Part of the “modern” failure has come about because
we haven’t given any thought to what we want to accomplish
or what ought we accomplish or what should we accomplish,
not just as individuals, but as a society or a state.
What is our goal? Simple enough question, what is our
overall human goal? What kind of people are we now and
what kind of people do we want to be or should be in the future?
This failure to project our possibilities is not just a political
failure, but an economic failure and a social failure.
Yesterday we were…
today we are…
tomorrow we will be…
Simple enough and yet few if any give any thought to what happens after today.
Now individually we might have goals like being able to retire at age 60,
( I fucking wish I could retire at 60, but alas, I shall be working until I’m 90)
But what goals should we accomplish as a people? Should we work toward
abolishing poverty? Should we work toward colonizing the stars? Should we
work toward world peace? I say yes. We can and we ought to work on all three
goals. So what is stopping us? a failure to truly understand what human beings
are and what we could be…
As I have stated before, I think the Buddha is wrong in making suffering
the primary instinct or primary value in the world…
for the Buddha, Life is suffering…
and the Buddha thought that suffering was caused by our attachments. We are attached
to people, things like money, feelings/emotions… and the Buddha thought
that by ending our attachments, we can gain freedom. If we stop our desires and
cravings, we can become enlighten and end the cycle of suffering that is otherwise
inherent in life. This philosophy is one where we can see where we are now
and where we need to be in the future. How do we become enlightened is the goal.
So all our actions and thoughts are in this future event of becoming enlightened.
And this is what we need both individually and collectively, a goal in which
we can see the past, of what we were, and the present, of what we are,
and the future, of what we will be and how do we achieve our future goal
of what will be…….
the means to achieve our future goal is in the political and economic
and social realm. We achieve our goals by using our political, economic
and social structures, institutions, organizations as our means of creating
the space needed for us to achieve our goals. We achieve our goals because
the political, economic and social institutions and organizations we have,
have freed us from enough burdens to allows us to achieve our goals…
for example, because the state takes care of the roads, individually we don’t have to,
and that create for us, time to engage in our own needs. Because the state
educates our children, we don’t have to and thus we have time to accomplish other
tasks. Our political, economic and social institutions give us time and space to achieve
our own goals. We do not serve the institutions or organizations, they exists
to serve us and this is important to note… they serve us and we and they ought
to remember that. Institutions like the police departments and the educational
system are there to serve us, not us to serve them and the same for the political,
economic and social institutions of our modern era, they exist to serve us.
governments fulfill a basic and essential function of keeping the system running,
so we can accomplish other task. so when we decide upon a goal, that goal is
about us accomplishing other task with the assistance of the institutions and
bureaucracy of the government… note I said with the assistance of, not
as below the institutions but in command of the institutions/bureaucracies.
“We the people in order to form a more perfect union”
We the people, and we the people are in charge and we are in charge
of the government and we are in charge of the institutions and bureaucracies
of the government. The government and the institutions and bureaucracies work
for us… simple as that.
So what goal should “we the people” engage with that will benefit us
and improve us going into the future?
We can begin with education……. we have a failed educational system
and that failure lies with the fact, that education today is about
job training. Our entire educational system is about training workers,
about turning children and young adults into workers. It is about
marketplace values when education should be about the questions
of the nature of the human being. We should not train people to become
workers, we should educate people to become human beings. The goal is
not to work for 40 years to make someone else wealthy inside a rigged
system, no, the goal should be to help people to learn how to doubt
and to begin the process of understanding who we are.
Our educational system is misguided at best and dangerous at worse,
because our educational system exists to train people in job skills, whereas
we should be educating people in how to become human. Jobs skills
shouldn’t even be taught. the question of life is not, what job should I have
and what skills do I need to do that job, but the question of life is
who are we and what is our goals, as human beings.
You want to make a change, make that simple change.
Don’t learn a job skill, instead learn to think and wonder
and doubt and discover who you are. Train to become a human
being, not a worker. and once we have become human, we
can then focus on the goal we need to create that we can
individually and collectively, reach for.
You have been miseducated, you were taught job skills and not
how to be human, what are you going to do about it?
Kropotkin