Mithrandir said:
Perhaps it’s time to start a new thread, but I’d say this:
No matter how inwards you look, you still live in the company of people. And that people organise one way or other. Having a mass of people all looking inwards, doing their own and not looking to the sides it’s just another way of organising and perhaps an even more toxic one.
It’s back to natural state. A band of hunters and collectors. Nomads. A cannibalistic society with no apparent structure, but an invisible one. Because we can’t forget this is a product made by a company with funding purposes, not precisely a hippie cultural product.
About the ST: There’s no moral struggle. If Episode IX redeems Kylo as head of the First Order, then we’ll end up having a movie about a fair kingdom with a good fair emperor and everybody lived happy. Because TLJ already establishes that there’s not a hierarchy between moral-social structures: there’s darkness in rey, light in kylo, grey areas. No need of a dogma (only that not needing a dogma and praising gray is a dogma in itself: the sacred word of everything you do is good and acceptable), so just change the “inside”, the head of the regime and then magically the regime can start being good.
And that is dangerous. And yes, it’s not western, it’s oriental culture and thinking. But not because it’s chinese, but because the western corporations find that model a lot more profitable in this stage of social-mediated liquid society. The old fronteer of private and public spheres has been turned down and publicity reigns supreme. That’s Sparta and not Athens.
Individuality requires by definition the possibility of being developed, and it develops in time, like a culture (or agriculture). To have the possibility of individuality, there has to be a defined private sphere that allows that culture to grow in time, from past to future (education, family, etc.).
The overwhelming power of today’s public sphere undermines that possibility: the world is so connected that it leads to the illusion that everything happens here and now, as they made Yoda say in this movie, as if it was wisdom.
And what’s the basic permanent structure of private life in a society? Family, and lineage, not the mass but the clan. Lineage allows the individual to draw and recognize itself in a trajectory through time, even from and beyond its existence. Which doesn’t mean that lineage gives you privileges over the others, but to allows you to know your journey, and certainly conditions it to an extent.
Problem with family is that it is a structure, and as any structure, it implies some kind of oppression. As the jewish law states, the mother is evident, the father only can be supposed. That’s why traditional societies reacted by defining a role for the woman associated with the private sphere of the home. Family is the base of democracy, as was in Athens centuries ago: it was based on the relative oppresion and confinement of half the humanity to a strict and defined model of conduct.
Jeopardize those role models, and you’ll end up having no family. Without family, no identity. Without identity, a vacuum of sense or purpose. And without that, a new society based only in consumism. It’s not misoginy, it’s just reflecting on the reasons of traditional structures, and what their movement implies. Men will not occupy the private sphere. Have women abandon it, and you’ll end up with no public sphere whatsoever, and everyone just obbeying what some influencer says in twitter, instagram, youtube or whatever.
That’s why, below and below any politically correct speech, feminism as it is understood today which is as a total cultural struggle (that goes beyond fair and absolutely reasonable claims such as rebellion against harassment or difference in payment), is very, very useful to the corporations. And that is why it is very, very present in the corporations agenda. It’s the trojan horse through which tear down the only barreer left between the human person and the massive consumer.
And that is why femminism and this apparent oriental philosophy of not holding on, letting go and being passive go absolutely hand in hand and are all part of a same stage of modern capitalism advancing over the human being, when evil and good are no longer needed as concepts, nor men or women, nor family, nor identity, nor stability of any type. And yes, no more heroes please. Just be comfortable with the world we create for you because it is what it is.
