In addition to the two recent posts on the Outlaw Politics page, there are also two new poems in the Surrational Rhetoric section. Look for more in the upcoming weeks, as well as various book reviews that will show up once we get a few guest writers to agree to humor us.

-the ambassador

I put up a follow-up post to the colonel's original post on Outlaw Politics - Vision, Ideology and SUVs. It continues his discussion of images and ideologies.

-the ambassador

Check out my new post "What we see and how we look" in the Outlaw Politcs blog. Let me know what you think.

-the colonel

Expansion

The NarodnaCollective is going to undergo a bit of a change (must be some kind of contagious, these days). I suppose an expansion is more like it. In short, if you look to the right side of the screen, there is a new list titled "Contents." After a bit of discussion, the colonel and I decided that we would branch out a little.

So from now on, there will be separate blogs for separate subjects - i.e. one for political philosophy, one for domestic public policy, one for foreign policy, one for poetry, etc. We're hoping to have guest writers join in on some of our discussions as well - and, as always, anyone is invited to offer opinions on or generally eviscerate the things we say.

-the ambassador

Truth of Happiness

Upon reading the ambassadors recent post about happiness, I couldn't help but think of the Buddhist word "metta," which roughly translates as love, or lovingkindness.
In Sharon Salzbergs book Lovingkindness she discusses not only metta and how it differences from passionate love and especially from desire, but also about practices of metta. She suggests certain phrases to repeat to oneself while meditating. They start with wishing happiness and peace et cetera for oneself, and move on the wish these things for your friends, aquaintances and eventually enemies.
I'm trying not to be overly verbose with this post, I plan to move onto Ideologies of a Visual Culture shortly for my next post, but I felt what the ambassador said was enlightening and must be acknowledged. So I will try to sum up what Salzberg says quickly, I do suggest people read it however.
Anyway, Buddhism also has a strong understanding of the oneness of everything, and it seems that if we attain happiness for ourselves we can some how share that happiness with the rest of the world.
Important to keep in mind is that metta is not desire. It seems that desire leads to material things and as the ambassador was saying, that is far from an eternal happiness.
Lastly, I want to draw attention to ignorance being bliss and see if I can combine a Taoist thought with a Buddhist thought.
The Tao Te Ching repeated tells us that the enlightened one is least versed in text book type knowledge (if you will, cutting many corners here). It is through a lack of structured learning and knowledge that one becomes a "sage."
Metta tells us that happiness will not come from desire and objects or even activities that last a short while, but instead will come through an understanding of impermanence and unconditional love for everything.

-the colonel

Symbolic Distortion

In a previous post - Finding the Symbolic - I said that communalism could be a way to re-establish symbolic distance into society. However, I never said what it was that corrupted or collapsed this symbolic distance in the first place. Todd McGowan, in The End of Dissatisfaction?, says that we have a command to enjoy in today's society, rather than the previous society of prohibition (which provided a barrier to enjoyment). So today, he says, the symbolic distance has collapsed.

I, on the other hand, would tend to agree with the likes of Slavoj Zizek and Karl Marx, who say that "the moment all commodities are exhangeable against money . . . all other commodities [other than money] undergo a 'transubstantiation' and start to function as the appearance of the universal Value embodied in money . . . (For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 21" It is not, then, a collapse of the symbolic but rather a distortion or corruption of it that we see occurring today. So part of what creates this is that we focus almost solely on the exchange value of an object today, losing the symbolic barrier that would allow an object to hold actual meaning for us.

-the ambassador

Ignorance Really Is Bliss

Something has struck me in the last few days, as a result of a few things converging: first and foremost, I've been re-reading the most recent posts the colonel and I have put up. Secondly, a comment was made on one of my posts about Truth/truth, and why we believed it could actually exist - which went especially well with the Lao Tzu quote the colonel ended one of his posts with, and the ideas he put forth in the same post.

My realization was this: perhaps what I was describing was not a universal at all, but was instead my personal conception of the universal. As Kierkegaard put it in Fear and Trembling, "the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal, and the individual's ethical task is always to express himself in this, to abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal." Perhaps there was no Truth (in a universal sense) at all. I'm inclined to believe that it was, in fact, merely personal truth. Striving for Peace or happiness or enlightenment or whatever you may call it is a personal struggle - though that doesn't mean, necessarily, that it is an isolated one.

All of this, in turn, led me to ask how I define happiness. What would it even mean for someone to be personally happy? In a book I read recently entitled The High Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser seems to believe that happiness in today's society is equated to materialistic values (which is to say the acquisition of wealth, possessions and prestige). This becomes a problem because it structures both how happiness is defined and the shape an attempt to attain it must take. The disconnect is that happiness now seems to be a consumer good - it is something you can buy as long as you have the money for it, and the catch here is that you always need more money to buy more happiness since any happiness or satisfaction derived from purely materialistic triumphs is ephemeral at best. It is no longer the qualitative symbolic happiness that matters. Instead, we value only the quantitative amount of happiness we can purchase - which is always inadequate.

To wrap things up: Maybe ignorance really is bliss. What if the way to happiness is precisely by not knowing what it is or how to get there? Maybe what I should be doing here, for myself and for anyone else who cares to follow the occasionally lucid ramblings I put up, is defining what happiness is not. To try and say what it is would be to make the exact same mistake that materialism makes: it structures not only how happiness is defined, but also structures how you would get there.

-the ambassador