Our social world is constructed through symbolic interaction (unless it isn’t), and this process can build very effective constraints on our freedom of action. To use a popular metaphor, we find ourselves in a “box”. Many times in my life, I have found myself struggling to decide between A and B while forgetting about the existence of C through Z. Remembering C through Z is a step on the path to personal liberation, but it isn’t easy to do. It takes affirmative effort and practice to “get out of the box”.
Every assumption must be questioned. Conventional wisdom and common sense must be distrusted. The counterintuitive must be considered. The structures of power must be revealed for what they are, for some of them are efficacious only when they are obscure. You must become mad to begin to be truly sane.
In our own lives, something as seemingly simple as the roles we enact should be seen as entirely subject to negotiation rather than as a fixed ideal to which we are driven to conform. What does it mean for me to be a brother, a husband, a son, a neighbor? Each of these roles involves a set of claims on me, and each of them may be deployed by me in order to make claims on others. If I understand the power of the roles and the associated discourse that accompanies them, I can begin to be free to negotiate what they mean and to build brotherhood, son-hood, husband-hood, and neighborhood in a way that liberates and serves me rather than boxing me in.
I am called an American by virtue of my birth within some imaginary boundaries, and this is supposed to impose considerable claims on me. Moreover, I am supposed to embrace these claims with pride and happiness and gratitude for the claims I make in return on America. But it turns out that the claims on me are quite concrete (pay taxes, obey commands, genuflect before the symbols of state) while the claims I have are abstract (freedom from some vaguely specified danger or tyranny). In fact, America itself is an abstraction, a tool for other men to secure my acquiescence in their subjecting me to their extractions and edicts. Once I know this, I can never go back to seeing America as “real” or the term “American” as signifying legitimate duties beyond what I owe to any human being.
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"Many times in my life, I have found myself struggling to decide between A and B while forgetting about the existence of C through Z. Remembering C through Z is a step on the path to personal liberation, but it isn’t easy to do. It takes affirmative effort and practice to “get out of the box”."
Yes!! The excluded other is the secret of how we stay trapped.
The only way in fact that we're going to get out of our political enslavement is to get people to see at least C, if not D through Z.
i owe, i owe
it's off to work i go...
when we attempt to be what somebody else wishes us to be in the role they have defined for us, we tend to comfortable slip into that role for their benefit to keep up with the illusion. it is not difficult at all, because everybody can be comfortable within their own mirage.
but just try to not be the whiney child when dealing with your parent, no matter what your age, and your acceptance level from that parent goes down drastically. rejection on a personal level comes directly from stepping out of the annointed role. it makes us all actors, and bad actors at that. To redefine self helps the mental picture, but you really never can redefine self within your community because the people already know you and you have no say to redefine that role - other people will only see you on the basis they have only seen you on. it is one of the reasons why meeting a friend out of context, their name will sometimes slip past your recall.
i believe you are correct - that these boxes limit us severely. but they are so engrained that people now take academic courses only for credit and reject knowledge provided cheaply as cheap knowledge not worth having. little do they realize the discovery in life is free and only the amerikan attitude that we are not happy unless you are spending money (preferrably somebody else's) is a hopeless little box to attempt to crawl out of.
the cynic might say you can't, but ghandi proved to me that i can do anything if i don't listen to the nay-sayers and their artificial consequence. people tend to be resistent to have to's, but eventually every one of us realizes what we 'have to' do to get our world the way we wish it to be. relativity is a much greater concept than people imagine - but it is graspable because Einstein could resolve it into concrete terms. Perhaps we need to decide whether there is an amerikan dream - i think there is one for each amerikan, but we can only reach it if we allow ourselves to dream. The PTB, aware of this' keep our plates full with busywork.
i owe, i owe,
its off to work i go...
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