May | 2014 | Musings

Concerning a couple posts entitled “The Conservative Road to Serfdom” and “Why Is Distributionism So Intolerable?“…

While I am not a Hegelian, it seems to me that much of the direction of these essay’s thinking is captured and re-entangled in a Hegelian dialecticism. The notion of internal and external in Hegel directs us to the problem of limit and liberty, control and choice. In this question, we hear the faint echo of Aristotle’s potentia in Latin and dunamis in Ancient Greek and actualitas from Latin and energeia from Ancient Greek. These relations are inscribed from origin (arche) within the prism and reduction of power relations. The nagging question in Distributionism is “who decides, I or other?” For Marx, the question framed by Marx is forced communism or the natural evolution and unfolding of communism from the impossibility of capitalism. Both of these ideologies want to claim legitimacy in and from the freedom of the individual, the enlightenment of the masses, one at a time. Those who emotionally react to the prospect of external, dominating power want to force these dialectics into an externalizing mode. Those who seek legitimacy, lay claim to the individualizing, progressing, choice of critical thinking and self-determination…’I willed it thus’. Where is the origin of external and internal in Hegel?

It is in the beginning, the Logic. It is in nothingness and freedom. Pure, abstract being is the horror, the Dread (in my hybrid use of terms). It can mean nothing, be nothing, do nothing. Nothing neither opposes or confirms, hopes or despairs, moves or un-moves. It is antithetical to life. Pure being imprisons in absolute hermetic emptiness. Freedom finds its ‘infinite’ domain or realm not as a movement to something but as a movement from nothing. Freedom is escape from nothingness, from pure Being. Freedom has no choice but to escape, mediate, and discriminate. Differance [sic, Derrida’s fault] can only perpetually recapture itself, mesmerize, fantasize, phantasma-size, symbolize in order to escape the Real (Lacan).

Morality and religion may be thought antithetical to the highly secularized concept of ‘secular’. However, morality and religion also find their origin in freedom…freedom from sin, freedom from ethical anarchy, freedom from externally imposed, ‘secular’ norms. Morality and religion are surrogates of freedom while claiming and decrying their native heritage in freedom. Only God knows, only God is absolute. Freedom reserves the space for pure being, absolute otherness to be as Holy, as the safeguard which cannot be questioned. Freedom is from foreboding dread, anxiety, torture and age-abiding hāidēs. The ingenious synthesis in universal catholicism (not as noun) is in protecting and nurturing individualism while at the same time delimiting boundaries, immovable boundaries.

Boundaries reckoned by and through time in Anaximander ground justice and truth while simultaneously exacting a cost for their transgression. Heidegger would have thought ground (grund) and un-ground (ab-grund) in a typical Greek sense as origin and lack of origin (an-arche). Hegel seems to me to be fascinated and captured by this dialectic as were the Greeks. The excess to this dialectic can only be forever and infinitely recaptured by the dialectics all consuming lust for totality. It certainly merits an authenticity and easily brings one back to its bog. Hegel evens treats us to his profound psychological insight into the ever/never ending story in the master slave dialectic. The reciprocity and inextricable bounded-ness of the master and the slave find their freedom and their nemeses in each other. The freedom of the master is limited by the ever increasing dependence on the slave for livelihood, survival, definition and grounding meaning. The infinite freedom of the master, of necessity, requires the master’s servitude and indebtedness to the slave’s grounded-ness and existence. On the other hand, the slave, chained to existence, work and production requires the promise of absolute freedom. Freedom and nothingness, infinite and finite, determination and in-determinate dance violently in the bowels of religion.

In conclusion, let me simply draw upon the riddle posed at the origin by Hesiod and the Greek muses:

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean,¹

The Greeks know the dilemma and riddle posed by infinite freedom and absolute indeterminateness and all the subsequent permutations in historical dialectic and spirituality. Their answer, for the purpose of this short essay; revere, create, think, dramatize, poeticize, sculpt but never be lulled into sleep and demise by the spirit of gravity not for ‘will to power’ as Nietzsche’s oracle requires but for Desire to love, to renew, to believe, to breath in again our debt to alterity, to open once again the epoch of civilization wherein we live and move and have our being.

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¹See my Philosophy Series 4 discussion

I agree with the old line Republicans¹, why should we pay for the indulgences and abuses of others? Now that “corporations are people too” according to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision² they should be treated like people.

Regular people are charged more and more for garbage collection according to rising disposal costs.

Regular people pay for higher food costs because of destructive climate changes³.

Regular people pay taxes on gas to maintain roads and bridges.

Regular people pay the price for the housing crises and speculative banking practices.

Regular people pay the increasing health care costs for emergency room health care.

Almost everywhere you look regular people are considered responsible for increasing costs no matter who caused the increase.

If corporations are destroying the environment with climate change and increasing disasters, why shouldn’t they pay for it? Why should we pay for it? I suggest that we let oil companies make all the oil they want in whatever way they want too. I think we should have a national budget cost for typical historical, environmental damage including the cost of living and inflation. If the cost of environmental disasters exceed that budget, the oil companies, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. should be taxed to pay the additional recovery costs from these disasters. If the disasters are cyclical as these folks claim, when the costs go down they should be rebated the additional taxes proportional to what they paid in. Why should the burden get put solely on those that use gasoline with higher gasoline taxes? The “corporations that are people too” need to pay for the costs they incur. This logic used to be en vogue in Republican circles with Mitt and friends in something called “cap and trade” but became illogical when certain high positioned Democrats took up the cause.

If corporations too big to fail go under they need to pay the cost for economic recovery not charge it to the national debt. They should probably have insurance policies, just like regular folks do, to cover their costs in case they go under and can’t pay for their economic damages. Why should the Federal Reserve bail out the big guys and let regular folks go belly up on their houses⁴?

Banks and insurance companies need to be able to pay for risky investments and policy holder damages in case their bets don’t pay off. Why should regular folks pay for their maladies? Why should they get to charge it off to the national debt⁵? As recent history has shown, we get “cherry picked” with effectively “catastrophic” homeowners, health insurance and car insurance that we cannot use unless we want to get dropped or pay higher premiums.

Health care companies make great profits. The reason they do is because they are partly subsidized by the taxpayer for emergency room health care, Medicare and Medicaid⁶. Why are their profit margins covered while our health care costs go up? Why should taxpayers pick up the cost for corporations that do not pay their employees a livable wage? Why should we pay for food stamps and health care while these corporations pad their pockets with profits at our expense? Again, Mitt and friends found a logical alternative to this only later to be loudly decried on the right as “Obama-care”.

War hawks should sign up to pay for their wars from their political parties contributions and wealthy donors if they are hell bent on stating wars⁷. Why should I pay for a war I never wanted and have to live with the consequences of my lost family members. I think good ‘ol Republican boys that are gun-ho ought to be the first ones on the front line.

Let everyone that wants a gun get one but if the gun gets used to kill someone the gun owner and the company that made the guns ought to pay all costs and damages associated with their destruction. They should also pay for higher law enforcement costs. We should have VERY stiff fines and prison sentences for those that do not lock up their guns and keep them out of the hands of unlicensed gun owners.⁸

These folks need to pull their own weight and quit relying on the corporate welfare, nanny state to keep bailing them out. Many of these additional costs fall on the backs of regular folks. Why can’t these predominately Republican folks live up to their own professed ideology? They complain about the nanny state when it comes to others while sponging off the nanny state in understated or re-stated ways when it comes to them.

It seems to me that folks are all too happy to profess a Republican ideology⁹ when it comes to other folks but when it comes to them they become, shall we say, covert Democrats. Of course, they do not process it that way. They have all kinds of ways to rationalize their hypocrisy¹⁰. They call it ‘free market’, environmental liberal lie of climate change, Democratic nannies, politician Social Security robbers, “I get the Medicare I already paid for”, Medicaid bleeding heart liberals, etc¹¹. They have many ways to rationalize their implicit Democratic concerns about themselves in terms of good ‘ol Republican values.

If the free market really is the best way to distribute goods and reward risk-takers¹², the burden should rest on the risk takers not on folks that never took the risk. Why can’t we have a free market that really works as it is professed to work. Reward and punishment need to fall on the backs of the ones that take the risks and reap the rewards. If it does not then we have the dreaded nanny state albeit under the guise of blaming others for their failures.

As I have previously pointed out¹³, many conservative have enlarged amygdales. The evolutionary ancient amygdale is the fear center of the brain. It is highly functional for fight or flight. Unfortunately, it cares little about consistency and contradiction. That part has to do with the anterior cingulated cortex, a more recent evolutionary innovation. Our future will not rest on fear, deception, and brute power to uphold insane, contradictory and hypocritical ideologies but on compromise, error correction, and critical thinking. We need to hold ourselves and others to the same standard, whatever it may be, and not find ways to propagate our advantage at the cost of those that had nothing to do with us, our failures and our risks. Isn’t this a ‘conservative’ value?

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¹See Conservatism and Liberalism: A Historical Perspective

See The Question of Conservatism

²See Money is Free Speech?

³See The Ryan Plan: Part 3

⁴See Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis

⁵See Myths Exposed: President Obama is Responsible for Historic U.S. Federal Debt and Spending Levels

See Down the Rabbit Hole

⁶See FAQs on Health Care Reform

See Health Care in Louisiana and Massachusetts-Bobby Jindal and Bill Cassidy

See Mitt and Friends

⁷See Wars Started by Republicans Including Vietnam