13 wnt. OUR CREDO: The name of this site is Why Not Think Differently. (Just go with the shortened version.)
"Differently" has nothing to do with Substack, me or anyone else. Differently only refers to you, and your yesterday.
Even if you have one of the biggest Substack sites, if you are in the same mind-set as you were yesterday, you are missing life's opportunities.
We're not looking to tell people how to spend their time, but only offering what we think as an alternative. This, until the seduction of the chosen subjects begins to take over. Problems abound and I can discuss them all, but what is my access point into them, toward my action? In some way, they have to directly relate to my life.
WE WANT TO: Engage in some of the pressing social, economic, and civic problems in our society in an intelligent and personal way, on at least a symbolic level which we can test in our daily lives.
WE WANT TO: Understand something of the cultural, historical and international contexts of these problems.
WE WANT TO: Envision solutions and think through ways to turn plans into concrete personal action, (our access point).
WE WANT TO: Have appreciation for the privilege and obligation to be a part of a society struggling to become a working democracy in a more complete way.
We must discover what is the ulterior meaning behind our dialog? What are the hidden issues. Central to our method is to slow down and begin to develop the habit of comprehension. It is the internalized refusal to read through something without understanding it. It is querying the claims of the author, looking up strange words, and going over again any text that doesn't seem to flow.
We also want to Understand a new, non-judgmental, yet highly critical way of functioning as a group of Substack commenters. Group building entails directly confronting the "Culture of Silence", perhaps the main blocking element. Something at home, something in the schooling, and a lot in the media, has made the entirety of government and collective action, in all its aspects, seem remote, more hostile, and not worth knowing about. Government institutions seem shielded against any meaningful change, no matter how our "democracy" attempts to vote someone new into office.
All new collective action is being dismissed, or labeled as bad. We hang on to the word democracy even though it is disappointing, because we see no alternative. That plays a role in the resentment, negation and the alienation from the whole, and from our nation. It is the cause of divisiveness, that may likely kill us as a functioning unit.
I will write about the Culture of Silence soon. Its origin is the railroading of ideas by the mainstream media and now at the university level. Railroading means forcefully pushing one argument down a single track. This one way is the only RIGHT way, so there is nothing to talk about, nothing to discuss. Our call on this site for discussion is either naïve, or revolutionary, but definitely not group-think.
You do something with your day, why not give some time to engage here. If you claim to be too busy, that is just a statement of your priorities. You believe that you will get a bigger payback doing what you now do. (Maybe you will?) Busyness might mean you’re important.
Or you might be setting out to live a glorious libertarian life, and celebrate your freedoms all on your own. But you ignore the miracle of everyday life, in which the simplest, most ordinary and mundane activity, presupposes an enormously complicated structure that is in place, and that is functioning. It's a dramatic illustration of culture, through social institutions and through the norms of organized behavior. All just reduced to one word, "infrastructure".
Like Darwin, you may think all of this miracle {Just-Happened By-Itself}, “natural selection”. It must be the miracle of the unfettered market, or some such. But the unfettered market is controlled by corporations and the billionaires who run them. They are doing all the planning that you deny government is capable of. But they are planning for their own benefit, surely not for yours.
It is actually a bewildering complexity, and points toward the necessity of theory building to simplify it. What is the process of planning, and what are the relations between theory and practice?
Here I am proposing how we reason on WNT, and what we want out of this site. Maybe these are not discussion points, but certainly you can add what we are leaving out, or suggest how our insight may be biased. Hidden biases are in our acts and in our chosen vocabulary. The old vocabulary is built on separation. To try to forge unity using terms of separation cannot give the desired results.
We invite your participation on whatever level you are willing to give it. You can break the Culture of Silence right now. The comment fields are open. Please introduce yourselves.
Well, Just relax while you think about it.
Jean-Marie Leclair 1697 - 1764, even back then they took it easy.
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Calling out a return to past times when discussion was more the norm might seem like an innocent endeavor. "We did it before, and we can do it again, why not?" Democracy works only when a critical-mass of people decide that they can participate. You have to participate with talking before you can participate with doing.
Then you conjecture that we are either naïve, or revolutionary, but definitely not group-think. You are naïve only if you think discussion options in today's world is NOT REVOLUTIONARY. Even to ask for justification for conventional wisdom is the greatest upheaval. There are so many "mono-topics" that can't allow any interference.
I will write about The Culture of Silence in the next couple of days, (if I may). We are coming face to face with the major shortcomings of the western culture. People give no-constructive-energy toward repairing our damaged society. They must believe that either, it has no value, or that it is so tough it will never be destroyed. It may be true that momentum gives the appearance there is nothing to be troubled about. (Does anyone still believe that?)
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