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Silence8 -> RE: Ayn Rand you big Sub!!! (11/3/2009 7:28:38 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: abuddingdom
Silence8 , I'm curious - how do you know that her "sales have soared"?
If you aren't just trying to push buttons, you appear to have strong feelings, As do I - in another CM thread I just recently made the old argument - but one which I believe - suggesting legalizing or at the least decriminalizing the "vices" which society has been fruitlessly trying to control by law enforcement(I could almost hear the virtual yawns). But what I really wanted to say is that I stopped just short of supporting and voting for Paul. I'm so frustrated with partisan politics and the way words such as "conservative" have been twisted that I sometimes struggle with ambivilence and sometimes flirt with apathy regarding politics. For the sake of discussion, how would you try to rally me? As "maybe even a communist" who admits even China is losing it's redness do you feel like a lone voice "out there" ?
I disagree with most of what Ron Paul advocates, but I still find it reassuring to see a politician who stands for anything besides the weight of his or her wallet. The problem was never democracy, but the very notion that democracy and an unequal distribution of resources can realistically co-exist. I am in full support of democracy -- I challenge you to find me one!
As far as China is concerned, Soviet Russia for that matter, the same issue arises -- you can't have socialism in one place, democracy in another, dictatorship in yet another. There's no such thing as a communist nation -- the very notion of a nation-state only works in a capitalist framework, i.e., one in which some minority ('class') controls a majority of power and resources.
According to capitalist media, we are all capitalists, and I do not exist. Along with Ayn Rand, who can still watch for-profit news with a straight face?
The following is a quote from Slavoj Zizek on democracy now
quote:
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, what interests me is, for example, Paul—sorry, Paul Krugman said basically the same thing, which tells us a lot about how ideology works today. He said, what if we make a mental experiment, and all the leading bank people, managers and so on, were to know how it would end two years ago? He said, let’s not delude ourselves; there would have been no change. They would have acted in exactly the same way.
This brings me, as a psychoanalyst, into the play, because I think this makes us aware as to what extent our everyday dealing is controlled by what in psychoanalysis we call the mechanism of fetishist disavowal. “Je sais bien, mais quand même…” “I know very well, but…” You know, we can know very well the possible catastrophic consequences, but somehow you trust the market, you think things will somehow work out, and so on and so on. It’s absolutely crucial to analyze this, not only in economy, but generally. This is the focus of my work: how beliefs function today. What do we mean when we say that someone believes?
So that I don’t get lost, let me tell you a wonderful story, which is my favorite story. I quote it also in the book. You know Niels Bohr, Copenhagen, quantum physics guy. You know, once he was visited in his country house by a friend who saw above the entrance a horseshoe, you know, in Europe, the superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And the friend, also a scientist, asked him, “But listen, do you really believe in this?” Niels Bohr said, “Of course not. I’m not an idiot. I’m a scientist.” Then the friend asked him, “But why do you have it there?” You know what Niels Borh answered? He said, “I don’t believe in it, but I have it there, horseshoe, because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody. You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no? Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean? You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.
Along these lines, at the height of the financial collapse, the Financial Times had a round table entitled "The Future of Capitalism?", as if directly referencing their own complicity. We all know very well what caused the problem, we all know very well that capitalism is self-destructive, wasteful, and ill-advised, but ...
The waves of disillusion, not to mention incessant irony and debate over "what is irony?", relate directly to the contradiction of coexistent capitalism and democracy, two mutually-exclusive concepts.
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