Politics is a card game in a room in a building in a city in a country on a planet in a galaxy

[wcepler]

Politics is a card game in a room in a building in a city in a country on a planet in a galaxy.

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Politics, like a card game, can absorb our attention away from big picture dynamics relative to which the card game (or politics) is a simplistic and stuporous sideshow.

But how do you talk to people who are so "lost" in the card game they think the card game is reality itself?

If when sitting in a theater you get so "carried away" with the movie that you don't smell the smoke from a fire in the basement, your insensitivity to the larger reality will lead to your death.

Well, we've got so many fires in our basement; it's hard to know where to begin.

So politics, schmolitics. Let's talk about the causal matrix of this social sitcom of effects.

Mostly this means NOT putting our non political intelligence on hold while playing the hands dealt to us by Greek God like elites.

The most important thing to see about "politics" is that it truly is a "game" invented by the planet's astronomically rich 1% (or less) to distract and delude all the rest of us into thinking we have some (any!) input into the national and international policies of our respective nations.

In short, so long as we're playing political cards, we won't notice that America is a textbook Dictatorship of the Rich, which has absolutely controlled most of what has happened to our life and is still controlling most of what is happening to our life and which will CONTINUE to control most of will happen in our lives in the future (and the lives of your children).

And there are numerous things to be seen about the psychological context of the current Bush/Republican horror show. To site just one example, it's clear that we are mostly dealing with the neurotic acting out of sexually repressed men. You know, the congressmen who are always pawing the aides and who pop up in sexual scandal after scandal. NOT to factor this sexual variable into here and now Washington dynamics is criminally naive. You have to know the face of your enemy, and you'll never see it on a deck of cards.

How about the context of science? It's certainly there, since people who have a C- understanding of basic algebra (much less measure theoretic probability, quantum mechanics, paleontology, and organic chemistry, etc. etc.) are going to be too duh-brained to connect with on any significant intellectual level.

This isn't to say all of us should have Ph D's in theoretical physics, but it IS saying that when an administration which is so retarded it’s trying to regress science back into the Dark Ages, this should be a heads up that factors are at work here which have nothing to do with a traditional political card game. This, to put it into a word, is the stupidity context of Bush/Republican policies and it should warn us that it would be wise to treat these people as virtually a different species, e.g., Homo duhians.

The philosophical (for the lack of a better word) context is rather harder to talk about, since such intuitions can be very hard to communicate. But at least we can say they are independent (fortunately!) of religion and have to do with transcending the simplistic conditionings of our species. Unexamined time and space beliefs can be transcended by theoretical physics and/or philosophy and can lead to a release from emboxing foolishness. The separate self identity is can be seen as delusional, since a given life functions very well, thank you very much, without having to be tethered to this pseudo identity. Denial of death also comes to mind (everyone's going to die but me!), but this collective foolishness can be "seen thorough" (a root meaning of intelligence) with courageous realism and leads to existential transformations.

Clearly, these are limited and arbitrary examples (and yes, debatable) but the core intuition of this paper is that politics is a meaningless and self destructive game when separated from the psychological/philosophical/scientific context of everything – politics included.

It's easier, of course, to just play the game, but only this context-perspective ON the game can lead to a sane and functioning human civilization. Surely the both/and of political pragmatics (basically beginning where you are) and game-transcending intelligence is the door to social health.
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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

more from Bill at: <http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. Bungling Neonates.