Convention

Each day there are more people on this Earth.

Carbon dioxide levels continue to rise to what climatologists estimate may be the highest in millions of years. 

At the same time, there are some that insist vehemently that our way of doing things is perfectly fine and just, the globe is in fact cooling.  In spite of research that states we are responsible for almost 130 times the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as natural causes, or record temperatures worldwide.

Economists do the same for capitalism, glossing over poverty and hunger as an intractable and inescapable social woe. 

The status-quo has always been an easy nostrum, seized upon by many charlatans over thousands of years who understand neither fate nor possibility, but know how to manipulate our vulnerable psyche. 

War is the answer, work is the solution, a good citizen is its own best medication – compare this to doublethink.  War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.  Party slogans are policed by the media – the real arm of the establishment.  Censorship is not needed or desirable. 

How do we reach down to the roots, as suggested by Wittgenstein?

“Getting hold of difficulty deep down is what is hard.

Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was.  It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way.  The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking.  The new way of thinking is what makes it so hard to establish.”

The first step in a new way of thinking seems naturally to oppose the old:

“Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture.  For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the garment.

Can make forge new attitudes?  In a world in which perspective and choice seems normalized through sterile media, are we ready to question those things fundamentally accepted as true for justice and freedom?  Can we shift our practices and prejudices?

Or will we remained scarred and chained to orthodoxy.  Will the foundation of words resist, explode and envelope us in their destructive blast, or will they yield?

All of our work assumes that the flight of our actions will guide them to rest in a distant but grateful valley.

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