America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This in not prophecy, but description.
The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
"Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter or arithmetic--and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."
The fallacy of modern atomistic individualism is of course not just our "tabula rasa" self-deception but also our ego-mythical "social contract": if every member of modern society is supposed autonomously and privately to think through for himself the most vital and fundamental (normative, evaluative, principled) issues of his life -- i.e. to undertake primal self-formation utterly on his own and outside the purview of parents/peers/education/media etc. -- then of course the vast majority will never advance past point A or B, whatever is most obvious, blatant, and simplistic. Expecting moderns to be radically "self-creative" when their culture systematically strips them of all concrete cultural content that might act as soulish or spiritual alphabets, is expecting fleas to jump when their legs have been cut off. Ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing is going to get produced: humans require raw materials, they require means and tools and techniques and instructions as well as a repertory of ends, principles, values, teleological orientations, hierarchies of perspectives, etc.. If anyone wants to know where such an unholy and vast mass of aborted personalities came from in modern society (the modern Many), one virtually has to look no further than the vacuous or abstractivist code that deprives all of them of cultural traction and grit, and encourages their doulic lethargy and their banausic materialism.
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