Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Apr 4^th, 2013 at 3:00pm:

I don't agree with your arguments MM. But I respect them and are glad of them.

It's always healthy to keep an open mind and be unprejudiced to all possibilities. Societies have constantly changed over the centuries so it's not unreasonable to imagine that we won't be staying with our current system forever.

If we continue down this current path of autonomous government, we will either be completely over-powered by the government or we will completely over-power them. Here's hoping it's the latter.

Yes, I thank both you and MM for your contributions. I think there's a lot of truth in what you've both said, albeit from different directions. The big stumbling block, you make clear, is the old story of the monkeys, 'That's the way it's always been done around here'. 


http://www.wowzone.com/5monkeys.htm

Anarchism appeals to contrarians.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201206/field-guide-the-contrarian

Perhaps 'Freethinkers' is a better term. Though I don't mean people who take the opposite view for the sake of it, when I say 'Contrarian', I think of Christopher Hitchens, Germaine Greer, ( "everything that is, could be otherwise" ) and George Orwell and of course post-structuralists like Foucault and Cixous. I think also of, 'The ones who walk away from Omelas'

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/dunnweb/rprnts.omelas.pdf

And so I make an assertion, there ARE freethinkers. And what is more they DO have an impact. In fact all of the above have had an impact on me, not least Ursula Le Guin, with 'The Dispossed'.

So what produces 'freethinkers'? Disillusionment? It must be one of the drivers at least. Feminism, I count as the ism that did most to teach me how to think. Powerful argument dispersed the illusion of the patriarchal and left a space that filled with questions aimed at all other assumptions.

Surely there has never been more disillusionment than there is now. Surely the ranks of freethinkers are growing? Which means that there is a market for new ideas. Anarchism, ( of a form) is a possible, it just requires a marketing team to get it over the 100th monkey line. 

Sorry to repeat this post#104 - I felt it got missed, as they do, coming on a page break. 

Well I think your wrong about Christopher  I sure as hell don't agree with him about everything, especially Iraq, but I don't doubt his sincerity. Someone, I forget who, once described Orwell as "A man with an almost unassailable posthumous integrity" and they were trying to do him down lol. Germaine typifies the attitude of, 'I don't care about being right, I care that you think about it.' I think she's on Q&A next week.

I call myself atheist because I don't care to look like having a bob each way. But my beef is with priests and religions, rather than God. My name for God is Universe, (I don't think you can do better than, 'the one poem' ). My relationship[ with Universe is personal. It involves awe, love and we share the odd joke. It makes me quite angry when people suggest I have to communicate with Universe through them.     

Quote:


Aye to that 

Mistie, the "herd" is not some distant, faceless mass. You and I are members of this herd. We help to make the herd what it is.

Alan and Today Tonight’s audience have their own opinions and beliefs. These beliefs are not heard or respected by these forms of mass communication, they’re manipulated. You only need to look at the nightly weight loss products which are marketed as current affairs, or Alan’s overnight conversion to the banking industry, or Telstra.

And these are just the most obvious examples.

It’s not idealistic to want civil society to work. Liberal demokracy is based on systems of justice and equal opportunity. It’s why we have media, corporate and financial watchdogs. It’s hardy idealistic to expect them to do their jobs.

I think it’s very reasonable that when laws are established around media ownership, cash for comment, editorial control, etc, these laws are not flaunted, or at the very least, prosecuted when they are.

Your notion of the "herd" blindly following a strong leader or oligarchy is very ideological. It’s history harks to the Divine Right of Kings, with the minor hiccup along the way of Fascism.

This is only realistic when you ignore the systems of autonomy and self governance already in place. In the inner city of Sydney, residents have a huge amount of power in their local neighbourhoods, largely because one community leader, Clover Moore, has actually engaged with community forums and listened. And acted.

This is much more difficult at the national level - the tyranny of distance - but it seems to me that whenever policies ARE attempted to benefit the "herd" over the oligarchs, the oligarchs win. The mining tax, coal seam gas, private schoolfunding and private heath care rebates are all instances of the oligarchs using paid lobbyists to achieve their will.

This isn’t a contest of wills or a reasonable debate, it’s one group paying off the decision makers to get their way.

Forget Anarchism - for now. I’d like to see liberal demokracy get a fair go first.

There's a reason why I spend most of my time here criticising academics and not Murdoch and TT etc. Academics are meant to be the bastion of truth and inquiry. Yet, I've lost count at the amount of times I've seen dishonesty from them. Journalists are trash: Fact. I expect nothing more than sensationalist garbage coming out of their mouths. Academics, on the other hand, are supposed to enlighten, yet they are just as manipulative.

Grey, I think it's a mistake to catastrophize. I've never wanted to be the apologist for liberal demokracy, but many of its failures can be attributed to its success.

Labor, for example, is struggling because its past reforms have been so successful. Award rates of pay, universal health cover, good work conditions under (in NSW) Workcover, low inflation and interest rates, mandatory superannuation, etc, etc, etc.

These are ALL the result of progressive government policies. Labor is now in the unique historic situation of reaching the end - and the limits - of its reform agenda. It's still trying with disability cover and the Gonski reforms, but people have stopped listening.

I blame this largely on the reaction of the oligarchs, but the Labor Party needs to take responsibility for the way it's managed things. Hawke and Keating traded with business to get its reforms through. They had the Accords, they lowered company tax rates, and keating gave Packer everything he asked for. John Laws talks about the way he was massaged by Keating. To explain the economy and the need for reform, Laws was taken to the Reserve Bank to be personally introduced by the treasurer to the Reserve Bank board. No doubt a long lunch was included.

Apparently Rudd just threw the mining tax onto the mining industry's desk. There was little to no consultation, and this was Rudd's undoing - from within and without his party.

I'm not sure what it was like for Whitlam, but as I understand it, most of his policies, including universal health cover, were election promises. In the end, the oligarchs, including Murdoch (and many say the CIA) did Whitlam in, but there was also the problem of an oil crisis and its subsequent recession.

Ben Chifley ushered in unemployment benefits and the beginning of a welfare state, but pushed the oligarchs too far when he tried to nationalize the banks.

Australian living standards are at an all-time high. People will never go for the revolutionary option unless they're almost starving to death. Mind you, the oligarchs will push back every step of the way. Spain and Russia both had civil wars after (or during) their experiments with revolutionary governments. If the oligarchs don't get their way through the mass media, political lobbying and donations, or simply funding and creating their own parties, they'll back an army. This, it seems, is the way business is done.

The flipside to this is the Maoist strategy during the 1970s. Maoists were told not to put their support behind the Labor Party or capitalist running-dog labour organizations because Beijing believed the conservative parties and the Vietnam War would bring on the much-prophesied end of capitalism. If Maoists voted in the 1972 election, they were told to vote Liberal.

Liberal/social demokracy is by no means dead in Australia, but it is at an interesting crossroads. As people have turned away from politics since the liberal reforms of the 1980s, politics has become the domain of lobbyists, corporate backers and dull, professional politicians - mostly lawyers and ex-party staffers. A political elite has always controlled things, but there is now very little faith in the political process. This crisis of confidence has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems that very few people want to participate in communities anymore, and I have to admit that I'm one of them.

You are right, I think - demokracy is a dead parrot. However it's not just the current system, but social/political theory in general.

The Socialist Alternative and Anarcho-Sydicalists are hardly overflowing with members themselves. The ideology of capitalism is individualism, and this has been thoroughly internalized. People, it seems, would prefer to focus on themselves.

With a lot of help, of course, from Alan and his advertisers and Today's Tonight's weight-loss stories.