Reading Pepe Escobar’s beautiful memory of Jean-Paul Sartre reignited a thought process which I had previously set aside on several occasions because of my tendency to submit to a sense of futility in the face of the seemingly ever expanding human proclivity for degradation. My interpretation/analysis stems from a consistently chronic sense that I have, for most of my life, been as much an outside observer of human social pursuits as I have been a participant. In the face of what appears to be an ongoing expansion of planetary domination by humanity, I cannot help but strongly suspect (I dare not believe) that humanity is not capable of transcending its own seeming essential characteristics which, in themselves, negate any possible belief in freedom.
Human nature has us longing for inclusion while we simultaneously desire rising above the banality of our social structures. These desires seems to underlie the majority of our precepts and the necessity of laws for guiding what might be called our fragmented global social body.
The belief in different strokes for different folks is consistently clashing with authoritarian limits, while both are portrayed as necessary for maximizing human potential. This is where I tend to wander into the vicinity of B.F. Skinner – even as I know that that piece of property is not where I want to be.
The great problem of the unending repetition of leap-frogging from the desire for liberation to the implementation of another…