Empathy is big business and cowardly, unscrupulous public "intellectuals" are cashing in on it. Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Store: www.amazon.com/stores/page/60...
Thank you for pointing this out; people should ponder it more often. There is so much queasy idolisation of public speakers; they end up becoming gurus, perhaps unintentionally.
I agree with the 'intellectuals' label - these are not really intellectuals (people who relish formulating and examining new ideas about reality and entertaining challenging discourse with others who value the process of discovery and realms of ideas about the nature of reality), they are self-serving individuals who have nested themselves in academia and claimed the title of "expert" without any evidence of any genuine, developed and dynamic expertise.
An intellectual is simply a well read person, whose knowledge base may or may not be of use at a particular moment. Right from my student days back in Germany in the 1970's, I formulated for myself the following guideline to which I still hold: Intuition for questions. Logic for answers. Intuition for application. Under such a fluid approach to the world we live in, there is no place for intellectuals being given the power to rule.
As for Marxism, or any other ideology for that matter, I take the following pragmatic and non-ideological approach: Any system which requires us to abdicate much of our personal agency to ruling elites by default means that many needs of the individual will be denied. For indigenous peoples, their tragedy - suffered under the hand of constantly expanding empire - is visceral and clear for all to see. However, with the same frame of reference, we must also ask when and how the majority of all other western peoples and cultures lost their indigeneity. When and how did civilisation domesticate us, alienating us from both ourselves and the land? For none of us are truly free in the indigenous sense; that is to say as a natural organism living in its natural habitat. * * * So to consider our current state of civilisation: Poverty and dependency are largely enforced by acts of exclusion; exclusion is apartheid, segregation, a tool of coercion. Deprive a population of its natural means of survival and you can extort both labour and loyalty. (If you can extort loyalty, what does that say about our supposedly free elections?) The problem is not lack of money. The problem is that we need money in the first place. The problem is that the whole world is being held to ransom and that we need to pay in order to access it. Is that not the indefensible crux of capitalism? If feudalism was a violently enforced protection racket, its offspring, capitalism, added private property and licensed plunder to the extortion. As for communism, it is still built on the same foundation and uses state property to leverage compliance and extort wealth: Ownership is violence: it violates people, it violates the land. No one can own the Earth. Standing up against the bullies and the psychopaths is the way to go: above all, don't feed them. * * * I believe there's only one way out of all the dilemmas, the confusions, and the brokenness caused by thousands of years of imperialism and colonialism: That is for the majority of us to find the necessary courage and develop such a strong sense of self assuredness and fairness, that we become ungovernable. To be ungovernable, to be incoercible is what it takes to be incorruptible, to be true to oneself and one's community: just imagine all that incorruptible energy working in the community, for the community! In terms of virtues worth striving for, this has to rank somewhere at the very top. If enough people are ungovernable and willing to federate and fight to preserve their freedom, then government becomes impossible. It is for us to pull the warlords down - primarily by non-compliance, but by force if necessary. Thankfully, liberation requires no ideology or ism's: anyone can walk away and become an outlaw to the establishment order. (Indeed, people who impose their ideology on others are the worst of the lot.) It’s going to be a tough struggle. Onwards and upwards!
PS, Sam, how easy would it be for a (reformed?) narcissist to integrate with a community as described above that fosters personal agency but is unsupportive of any kind of control mechanisms, either personal or systems based?
