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The Revolution of Love |
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The revolution wont be about one side beating the other, like the working class rising up and beating up on the upper and middle classes, reversing the oppression, and maintaining the status quo. The revolution will involve everyone, because it will be in the interests of everyone, and in a certain sense wont be a revolution at all, but a renovation(?). Well I don't know what you'd call it, but thats not important anyway. Although plenty of people are "anti" one thing or they might like the idea of lots of beautiful looking people from all round the world holding hands in a picture, but when it comes down to applying these principles to their own personal lives - operationalising the vision - it rarely happens. The unspoken vision of them sitting on top of the pile that it is the human rat race is the one determining their actions, that is because they don't want to be at the bottom of the pile (which they most often are - the pile is like a pyramid - and the more people want to be at the top the wider the base and hence the wider the number of people who get oppressed and crushed at the bottom. In fact wherever you are in pyramid you are oppressed and oppressing. Even when you are at the top you are fuelled by a fear of being dragged back under - hence partaking in the rat race, the pyramid is to live through fear and to be perpetually oppressed). Most people don't think about trying to move out of the competition. Life can be viewed in other terms than your relations and more importantly your status in respect with other humans (perhaps only to an extent but to a significant one nevertheless). Knowing this you can shape your life so that you are not forever contributing to your own oppression by seeking to be at the top of piles that you are destined to be crushed by. I think this requires an investigation of the inner self, to define and love oneself not purely as a function of one's relationships with others, but primarily through an energy generated from within. This if of course a personal project and will not change the world outside you, but will change the world inside you. Hence I think there are two projects to be advanced. They are actually, two parts of the same project, but their distillation is useful for understanding the way forward. One project then needs to take place at the personal and the other at the organisational level. The first project is necessary for the realisation of the second. The first project is of a personal nature. It is the cultural mind state that is needed to operationalise the structures indicated by the second project. It requires for people to develop a sense of identity or of value or love for oneself that derives from within, that is the inner spirit, the inner energy - not from one's relative position in the pyramid of status. It thus requires a displacement of the attitudes that lead one to contribute to the oppression of oneself with attitudes of self-love, the only way in which the attitude of love for and trust of others can take route, the only way in which the attitudes required for the operationalisation of political equality can take route. This if of course a personal project and will not change the world outside you, but will change the world inside you - the world through which you view the world outside you. I would not deny that having got the inner world on the right path, that you can still find yourself in a position of oppression. The second project is about the world outside us. It is about our relationships with each other. It is about striving for the goal of political equality, the one equality which if assured would surely banish any other kind of inequality. Political equality means equal say in contributing to discussions and decisions over things that effect one's life vis-a-vis other people, so long as those decisions do not contradict the principles of democracy (ala John Stuart Mill styly). The question is then how do you engineer a more democratic state that will benefit everyone, what will be the steps of reform that lead from what we have now to what we want in the future and most importantly how do you ensure that other people will benefit from it? The two projects are integral to each other. A culture of individuals who value themselves in terms of how much better they are than other people will not see benefit in a more democratic state. A demantling of empire takes away the very 'raison d'etre' of these people (I think a little bit of these people exists in all of us). A culture of individuals who derive value for themselves from an inner spirit will not see a more democratic state as such a barrier to their own personal ambition. Perhaps as an aside, I've always thought of writing a book called: "Democracy: Unfinished Business". Democracy was not borne purely in respect of the principle of equality (although that it is the underlying principle), instead democracy was and is a slow process of enfranchising powerful groups of influence (i.e. at first it was only landowners who were allowed to vote, then men, then women etc). However, it is evident that the system of representation is still a compromise between 'empire' and the principle of political equality. Choosing a representative from a group of representatives which have a monopoly of opinion over the mass media and which are both supported by international conglomerates and businesses (which are the latter day landowners) is not political equality. It allows a degree of equality that is not evident in pure dictatorship - but it is then nothing more than elected dictatorship where the election is itself a very unequal process as it is orchestrated by a certain group of people.
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