Power,Responsibility and freedom

[undergroundpanther]

Our only hope is to ‘de-centre’ ourselves, to see that we are not islands and that our existence does indeed make sense only as ‘part of the main’2. We are social creatures who have come to mistake our nature as isolated individuals. Consequently, we do not understand how our social world has come into being nor how we operate within it: we stumble around blindfolded, full of envy, rage and pain.

We are not who we take ourselves to be: not, individually, the architects of our personal destiny, not responsible for all we do and think. We are truly not, even, extinguished by a personal death; the Texan billionaire does not in fact have to steal the existence of our progeny in order to find time to enjoy the newspapers (but for our progeny, of whom he will be a part, to exist, he will need the courage to die).

Exactly as Copernicus showed that our planet is not the centre of the universe, so we need to see that our ‘selves’ are not the fons et origo of our experience and conduct. As far as understanding ourselves is concerned, our Twentieth Century psychologies have been almost entirely misleading. It is with some of these misunderstandings, and the ways they are exploited by power, that much of the rest of this publication will be concerned.

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POWER,RESPOSIBILITY and FREEDOM
http://www.davidsmail.freeuk.com/intpub.htm