Thursday October 4, 2018

Wherefore this talk of alienation, with its paranoid, “friend-enemy”-divided, ego-centered picture of the cosmos? Why no delight in others? May we re-cast ourselves as optimists? May we create, despite the limits of our condition, applying ourselves with purpose so as to rework these conditions? A voice intervenes to help us pick the lock. “Conditioning scenes,” it tells us. Conditioning scenes furnish the materials and sometimes the rules, says Sidney Hook, “but never the plots of the dramas of human history” (The Hero in History, p. xiii). What if, in the script of our awareness, we replace “I” with “we,” and “alienated” with “outstanding”? Can we still find in ourselves a “center” to which can be assigned narrative categories like responsibility, decision, and action? What would occupy this center? A Head? A Brains Trust? A Party? A Corporation? A Church? A Logic? Big Brother? Dear Leader? To whom do we grant agency: founding fathers or We the People?