' traded that opportunity and duty away for the counterfeit item - New Age spirituality and self-actualization'. So are you talking about me or not? What's hard about saying 'some of us'? If you say 'some of us' I'll know that maybe you include me and maybe you don't. Right now there's nothing to say because in the same breath you are and aren't talking about me. So I end up feeling (feeling!) like you're lying about me!! Which is crazy-making :(

our civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught between globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetary ecology.
http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki ... +Creatives (http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki-index.php?page=Cultural+Creatives)

That doctrine is why we have no political Left – it steers all of the potential spokespeople for the Left into a narcissistic and unprincipled dead end of political irrelevancy and impotence.

take care with the baby:

TheTransitioner.org brings together those who want to marry the economy and Collective Intelligence in order to build a fair economy for everyone, with a robust and fair monetary system, and help Collective Intelligence evolve within this context:

* Current communities that are building and using community currencies (CC) will become successful and sustainable on the condition that they are smarter, better learners, more flexible and more creative than the current pyramidal intelligence that shapes most organizations in our societies (those that are strongly resisting to such a change);


* Collective Intelligence can evolve on the condition that there is a monetary system that is not scarce but sufficient and issued by democratic, open and transparent process

_______________

According to the famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845), philosophy had to stop "interpreting" the world in endless metaphysical debates, in order to start "transforming" the world. Which the rising workers' movement, observed by Engels in England (Chartist movement) and by Marx in France and Germany, was precisely doing. Historical materialism is therefore the primacy accorded to class struggle. The ultimate sense of Marx's materialism philosophy is that philosophy itself must take position in the class struggle, if it is not to be reduced to spiritualist Idealism (such as Kant or Hegel's philosophies) which are, in fact, only ideologies, that is the material product of social existence.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.c ... aterialism (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/dialectical+materialism)

...with an ideal of consensus?

My pedestrian best guess - It's all about the money.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c297/rustyfeasel/monetocracy.jpg

The defining component of any purposeful human system is its purpose. The purpose of the economic system promoted by all Western governments is never debated. It is nowhere even acknowledged. You will not find it written over the door of any presidential office, state legislature or party political headquarters. Nevertheless, in our judgement, the true purpose of the Global Monetocracy, is that of money growth in order to maintain the current debt-based money system.

What is our evidence for this assertion? The debt-money system itself has been described in earlier Schumacher Briefings by James Robertson and Richard Douthwaite. They show that almost all the money we use (i.e. all except the notes and coins, which today are about 3% of the total) came into existence as a result of a bank agreeing to make a loan to a customer, at interest. This is why it is called 'debt-money’. This system has several extremely important consequences. First, it gives the banks a free lunch. They are, in effect, able to print money and lend it out at interest. Bank profits from this source alone in the USA, UK, Eurozone and Japan are about $140 billion per year. It is quite outrageous that the banks should have this power. Counted among public figures that have been bold enough to object are three US presidents: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Its many critics amongst economists have even included Milton Friedman, a favourite of Margaret Thatcher and the American Right.3 That the governments of Western ‘democracies’ permit the banks to continue to enjoy this massive subsidy, and for this extraordinary privilege to be off the agenda of public debate, is a tribute to the power of the ‘elite consensus’
http://www.gaiandemocracy.net/articles/SB%20Ch3.pdf

hypothecation and worker control.

Seems to me there can be consensus 'round them things...

Somebody's confused here. Who are you talking about? I 'could be [one of the] spokespersons for the left', but I goddamned sure haven't ' traded that opportunity and duty away for the counterfeit item - New Age spirituality and self-actualization'. So are you talking about me or not? What's hard about saying 'some of us'? If you say 'some of us' I'll know that maybe you include me and maybe you don't. Right now there's nothing to say because in the same breath you are and aren't talking about me. So I end up feeling (feeling!) like you're lying about me!! Which is crazy-making :(
Whatever. What can we say without offending someone? How about this: consider yourself to have blanket immunity from anything I ever say that you may construe as being personally offensive.

I don't know if I am talking about you or not. If I meant you specifically I would have said you specifically. If the shoe fits wear it, if not don't.

I am certainly willing to see that I have been co-opted and seduced by New Age ideas and self-actualization concepts. How the Hell else can you explain the total ineffectiveness of the Left over the last 30 years? I know that I have been ineffective. I know that we have been ineffective – just look around. How can we improve our political effectiveness if we aren't willing to accept criticism of ourselves?

It is hard for me to imagine anybody being immune to the self-actualization cult, since we are bombarded with it and have been for 30 years or more. If you are immune, that is great. Lead us forward into the class struggle then. You are just what we need. I don't mean that sarcastically.