A Constitutionalist says:
"'The masses, and lately even a few upper-levels, turn via mysticism and marijuana toward a more tolerable pseudo-existence. I prefer to inhabit the objective universe.'" (p. 19)
He uses loaded language:
"mysticism" can mean "mystification" or meditation directed toward understanding of inner psychological processes, not toward "pseudo-existence";
society is not objective but inter-subjective.
We are society. Thus, it is what we have made it and are making it. Very different cultures have existed and can exist. To take a snapshot of existing society and to say, "This is the objectively existing society that we must inhabit," is nonsensical. Society is continually changing because of different understandings of what it should be like. Each of us has to make value judgments and choices which might be to accept the way things are or might not.
Of course I might be prejudging what the Constitutionalist would say if I were to engage him in conversation. In fact, I must be because the Constitutionalists come into conflict with the Guardians.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I think you were missing something. Commissioner Svoboda pretty plainly "loaded" the curricula of the schools he forced Constitutionalists to send their children to include "mystification" masquerading as mysticism precisely to help GOAD the Constitutionalists. To make them more alienated from Earth and the Federation, more willing to leave.
But I do think Svoboda pere merely took advantage of a wider phenomenon within the civilization of his time, a turning inward, a turning away from an unpleasant and frustrating objective reality. Hence marijuana and pseudo-mysticism.
Sean
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