Thomas Lunde wrote:
>
> Dear Brad:
>
> As usual, your scholarship awes me and I am grateful for your responses and
> the book references you quote.
The late psychoanalyst [Prince] Masud Khan
describes, in his book: _The Long Wait_,
a patient commenting on his imposing library. The patient asked
something
like: "Have you *read* all those books?" Khan replied something
like: "I *live* with them." I do not qualify as "having scholarship",
but I will say that books have given me much, in a life where only
recently
have persons also given to rather than only taking from me....
> Let me try and stay on theme here using your
> references. If in the Greek democracy, the highest ideal was not the vote
> but the participation which culminated in the vote, because they valued a
> society of their peers.
That's what Arendt asserts, and I (obviously) like.
> Contrast to our society in which a number of
> writers have postulated we are governed by an elite and the electorate on
> the whole is considered the great unwashed and only consulted infrequently
> via elections. (Which is manipulated by the most creative and best financed
> people in our society acting in the capacity of spin doctors.)
Pulling a voting lever isn't IMO a very rewarding (or even enduring)
activity
-- surely playing pinball is far better. Here is what Kant might
call a synthetic judgment a priori: If my vote genuinely affects
the outcome of an election, then the election is not fair (I once worked
in a rather depersonalized place where they
had the slogan: "You are the difference" --
and this was before Derrida et cie...)....
>
> This has led to a puzzle that others as well as myself have not found an
> answer for and that is why the poor and disenfranchised cannot be enticed to
> enter more fully into the political process. Could it be that they/we often
> are made to feel that we are not peers?
[snip]
In his "novel" (it's a lot more than that...), _The Sleepwalkers_,
Hermann
Broch (p. 647) expressed an idea which I hypothesize derives from his
Jewish
background: that the Messiah may "walk... in the most unlikely guise
and even be the casual passerby now crossing the street".
I certainly
do not set myself up as a paragon, but surely we can try to treat
"the other" with respect (ref.: Emmanuel Levinas
_Totality and Infinity_, where he IMO perhaps
carries the notion of respecting the other too far, to the extremity of
abasing and debasing oneself).
In my own experience as a psychoanalytic intern (and, since I lacked
Khan's
resources, I wasn't able to be as independently successful as he...),
I had some experience with severely damaged and impoverished persons.
I was able to work well with, and to genuinely respect and even
enjoy being with them, but I knew I needed the company of persons
more "like myself", to satisfy *my needs*, too. I once had a
psychotherapist/analyst who said it is a well known secret in the
profession that, to be a good therapist, you need to be:
Well paid and well laid
