I have just finished Jones’s biography of Karl Marx and now
am thinking about starting the second, “Karl Marx” his life and thought
by David Mclellan……
and I am left with many thoughts, not just about Marx but the role
of the individual and the role of society…
as usual, I shall use myself as a guinea pig and experiment on me…
I was born in a completely different social, political, philosophical,
historical situation then exists today…
my point of reference is the cold war…
as kids we hid under our school desks in preparation
for a nuclear attack from those evil commies…
my personal milieu was liberal, upper class…
my parents were prominent enough to get invites
to all the see and be seen events of Chicago in
the early and mid 60’s…
less then a decade later, we were poor enough to get
public lunches at school…
one of the major events of the 1970’s was Nixon resignation…
Aug 9, 1974…I was 15 years old…and coming from a political family,
I was very interested in that watershed event even if I didn’t quite
get all the politics involved…
my formative years were spent with Vietnam… watching Walter Cronkite
announcing during the dinner hour how many American troops died that
week in Vietnam… and watching the streets demonstrations on TV and seeing
my father come with blood on his shirt from street fighting during the 68
convention…
there was great social and political unrest in America…
I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show…live…
thinking back upon it… I am taken by the fact that it was a
completely different world… I may has well have lived on Mars
as far as the difference goes between then and now…
I was 42 when 9/11 happened…
that isn’t the defining moment of my social, cultural, political,
historical or philosophical understanding of the world…
I was already middle age then…9/11 didn’t and doesn’t define me…
as it defines the entire younger generation who were children or were born
after 9/11…
my daughter was 16 on 9/11… she doesn’t see how that event defined her,
but it does, just as it has defined every single child born thereafter…
the question for me as it is for every individual, is how do I fit into this
world in which I was born?
and that answer is defined by the person’s milieu one’s find themselves in…
I see a different America then Zero Sum or URwrong because I was born
into a different milieu then Zero or UR………
that which helped defined me and who I became is found in the social,
political, economic, situation I was born into and lived in for my formative
years…
I am the sum of those social, political, economic forces that exists
in my formative years…
but I am also the product of my evolution as a human being…
today I live a fairly comfortable middle class life in a million dollar
condo…I am not wanting for any of my lower needs, the physical needs
of food, water, health care or shelter or clothing…
the next level of security and safety needs are met as I live
in a very safe suburban upper/middle class city and work in
a slightly lower middle class city but still I have no safety or
security fears…
I have love/belonging from my family and I love them…
I don’t have a need for the esteem of friends or co-workers…
I am very self contained…
I have self esteem because I don’t need recognition or status or
respect from others…
I am at the stage of self-actualization…
I am attempting to fulfill my potential of being human…
we have that one track…
we also have another track in our lives…
we exist within a society… we have many, many diverse
systems which we belong to…
I am part of the overall economic system that exists within America
today… I am part of one company overall system… and I exist within
one store which is part of some great whole system…
we have individual man, one human being, me…
and I not only exists within the context of me trying to become
fully human… but I exists within a society, a culture, many diverse political
and economic systems… how do the two distinct and separate aspects
of human existence get along? in other words, I am Kropotkin, trying to
become a better Kropotkin… and yet, I am part of a vast
and widespread number of systems, political, economic and
social……
how does Kropotkin fit into these wide and diverse systems and still
reach an individual understanding of who I am…
how do I be an individual within the context of all those varied
and diverse political, social, economic, cultural systems that we live in?
do I discover who I am within the many social and economic, political
and cultural systems or do I find myself within a individual context?
I am Kropotkin… and my needs are… and how do I fulfill those needs?
do I become who I am within a systems context of the political,
social, economic, cultural… or do I become who I am without
all the widely diverse systems we are entangled with?
I have made the argument before that we cannot be isolated, alone,
and come to a realization of who we are without some context
back to the various systems we reside in…
a man alone on a deserted island cannot become who he is…
a man within the confines of society, family, job, religion,
philosophical… can, can become who he is because you can compare
and contrast what others are doing and believing and thinking to what
you are doing, believing and thinking……
but there does seem to be a line drawn… between the individual attempts
to become who they are and the society needs for worker ants who make
no attempts to discover who they are because that defeats the primary
goal of the current economic system which is the pursuit of profits…
which is just another brick in the wall… where we as human beings are
defined as homo economicus… where we define ourselves as economic beings
without reference to the political, social, cultural and individual milieu
that we finds ourselves in…
so we have several dozen tracks we are engaged with…
we our engaged with ourselves and our own individual pursuit
of our own needs and goals…
we are engaged with the current social, political, economic systems
that we are part of and that aspect doesn’t get as much play as
it should…
we are engaged in the political… what of the impeachment?
what about full voting rights for everyone over 18… regardless of
who they are…
we are engaged in the social aspect which is movies, music, plays, TV
books and media that helps us understands and entertains us
we are engaged in the economic track of working and buying
and consuming and producing… we are economic beings to some extent…
and some have other tracks such as religious tracks in which they engage with
the religious and or the scientific track or the philosophical track where we engage
philosophically…
we have many different and diverse possibilities in which we can engage
with… social, political, economic, cultural… and we can engage with
ourselves in our pursuit of what matters to us personally, to become who
we are…
there are many different possibilities for human beings today…
what is your engagement with?
the social, the political, the economic, the cultural, the philosophical,
the religious?
what possibilities do you engage with?
and that is the human question…
what possibilities do I engage with and what possibilities
should I engage with?
it is all connected…
my childhood milieu and the current milieu I find myself in…
the social and economic and political and religious forces that
are pushing and pulling not only my life, but everyone’s life…
how do I define myself and how do I become who I am
and what ought I to do? it is all, all of it, different sides of the
exact same question… what does it mean to be human?
and “what are we to do?”
the social, political, economic, cultural questions we see are
not different questions but questions asked about the same thing,
what does it mean to be human?
how do I define myself? do I define myself in terms of
existing social, economic, political or cultural terms we
see today or, or do I define myself by my own understanding
of what it means to be human?
so many roads, so many paths, so many different possibilities,
but each road, path and possibility all ask the same question…
what does it mean to be me? and what does it mean to me, to be human?
you and I are not asking different questions or seeking different answers,
we are asking the exact same question with the only difference being our
starting points, the different milieu we grew up with and with the different
milieu we find ourselves in currently…
but the question is still the same…
who am I and what does it mean to be human
while being me……
Kropotkin