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Michael Harold writes:
"I went to this link:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/05/86787.html
and found a fairly interesting discussion of Chomsky's political leanings in the context of anarchism, libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism.
"I have to mull this over.
"This much I do think. The libertarianism of Lew Rockwell is not the libertarianism of Antiwar.com. No way. And the ideas of social democracy and libertarian socialism have a similar distance between them.
"Anarchy as an individual act means one thing. Anarchy as a form of social organization means something entirely different.
"And individualism as a synonym for libertarianism is much further away from libertarian socialism than libertarian socialism is from social democracy."
In the essay to which MH provides the link, the following (under)statement appears: "The truth is that there were – and there are today – many tendencies and different positions concerning organization, labor and rewards, methods and manners of actuation, that is, a wide range of issues."
Google "Individualism" and see what you'll find at Wikipedia. That will give you a very quick education in the mind-boggling variety of individualistic, anarchistic, or libertarian schools of thought.
It always threatens intellectual integrity to label, categorize, and/or generalize, but in the realm of political theory, it is virtually an act of mental suicide to do so.
To the extent that anyone is literal-minded, he/she thinks that political labels (abstract nouns) have essentially one and only one meaning each, and that he/she knows what those meanings are. This manifestation of literal-mindedness is by no means confined to the consciousness of religious fundamentalists. There are as many political fundamentalists as there are of the religious variety, if not more. Everyone who is literal-minded is a fundamentalist, because literal-mindedness is a *state of consciousness* that restricts the meaning of everything we think, feel, or do.
If we're to survive physically as a species, one of the most daunting tasks to be achieved is the liberation of our thinking from the consciousness-contracting structures and strictures of language, interpreted literally or univocally. It is the task of poetry, broadly and deeply understood as anti-hypnotic language, to wake us from our sleep of constricted, restricted meaning.
As that poetic giant, expander of consciousness, and prophet against political empire William Blake puts it:
"Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!
Strictly speaking and properly understood, all of our "political problems," are derivative from "quality of consciousness" problems.
Practical, pragmatic, action-oriented people do not want to admit that unthinking action is problematic, and of course that's why such people are causing the most problems in the world. For them, feeling and willing are far more important than thinking.
We can and should act politically, but if we are not to make matters worse, as the Nazis, Bolshevics, and Bushevics (to name only three movements) have done so spectacularly with their coercive institutions and *predilection for action at the expense of forethought*, we can and should look first, as Confucius and others have said, at the state of our own consciousness.
Ken Rogers
