Dear Gillian
I think with your extra height you might well ‘see over’ all this nonsense. Nothing religious as such, but plenty of self-absorbed hyper individuality wondering ‘why’ none of their efforts to ‘be together’ actually work! In defence of Versaille, when I was there, actual French people were few and far between.
The modern capitalist system consists of an empowered minority (the ‘bourgeoisue’) financially exploiting an oppressed majority (the ‘proletariat’). As the bourgeoisie controls the means of production, it controls the culture of society by deciding which laws to enact and follow – and which to suppress and ignore. This bourgeois system favours the isolated ‘individual’ over the empowered ‘collective’ and engineers the outer (material) aspect of this culture to produce an appropriate (inner) psychological environment which reinforces and supports this cut-off material reality. Whereas humanity as a species evolved through a historical and material collectivity – modern capitalism enforces an ‘hyper individuality’ where each person is artificially reduced to a competing and self-contained oasis of self-interest.
Everyone else manifests as an exterior agent of limited but highly condensed and focused hyper individuality. The onus is upon an exclusionary ‘competitiveness’ that interprets any form of ‘collectivity’ as being the ‘weakness’ that undermines the earning and purchasing power of the isolated ‘individual’. Families breakdown because the ‘collectivity’ they represent becomes economically unviable when the child reaches the age where they can be legally exploited (the so-called ‘coming of age’). Just as families must be destroyed from within, personal friendships must also be prevented from building into independent networks of support that reject capitalist hyper individuality. In this article, if the reader takes a step back from the feigned self-righteousness, the forces of dialectical separation (favoured by the capitalist system) can be clearly seen as functioning in exactly the same manner in each example.
The reason ‘why’ each individual thinks this is happening is actually ‘false consciousness’ at work and in most cases is indicative of extreme self-interest. There is a loss of ’emotional profit’ and so this ‘business’ (personal friendship) is closed down – citing difficulties in securing the necessary raw materials to produce the desired product – in this instance the myth of the ‘perfect’ personal relationship!
THE SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 