[Khaled] We have 2 political parties that feed at the same trough. Once the election is over, we are back to the status quo. ... Has the pendulum gotten too heavy to swing anymore?
[Arlo] People are content, rightly or wrongly so. I could make some reference to the "fiddling while Rome burned", but that just underscores the point. I've heard a few of my international friends talk about America as the "artistocracy of the world's population". When we examine our place in the totality of the world's people, we occupy the same position the Princes and Kings occupied in the Middle Ages. Power, money, wealth and "freedom" are given to the few at the expense of the many. In the case of Europe, the peasants were the many and the Nobility the few. In the same way, we are the Nobility to the world's peasants. The Nobility is always comfortable, entrenched, dogmatic in their support of the system that brought them their power. They are also separate and apart from the day to day lives of those who's backs they stand on. Revolution never comes from within the Nobility. It comes from the disenfranchised or victimized. I am also reminded of Arnold Toynbee's warnings, discussed in Joseph Campbell's Hero with A Thousand Faces. "As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long survival- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify unremitting reoccurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work if Nemesis is wrought doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace is then a snare; war is a snare change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified- and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn." We are hopelessly optimistic when we think that although every civilization has fallen and given rise to new ones throughout our history, that now somehow we have a created a civilization that will last forever. Sooner or later, all Romes burn. And just like the tale of the minotaur, the new will come from outside, like Theseus represented the emerging power of Crete. Maybe in our case it will be China. Or India. Or from some unexpected location. But it will come. That's not to say that change from within is impossible, of course. We seem to be in an era of static latching. Pirsig called it a slow drift back to the last set of static latches. Hopefully, we will enter another era of Dynamic progress, and will see the return of the next generation of hippies. But, maybe not. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
