Monday, December 19, 2011

Desire Democracy Imagination

I post this out of context--as one post in a discussion on on-line voting and decision making. This is the heart of why I think this is a profoundly wrong way to build a democratic life together.
Decisions that involve our mutual desires are built on, depend on-- our capacity for imaginative empathy--and nothing has been more degraded by our current alienating economic/social/power structure.

Healing cannot happen apart from the challenge of working within diverse, physical assemblies--discovering once again what and who we are, else we cannot know what we desire.

Bob, of course sex is important--and nothing is easier to see, than how this is so. If it's not, that's maybe cause we are so used to 'gender' as a euphemism--and misleading one at that.

When a woman speaks, she speaks not as a generic cipher but out of her social and biological experience as a woman, and is heard as such by men, and by other women. So too, men, queer, trans.... This is sex, is it not?

Let me repeat--decisions that involve our mutual desires are built on, depend on our capacity for imaginative empathy. This is not a technical problem. It cannot be solved by any sort of technological fix. Only out of a profound alienation from our animal lives, from our biologically rooted social imagination, is it even possible to think of building democracy apart from face to face deliberation.
I

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