- Capitalism and Alternatives -

reading Carl Rogers would help me improve my posts

Posted by: Samuel Day Fassbinder ( Pomona Valley Greens, USA ) on September 07, 1997 at 13:16:58:

In Reply to: sammy, sammy, sammy, posted by Kevin on September 06, 1997 at 18:48:14:

: : Let's start with:

: : : The world is filled with people who are jerks regardless of thier political persuasion....

: : Hardened cynicism *yawn*. It became hip in the '80s, another product of capitalism.

: Perhaps a quick whip through each entry you have provided may be a nice start for you to re-evaluate your own...or perhaps you are too busy staring into the clouds dreaming up clever ways re engineer us all.

Nope, I'm trying to start a thread around utopian dreaming. Since I think the people as a whole, each and every one of us without exception, should have a say, should decide how to act together to produce the future, I'm using the vehicle of Internet communication to get the ball rolling about ideas of life as it could be. My life is pretty good for what I've made of it, but it could be better, a lot better, and there are a lot of people out there who have a long way to go before their lives are better, and a lot of that has to do with their entrapment in systems. I'm not impatient for the revolution to happen tomorrow (it won't, of course), but that's my privilege. If you think that anyone pursuing this line of reasoning should have his head examined, that's your privilege.

If any of us were REALLY hardened cynics, you or me or anyone else, we wouldn't post here. My remark about '80s cynicism was about cynicism as a fad. Sorry if it felt rude to you.

: : :and I am tired of everyone who says that this is an indication of an oppressive regime or ideology that does not care about people.

: : This, friends, is what Freud would call "transference." Blame others for accusing one of having an "ideology that does not care," after saying in the same breath that "the world is full of jerks." Kevin may be hardened and cynical, but it is the fault of others that he is hardened and cynical, for they accuse his attitude of being uncaring.

: Yap yap yap...time to revisit your text book. It is nice to see that you can take things out of context and place them back into an argument that serves your own purposes.....not a unique character trait...yet I am sure that hitler was looking for a few good men like yourself.

The world is filled with jerks (you actually wrote this) and, from the following sentences, I can tell that I'm one of them, and you're tired of people telling you that this is because of an uncaring ideology. So the people telling you this must be jerks. Furthermore, I'm a jerk for pointing out that you said these things ("the world is full of jerks," and "I am tired of everyone who says that this is an indication of an oppressive regime or ideology") in the SAME PARAGRAPH, thus in the same context. If I misunderstood you, well, that's why.

You outline conclusively that you think I'm a jerk, starting with the Hitler reference and rolling throughout the rest of your post. Since I said that I found consumers boring, you assume that I cringe when I see them and that I assume that they hate their lives, that I think consumers are rotten, silly, and misinformed. And you use all these assumptions about me to lecture me on my "view of the world and its evils" based on a "sad and boring truth" reflected in "all of my posts," and that I am trying to "force" socialism upon everyone.

Since I neither believe nor perform any of these things (except that you are right in assuming I believe consumers are misinformed), I'd like to know: where is your evidence for these assumptions? The only thing I can point to is that I said they were boring, that I'm not interested in most of their personalities. Most of them are very nice people, at least toward White males like myself, and I have plenty of evidence to support that.

As for who decides what under some future utopian condition, I have no conclusive answers, and we'd need a consensus decision, all six billion of us, before we could say anything with certainty about that. We already have a consensus about capitalism, that it rules the world, today, so such a consensus can't be impossible, can it? And before we can even draft anything, we need a brainstorming session. So welcome to the brainstorming session, Kevin.


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