RE: Exploring the boundaries and ethical obligations of protesting within a democratic society.

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Exploring the boundaries and ethical obligations of protesting within a democratic society.

in blurt •  last year 

Hello to you,

I welcome that you bring up the topic and I partly can understand your concerns. But for the sake of dialogue and disagreement let me throw in some thoughts.

The problems began with sedentarisation, i.e. land occupation and the resulting ownership. Those who are sedentary are dependent on agriculture - and thus the weather - and the difficulty of distributing crop yields fairly and centrally to people who do not move but stay in one place, through elected representatives of the people, will never be solved because it is an insoluble problem.

One may see the simple fact that distribution can never be equitable and always some get more, others less. Since no distribution can ever be just, because perceptions of justice vary, it is not. Those who distribute are also not responsible for crop failures, nowadays the gross national product, because no one can in truth be responsible for something like crop failures or mismanagement.

The impossibility of taking responsibility for so many people is a fallacy in itself. To claim this nevertheless and to proclaim this task as a duty or as a task to be mastered creates dissatisfaction for this reason.

The great fallacy, then, is to think that the people's representatives could do such a thing. They cannot.

Many people realise this and say that one should therefore be lenient towards politicians, since they can only fail in the face of this insoluble complex task. This is true, but those who believe that they can accomplish this task also believe in the feasibility of distribution and justice.

The whole thing is therefore a game. Since no one can openly admit that politics cannot be just and good to everyone, they pretend that they can. If one were to tell the truth, such as "we don't know exactly what we are doing here and what the effects of our decisions are", because this would make one's own raison d'être superfluous, everyone pretends to know how problems of human coexistence can be solved. But nobody knows. But since we all intuitively know that nobody knows, we do more of the same, quasi-permanently paradoxical actions that eventually lead themselves into absurdity.

C. G. Chesterton already grasped this quite well about a hundred years ago and I interpret from him that politics "would be anarchy" because people knew inwardly that they could not fulfil the mandates they had been given, but nevertheless kept up appearances outwardly, often without knowing it themselves.
Self-deception is therefore always state of the art.

Public protests can be seen as a vehicle and outlet for people's need to get together and optionally experience anger and joy, that is, the manifested physical experience of walking, chanting, shouting, singing, screaming, exposing oneself to danger, and so on. The content is basically irrelevant. The main thing is that you can meet out there loud and unbridled.

Carnival used to stand for the "pagan" celebration of this once-a-year mass binge. To escape the toil of the daily always same work and to let out once so completely the sow.

In former times one was more tolerant of these events towards oneself, where else should the proletariat let off its excessive energies, if not with the many on the street? The drunkenness and also the surely taking place brawls as well as bloody noses, drunks and other "varieties" have the higher placed or intellectuals quite understood. But today, when nobody is willing to understand any misery or misbehavior as a human need to break out and everybody thinks that their political slogans are the reason for the gatherings, it has become different.

In a democracy, trying to take over public space or forcefully bother others is not okay.

It's nevertheless done and practiced. It is supposed to be not okay. If protesting and the accompanying annoyances wouldn't take place it wouldn't be a protest. A protest is meant to irritte, to attract attention, to disturb traffic and aggravate the non participating public, otherwise the public does not see or care. If protests were smooth and soft and without any violence taking place how then would you call it?

It would be much more creepy to imagine that no peoples walk the streets any longer and even though I don't believe myself in the effectiveness on politics I believe in the experience of gathering (even though it is not my cup of tea and I stay away mostly from crowds).
Man is, after all, also animal. We tend to forget this.

Greetings to you.

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