Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 03:38:54 +0200 (MET DST)
From: p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl (PETIOT_Pierre)
Subject: My own private freedom  


Hi all,

The fact that I use Frank's post as a thread for expressing "my own private 
freedom" is a pure statistical accident.

>Without individuals their can be no society, 

Without society no one has even seen ANY (human) individuals.
(It is so easy to forget about mother, father, the baker, the doctor and 
even the people in charge with the technical aspects of your funerals... You 
just need money and all these low level concrete details vanish)

>but by entering in a society (if it isn't an authoritarian, competitive one), 
>the individuals become more than they were on their own. 

THERE IS NOT SUCH A THING AS AN ISOLATED INDIVIDUAL ON THIS EARTH.

The number of certified reports mentionning isolated individuals on Earth 
can be counted on my fingers and toes.
And THAT is not a FICTION.

In other terms individuals DO NOT enter society. 
And hence they have no chance to become "more" because of that. 
They simply do not exist out of a society.

That does not change a feather to the spontaneity Barrett was speaking of 
and to the fact that humanity never had ANY other resource than it. 
The only correction required is to drop the FICTION that this spontaneity is 
rooted in the individual.

The point of view above is the point of view of J.J. Rousseau (or possibly 
some of his English equivalents)

This point of view is a FICTION which might be possibly interesting from a 
layer's point of view.
But it has no experimental meaning. 
Observation clearly shows that human being do not exist as individuals in 
Nature.

I would like to remind people that this specific FICTION has been created by 
the Bourgeoisie, for the Bourgeoisie, and provides the functional 
pre-requisite for any commercial activities. 

In other terms, the individual as addressed above states the existence of a 
"free" customer, and nothing else. 
Without a "free customer" no sane shop keeping is possible.

This has several time been illustrated by the best authors (Marx namely, and 
if you do not like Marx, go to Max Weber for a change and from there, think 
a bit on the left)

I do not understand what we can do  for  the liberation of the mind and 
hence against capitalism 
and as long as we are still working on basis of concepts
which constitute the very foundation of the world we pretend to fight. 




Pierre PETIOT
See also...
http://www.euronet.nl/users/p_petiot/poiein/poiein.html
http://www.euronet.nl/users/p_petiot/index.html