Unlocking The Authority From Within: Open_Notes 6

government is *NOT* a necessary evil - "citizen politician" does not mean a substitutional representative with term limits; each citizen a politician with a life term (stability; institutional memory) - "a people whose sole "political" function is to vote for delegates is no people at all; it is a "mass", an agglomeration of monads; politics, as distinguished from the social and statist, involves the re-embodiment of masses into richly articulated assemblies, the formation of a body politic in an arena of discourse, shared rationality, free expression, and radically democratic modes of decision-making; this process is interactive and self-formative" (-Murray Bookchin).

personal and group identity - manufacturers inventing personas (name brands, labels); choosing of pre-manufactured identities -- low-brow, middle-brow, high-brow, non-distinct no-brow (socially constructed boxes; confined within bounds; trying to "fit in") - cultural marketing; the language of clothes; categories *imposed* on us - taste as a marker of class; taste and choice levels; ladder between strata does not exist anymore - so far down on the bottom-level I can't afford myself vs. negating the ideal; high-society slumming it - the "clique" a social class all its own - social implications; awareness beyond oneself lacking -- the avant-garde [the leaders in new or unconventional movements, esp., in the arts; vanguard] absorbed into the mainstream; intellectual accessibility increasing -- new money trying to look like old money; nouveau-rich better than no-rich; visual tags replacing the auditory tags, the tone of richness; the class accents - the support of corporate slavers, oppression and misery around the world, indentured servitude; the fact of people of color especially, wearing these clothes, giving support to slavery, needs a rethink [ie. NIKE] !!

Unlocking The Authority From Within: Open_Notes 6