[PEN-L:9440] RE: My Ideologies

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brad De Long [mailto:delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 1999 12:09 PM
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [PEN-L:9438] My Ideologies


>
>
>Brad, for us ignorati could you briefly explain what belief in the
>"autonomous subject" entails and why you think it is false?
>
>
>Bill

That I have a very hard time believing that my deep opinions, my
views, my tastes and preferences are in any sense "mine", or
constitutive of "me" in a strong sense that implies that other people
ought to pay attention to them.

Instead, they are the result of a whole bunch of forces--society,
nature, chance--that have molded who I think I am.

Thus when I make choices, who is really doing the choosing? Some
combination of society, nature, and chance. Not an autonomous agent,
but instead simply the locus of the effects of a structure of
structures...

Even worse are those times when I get in the car in the evening to go
to the grocery store, start thinking about something, and the next
thing *I* know I'm pulling into the Upper Haste Parking Garage.
Exactly who has been driving the car?...


Brad DeLong

Very Good. Excellent. That is exactly the rationale that Eichmann used at
trial. It wasn't really me and my own will, I am a product of a Zeitgeist, a
product of an Order and myriad forces that shaped my temperment, identity,
"choices"--not really free choices--ideology and even self-deluded notions
of a "free self." While I was in Palestine learning some Hebrew so that I
could me a more effective agent in "solving" the Jewish and "Untermenschen"
problem, I actually met some Jews I personally liked; but alas I was a mere
product of a whole era and system--a shaped entity programmed to do what was
ordered and deemed imperative for the "survival" of that Order that shaped
the "self" in me.

Just like the Summers Memo, underneath it all is the calculus and syntax of
apologia for a bloody system and its bloody notions of "rationality",
"efficiency" and "freedom", but also the apologia of opportunism, whoring
and pimping of imperial ideology and criminality and escape from personal
responsibility.

Damn, where are the Libertarians when we need their notions of "personal
responsibility"?

Jim Craven