A Pathology of Our Culture

Why do we have so much difficulty discussing questions of value?

That we have yet to come up with a clear code of conduct for meetings? That we can easily entertain ideas about digital discussions and voting, but have no way to examine what it is we desire from this--not what we want to happen or do--as some form of mechanical problem solving, but what we want to happen to us, what we desire from one another in being together, in how and what we want to become?

This is a pathology we've contracted from living in this empire of money & death, our severely damaged capacity for imaginative empathy. It reveals itself in every GA--where at least it's visible, if painful to see (like licking a supporting open wound)--even more evident in FB, in comments to posts and articles, but there likely to be misread as individual bad behavior, not as the universally shared pathology it is.

I was asked, what do you mean by values?

What we really want, and why. Justice is not an abstract idea--it is a desire experienced in the gut. Where does that come from--in you? In me? Talking about values means including--becoming aware of and sharing the individual experiential roots of our ideas about what we are doing and what we want and why.

"We are creatures of desire not of need."  Gaston Bachelard

Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord