Power over life!

What we can start getting glimpses of (for all this that I am working on are just glimpses of the problem but it is very good to start getting a more rounded picture after talking about it for the past three years), is that what power has power over is the things that give us life, that keep us healthy, that allow our self to flourish. Speech is one of these things. Speech and freedom of Speech and this is why the internet is such a precious invention: because we can speak to each other. Whether and when we reach each other is yet to be seen but the medium already offers us a possibility that we didn’t have before and it is still a terribly poor tool for what is needed. Hopefully it will bring us to dialogue in our actual lives, real dialogues and not mediated by computers. Our lives are changing so rapidly because we can communicate. I speak of speech as an objective reality, “giver of life” and when I say “Life” I mean a particular invisible substance (is this the “substance” you were talking about Spinoza?) an invisible substance that fills our lives with vivifying energy that I am calling the logos as in: The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos), ] and further identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos, which is similar in the stoics: The Stoic philosophers identified the term with the divine animating principle pervading the Universe. We experience this vivifying energy in emotions such as gratitude, grace, joy, trust, awe, love, sympathy, empathy, enthusiasm, curiosity, pride, dignity. For people who have difficulty with Christian language, the stoic definition is more suitable.

In every period of our lives, the possibility of experiencing these emotions is determined by our position in a particular institution: family, school, university, industry, corporation, cult, church, government, nation… and in every one of these institutions our freedoms to think, speak and act are limited and conditioned by the status quo of the institution. We are starving each other of life and life giving activities. We are starving our children and our old people who can no longer talk although they are the one’s who know best and suffer most with what is going on. We are starving them of LIFE. We are starving each other in jobs aimed at the production of money and not culture even if in art we continue to exploit the old formula of the hero or, more realistically, declare the death of the hero in such vivid characters as the chief woman in prime suspect who, besides being a superb human in resolving the crimes is an alcoholic without hope or life of her own. Yes, she is the hero of our times: a superb human without a human life, talking of which, I should give my self some dinner!