back in los angeles.
john drove me back from LAX last night and we talked about the static nature of the language structure, so forgive any awkwardness of phrasing to follow. it is
unintentional, but definitely a product of some kind of paranoia.

i'd like my post to self-inspect the way yours did; it helped with the heftiness.
My curiosity about the human ability to explore one's own motives has always been hampered by an uncertainty of whether or not I really want to discover my own motives, and more importantly, whether motives at their origin have any discoverable quality (within human capacity to discover. It has always seemed equally likely to me that rather than "discover" our true desires, passionate search is likely to redefine or change our desires. On the other hand, I am intensely, one might say unhealthily, prone to question my experiences themselves.
I think that first part, my own uncertainty about motives, is, at a much more complete level, the same sensation that pierces the common attitude of non-questioning.
"Who cares why this roller coaster is fun? Or where this themepark came from, or why they built it?" and here is the loop-back effect: "because I am here and I want to ride it! it is fun!" The assumption is that the current experience is worth more than the danger and effort required to ask if there might be something "bad" driving it or something "better" beyond it. In short, the assumption is that there is little chance the worth of investigating beats acceptance of experiential truth.
The elasticity of this assumption is a large determiner in my current struggles to think about intellectuals versus non-intellectuals. Growing up with an intensely intellectual blue-collar-worker mother, I disdain almost all simplistic class divisions, but that does not mean I can conscionably think there is no gradient of tendency towards thought (read: question) between different portions of the population.
I re-read your big post a couple times because it was so full of thoughts I struggle with and new ones i was fascinated by. Probably the main two sections that needed to be reread were your thoughts about logic and nihilism in people's Concepton of All This, and the short discussion of your complaints with Gramsci's division. I definitely agreed with your frustrations as they were posed in the blog, but i don't think I read Gramsci the way you did. I'll be back after work. word.

They've got no fear of the underdog. That's why they will not survive.

Gramsci really annoyed me with his division of society into intellectuals and non-intellectuals (and then especially with his empty gesture of saying that we are all intellectuals). He is saying that the non-intellectuals should get to determine society's conceptualization of the world while the intellectuals are only fit to serve as scribes. But intellectuals are people too. True they should not dictate, but they should also not be excluded. Even though this annoyed me, it was fruitful because it made me evaluate why I am so passionate about education. I am starting to think that my passion for education is merely my intellectual manifestation of my broader human desire to connect to people. I like that knowledge connects me to history and people all across the world who have read the same articles and had the same thoughts. I love TV and music and friends just as much as education when I think about it because those things connect me to people (whether physically or mentally). Education may not be THE answer I thought it was, and now I think a feeling of belonging and connectedness (in whatever form it takes) is THE answer to what people want. And what is more important than THE answer (because I think there might be a lot of THE answers) is how I got to it. I had to think like a person (with feelings) rather than an intellectual (with logic). So intellectuals don't have to be relegated to the dustbin. But they just have to trust themselves as feeling people and believe that that side of themselves is fully justified.

Next, I wonder what Gramsci means by “conception of the world.” What do you think are some different ways people can conceptualize the world????? (Looking for a real answer here) I tried to think about it and came up with the idea that one’s conception of the world is a combination of logic and a chosen degree of nihilism (by which I mean the decision to intellectually disregard what one knows through physical experience to be very important). The degree chosen varies from person to person. For example, zero degrees of nihilism says that if I am stronger than X, I can kill X and have his stuff. One degree of nihilism says I have more money than X, so I can buy his stuff from him. Two degrees of nihilism says I am smarter than X, so I can control X and get him to give me his stuff. Three degrees of nihilism says I am kinder than X, so let him keep his stuff. Four degrees says X and I are one, so what is X’s is mine. All stages use logic, and vary only in how much of reality they chose to ignore. So saying that the new conceptualization of the world should come from the “real” people is giving them too much credit. It is not like they are enlightened in their “realness.” It’s just that they are the majority, so they should dictate what level of nihilism we function on. The truth is that a society can be formed on any one of those levels and has been formed on most of them. We are in the intellectual phase, and so the intellectuals are seen as the elite dictating the conceptualization. Instead, they just have the right skill at the right time (while the great marathon runners and power-lifters are empires too late for their skill to wield political power). My guess is that the next trend will be toward kindness, and the educational system will then be geared toward honing that skill. I would have no power in that kind of a system. I value knowledge at the expense of everything else, but I do recognize that a system based on kindness would be better than one based on intellect (just as money is better than violence and intellect is better than money).

I just read a book called Paradigm Found by Anne Firth Murray the Global Fund for Women lady. Of all her messages the one that I liked the most was the idea of structuring your efforts to mirror the change you want to see. For instance, if a non-profit is promoting democracy, liberalism and free speech, then it makes no sense to structure that non-profit as a strict hierarchy in which half of the employees have no say in the day to day running of the company. This is an obvious example, but if you are serious about this idea of structuring your operations consistently with your principles you eventually have to rethink a lot of stuff. For instance, say you are fund raising and a corporation offers you a ton of money, but under the condition that the money goes to a certain cause, and your organization supports ideas similar to that cause, but not quite. Do you accept the money and slightly alter your mission in order to do immediate good, or do you turn down the money and stick to your stated mission? I think you stick to your mission. Anne said you stick to your mission because of your principles. I think you stick to your mission just to make life a bit more manageable. Tie your hands one day (the day you state your principles) in order to save time every other day deciding between what amount to equally good and noble choices in the grand scheme of things.

Shoot, I can't put up a direct link yet.
but if you access JSTOR through cornell's library portal, there is an article called "Gramsci and Democracy" that really felt like it was written along the vein we were talking the other night.
Typing "Gramsci and Democracy" into the Search window suffices to access it once you are there.
I don't know about the other two articles yet, and I have to go be a waitress now.
soon.

Hey Suzy. I set it up. Am I a freakin genius or what? I figured out the name of the proof I was interested in. It's called the principle of anti-realism. And it claims that if a truth exists, then the truth is knowable. Well, that's pretty neato in and of itself, but then this guy named Fitch beefed it up even more. He created a proof that claimed that if something is knowable, then it is known. So that would imply (together with the anti-realism principle) that if a truth exists, it is known. But a lot of people don't approve of his proof. Unfortunately all of this proofing is done in a language that I don't understand. Its called modal logic, and as far as I can tell, it is definitely not constrained by the type of logic we normally think of. For example, in the logic I am used to, if you start out with an assumption and proceed by logic to arrive at a contradiction, then that proves the assumption false. But some modal logicians think that a contradiction isn't that powerful...that it can't prove something false. It seems like they like to leave the door open to the possibility that logic is wrong. I'm going to go read about it, see if we can't prove god exists after all. I mean if Fitch is right, then the existence of something proves that it is known. In that case either we know everything (in which case we are god), or there is a thing or things that together know everything (in which case the collection is god). At least as far as I am concerned. But that is certainly due to my bias toward knowledge. I am just assuming that an all knowing being is all powerful. But that is obviously not a guarantee. Anyway, exciting stuff.