Social Gravity: The Stance Toward Person-hood

Social Gravity: The Stance Toward Person-hood

L. Edgar Otto   18 November, 2012

Sometimes, given a perspective of a long span of the life expectancy, I can ponder different eras of myself but more so the comparison with others especially across generations of my own family within the general background of world history.

Today, I feel it is not just the individual moves toward a different place that may be behind the times or even ahead of them, or from some perspective at a given time our evaluations and expectations of others changes who is ahead or behind or what in character seems constant. It is difficult to know then what values to pass on to the next generation with any degree of general certainty or if those values themselves will prove strong tools of survival.

I see at this time the overall distance between he who was my father and his life journey a much wider distance and I realize that this distance also widens in who my children are. I find this a novel idea and it may not necessarily be the actual state of things for its sake of fresh thoughts in the flow of the stream and mainstream of time, of star formation and exhaustion, of promiscuous orbits half chance in the small parochial globular clusters where our immediate sphere of friends hold together as if in its inherent diversity is a gated community far from the voracious flagship galaxy.

While our precious metals leach out into the ever more salty sea it takes too much of energy to mine them there.  This is a physical entropy or catastrophe despite the water cycle that brings some of the salt back and recycles the rain.  The innate creative forces in water at that field of the creative frontier eventually grow barren and living things based on carbon require more protection against the hidden forces that tear at us like descending into a black hole beyond the point of no return of the kind that has no intelligible inside or structure.

Socially, this crude understanding of falling to a ground we call gravity, comes to my mind in the political and economic issues of recent days.  From the progressive side or from the libertarian side I find the resistence toward a new freedom which is just as well described by our forefathers as giving good weight and balance to government as if the old but revolutionary in its time and in a sense for all time, "New Constellation".

Conservative or Liberal and how these ideologies define themselves balanced on not necessarily enduring nor costly maintenance of freedom aganst their opposites right or left that tend toward the opposite pole of slavery.  So it makes some sense that in the case of the United States by the amendment outlawing slavery in the abstract that it applies to the idea of a corporation being a "person".  Life in the environmental context from a pragmatic and material viewpoint then may be considered an issue of recycling or reuse of the resources in question or the endowment of the species and its individuals.

The idea of what is a person, quite aside from the notion that such a definition can extend beyond and individual or even a species or even to abstract entities like the gods or a state, is further complicated by the question of what is an individual and what is collective as persons.  Despite the ideals of libertarians and socialist leaning ideologies in practice we find the imbalances beyond initial equality of opportunity which as if a person, even a king, the leadership can be a necessity if it keeps the state sound and protected so as not to raise the right or excuse for revolution as a working principle.

A corporation allows individuals who amass wealth to have a firewall against the liability of mistakes, an insurance against the self responsibility moved to the general law as a protection of their personal achievements and usual ability to guide the development of the society for the good- yet any entrenched regime over history waxes and wanes in this hope of benevolent leaders for all or some of the people.   A corporation is depersonalized for the benefit of an individual and the rule of law rather than base conflicts such as war.  Yet such a law permits power that can depersonalize the people and push the spectrum right or left unto slavery as the lowest common denominator.

In the collective, the unions once a bulwark against the tide of rising socialism and to some extent outliving that function as all such utopian economic inflation arises to impracticality, today are calling for a change in the definition of person-hood in that amendment.  The rationalization is that the unions represent the individuals, but can do so as representing a mirror to the corporations- the lowering level to new forms of slavery such as wage or debt slavery, where the welfare state and the monopolies seesaw in the descent in bed together.  Unions of this kind represent more the collective abstracted from person-hood as surely as the corporations.  Should we balance things by declaring the unions as persons?

The dynamic here can be thought to reduce to the Freudian style foundations behind the scene of the struggle between individuals and society- or the struggles, Darwin like between cultures and races, or the absurdities of castes and classes. In this respect that there is a universal trend once achieved there is naturally no going back works for both sides continually.  This state of things remains the social environment as they are metaphors of natural law and cosmology until the threshold of critical mass is reached where the people understand new physics in its social role where technology catches up with our intuitions of values.

Granted we intelligibly build also on old ideas of our traditions and treason's, but the fact remains that if there are new born these once an organism in fact can have legal as well as asserted to have higher rights of life in their being. In the creative aspects of this world, be it earthly or wider in source and origin, and beyond he similarity of all people as if these can maintain differences under one idea of a spirit or soul and not loose that paradoxically in the name of equality we may ask when does an individual person begin.

Certainly from the legal aspect as so many politicians lately do not know about the science now understood on such things in the emotional statement of ignorance as free speech rights of person-hood or free expression of religion yet not freedom from religion the collective principle that is usurped by the state in matters of ultimate decisions of life and death and citizenship such as their ideas on rape and person-hood that has lost elections, is an issue of the collective or the individual and not at conception nor that before conception our individual cells have a sort of half person-hood.

For we know that it takes more than thirty-two mammal cells to differentiate in concert so as to initiate an individual, before that it can me many individuals as if clones and clones of clones.  We do not have the mathematics or science in these matters of initiation to describe the hierarchical scale of such person-hood in a clear and intelligible manner.

Until these issues are resolved more foundationally in the expression of reality over spans of time and as if the looping in evolving spirals of repeats and rebirths of a dynamic but intermittent moving history. climate also a case of what is not really defined even by the existential elements with general properties of our carbon based lifeforms, the state of the world and its individuals in it as if in a distant half creative and part hidden social gravity will risk all in permanent passions of revolution or at the frontiers and foundations our lifelong rumors and reality of permanent war.  While hard decisions have to be made by leadership this does not mean they are right or need to be justified in stealth and propaganda by more than what we should have in our dealings with each other with courtesy and common sense as we give in to what in principle is all natural and yet in our imperfection we cannot distinguish what by assertion is or is not artificial in our goals and idolatry for our shared and individual roles free or slave, alone or with family, in the states.

Is there time enough for awakening here and now, a truly new constellation?  I feel that if my father were to experience the world from this next ladder of perspective in evolving and he go beyond the joyful frontier achievements of his day he would agree so see the world more like I do, maybe not be as effective in his work asking too much of the why and less of the how.  So too my children will come to have a better and more balanced view of me despite my not being there for part of their development because of the state of the state ultimately as well a few deceptive and nasty individuals, if there is time and this generation not left sleeping to the fact or necessity so envisioned by the herd and overseers that they can know what freedoms each and all of them have lost.

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