Confusing freedom and oppression
There are things that are not open to debate
by Mike Meyer
Millions of words have been produced trying to understand the rapid process of change that has been a source of trauma for many years. Society is changing by the day. People are inseparable from their network connection wherever they go.
The post industrial world was on a steady course with governments and societies converging toward a unified planetary economy and political structure based on classic liberalism. Poverty has been in significant decline for the last seventy years. Violence has been fading from our daily lives at an ever faster rate over the last fifty years.
Yet we are more worried than we have been in years. Our 18th century model, Enlightenment governments are stumbling with groups lurching toward the past and short term authoritarian violence as some kind of twisted ideal. Greatness is now a word that most people in America will not use. It has been hijacked by people we thought we knew but who are now frightening in their bigotry and ignorance.
We were all rushing to kick the ball like it had never been kicked before but Lucy jerked it away. Suddenly we were on our backs on the ground and struggling to breath. Again.
Realizing that the forces of regression can only justify themselves with lies and then complete denial of truth makes their outrage and victimhood a really bad joke. Bad jokes are best ignored. It’s a pain, particularly when they keep repeating the same silly story, but they have no chance of convincing more people. They were at their peak two years ago. These people gained political power by chance in America but they aren’t gaining followers. We need to move on.
We are now in a serious paradigmatic change of human society and the human way of thinking. At one level we can say that the folks entangled in regression are simply the folks who panicked when they lost track of how fast things were changing. They refused to believe that the fake leaders that lured them are the ones that screwed them with a perversion of the capitalism they were taught to love. It’s a lot more complex than that and also dependent on many cultural factors but that does not make it fundamentally different.
This is part of the change that we have been climbing toward for the last two hundred years and has gained enough speed in the last fifty years to give us significant momentum. We need to stay on our trajectory but start mapping where we are going because it is new territory. That is much more productive than howling in outrage when change comes to us personally and takes away some of our toys particularly the nasty ones we keep hidden in the closet.
The base failure of our representative governmental systems, specifically in America, is more a matter of loss of privilege than anyone wants to admit. Hidden under that is the loss of the right to objectify people as toys for illicit pleasure. This is being pressed back down by the, frankly, dirtiest parts of our population.
That this has been brought into the open by #metoo and #blacklivesmatter is starkly visible in the nomination of a sexual predator to the Supreme Court nominated by a far more corrupt sexual predator. The increasingly disgusting efforts to justify bigotry, homophobia and misogyny by people attempting to claim abuse as a right for certain, white people leaves no room for compromise. These are not debatable positions in emerging planetary society.
The collapse of discourse and debate is not a shortcoming of communication but a moral failure that has been politicized by individuals refusing to admit wrong. We can see this in the goals of those howling at their justified losses. They seek only to win and to win justifies all moral failings. We gain nothing by debating topics of moral depravity.
The demand for those abuses as freedoms for the few are oppression for us all.
