"I Need To Learn More"

Madame,

“My experience is the norm.”  In this society cleverly divided by a privileged class where money and privilege begets more money and more privilege, while the opposite begets the opposite, we get this self-structured inability to perceive VALID differences.  Too many of us instead dismiss different views as “radical,” “far outside the norm,”  “crazy” or “evil.”  We end up universalizing our personal experience, as in “true in my experience” means it must be true for all, or at least ALL WHO MATTER. 

How easy it is to make us self-delusional in this hyper-individualistic society! And with it, all the deleterious second and third order effects from that self-delusion.

What we get, instead of consensus and united action to change a system that more and more intellectuals recognize as disastrously harmful to the shrinking middle class while it further enriches an already obscenely rich micro-sliver upper-upper class, is diversionary misfocus. 

The knowingly malicious and the willfully ignorant team up to manipulate the carelessly ignorant to vote against their own interests, and then alienate the remaining ignorant to become hopeless or apathetic enough to stay away from the voting booth.  Giving the appearance that voting has become irrelevant.

Bill Moyers had a piece recently to talk about a strategically clever donor class:

“We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

“Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,

‘So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics... When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?’”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/politics/the-rule-of-emperors.aspx#ixzz2yE2qeFIA

Precisely how that donor class wants it.  It won’t change until most of us cease cooperation with it.  Perhaps the first step is to say to ourselves, “I don’t want to be low-information anymore.  I want to learn more.  I NEED to learn more.”

"And I need to talk with others.  Others NOT like me."