politics

Lie to one person and you're a crook.
Lie to many people and you're an entrepeneur.
Lie to everyone and you're a politician.

Epilogue – Ecological Literacy – excerpt from page 297

Reconnecting with the web of life means building and nurturing sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of further generations. For this task we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals and microorganisms. To understand these lessons, we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. We need to become, as it were, ecologically literate. Being ecologically literate, or “ecoliterate,” means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (ecosystems) and using those principles creating sustainable human communities. We need to revitalize our communities – including our educational communities, business communities, and political communities – so that the principles of ecology become manifest in them as principles of education, management, and politics.

I respect Barack Obama’s right to repudiate his pastor’s comments, as he did, but I respect even more his refusal to throw the man overboard in a practice we witnessed all too often with the Clintons when they came under right-wing attack. Hillary did it again Tuesday, telling the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board that Wright “would not have been my pastor.” So she says, but the record shows she was there in the White House on Sept. 11, 1998, when her husband posed for a photo with the Rev. Wright and was grateful for his support in the midst of that wrath-of-Leviticus blue dress flap. Ingrate.

The primary social goal of both systems of political economy is for middle-aged men to attract good-looking younger women. Democratic capitalists believe that good-looking younger women are attracted mainly by money. Social democratic capitalists believe that they are attracted mainly by power.

"The price of temporarily suspending our disbelief while reading novels and viewing films is small.  The price of suspending our disbelief (turning off our critical thinking) in matters of politics, economics, technology and religion is immense.

We must learn to avoid war and develop a general will to peace. I believe the key to this development is to learn the truth about the real causes and effects of wars so that we can see through the false propaganda which is used by political leaders to convince us to go to war.

The highest risk for war is where various economic interests are able to control foreign policy to promote their particular interests rather than the well-being and liberty of the individuals within a society.

Politics is not about public interest but someone’s special (economic) interest.

I was pleased long ago, and even moreso now, to be achieving connections between polemics and more profound forms of philosophy--partly because I agreed with Thomas Mann, that "the destiny of man in our times presents itself in the form of politics," and because I agreed with Nietzsche that mass-slavishness and nihilistic hybris were combining to form a danger of "Great Politics" the like of which the world had never seen (a prevision clearly of Nazi imperialism and nihilism), but even moreso because political culture presents everywhere a concrete profile of the actual "values" and "dysvalues" of any given society. Politics is our aggregate or collectively effective character, replete with delusions and murderous predilections for irrealities and deceptions. The state, as Plato remarked, is the soul writ large.

What does it really mean to be a leftist in the early part of the 21st century? What are we really talking about? And I can just be very candid with you. It means to have a certain kind of temperament, to make certain kinds of political and ethical choices, and to exercise certain analytical focuses in targeting on the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic, that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream. That's what it means to be a leftist. So let's just be clear about it.