I want to say something in response that I feel is urgent and essential. I ask that anyone reading this please put aside any hostility or disrespect you may feel for me and please focus on what I am trying to say here.
This is about Occupy. I am going to try be concise.
From when I first got into Paul, back in August of last year, I believed that Paul needed Occupy and vice-versa.
Here's why.
IMO, Paul's strength is his philosophy of Liberty.
Occupy's strength is their philosophy of solidarity.
Now, let me explain what I mean.
I started a thread in the off-topic sub-forum yesterday about Albert Camus.
Camus wrote about how Marx's philosophy was wrong, but that solidarity of humanity was essential.
I saw this quote in an article yesterday that made the suggestion that Marxism is making a comeback:
"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by." - from "Why Marxism is on the rise again"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism
People are suffering. We all know that.
To me, the REAL Occupy are the people I know personally or whom I have seen in the news who have tried to stop the suffering, from people losing their houses from foreclosure, for example. The people who empathize, but perhaps do not understand or care to understand the Paul view on
why people are suffering.
The media has tried to turn Paul into a monster that doesn't care about people. Referencing Ayn Rand, the newsletters, and anything else they can get their hands on, I believe that they have been pretty successful. I have seen comments out on the internet that tell me that the individuals who made those comments did not have the capacity at that moment to believe that Paul is who we know and believe him to be.
But, I believe that there is a larger group of people who "side" with Occupy yet want to believe that Ron Paul is who we know and believe him to be. These people are more intelligent, more humane, and probably have been less degraded in their own lives. They understand suffering, humanity. They also can understand complexity, these are educated people.
I know people like that. I believe that these two "sides" will come together, because they must. Humanity must come together to save itself. And I believe that the majority of people on this earth are intelligent and humane enough, and those that aren't are so either because they have been "humiliated" so much, as Camus puts it, or that they choose evil.
I believe that the philosophies of Liberty and Solidarity MUST come together for our country, the world, to be saved.
That's all I can really say, I think. But I really believe that this is where Occupy and the R3V can finally find each other. I still believe they/we need each other.
If you are interested in what I'm saying here, I URGE you to check out the short essays in this book:
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus (free epub ebook format)
http://www.epubbud.com/book.php?g=DV6H76TX
and if you really want to see a man in 1940-something turn on Marxism while defending the humanity of the people who suffered for it, check out The Rebel: An Essay of Revolt, again by Camus (I haven't been able to find a free copy online, but I have an ebook copy that I can send anyone, or you will likely be able to find it at your library or of course you can buy it.)
I've been trying to "push" Camus here since I got here because of what I just talked about, and because of the similarities I see between him and Paul. I really believe he nailed Marxism.
To illustrate, here are two quotes that deal directly with what I am talking about.
“At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and its nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers’ plot at Highgate Cemetery [Marx - my note here]; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what the intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period.
All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of the fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.” from “Beyond Nihilism” – The Rebel by Albert Camus
"Q: One cannot avoid tackling certain subjects today. The most serious one is a problem for all men: in the struggles dividing the world today, must we really be willing to forget all that is bad one side to light what is worse on the other?
A: Before he died in combat in the last war, Richard Hilary found the phrase that sums up this dilemma: “We were fighting a lie in the name of a half-truth.” He thought he was expressing a very pessimistic idea. But one may even have to fight a lie in the name of a quarter-truth. This is our situation at present. However, the quarter-truth contained in Western society is called liberty. And liberty is the way, and the only way, of perfectibility. Without liberty heavy industry can be perfected, but not justice or truth. Our most recent history, from Berlin to Budapest, ought to convince us of this. In any case, it is the reason for my choice. I have said in this very place that none of the evils totalitarianism claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself. I have not changed my mind. On the contrary, after twenty years of our harsh history, during which I have tried to accept every experience it offered,
liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals, for labor and for culture, the supreme good that governs all others."
- Albert Camus from "The Wager of Our Generation"
Resistance, Rebellion and Death
Now, I am only suggesting you check his stuff out here to get an understanding of what I am trying to say.
IMO, the REAL Occupy people, who may or may not actually be involved with the actual organization, are about PEOPLE, solidarity. They fight for one another.
I believe, that if the philosophy of Liberty and those who fight for it, and the philosophy of solidarity, the understanding of suffering, of the human condition, and those who fight for it, come together, this world will be where it should be.
I believe that these two groups don't understand yet, and this is my opinion, that they are Yin and Yang.
This is a suggestion, this is my opinion, but I believe it with all of my being.
When I got into Paul, I fell in love with you all because you fight like no other people that I have ever met, and you fight for truth, and justice, and liberty.
When I saw Occupy, I couldn't understand what they were doing. I thought I understood what they were TRYING to do, but I thought they were failing.
But I have learned over the past year a new lesson about faliure.
Part of that lesson was succinctly put by Nassim Taleb in this interview on CNBC (quote is at @8:57, about his upcoming book)
"...a robust system is a system that not just can sustain shocks, but one that improves after every shock"
"The Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb Cheers Ron Paul's Economic Platform on CNBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6s8a6H7Qts
I believe that the R3V and Occupy have to learn to handle the "shocks" of each other, and "become the system."
There ARE "social darwins" in this world, but I believe that they are the minority. They are the TRUE monsters, the TRUE "selfish" people, as Paul has been unjustly portayed, and the TRUE Marxists, the "prophet
of justice without mercy", as Camus said above.
I hope this is helpful. If not, no harm done.
\nn/
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