Joseph, good luck selling your book. But beyond that, thanks
for the message below.
I don't know if you have all the answers,
but you're asking good questions.
I think there might be some other answers, or additional answers, to
"humanisation" in reply to the problem you pose.
For example, one essential for a free society is for many or most of
its citizens to be inquiring and skeptical of the easy explanations
offered by the politicians, media people etc. that you decry.
Said intellectual skepticism can either come from an altruistic
love of "truth" in some abstract sense, or from the selfishness of
the individual brain saying that it respects where logic and curiosity
are leading it.
As Bob Dylan once wrote, "a question in your nerves is
lit/and you know there is no answer fit/to satisfy you or make you
quit/
because you know it's not he or she or it/that you belong to."
If you're a self-respecting individual with a brain and the curiosity
to
use it, in short, you're going to test the statements of the
politicians -- all
politicians, from all across the political spectrum -- to see if they
make
sense.
You're not going to accept the pronouncements of what Orwell
called the "Ministry of Truth," no matter whether it's run by
Communists
or Republicans or Christians or Jews or Muslims or atheists for their
own ideological benefit, because your own brain tells you to keep
looking,
keep asking questions.
Another essential of the free society and the good society, I will
argue,
is a recognition that it IS a society; it's bigger than any individual
achievement. At the least, if you're a fanatical Ayn Rand supporter
(as I used to be), you have to recognize that the freedom you cherish
is sustained by
the assent of other people, and supported within certain social
institutions
and social frameworks. Or as Aristotle put it, that human beings are
"POLITICAL" animals, first and foremost. We normally function in
groups.
Or if you're a Christian mystic, like the famous
poet John Donne, or an eastern mystic, like some LSD pioneers in the
1960s,
you may come to recognize that we all are interconnected, that in a
moral sense, "no man is an island." And that in a very practical and
material sense, all "men" (i.e. human beings, including women) are
nothing at all if we are separated from the nonhuman environment, from
access to air, water, food, nitrogen, carbon, and solar energy.
There's more to the good society than this, of course. But keeping an
open, inquiring mind, respecting your own questions and insights and
doubts, and recognizing your interdependence with your fellow citizens
and the planet are several of its key foundations.
Post by Joseph HThe beauty of a free country ought to be that intelligent
men and women are allowed to come to the fore and that these men and
women create and perpetuate a society where past lives and past
achievements are valued and where current lives are afforded the best
care possible.
The REALITY of your free country is that while a cohort of caring
people - teachers, writers, etc - strive to inculcate these values a
far more potent minority - politicians, the media, money people -
abuse and decry them at every turn.
Until such time as the former group once again finds the confidence
and the power and A NEW VOICE with which to confront these abusers
nothing will change.
The Advent of Humanisation offers such a voice.
Joseph H
www.humanisation.org