The Mouth of the River
"You cannot go down to the same river once."
- Terrence McKenna.
The danger of abstractions are immanent whenever 'a philosophy' ties itself to 'a future'.
There are social and political regulations that should come from common agreed upon laws. It's more than arguable that modern representative democracies are the best approximation to large scale egalitarian political formations history has ever seen.
Modern intellectuals who deny this by obsessing over material disadvantage and 'x class struggle' are fundamentally blind to the very temporal conditions of intellectual liberty that have allowed them come to these liberal conclusions.
Of course, there's always room for improvement. The fact that liberal economies have been over-leveraged by mega-capitalists (not capitalism per se) is something that can be dealt with without wholesale revolution.
It's also more than arguable that liberal economics and mega-capitalism are not synonyms.
Economy is not primarily about money, it is fundamentally about the equitable exchange of social produce of every type, and autonomy and self-determination in making those exchanges through free relationships with others. Importantly, our speech - languages, dialects, reckonings and accountings, calls and responses - are at once a product and the vehicle of all social relations and exchanges. Liberal economics has at it's essence this doctrine of self-determination and personal empowerment. We should be wary of ideas that intentionally conflate liberal economy with capitalistic greed and a 'need' to overhaul or replace our democratic political formations.
...Because then there are regulations that should only ever be derived from a voluntary change or awakening within the hearts of people and communities in their collective paths of self determination.
This is not a path *to* self-determination either. That would imply some abstract 'future' that is disconnected from and dis-contiguous with both the past and the present, to which we must aspire, and if need, to mold the present to conform with this imagined destination. This is what Led Zeppelin warned against in their epic, the age old siren song.
"Ists" and "isms" for all their professed good intention invariably start out with a structure, a system, or pre-imagined 'future' with a set of limits and rules which, fully formed, are hoisted over and onto the present. Whatever sits outside the structure is deliberately sliced off, and whatever falls within is conformed and confined to the set containment.
But this approach to social and political formation invariably cuts through to the individual heart, and divides the spirit. The cookie cutter is inevitably pushed down through resistant hearts and minds.
This approach is fundamentally abstracted from reality, and what is cut and sliced leaves a trail of blood, trauma and discontent for generations, despite the convivial philosophy preached at its inauguration.
The question should not be what a proposed future is. Centuries of bloody revolution brought us to the temperate temporal planes we now inhabit - we don't need to try to reinvent the proverbial. Instead we should remain vigilantly mindful and wary to avoid yet again giving our world over to intellectuals as an abstract plaything that can be shaped and molded from the study desk. Because the future is made right here in how you shape the now with your words and acts, how you name and delegate, authorise and assign, call and respond to every moment you live in and person you interact with.
The front of reality that we call the present is unavoidably and necessarily a granular iterative process of social relation mediated through the grammars and languages we deploy and exchange.
Of course going to Mars is stupid, not because it's a waste of money per se. It is stupid because it is a theft of the resources of the present for an abstract and imagined future that is not relevant to the living here and now and immediately before us tomorrow - we who bear the front of reality in our daily moments, actualising the future in every action we take and every word we speak.
But wherever "ists" and "isms" are deployed there is the division of privilege in an equally abstracted imagined future. "environmentalist, feminist, indigenist" - some are in, and some left out.
Our discourse should be more intelligent and sensitive than this, not in the definitions of philosophers and "ologists", but in the actualising power they have in laying down fertile times and places to exchange our social goods in the freedom of prosperous community.
Credits to Wayne Cristaudo and Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, among others.