Reading Backwards

[coberst]

Reading Backwards

How do we escape from the grasp of today’s ideologies, fads, rationalizations, and general enculturation? We must learn to read backwards to remove our self from today’s cultural container. As Archimedes observed we must find a platform outside of that reality which we wish to understand and to move.

Reading backwards is using our library card to borrow books that were written many years or many hundreds of years ago. Reading has another great advantage in that we can easily focus on books that have withstood the test of time. We can easily identify thw ‘real thing’ insofar was worthy thinking is concerned.

We can read Churchill about the past one hundred years; we can read Marx, Darwin or Freud if we want to cover the 19th century, perhaps Paine, Jefferson and Hamilton on the 18th century, maybe Bacon, Chaucer, Aquinas and Plato going further back in history.

By reading backward we get a sense of the universal and the relative, the essential and the arbitrary. We can form the basis of reading critically with questions to act as our guide to understanding. We can learn to stop our general practice of sleep reading. We learned in our schooling to sleep read, sleep listen, and to become apathetic regarding all things intellectual. By reading backwards we can begin to comprehend the irrational impulses of our superficial consumer culture.

Our consumer culture through the schooling institutions has molded us into superficial creatures unable to withstand the inducements of our foolish value system.

[chonsigirl]

Originally Posted by coberst

Our consumer culture through the schooling institutions has molded us into superficial creatures unable to withstand the inducements of our foolish value system.

Are you insinuating that the educational system is working hand in hand with big business to dummy down the society?

Everyone has a different value system, coberst. Please clarify your comments.

I only read "backwards" when I read in Hebrew.

[coberst]

Chonsi

I think that our educational system is organized to suit those who run our society.

Who runs our society? Certainly not an apathetic and distracted population.

Our corporate leaders control the wealth and organizational power in our (USA) nation. They determine who can run for public office because they furnish the money to campaign. They control our society through a drumbeat of propoganda that makes us think of our self as consumers.

If they do not run our society they are not as smart as I think they are because there is nothing to stop them.

Our educational system is not working hand in hand with them. They do not allow anyone beyond a few to know who they are and what they do. Our teachers have no more power to determine these matters than does any other citizen.

Our elected politicians are out front so the people can throw tomatoes at them when they are unhappy, but the politicians have litle more control of the matter than do we individual citizens.

They are the Matador and we are the bull, and we see nothing but the cape.

[chonsigirl]

*I will not say I'm seeing red*

I am the gadfly, I do not agree Coberst. I do not think the educational system always suits the majority, or the minority.

As far as the cape goes, if you choose to step into the ring of danger, you take your chances. I do not think it is the proverbial "wool over the eyes."

You went from education to big business and politics in a hop, skip and a jump, coberst. Can you focus the thoughts a little more for me, please.

[Bryn Mawr]

Originally Posted by coberst

They are the Matador and we are the bull, and we see nothing but the cape.

It seems to me that you think very little of people.

There's more there than you give them credit for.

[buttercup]

quote chonsi - I only read "backwards" when I read in Hebrew.

[coberst]

I think that people resemble our bovine ancestors. We are inclined to be staring blankly into the distance or running with the herd.

I think that a little detective work will remove a great deal of the wool covering the eyes of the population.

There is nothing to stop the leaders of our corporations, banks, media, think tanks, elite universities etc. to unite in a clandestine network to control the nation. In fact, they would be foolish not to do so.

They start out with massive power because they control the power of American institutions; it is a small step to control the whole nation. They have proven that they can control us through advertising to become consumers without overriding values and borrowers without limit.

Before corporations became legal individual entitities their power couldn't rival governments. Now a single corporation can control a government. Legislatures effectively sealed the fate of governments. We have an illusion of democracy in western liberal democracies, our real rulers are the corporations.

[Lulu2]

Maybe it'd be easier to understand your point if you'd describe what people would look like, after the changes you want have been made!

What would we be doing? Subsistence farming? Fighting mammoths? Educating ourselves?

[coberst]

Originally Posted by Lulu2

Maybe it'd be easier to understand your point if you'd describe what people would look like, after the changes you want have been made!

What would we be doing? Subsistence farming? Fighting mammoths? Educating ourselves?

After we citizens accepted our responsibilities as citizens as our ancestors imagined we would look like rational adults willing and able to make public policy and govern ourself.

Perhaps democractic nations have reached their high points and there appears to be a slow decline back into systems wherein the populations revert to their bovine apathy.