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Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

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Location: Northwest Arkansas, United States

Friday, March 03, 2006

John Ralston Saul

Matt Holbert of Integral Journal has a post on John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, with a lot of great excerpts. My favorites:

One of the tricks which makes this sort of closet delusion possible is that the very size and prosperity of the elite permits it to interiorize an artificial vision of civilization as a whole. Thus, ours takes seriously only what comes from its own hundreds -- indeed, thousands -- of specialized sectors. Everything turns on internal reference. Everything is carefully measured, so that heartening "body counts" of growth or job creation of whatever can be produced. Truth is not in the world, it is the measurements made by professionals. [p.9]

A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function. Because the managerial elites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our education system, we are actually teaching most people to manage not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional. [p.14]

As for the individual, the one-third to one-half of the population who are part of the managerial elite are indeed castrated as citizens because their professions, their employment contracts and the general atmosphere of corporate loyalty make it impossible for them to participate in the public place. [p.89]

This approach and my earlier comment on how to insert the citizenry into the formal system of power are intended to indicate that our need is not, at this time, for another round of incremental changes in one direction or another. The effects of corporatism are so invasive that the strategy of the citizenry should be to change not the policies in place but the dynamics. [p.175]

3 Comments:

Blogger Doc said...

yes, yes, un-huh, right ... kevin - this guy knows what he's talking about. where do you find this stuff - i find it here. kudos.

jim l. wilson tagged me with a task - i usually don't go for games per se, but in this case, i'll tag you in my next post. But in that vein, what if we chose 435 members of the House of Representative Blogosphere's and started debating some of the key protocol issues that will be necessary as common ground. For instance - i think laws should be written at a 6th grade education level. that would simplify things a bit now, wouldn't it.

March 03, 2006 3:46 PM  
Blogger Kevin Carson said...

Actually, Holbert emailed me a link to it.

If you got rid of congressional staff and made elected representatives write their own legislation, laws would be written on a 6th grade level--maybe lower!

March 03, 2006 5:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function. Because the managerial elites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our education system, we are actually teaching most people to manage not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional.

Sounds familiar. FEMA, anyone?

March 04, 2006 9:51 AM  

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