Dichotomy

It's one of the strange things about the cultural baggage - or heritage - that the West has inherited, that we perceive the world as a duality. This is attributed to Rene Descartes, but of course he was only giving voice to an existing perception.
In philosophical terms, the most famous of the dichotomies is the mind/body split. I forget which of the old Greek dudes - Euclides perhaps? - who pondered on what actually occurs between the thought of moving your arm and the arm actually moving. The existentialists followed this up - Camus and Sartres both wondered about the gap.
But to me, the biggest dichotomy these days is the gap between perception and action. And it's not merely a philosophical fancy - it's actually crucial to the survival of the species!
Take it on a global level. We know our actions have fucked our climate. We know we are using finite resources with increasing speed. We know our lifestyle is not sustainable.
Yet our actions continue unrestrained.
We even talk about the world we shall leave to the next generations, as though they will do anything other than curse our name for the blinding mess we leave them.
On a personal level, this is perhaps easier to identify and understand. So I retain all the old anarchist understanding of the world - I'm still for a violent overthrow of the ruling class, and all the shit that that entails. But the reality in its day-to-day form is that I'm not even working class any more! Even by the standards of the West, I'm earning a decent wage as wage slaves go. By the standards of the rest of the world, I'm very rich. My children will be raised as middle class, even in this country which is one of the richest in the world.
And anybody who tells you that that doesn't matter are themselves middle class. Because if you think it doesn't matter, you're ignoring that you're one of the privileged few to have the means to access this webpage. And I can imagine myself in a few years' time explaining to my daughters all the deprivations that I've spared them by providing them with a fat income.
And this is the dichotomy at the heart of the crisis in our so-called civilisation. In order to live reasonably, certainly in a comparative and competitive society, you have to have certain abilities. Those abilities are not related to the intrinsic value of what you can do, but to the value they are assigned in this particular society. So being able to make a great and comfortable and beautiful chair, for example, is considered of minor value when compared to the ability to interpret bond movements and quarterly statements.
Yet most of us know which we consider to have the highest intrinsic value.
So I'm in the lucky position that I'm able to do some stuff. Most of my adult life I've been either broke, whacked out, or working in labouring jobs - on building sites, docks and the like. Because I was only looking after myself, so I didn't want to get in the rat-trap of work.
But now I provide for 3 other people too, and those people can't be in a dodgy old squat, but need a decent place to live, with certainty that their electricity bill is going to be paid, and that the kids can relate to their peers as equals.
And I am in the system. Bought and paid for it appears.
Still, I'm doing my best to make sure that I'm the one selling the illusion, and not that I've bought into the illusion. There is - at least - a plan. To get out of here, to make our lives different and elsewhere.
And of course that is the key to the dichotomy. Now, much of my effort, that isn't given over to working for the multinational devil, is dedicated to trying to get the best possible life for my wife and kids. And it's well thought out enough that I'm even trying to minimise the impact of climate change on my family, to offer us the best possible future, to maximise our survial chances. Pure evolution in action, in other words.
But that's evolution at a very base level. If there's one thing we should have learned by now, it's that as a species, we're strongest when we work together. Until we really learn that, and stop splitting up the world into 'us' and 'them', into black and white, into haves and have-nots, into - ridiculously - 1st worlds and 3rd worlds, until we stop doing that, then there is no future beyond survival at its very basest level.
So, just a simple thought. The people who are worst equipped to survive in a world that gets down to the most elemental survival, are precisely the people who are profiting most from the current situation. Because when money doesn't matter any more...




btw - picture comes from here in case you like it....