Efforts toward perfection

There’s your choice: no fucking choice . . .  Sad, what are our options?  I am firmly ensconced in the choices I’ve made – happy, really – in a redoubt of familial obligations, duties by choice.  This limits, in my mind, what I can do, what I should do.  Also this redoubt jibes with the idea of primarily changing oneself.  First yourself and then the world and how goddam true that is.

We want the United States to change but ignore that role in ourselves – a bit ingenuous though.  I will say that some of those out acting (striving, being activists) have made the turn, have changed themselves, are the change they want to see.  Good.  A single man as I once was might live simply – ask a lot of questions – and go forth as an agent of change, go fight for what is right.  That is what some of those activists are.

But back it up a minute.  What change is on offer?  You took to the streets for Trump but didn’t do anything during Obama’s time?  Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need to slow down and back up a minute myself.  Think Standing Rock.  Yes, people have been involved.  The structures run deep and the Standing Rock people are experiencing what a challenge to these structures gets you: attacks by dogs, acoustic bombardment to achieve psychological disruption, being sprayed with water while it is fucking freezing out.  Oh, and even more insidious: you get to stand up for a cause while most of the nation carries on in ignorance which allows the powers that be to continue with their sundry mistreatments/criminal acts.  That is the cruelest thing of all.

And it is what any person questioning any system must face: How docile has the status quo rendered the great masses of people?  How has this docility been countered?  By protesting?

I want to say that if on an individual basis everyone examined their lives we would have a populace that would have moved past fossil fuels for rational and spiritual reasons. And perhaps that is assuming too much.

But there is this idea of mass man, of mass society and it is undeniable and it stares one in the face every day.  In deciding tactics, this fact of mass society must be considered.  In deciding whether or not to even act, this fact of mass society must be considered.  The bull is still caged.  The bull writhes and bucks, relaxes then violently kicks.  What good to stand outside the cage and attempt to dictate right action to the bull?  One must prepare for and contemplate what to do once the gate is opened and the bull emerges.

In talking about mass society, Ortega y Gasset (OyG) contrasts the mass of people with minorities, minorities being groups where each member must “separate himself from the multitude for special, relatively personal, reasons”.  Minorities used to run the world, OyG argues.  But now the majorities have stepped forward and live as an unquestioning, non-deciding mass that follows rather base pleasures and who live unexamined lives.

Striving is what separates the two groups, as OyG elucidates:

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.

Damn.  Never mind, it’s off to Standing Rock for this chap.  But again, hold on a minute: is that my “effort towards perfection” as OyG states?  It sure as heck would involve “piling up difficulties and duties”.  Après election and being in this world in general I will at least keep asking questions.  And read some more Ortega y Gasset as well.