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Rights and Responsibilities: Addressing Love and Violence in a Post-Capitalist World

Love is always wise: So I heard a voice, perhaps it was a bird, telling me. At first, this is offensively incorrect. It means rejecting all means of self-protection, all methods of self-preservation. This is not the world we live in. We live in a fraught world of assorted love where real psychological, financial, emotional, and life-threatening hard won minor entries into worn journals seek solace in lost and broken stories told by broken older people, more experienced people. In fact, it is the responsibility of those of us who have learned from experience to teach the younger generation the realities of the illusions of love.

But upon further reflection, yes, indeed, to live as a saint, a holy and right way – as though there is an after-presence that we should all be striving to locate ourselves in a correct and upright position, then yes, we should always choose love. But truly, who can do that? These seems like one of those occasions when we can say no person can really live in such a way, at least not all the time, and certainly not always selflessly. That is, without self-interest getting intermingled in the manner of such an approach to life.

Perhaps it is possible. What a beautiful end to one’s life to have lived that way. This being true whether there is an afterlife awaiting with rewards of esteem and euphoria or not. Or not. That is a lot to think about. We are indeed to live as though there is no reward for what we do. To do the right thing, on an elevated level, each to their own capacity, each to their own responsibility, each to their own majestic presence in this life, small or low, overwhelming or hidden; that is love.

Improved, excellent education and magnified cultural sensitivity are not enough to end violence. A start in the right direction, a necessary beginning, but there is something more ontological that must be collectively restored to our inner-selves that is not too dependent on a matter as intangible as grace in order to master what a society, what a peoplehood can become post-violence. I do fear the most difficult pattern to subsume would be an era in which we slowly come to reject violence. That is not the era we live in today. Many conceive of selective persons for whom this is a reality, but, no, we are not even at the beginning of that stage. It is not that I say there is violence therefore no one rejects violence. I am not so stonehearted.

However, violence is so intertwined into every aspect of cultural affairs, within and without social orders as dynamic as those across the Earth, that to say there is any real status given to non-violence would be a disservice to the very idea of anti-violence not to mention the goal of a post-violence society. It is also not that we are to be reborn as one, but that our shapes and stations across this axis or that must be neurologically infused with the core elements in interdependent freedoms. No, we are so sadly removed from such a state that it has been difficult to continue this project and still claim that it is non-fiction, that it could possibly offer hope of a new tomorrow. But it is just that which must come. A new tomorrow is necessary for growth and what is more, for stability. Without stability the astronomical potentiality of the different surfaces of how to address justice just may leave us behind, far from the very lived justice we seek to find. Having said that, the topic and substance of addressing justice must come first and be an early presence in our talks, or educational institutions for all ages, and our refined ingenuity for caring.

We must still believe that we can care and that we are able to care for each other to such extremes that as a matter more than cultural mores or amended laws, but constraints within reality – that we can leave violence behind us and move on to other things. Such wonderful things. We are living now in an age that was the distant past for Vulcans of Star Trek. We are barbarians. We are illogical. We have no control over our emotions. It has been said that though there is one idea of democracy for one country, another country may establish democracy within unique and different distinctions, and this is true. So true is how we will differ from the early era stereotypes of Vulcans; as soulless automatons lacking passion and depth. Still, similarly, we must find our method of embracing Surak. For us Surak will not and should not be a single individual or idea that spreads and uproots the old dominion. Our problem of violence is multilayered and we should have a multilayered response.

Our approach to resolving conflict is still an early study. Non-violence and conflict resolution are still nascent as a widespread concept, at least as we know them today. They are one layer. Racial justice is another layer. Poverty is another layer. Interpersonal turmoil is another and trauma yet still another. They are all violence.

To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, violence in society exist to protect the law. The law exists to protect those in power. It falls within any society’s rights and responsibilities to protect themselves from a government of institutionalized violence. A change in power structures is not as far-fetched as many would have us to believe, limited by their own imaginations, and distilled by the indoctrination of capitalist credo that government exists to protect the people. It has not. Within my initial direction of the idea of rights and responsibilities, I think, goes one step further. I do not believe most societies would fall in plunder and anarchy if given the chance to rule themselves, to have rights themselves, because inside most individuals there lies a different credo, one of assumed rights and responsibilities towards oneself.

As so many self-help specialists have helped a generation to see, when we take care of ourselves, we are in a much better position to take care of others. We all do better when we all do better, as so many have said. Without currency, for example, people would not stop working, but they would work in a field more aligned with their sense of self – self-realization brings wisdom, wisdom brings charismatic openness to lift those around us. As stated in the science fiction series, The Orville, after matter synthesis when money became obsolete, people didn’t lose that drive to become something great, it just took on another form. The Orville gives us “reputation” as one replacement for money as people still want to be the “best at what they do.” While I agree with this as a mainstream sentiment, I think it is just that, a sentiment.

Perhaps without currency – within the inner stemming eclipse of rights and responsibilities – we would simply learn to take care of one another. I put forward to you, that if we each, all of us, had everything we needed or wanted provided for us, would not the majority of those in most societies want to give back for that which they receive. This is where social services come into play. Everything from healthcare to recreation, all according to an even balance. Yes, there is a Marxist element here: each according to their own ability. Is that so bad? This balance would be so much easier to manage as society would have already found a balance in providing for those without asking for anything in return for providing to everyone else.

They would give in return for what they had received. Call it pride, as I know some of you will, or self-dignity, it is our internal sense of rights and responsibilities that will drive us to create a productive society that does not leave anyone behind – I do not mean that as a helpless, exploitative political motto. It would be real. It would be true.

I have said for some time now that social progress begins with education. Perhaps it begins with other externally acting reforms that persuade an atmosphere and environment that allow unaltered education to exist. From there education can continue to sustain such a society for generations. Perhaps these externally acting reforms will come from the political arena, or, perhaps, from an ontological-spiritual dominating tradition of what Emmanuel Levinas wrote about becoming the other. He meant this in the sternest, realized sense, that before we can become, we must become the other.

To return to Benjamin, what we can take from the notion that violence exists to protect the law is that violence in society is a choice. Not altogether a choice made willingly by us as individuals, but certainly one we collude in with our engrained capitalists dream-like denial of our own mortality, as Ernest Becker put it, in our pursuit for wealth and prosperity. What Becker shows us is, again, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Think back on what was previously stated that in with worldbuilding of The Orville, reputation replaces currency. This is opposite of the critique of humanity that Becker illustrated in his writings. Striving for, taking pride in, targeting ambition for productive means, aiming for something higher, these can all be positive attributes if given a more humanistic aligned environment in which the groundwork has been settled on the soil of rights and responsibilities. 

We do not give up our innate nature. We do not give up on curiosity, our wonder, or need to explore ourselves is paramount to what we know of life and living and being social creatures. The tenet of the reality of our own esteemed rights and responsibilities takes us to a place where we can see that we can be held to account for the condition of the world and our place in it. We are all graduates of our own experiences. With that in mind, keep alive the notion that we can be trusted to live out or days seeking a more fulfilling role for ourselves than the current options made available to us by the capitalist state-structured ethos of bootstrap technologies, of corporate office parties and wage labor.

See: Towards Post-Violence Societies: An Outline of Interdisciplinary Violence Studies and Violence Research