Everything could be different (i.e.: better)

Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.
Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

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Once agan (+2022.11.06), yet again, I learn something my childrearenders ignoranced me of which was just about everything (except, of course, they would have liked, some of their benighted prejudices.

"Until [the mid-eighteenth century] few had dissented from Montesquieu's assertion that the democratic and republican institutions of antiquity were unsuited to large realms... [S]since a democratic government supposes a concert of wills and since a concert of wills supposes men assembled in a rather restricted space, only small republics are feasible....

"After the mid-century, however, the argument was made, most notably by the framers of he American Constitution, that the principle of representation made it possible for republics to grow bigger....

"Representation... was almost impossible to put into practice before the invention of printing, which so much faclitates communication between the constituents and the representative, and renders it so easy for the former to control, and for the latter to account for his conduct; and above all, which averts those sudden storms, so often excited by the force of an impassioned and popular eloquence." ("Divine art, Infernal machine, Eliabeth Eisenstein, p. 131)

For me, this was an eye-opener, and a lot of stuff to unpack here. The divine art, of course, is here presupposed: the printing press enabled those of us whom Fortuna pushed out of birth canals not members of any of the estates of the realm, to become educated and to think of ourselves as "ends in ourselves" not just walk-ons for a Brueghel painting (the higher a person's standard of living, the less enthusiastic they likely will be to want to die for their country because the more reason they will have to live for themselves....). So far, so good.

But now the infernal machine part: the insignificancization of the thus educated individuated person. 154,000,000 citizens voted in the 2019 U.S. Presidential election. There are 192,000 pixels in the above picture of the Founding Fathers (irrespective of how much extramrital sex each one of them had). My vote mattered only a little more than 1/1000th of a single pixel in that picture; I'm just a Where's Waldo?

How would I (or you, my reader, if you, like me, are a "nobody"...) fit into that concert of wills writing the American Constitution? (Click the picture to find out; Clue: It has high animal protein content.)

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The "Atlantic Revolutionaries" – my suspicion is that at bottom they were just a cabal of selfish troublemakers spinning high-sounding PR like the Zelensky tv production crew in Ukraine in 2022 – should have been forced to fight without their weapon new weapons of mass constuction hence destruction: representationism. Either (1) large scale tyranny or (2) small population polity, not: (3) obfuscated large scale tyranny by a small polity of representatives: "communication between the constituents and the representative... renders it so easy for the former to control, and for the latter to account for his conduct" (supra). No thanks: I am a person, not a represented.

So what would things be like today had the hotheads been deprived of their superweapon? I don't think we know. Just like: What would the South have been like without African slaves? People make do with the conditions in which they find themseles and generally some make out. So I have confidence that life would have gone on the the hotheads as well as for the would-be plantation owners. Things would have to be different, and they could hardly have been worse – ever increasing inconsequentializing of individuated persons – than in today's massocratic representativocracy, where I, at least, and you too, my reader?, am / are indifferently replaceable: just a "Where's Waldo?" (right).

All men are created equal? Let's imagine that in that picture of The Founding Fathers above, a homeless bum had somehow managed to wnder into the room, perhaps because they had inadvertantly forgot to lock the door, or maybe because riffraff knew they were not supposed to go in there.

The bum comes up and picks up their breautiful new document in his grubby mitts and starts wlowly reading it – he is literate but not so quick with words as his betters. The bum is entirely polite and respectful of everyone and everything, jus dressed in tattered clothes messed up due to sleeping in the street. What do the gentlemen do? Do they say: "All man are created equal! Welcome, our peer fellow citizen!"? My guess is that they somehow or other get somebody to remove him from their "concert of wills" (supra). "Hey, Tom!" "Yes, Ben?" "You seen Charlie [Carrol of Carrolton, the richest man in the colonies] today?" "No, have you?" The bum: "Gentlemen, now that I have taken off my disguise, what were we saying about all men being created equal?"

How like the 2022 Zelensky mess in Ukraine was the 1776 American Revolution?

How like the 2022 Zelensky mess in Ukraine was the 1776 American Revolution? Of course the American government and its official child indoctrination institutions ("schools") do not provide me with anything but self-serving propaganda about either one, because the truth at best cannot be entirely favorable to them; there are two sides to every story except if you can keep people in ignorance the other side. The British in 1776 and the Russians in 2022 are bad; "We" are good. End of discussion.

So from the propaganda: There were a significant nuber of persons in the colonies who were pro-British. They were dealt with harshly as traitors by the secessionists. Like the pro-Russian saboteurs and spies Mr. Zelensky sees everywhere in his government who need to be dealt with harshly. But in both cases, If everybody loved the good people there would be no bad guys to ferret out, would there?

In both cases the good guys complain about oppression, from King George, or Dr. Putin. And from their self-serving perspective, surely both stand to gain by throwing off the oppresor. If you are a big western corporation, you will probably do better in the EU (European Union) than in CSTO (the Russian Collective Security Treaty Organization). Odds are that Biden capitalists is less regulated and more richly capitalized in Biden capitalism than Putin capitalism, because they are Biden cronies.

But as a poor scholar, would I really benefit from getting getting killed, or, worse, badly wounded, as a conscript at Bunker Hill in order for wealthy merchants to avoid paying taxes to the Crown? Mr. Zelensky's powsy wowsies make out from the current war's massive American military welfare Mr .Biden gives them.

Give me liberty or give me death? What good would my death do me, as opposed to for people like Mr. Benjamin Franklin who served the revolution by having sex with aristicratic French ladies to seduce their country's help against the British. All they told me about Mr. Franklin in school is that he flew a kite in a storm and published an almanac, so what? They did not enlighten me that he advised a young man to have sex with older women becaue they can't get pregnant and all women look the same in the dark.

Verily: Dulce et decorum est pro patria copulare. Sign me up for that, not Archie Bunker Hill!

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Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.
^[1]Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.^[1]

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The evil of "Celebrity"  The evil of "True grit"  The evil of "Roots" —————  Thank Robbie for APtS!