To have easy and freely chosen one-mindedness, it is best if the owner and the worker in a business are the same person. If I am the person who decides what movie to go to and you are the person who goes to the movie, that will seem ludicrous to us. In this example, we easily can see that to separate the choosing and the doing from one another in time and space (into different bodies) brings fear into the relationship. We will each fear that the other will not be sensitive enough to our needs and wants. The potential for conflict is great.
If I am the chooser and the doer, however, I have no fear at all. I know I will be sensitive to my needs and wants so the relationship between the chooser and doer, being both in me, is peaceful. This inner peace is the result of my freedom; the capitalist in me is happy.
If you and I are going to a movie together and we both are the chooser and the doer, then our relationship can be timeless and spaceless. If we are lovers and you want to go to movie A and I want to go to movie B, we will talk about it. If you want to go to movie A more that I want to go to movie B, we will decide to go to movie A. We will both be happy — yet in the material world I did not get anything I initially wanted while you got everything you first wanted. We are happy because we freely acted as if we had one mind. The limitations of the material world are fully accepted; we could only go to one movie together. There is peace in the relationship. This peace is the result of solidarity; the democratic socialist in us is happy."
From Mondragon: The Loving Society That Is Our Inevitable Future thanks to Dave Pollard for the link.
5 comments:
I'm frankly a bit puzzled by this word mincing. In cognition, the notion of free will and choice has been invalidated, not that many of us don't continue to labor under the false impression that we're actively "creating our reality" or some similar New Age nonsense.
Even if we accept that we choose and do rather than submit to the myriad things that simply happen to us, everyday choices regarding clothing, menu items, movies to watch, etc. are utterly mundane. We might suffer buyer's remorse or believe the grass is greener somewhere else, but it's mostly inconsequential. True, small choices can develop into life-altering branches, but we rarely know that sort of thing in advance.
The mincing you see is probably due to my failure as a blogger: my mincing of topics.
This article is about a relationship-cooperative in Spain called Mondragon where their way of doing business involves the workers also being the owners. The choosing v. doing distinction points out the failure of most modern business ventures where the majority of what people do day-to-day are acts chosen by somebody else.
You'll notice I expanded the original quoted passage in my post, I hope that clarifies things.
Two Dave Pollard posts in as many days. I read his blog, but I don't link to it for reasons I'll leave unstated. I also scan or skip over the softer, pointless stuff he writes. I probably should have withheld my comment above.
Haha, fair. What other blogs do you read?
You know, the usual doomer stuff plus some others on media theory and, oddly enough, identity politics. Some are on my blogroll, but a few of my regular reads I omit, usually because they're a combination of poorly written or longwinded. Even smart people with good ideas tend to write poorly or mistake unnecessary length for quality.
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