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Society's Stinky Parts's avatar

It is impossible to get a man to understand something when their social and symbolic capital depends on not understanding it.

Have you read Simone Weil's "On the Abolition of All Political Parties"? The case she makes about parties explains why I can't buy in to the attachment to aspects of the current "system" or of system at all. It is competition *itself* that is at fault. It legitimizes the ideas of prize and spoils and surrender. It generates and selects for the pathological behaviors that we (ostensibly) say we don't want in government. It creates a privileged class that, to prove/construct their suitability as "rule creators", regularly flout their own diktats and grant themselves privileges. It rehearses the idea that contest is not only a valid divination ritual, but a real substance that has "actually" constructed the universe.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-on-the-abolition-of-all-political-parties

If people must have a representative republic, the aristocratic mode of election must be abolished and replaced with sortition.

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Walden Mathews's avatar

When enough people are starving, sick, suffocating and generally failing, that "capital" can shift. I think your first sentence is the real deal. Probably everybody reading here can place him/herself on a spectrum that tells us just how far each would go in order to push changes. I confess there is plenty I will not give up...not today.

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CarbonCopy's avatar

Oh I couldn't agree with this enough times!

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CarbonCopy's avatar

Additionally I always hear oh we can't do something like this it would be chaos and it is more important to rebuild the system. As if you could fix a historically corrupted system. That's like killing one ant and expecting the ant hill to just go away!

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Society's Stinky Parts's avatar

"Historically corrupted" I like that, in the same sense as I like "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." But really, none of these schemes are ever conceived with a "pure" heart. Everything since Plato's *Republic* has been conceived to continue Platonic cosmic doctrines of totalitarian aristocracy and submission to others' will. Even Marxism reveals a certain continuity with Marx's own German Lutheran upbringing and prejudices that influence his revolutionary theory and situate it in time and place.

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CarbonCopy's avatar

The truth as you can't not get "born into it"! Everyone had or some have parents and a place/environment in which they have been "engraved". Can't get away from it without serious introspect!

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