A complete cognitive reversal: I used to spend time thinking back to how awesome I was. How lucky the seemingly random sequence of events and dialectic changes (world and self) worked itself out. I relished the experience of now - plotting and daydreaming schemes to take over the world. The past was a spring board to an ever expanding network of possibilities.
Now I use my analytic to break down all the ways I fucked up. Savoring the different feelings of shame, embarrassment, and regret of past decisions that shape the way I'm situated in the world now. The present is bleak - for the future is now shaped by the past (or more specifically, the possible future is now denied or rationalized away when aspirations attempt to take form).
How much of our values, thinking and understanding is merely situated within our individual context? Yet how far we go to justify its shape - and impose its reality on others.
(Funny enough, it can also all change with a single touch.)
So it's (almost) understandable that in a time of revolutionary communication technology - Senator Bayh decides to resign because, well - politicians don't talk with each other anymore.
I may be presumptuous in my own thinking. I can't define my identity or values, but I've settled on the label of third culture kid (i.e. doesn't know where the hell he or she is from).
But it seems clear to me that politicians are too mind-fucked in their own reality to understand the world. In the US healthcare debate:
Liberals think money comes out thin air - to create a bill that essentially subsidizes private insurers. Where the savings in healthcare costs will eventually be more than, um, the subsidy that pays for the costs. (The numbers are predicated on presumed increased economic growth rates). I don't think lowered healthcare costs paid through increased tax results in increased overall productivity.
Conservatives took Econ 101 and stopped thinking - to propose a single price system, reward cost cutters, and competitive exchanges, as the 'market' solution. Okay geniuses - the 'market' is your solution to a system where healthcare providers have no incentive to lower the cost of treatment and insurers have no incentive to pay for it. Let's just reframe every complex social issue into a simplified economic framework (and public/private ideology) - that'll solve the problem.
Anyway enough about healthcare (I'm no expert, I don't even have insurance).
And really, what do I know?
I'm too mind-fucked myself to even consider a possible future.
