Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Jan. 12, 2011

Our nation’s mythology bespeaks privacy. Everything is always "private."  If you go according to this core national myth you would believe that nothing is public, I guess. If you really go according to that logic, or really believed it, it follows you would believe that nothing is public. Which is just a bunch of crap.

This is what you might call "ideology." Although it is a bunch of crap, what is always being taught, preached, or inculcated is that nothing is ever shared. All you have to do is stop and think about it. This seems obvious enough. I am quite certain this is the case. This is the ubiquitous propaganda, and we hear it all the time. Of course, if you want, you can "interrogate" it. As follows:

Why are the Chinese holding half our dollars? Because we are busy lying about everything being private; and if you lie, then, in the meanwhile, something odd happened because you were basing yourself on ideology instead of going for the  truth. Why did China get all of that money? We find that we cannot answer  that.

Now what? It is China's private money? Maybe the theory that in capitalism everything is private needed to be interrogated. OK, so that is one question one could ask, about why private or not-private. Why is that a debate? There are all kinds of questions like that by which we could try to interrogate this propaganda. Could we get very far with that? I know that it would not stop being propaganda.

These are urgent question. I don’t know the answers to all these questions, so I'll just offer that notions of capitalism as “private” do not get us anywhere.

(More on the muddled and hopeless excercise of subjecting care economic theory to interrogation instead of just believing it: when Bernanke makes a so-called “helicopter drop” of money, which we pretty much understand is what they are doing lately, he would do so in our own U.S. territory. Of course. He wouldn't do it on China! OK; why not? Why not make the helicopter drop in China? Now that sounds to me like a good question to reflect upon. Maybe that is the way economics ought to proceed but they don't. Or: maybe these are questions no one can answer. This world of economics, if that is a good way to put it, seems to be characterized by continuous u-turns, self-canceling logical twists and turns, or even, Soros's,  "reflexivity" if you want a framework to work within. When anyone tries to answer these kind of questions there just seems to manifest before one such a dense course of u-turns and self-contradicting answers---so much so that it makes me feel that this is the nature of this world, for we live in a human cultural and ideological system characterized by "economics" --- "capitalism" --- whatever words you want to put to it.)



Below: an earlier draft.

Our nation’s core myth: everything is always private (therefore, nothing is public).
Ever notice how it is always being taught or preached that nothing is shared? It is ubiquitous propaganda.
If everything is private, nothing is shared. OK, then why are the Chinese holding half our dollars?
I don’t know the answers to all these questions either; but when we go with notions that declare capitalism to be “private” we do not get anywhere.
(Of course, when Bernanke makes a “helicopter drop,” it is in our own U.S. territory. OK; why not make the helicopter drop in China? There’s a good question to reflect upon.)

2 comments:

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  2. ...is everyone "private"? Is everyone an "individual"? Of course it does not even make SENSE. They are just words. The words correspond only vaguely to reality. They correspond most imprecisely to reality, or to the real conditions of life. Yet there does exist an IDEOLOGY of
    "everything is always private," and this ideology is an EXTREMELY powerful force because we feel the ideology. Therefore we can definitely say that these ideas shape the attitude and thinking of persons. And whose attitudes do these ideas like "everyone is just a private individual" shape. The ideas shape the lives of ordinary persons. The lower you are in terms of status or power, the MORE you do need to absorb the reigning ideology, because that IS reality, whether it is an ideology or not.

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