{"id":1128,"date":"2016-07-11T01:29:06","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T01:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2017-08-05T08:57:31","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T08:57:31","slug":"politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/?p=1128","title":{"rendered":"Politics&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Most of you who know me, (and especially if you follow me on twitter), you know that I&#8217;m acutely aware of politics. Politics is a challenging field, because of the obvious ego\/greed base of most of the players in that particular game. \u00a0And frankly, it&#8217;s exhausting to pay attention to it, much less be involved. \u00a0Yet, since that is the way we&#8217;ve organized our society right now, this game and its players impact us all &#8211; so we&#8217;d best pay attention.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I tend to agree with Plato about the quality of individuals who should be in positions of any kind of authority &#8212; although in a perhaps more updated form. Plato believed that the people should choose a Philosopher-King. In my imagining, we would more likely have Councils of philosophers, \u00a0so that power would not be centralized into one individual or group.<\/p>\n<p>Plato&#8217;s Philosopher-King possesses an open mind, intelligence, and a love of knowledge &#8211; combine with and a willingness to live a simple life.(The Republic, 5.473d) \u00a0Compare that with the ignorant, often religious, greedy billionaires we have in the US Congress right now: many who obstruct any movement towards helping the citizens of this country because of money they get from polluting or other negative corporate interests.<\/p>\n<p>I imagine us as a species, outgrowing our selfishness and moving into a place where our actions are taken only after considering whether this choice honors and protects our living planet and our fellow earthlings. I imagine us cooperating rather than competing. I imagine a world of art and music, with a beautiful chaos of new ideas and, of course, a giant dose of silliness and fun!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So it&#8217;s painful to pay attention to politics as it is right now. Yet, if we don&#8217;t&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. &#8211; Plato<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of you who know me, (and especially if you follow me on twitter), you know that I&#8217;m acutely aware of politics. Politics is a challenging field, because of the obvious ego\/greed base of most of the players in that particular game. \u00a0And frankly, it&#8217;s exhausting to pay attention to it, much less be involved. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[199,7,9,1],"tags":[35,243,244,242],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness-2","category-news","category-random","category-uncategorized","tag-consciousness","tag-intuition","tag-plato","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions\/1145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarletjinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}