See spot run

Follow these names to find who owns them

Recalling only the infamous truth about Hunter and Joe Biden my mirth provoked in regards to Partisanship. Bidness as Neo-Con usual is not what Trump (so they think) delivers. Amusing.

My absentee ballot is not cast. I remain indifferent. Alive, aware, and absolutely asserting right around the corner a better world exists. We must only decide that better is better and I see not even as a matter of policy the turning towards the best by voting one whip hand or the other. Put down the whip. Defang the State. Empower the electorate with responsibility. No candidate offers even a taste.

More than 700 high-ranking national security officials have endorsed Democratic candidate Vice President Harris in her run for the White House, with some leaders expressing concerns about former President Trump’s “scary authoritarian streak.”

[link to thehill.com (secure)]

The human individual whom the exponents of the middle class revolution had made the ultimate unit as well as the end of society stood for values which strikingly contradict those holding sway over society today. If we try to assemble in one guiding concept the various religious, political and economic tendencies which shaped the idea of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, we may define the individual as the subject of certain fundamental standards and values which no external authority was supposed to encroach upon. These standards and values pertained to the forms of life, social as well as personal, which were most adequate to the full development of man’s faculties and abilities. By the same token, they were the “truth” of his individual and social existence. The individual, as a rational being, was deemed capable of finding these forms by his own thinking and, once he had acquired freedom of thought, pursuing the course of action which would actualize them. Society’s task was to grant him such freedom and to remove all restrictions upon his rational course of action.

The principle of individualism, the pursuit of self-interest, was conditioned upon the proposition that self-interest was rational, that is to say, that it resulted from and was constantly guided and controlled by autonomous thinking. The rational self-interest did not coincide with the individual’s immediate self-interest, for the latter depended upon the standards and requirements of the prevailing social order, placed there n ot by his autonomous thought and conscience but by external authorities. In the context of radical

Some Social Implications of Modern Technology

Puritanism, the principle of individualism thus set the individual against his society. Men had to break through the whole system of ideas and values imposed upon them, and to find and seize the ideas and values that conformed to their rational interest. They had to live in a state of constant vigilance, apprehension, and criticism, to reject everything that was not true, not justified by free reason. This, in a society which was not yet rational, constituted a principle of permanent unrest and opposition. For false standards still governed the life of men, and the free individual was therefore he who criticized these standards, searched for the true ones and advanced their realization. The theme has nowhere been more fittingly expressed than in Milton’s image of a “wicked race of deceivers, who... took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scatter’d them to the four winds.” From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all,...nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming...— To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional),” this was the principle of individualistic rationality.3

To fulfill this rationality presupposed an adequate social and economic setting, one that would appeal to individuals whose social performance was, at least to a large extent, their own work. Liberalist society was held to be the adequate setting for individualistic rationality. In the sphere of free competition, the tangible achievements of the individual which made his products and performances a part of society’s need, were the marks of his individuality. In the course of time, however, the process of commodity production undermined the economic basis on which individualistic rationality was built. Mechanization and rationalization forced the weaker competitor under the dominion of the giant enterprises of machine industry which, in establishing society’s dominion over nature, abolished the free economic subject.

The principle of competitive efficiency favors the enterprises with the most highly mechanized and rationalized industrial equipment. Technological power tends to the concentration of economic power, to “large units of production, of vast corporate enterprises producing large quantities and often a striking variety of goods, of industrial empires owning and controlling materials, equipment, and processes from the extraction of raw materials to the distribution of finished products, of dominance over an entire industry by a small number of giant concerns....” And technology “steadily increases the power at the command of giant concerns by creating new tools, processes and products.”

Efficiency here called for integral unification and simplification, for the removal of all “waste,” the avoidance of all detours, it called for radical coordination. A contradiction exists, however, between the profit incentive that keeps the apparatus moving and the rise of the standard of living which this same apparatus has made possible. “Since control of production is in the hands of enterprisers working for a profit, they will have at their disposal whatever emerges as surplus after rent, interest, labor, and other costs are met. These costs will be kept at the lowest possible minimum as a matter of course.”5 Under these circumstances, profitable employment of the apparatus dictates to a great extent the quantity, form and kind of commodities to be produced, and through this mode of production and distribution, the technological power of the apparatus affects the entire rationality of those whom it serves.

Under the impact of this apparatus, individualistic rationality has been transformed into technological rationality. It is by no means confined to the subjects and objects of large scale enterprises but characterizes the pervasive mode of thought and even the manifold forms of protest and rebellion. This rationality establishes standards of judgment and fosters attitudes which make men ready to accept and even to introcept the dictates of the apparatus.

Lewis Mumford has characterized man in the machine age as an “objective personality,” one who has learned to transfer all subjective spontaneity to the machinery which he serves, to subordinate his life to the “matter-of- factness” of a world in which the machine is the factor and he the factum.7 Individual distinctions in the aptitude, insight and knowledge are transformed into different quanta of skill and training, to be coordinated at any time within the common framework of standardized performances.

Individuality, however, has not disappeared. The free economic subject rather has developed into the object of large-scale organization and coordination.

Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity