Prometheus 6

I had something or other in mind to write today, then I read Black Power Now, Equal to Nothing, Tom Tancredo -- Killing the Congressional Black Caucus?, and (especially) You Have To Identify The Disease Before You Can Treat It, and they all kind of meshed. I'm going to try to respond to the resulting commingling of imperatives. For the record, writing that was part of the process of figuring out just what to write. I had five or six false starts, trying to have each word respond to each imperative individually.

I read this

The exhibit says that black power is the ability to make "self-assertion meaningful" and to allow black people "to define success in their own terms."

...and I groan inwardly.

On a purely historical basis, the Black Power and Civil Rights movements were collective in intent, execution and effect. You can't take those words and point them at activity that is personal in intent, execution and effect. I do not call your actions selfish, evil or bad in any way; I simply say they have nothing to do with the Black Power or Civil Rights movements.

That's hard to see unless you clearly understand when you're talking about things and when you're talking about words (it's the difference between talking about the guys on the team and talking about the team). We tend to abstract to the point of stupidity. We talk about the Yankees as if they were the same team that fielded Mickey Mantle.

Two, three times per week I read something, article, email, about "Black identity" or "blackness" (which term really gets my goat). I always try to figure out just what the particular person is looking for, because an identity is induced from evidence, not something that is calculated and executed. We talk about “self-definition,” and forgive me but my question is what do you DO with that definition? If you measure yourself against it, it's an aspiration not an identity. And the weirdest thing about this to me is, you can be damaged when others attack your self-definition without touching your self in any way.

That's hard to see, though, unless you clearly understand when you're talking about things and when you're talking about words.

You know why it's so hard to get the USofA to change? It's because most of us are struggling against something that exists only in our understanding of things. Most of us have this hallucination that the USofA is a nation of people. The United States of America began as a business venture and its fundamental nature has never changed. No, it's actually become purer as time passed. Now, every problem is examined in economic terms, every solution offered is a new profit opportunity, credit guarantee or tax adjustment offered as an incentive for some already wealthy private entity to take up the cudgel voluntarily.

This is what you're up against. A government designed to create profitable conditions for businesses. What do your calls for morality mean to such a construct?

That's hard to see, though, unless you clearly understand when you're talking about things and when you're talking about words.

And if I can do this with no transition at all, the search for identity seems to be a search for a way to look at things such that natural decisions tend to be correct. You want your way to be as stable as that of the mainstream, but the mainstream's stability comes at the cost of yours because you are one of the resources used to stabilize the mainstream.

That is the nature of your position in the USofA. Buffer. Capacitor. Shock absorber. Last hired, first fired in a system designed to optimize wealth creation conditions.

Look at everything written by every Black Conservative Pundit for the last 10-20 years.

And it's true whether you knew it or not, so there's no need to change your goals. You just need to plan your next action as though you're dealing with a system designed to optimize wealth creation conditions rather than a nation of people.