A Green State of Mind

The 20th century saw the point where those in authority no longer appeared to be in a natural position of leadership, despite its vast accumulation of power, and the result was a more personal exercise of force.

The sovereign position of authority begins as an immanent reflection of the social, but will become transcendent as a way to organize and determine the social. In other words, this position is a creation of the social group that takes on the appearance of being the creator of the social group. Those in authority are at the core of a completion of power to such a degree as to be a comprehensive organization of not only the social but reality as well. The development and completion of power has occurred over many centuries, from a personal exercise of one individual having power over another to a system of power that regulates all of human life. The sovereign position of authority is embedded in this system of power and goes beyond any personal motivation or interest. It is a machine that operates independently of human action or need. However, when the overall system is disrupted and its contradictions are amplified, the personal beginning of power is revealed and a reactionary stance to deny this disruption is enacted.

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The importance of ethics can only be applied in the human arena, because ethics is directly linked to the structural mediation of reality.

The search for the good may appear to require an absolute standard that exists in reality, but the development of ethics always begins with the human condition. A sense of what is right and good can be very helpful to a political project, but there must be caution in order to avoid an ethical system transforming into a morality. While ethics is a practical and immanent exploration of the good, morality is a transcendent system that serves to classify aspects of reality as either good or evil. Morality demands obedience to these standards regardless of the findings of an ethical experience. In other words, ethics is intimately tied to how humans relate to the world and subsequently to each other. Humans engage in individual creation and collective use through culture that is a subset of the social. It is one of the primary ways that humans engage in relationships. Each individual human will have particular experiences of the general reality. From these snapshots of the objective world, general ideas are constructed from particular experience within the mind. These concepts are altered to a degree from the aggregate of particular experiences, and they are expressed as particular objects from the general idea. This occurs especially in the artistic endeavor, but is not limited to it.

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In order to understand fascism or its potential in a democracy, it is important to not only see the distinction between the authoritarian and the totalitarian but how democracy can at times be used to limit freedom.

The United States is now approaching the very final days of the Bush administration, a presidency that has been this generation’s example of a very massive grab for centralized power that seems to rebuke the democratic principles this country was supposed to be based upon. There has been much speculation as to what will happen in an Obama presidency, even to the extent as to wonder whether anything will really change. For it is vital to understand the structural nature of power and how it has manifested itself through a general government regardless of changes in particular leaders. And to refer to the Bush administration as fascist requires a very clear and concise definition of what that term means in order to fully describe the past eight years as a concentration of power worthy of a specific critique.

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