Is there no escape from -isms? When will we be free then?
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Is there really no escape? From -isms that is? They say all -isms have turned into wasms now, and we have finally made it into a period of intellectual freedom where you can work it out for yourselves. But - let's be brutally honest here, this is actually worth f**k-all! To try and characterise our age as postmodernism is a dead give-away in itself, isn't it - postmodernism IS, after all, as the loathed suffix states quite openly, another -ism. I won't go into the idea of postmodernism as such here, as this is another debate, I'm only concerned with -isms as a whole, but they definitely need to be discussed...
I mean, think of this - as soon as you deny one -ism or belief-system, you automatically create another. By denying religion (not organised religion or church, but only the basic idea of a super-cosmic creative power) you create atheism, by denying hierarchism you create anarchism, by denying individualism you create socialism and so on and so forth. And by denying all -isms once and for all? You create postmodernism (I'm using this as a convenience term, anyone with a better name for this age is invited to alert me to it)!
So, obviously, there is no escape, as there is no escape from leadership in any form anyway. Don't follow leaders, Bob Dylan sang in Subterranean Homesick Blues, and, of course, by trying to live accordingly, we are following a leader again, namely Dylan himself. When Johnny Rotten said don't dress like me and people indeed didn't, it actually made no difference from dressing like him, 'cause, again, they were following his leadership, this time defined by its self-created negative (a non-navigator, as Ken Kesey would put it, who was of course one of these leaders ex negativo himself with the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, being the leader of a group that perceived and defined itself as strictly non-hierarchic, and therefore should not have a leader, should it?!).
So, at the end of the day, it turns out, that we people always seem to need some kind of larger power above us for navigation purposes, and therefore cannot achieve absolute personal and intellectual freedom the way we are trying it right now (i.e. by creating one hyper -ism out of denying all the others). Still, personal liberation is the ultimate goal in life, isn't it?! So maybe we should just follow our natural instincts and at least accept this fact. It might be a way of bringing us closer to our goal, because accepting yourself the way you are is definitely a huge step into this direction... IMHO of course...
:-)
StipeyZ.Rickenbacker
I mean, think of this - as soon as you deny one -ism or belief-system, you automatically create another. By denying religion (not organised religion or church, but only the basic idea of a super-cosmic creative power) you create atheism, by denying hierarchism you create anarchism, by denying individualism you create socialism and so on and so forth. And by denying all -isms once and for all? You create postmodernism (I'm using this as a convenience term, anyone with a better name for this age is invited to alert me to it)!
So, obviously, there is no escape, as there is no escape from leadership in any form anyway. Don't follow leaders, Bob Dylan sang in Subterranean Homesick Blues, and, of course, by trying to live accordingly, we are following a leader again, namely Dylan himself. When Johnny Rotten said don't dress like me and people indeed didn't, it actually made no difference from dressing like him, 'cause, again, they were following his leadership, this time defined by its self-created negative (a non-navigator, as Ken Kesey would put it, who was of course one of these leaders ex negativo himself with the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, being the leader of a group that perceived and defined itself as strictly non-hierarchic, and therefore should not have a leader, should it?!).
So, at the end of the day, it turns out, that we people always seem to need some kind of larger power above us for navigation purposes, and therefore cannot achieve absolute personal and intellectual freedom the way we are trying it right now (i.e. by creating one hyper -ism out of denying all the others). Still, personal liberation is the ultimate goal in life, isn't it?! So maybe we should just follow our natural instincts and at least accept this fact. It might be a way of bringing us closer to our goal, because accepting yourself the way you are is definitely a huge step into this direction... IMHO of course...
:-)
StipeyZ.Rickenbacker
