A Green State of Mind

A process toward democracy is also a process toward sustainability, and the two approaches support each other through an emphasis on immanent structures.

Democracy and sustainability have been two important elements within various leftist movements for at least the past twenty years. They have been addressed separately involving very vital issues of the environment and empowerment of the people, but there is also a deep connection between the two that may not be obvious at first. Some have argued that true sustainability is possible only through a unilateral top-down type of public management, but the goals that can be achieved through sustainability are most compatible with a democratic society. It is important to describe the characteristics of democracy and sustainability in order to see how they can converge and complement each other in such a way as to realize justice and the survival of ecosystems in tandem.

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The ideal of the free market obscures the reality of an economic system that perpetuates a strict division between worker and owner that also perpetuates systemic inequality.

The nature of capitalism may have the appearance of an economic system used to express the freedom of the individual, but it is also a system that strives to reproduce itself across space and time. Capitalism has a general characteristic and a particular characteristic. In general, the freedom of choice that might be perceived is in fact a local pocket of no restriction that is always embedded in a global restructuring of an ideology that presents capitalism as the only choice. On the other hand, capitalism in particular is an immanent structure created by humans like any economic system that eventually becomes a transcendent structure. It moves from being a specific tool to a universal law. When capitalism becomes this universal law, there is an inverting of the relationship between the social and the economic. The economic is expanded from its original use as a subset of a society to a containment of all social relationships. Capitalism therefore establishes a procedure of social control in the economic sphere as it grows and becomes a transcendent system.

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The Bill Of Rights, especially the first amendment, requires interpretation and analysis not in order to create new legal meaning but to discover the original meaning of the text in synchronization with a changing world.

It can be argued that the first amendment of the Bill Of Rights is the most important amendment. Certainly, it is one of the most argued over in all periods of American history. This continuing debate itself is a sign of good health in a democracy. In putting into practice the right to free speech, right to assemble peacefully, freedom from and for religion, and to petition the government one finds that courts have tried to look into original intent. This means finding the mentality of the founders, which requires inspection of the actual wording of the amendment. As text, it is a trace that presents the absence of speech first and foremost. This absence points to the use of text to convey meaning beyond long distances and spans of time. But the text, as being the final word of authority, is actually a continual recitation of a limited meaning since there can not be elaboration from the isolated inscribed words. More can not be said by looking at the finite words as they are detached from the original utterance.

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