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Apr 16, 2022·edited Apr 16, 2022Liked by epimetheus

All political problems are caused by politicial solutions, I would say, and we (meaning everyone not a politician or an insider in the politics machine) must reconquer language in such a way as to achieve a civilisational and societal catharsis from this:

'The private is political'.

This statement, if allowed to be a true value, means evrything becomes political ans since nothing in the real world can ever match the abstract perfection of the ideal world, everything becomes a political problem for politics to fix.

And as all political solutions creates problems...

In reality, very few things are political.

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Ha, I recall that statement by Eric Sevareid (a quite well-known US tv person/newscaster in the 1970s): 'The chief source of problems is solutions.'

[If you care for a reference: Stan Cox, Losing our Cool: The Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), New York, N.Y., 2010, p. 150.]

I'm not sure I agree with the statement that 'very few things are political', for while it is true, I think, under our current socio-political system, IF civic (self-) responsibility for the body politic is taken seriously--as in pre-1800 'republicanism'--THEN virtually everything a sovereign individual does actually *is* political.

Of course, given the above, 'Covid-19' is a 'political' crisis, nothing else.

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Perhaps I should have phrased it "Very few things in themself as themself are political"?

"Das Ding an sich ist nicht einem politisches Ding", if I got that right.

Used to ask colleagues of my wife this, when she was still in the world of gender studies:

"Can you show me how to hammer a nail in, the feminist way?"

Since hammering a nail in can be done the right way, or any of the innumerable wrong ways, whether or not it is or even can be done a feminist way is completely immaterial, facetious and make-believe.

Wresting control of language away from those who politicise everything carries its own paradox of course, because what is that if not a political struggle?

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The problem is the solution, or so I'm told by the Permaculture Teacher. Hmmmm

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