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This is a must watch.
Get inspired.
That is all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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And this was my response:
Yep, it sure is great when they get 'em young...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
I understand that we are all secretly yearning for a new universalism to bring humanity together out of its anomie and self-slaughter, but it makes my stomach convulse and my heart ache to see the oppressed minorities who have the most reason to resist opt for strands of religious universalism. Being all equal brethren under our common paternalistic authority, the Lord, does not interest me. I have not known self-proclaimed benevolent paternalism to ever be actually benevolent or fitting for adults (or children) who want to retain their dignity to follow.
Where is secular universalism in the Arab world nowadays? Secular Arab nationalism, secular Arab anti-imperialist and human rights groups? Likewise, where is secular Black nationalism in the U.S. today? Where can I find blacks, and whites, coming together on a platform of secular universalism...and, mind you, I'm talking about something much more substantial than the liberal universalism of Obama that guarantees that we all have the equal right to not have ourselves or our property to be bothered. Okay, sure, but is that all that we want politics to do?
Am I the only one in the U.S. that is yearning for the politics of the U.S. to be MORE totalitarian (in other words, to have politics invade MORE of our lives and do more to imbue our lives with more meaning)? Am I crazy in wanting that? I speak, of course, about not an authoritarian totalitarianism, but a democratic totalitarianism (sort of like the French Revolution on steroids), a democratic total-Weltanshauung (world outlook) to replace, equally, not only what I find to inherently be the hierarchical total-Weltanshauung of religion, but also the incomplete, petty, fussy, pathetic excuse for an inspiring Weltanschauung that is bourgeois liberalism. I want a politics that will imbue our lives with extremes of emotion and meaning...but I don't want a theocracy (which would, as it happens, accomplish those goals perfectly well).
It has always been accepted that religion is allowed to imbue our lives with meaning, but to turn to politics for that has always been seen as totalitarian and out of the proper scope of politics. According to classical liberalism, the proper scope of politics is confined to guaranteeing certain negative liberties (freedom from being harmed, etc.), which might make abstract sense, but applying only negative liberties, in practice, leads in practice to a skeleton of a society: fair, equal, just, but alienated, frustrated, pointless, uninspiring, depressing, etc. What about politics that don't just stand against something negatively (standing against infringement on property, liberty, etc.), but that also positively compel people to achieve certain accomplishments of meaning and greatness and excitement in their lives? This is the same lament that one hears from religious authorities about the problems of post-modern society, and I very much feel what they are saying and concur with them on this point. But I find THEIR solution intolerable. I am driven to desperately search for something else. But so far I have not found it, and I fear that I am the only one looking in this direction.
So far, the closest I have come to fleshing out these vague impulses that I feel has been to juxtapose something like this:
H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
And something like this...
Laibach: Geburt einer Nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Laibach: Life is Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
...and insist that they can be organically and harmoniously fused, and that they are two sides of the same coin, of a similar current of feeling running throughout all of humanity. Just as Joseph Campbell has written about the common threads of the religions of the world, and how one can come to not just a passive common appreciation of all of them, but an active fusion of their best elements, and just how he wrote similarly about mythological archetypes in "Hero of a Thousand Faces," likewise I would like to construct a "Nation of a thousand flags." Not just passive "tolerance" of national "diversity," but a forceful integration of all of the most extreme, exciting, compelling, and meaning-imbueing aspects of the world's nationalisms. There was once upon a time when nationalism was on the left, not on the right. (The French Revolution, many third-world independence movements, black nationalism, etc.) Oh how I long to forge a new left-nationalism. The result would be a stark contrast with what I see as bourgeois society:
Laibach: Wirtschaft ist tot (The Economy is dead)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Sterile. Obtaining better "quality of life" and better "purchasing power" (Qualität des Lebens & großen Angebote (literally, "bargains")) at the expense of putting ourselves through the process of bourgeois domestication. Substituting a set of cruelly self-regimented accountant's indulgences for the wild and free indulgencies of organic life. Substituting the bleak and cold stoicism and strength of steel and obedient factory workers for the fiery, impassioned, yet resolute organic stoicism and strength of the "Life is Life" video, or of these videos:
Die Liebe ist die größte Kraft. Die alles schaft. ("Love is the greatest force. It can accomplish anything).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Dead Prez - Way of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Despite the superficial difference in the "ethnic" wellsprings of these videos, I consider them to represent the same human longing for a free, indulgent, expansive, yet self-disciplined, strong, and meaningful organicism...and I could not think of a starker contrast to this organicism than the sterility and the guilty, suffocating self-loathing of the organic pleasures of worldly life that most religions maintain.
Long story short, I guess that's why my heart aches when I watch your video.
---Matthew
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One further thought:
Although it might seem at first like bourgeois society and religion are in an adversarial relationship, as it happens it seems to me like they are accidental (and unwilling) co-conspirators. Bourgeois society can't help but continue to have certain shortcomings that leave something to be desired from life (lack of meaning, etc.), and this constant source of problems is a boon for religion, as it gives religion a purpose and gives people a continued reason to flock to it. Then, with people going to religion as a compensation, people are contented, and bourgeois life is given no imperative to fundamentally change or revolutionize/transcend itself. So the two systems, even though they are oriented in opposite directions, end up enabling one another. This sly game has been going on for far too long for my taste. Though we may find escapism from bourgeois life's problems in religion, in the end I find it just as dissatisfying as escapism from bourgeois life via drugs or video games. Life still fundamentally feels empty. No, only an abolition/transcendence of bourgeois life towards some higher secular mission will save my heart and body from withering into dust.
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