I ran at the 2007 federal election as an independent as was quite proud.

Why not because i only got about 2500 votes but i was there to give a voice to my electorate, something that doesnt get done.

All we get is the party line as these idiots in government are nothing but sheep as they do as they are told.

Do it for the party or get out.

So when this next election comes round i will be there again, as i believe put your money where your mouth is.

This in itself is something all those in the parties do not believe as it is our money they use to get there for their retirement package.

This is the problem now nobody in government has the balls to do the right thing and really fight for the people in their electorate.

A sombre tune it is, perhaps, but as I think I said, the problem isn't 'out there' so much as 'in here'. Confucius remarked that 'what the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small mans seeks is in others.' No superior man can improve the conduct of the small men, or wish them away, so the 'out there' problem will never go away. It's an illusion; like democracy, communism, capitalism - anything that is unauthentic and runs on hypocrisy.

Since so few can accept that sombre view of our mess, they're obliged to solve the unsolvable much as Plato said our situation is hopeless but we have no choice but to act as though it were not (ie, pretend). His world was collapsing around his ears as ours is, and for very similar reasons. He was and we are living through what Robert Nisbet ('Twilight of Authority'-1981) described as one of the rare major collapses of authority. Another occurred to put paid to the medieval period when God was dismissed after fifteen overs.

Ours is a double wammy: (i) we haven't developed the skills (the love) needed to maintain our psychic integrity, and (ii) our physical life support system has suffered the same contempt and neglect. Apart from a few of the unwashed paying their taxes under duress, most things done nowadays are crimes committed against our collective selves, both psychic and physical. Capitalism is the organising 'philosophy' of that movement. We've become in great part desensitized to the signs of self-destruction, and, on a mere hunch something is wrong, seek solutions in our theory books on what one political party or another might do to save our bacon.

All bacon ends up in the pot one way or the other. We dismissed Marx, and the great irony of our collapse is that he foresaw it, and offered some friendly good advice.

I take the point about the Quaker ritual, Ex (if I may call you that). I referred to the traditional one that has been so eroded of late to mean little or nothing anymore. Again, it's the principles I see in such things, not the neglected and dilapidated reality of it in the hands of what amount to careless drunks.

In truth, we don't know how to get serious about reality. It involves discovering that it's a mirage that fades when you approach it. That's the shame as I see it (that we don't get exposure to such ideas). We've legislated in our hearts and minds not to engage in such womanish crap. Not when there's a buck out there to be got and a few derros to be rolled to get at it.

I don't think any of this is sombre. We have made these conditions in exactly the same way we make fridges and motor cars - by imagining them into being. What we don't yet understand is the collective nature of that imagining and that it lies behind the Genesis fable, as a clue.

Max Planck twigged to it as early as 1900. The quantum physicists backed him up. But with all the crackers going off during the twentieth century, none of us got to hear what it all meant for our tenure on this planet or our 'existence' in the cosmos. I think I may have strayed off topic here, but no matter which topic one picks now, it's either real or imaginary by the measure of these quantum discoveries.

Politics (and hence parties and all the -isms) without the self-realised person capable of love is doomed to a lot of gabbing and no real progress toward a solution. To me, the solution is for us all to realise there isn't a problem. There's nothing to be so afraid of that we need to kill each other off, using 'democracy' or any other fraudulent '-cy or -ism we clutch at like a Bible.

Sock Ratteezz,
I can't speak for anyone else, but for myself the problem is the context within which I would speak. Who speaks? Confucius wasn't familiar, I don't think, with Lacan's revision of Freud. In a poststructural age there is no self, let alone a "superior man". The self is a narcissus, domesticated by our symbolic order and taunted by the "real" that's lost forever. The popular notion of individualism is beneath contempt, yet cherished by the ignorant masses. The foundations upon which we propound our childish belief systems and intellectual hubris are thin air. The political context, against which we describe our arabesque reliefs, is nothing but an abstraction, an economic operating system we're in awe of that, apparently, can't be circumvented.
Now I'm interested in this notion of "love", "agape" I presume you mean, which also has no provenance in a non or politically anti-foundational age--just more evidence of human arrogance. And all this philosophical emasculation is the product of French Theorists--I haven't even mentioned Derrida and Foucault--who I like to liken to "crock" (how apt) and their "lost patrol".
We need a solution to the impasse, but you seem to suggest this is to be found in some retrieval of lost values?
It's refreshing to come across some unabashed conviction, I must say, but can it stand up to scrutiny?

Mitch,

Can it stand up to scrutiny indeed? In whose eyes would this scrutinising be conducted? It has to be the self for there is nothing else. The mob is an illusion amongst others we take seriously as entitities. And if it gets down to that, is it the false or the real self we're dealing with? There is no meaning to life other than what we can personally bring to it. Politics (and hence political parties, political discourse etc) are just bleatings of the lesser or false self - as you suggested, perhaps the narcissistic manifestation.

This is not sombreness but light in darkness. Senator Mason inducted me into the Democrats with a trick question to see which self of mine he was dealing with. Other parties just want your unquestioning loyalty and commitment to do their dirty work. Don Chipp chucked success in politics for principle. He alone in the Libs could see through the illusion. Nobody in Labor has got that sophisticated yet. Consider this: no politician finishes his career a success. Name one whose achievements didn't turn to sand. I've asked myself why that is so. Each of us has to wrestle with that particular gorilla in establishing what one does to give the cosmos its meaning.

Love is a mysterious thing; more mysterious than death. Agape probably comes closest of all the inadequate human attempts to define it. When Robert Louis Stevenson said that we're not here to succeed (but rather to fail, and in good spirits), he meant we're here to learn to love. Political agitation of any sort is groping in another direction. Compare Gandhi's politics to say Mussolini's.

Parties are at the latter end, which is why the Dems were so special, not as the party of the fairies at the bottom of the garden but the party that loved (before it was hijacked by air-headed women, and I exclude Janine Haines from that group). It served all, not just one or another axe-grinder's blinkered view. Fear is the villain.

By scrutiny, Sock Ratteezz, I mean can this agape be validated, or must it be taken on faith of some kind? Do you evoke a love that can mysteriously bind humanity together? Or a love that can be nurtured and cultivated in an individual self(not to say "soul")--a suitable vessel? Is this love, whether universal benign force or innate potential (peculiar to savants--Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi? Or a clerisy?), more than a human conceit--however wholesome its manifestation? Can it prevail, in other words, in the context of the benighted self it occupies--in company with the negative human drives with which it is forced to consort? Can it perhaps overcome them? Can this loving self see beyond its immurement in sensory reality, that is can it compose itself other than via our symbolic order--with all its chimeras and twisted logic? How can it be anything but of this world?
Indeed, we've not yet interrogated this "real" self. Is there a self that's somehow self-created--beginning as a blank slate, drawing all its experience from the world, yet somehow ending up aloof or independent? Moreover, all that sensory input is mediated by language. Language cannot describe the world, it merely rationalises it. There's (perhaps) no direct experience of the world, "language goes all the way down" according to Rorty". The sense we make of experience is pre-given. The sense of self is nurtured in us from birth so that we seldom question it. But what is it, is it anything if it isn't something pre-existing--a soul?
All of this is what I mean by "can it stand up to scrutiny?"
I don't say here what my own views are on the matter.
The integrity of a politics or ethics is of course similarly problematic.
'Tis a puzzlement!-)