A lack of self-awareness seems to correlate with focusing only on finding flaws in others.
Taken to the extreme, that mentality involves seeking to rid the world of ‘evil’ by destroying various individuals and groups of people.
Seeking an understanding of the functioning of social systems is wiser than simplistic narratives of villains, heroes, and saviors.
A lot of the latter currently exists in politics. That’s unfortunate because building power dispersed widely among citizens requires systemic understandings of culture and the political economy.
Mentally freed from the villains-vs-heroes trap, we’re more able to engage our fellow community members, irrespective of their ideological orientation. That sort of grassroots power building starts locally.
There’s a lot of sweeping generalizations about what is the political left and political right.
In my experience the ‘left’ has involved studying the histories of people building collective power to attain freedom and dignity, whether in triumph against racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, heterosexism…etc.
One doesn’t have to be a Marxist (as if it were a type of religion) to see that human striving toward freedom and material wellbeing requires attention being paid to the political economy whereby various forms of publicly accountable structures (government at its best) manages private power.
I hear from the political right that Marxists intellectuals have infiltrated academia. That seems odd because very few economics departments of US universities include much outside the realm of Classical and Neoclassical economics.
That differs significantly from seeing the Democratic Party as ‘the left’ especially in regards to political economy.
To me, a major omission on the political right, judging by reading publications such as National Review and the American Conservative, is discussion of the fact that ‘big government’ has not amassed power for its own sake, nor for the sake of what rightwing pundits say was a misguided attempt at social justice.
Studying the history of the past 50 or 60 years shows that our government has prioritized the interests of big multinational corporations over much else.
We see that with trade deals such as NAFTA, as well as the with the IMF and the World Bank.
The top 1 and .1 percent have amassed an extreme concentration of economic power while our nation has dismantled much of its industrial infrastructure, deskilled its industrial workforce, driven down wages, benefits, eliminated pensions, made it increasingly too expensive for people to get votech or university education…etc.
We see now that, geopolitically, as the superrich have amassed more and more power to rule the rest of us, China’s middle class is growing while here it’s shrinking; China’s economic ties throughout Asia, Africa and even in Europe are growing while the role of the US is declining.
The political right neglects to turn its attention to the fact that corporate America pushed both political parties for favored trade status with China, so that US corporate elite could see their own profits soar as US companies shift toward finance and away from manufacturing, causing loss loss for US workers, and cuts in pay, healthcare, and retirement plans.
As US corporate elite globalized not only there labor and supply chains but also there financial arrangements, they pressured the US government for slashing taxes on their wealth, while also putting a lot of their wealth into tax havens around the world.
The US government borrowed heavily from China and while taxing the superrich a lot less began borrowing more from the superrich.
Consequently investments into our country’s infrastructure and our human resources has declined, inevitably detracting from US global competitiveness, the health of our civil society, the standard of living for millions of our citizens, and US national security (imagine WWII without our robust industrial capacity).
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wrote:Taking an excessively hard look at oneself is unhealthy but there are an awful lot of people who refuse to take a hard look at themselves and are oblivious to the harm they do
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——– Original message ——–From: Tom Over Date: 1/3/21 12:24 AMSubject: RE: Happy New Year
Thank you Dino. I’m well. Sorry to repeat, but the key seems to be redirecting harsh self-critical retrospection to forward looking creative problem-solving.
I’ve not prayed again, but can understand how someone may seek a higher power for shelter from the tyranny of oneself caught in unsatiable, grasping defiance of impermanence and mortality.
Maybe mediation is a nontheistic method toward the same type of triumph.
Christians talk of a triumph over death. I myself seek triumph over fear and its offspring hat
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