a little cowboy in all of us: an idea you read about here first!

Do not forget this moment.  ¶  You are, for the first time ever, reading about the inherent importance of the cowboy in all of us – trailblazing.  ¶  Show me someone who prefers being second-to-all, and I’ll show you the anti-christ. The fact is, no one likes to be one step behind – so much so, that the way in which we phrase being as such, implies that we aren’t normally; we say we’ve “fallen behind” – never that we’re “one step behind” – because “fallen” evokes the sense that it is merely accidental someone else is leading the way. It only makes sense, then, that those who are leading the way, refer to themselves as being a “step ahead of the rest.” “Jumping ahead” sounds random, per chance, even insecure.  ¶  Equally horrific, if not more-so, is the perception of unoriginality. What lengths we go to to assert our being on the “cutting-edge” in thought, word, and deed. One of Presidential-candidate Barack Obama’s stump-speech points and claims to fame, is that he originally opposed the Iraq war; Hillary Clinton, that her political experience is why she was the first First Lady ever elected to public office; and John McCain, that his POW experience and tenure of American service is just the trailblazing quality he posses that the other two candidates do not – and should, he makes clear, if they are to be worthy of the highest office in American government.  ¶  So why is trailblazing important to us all? Dear readers, we are all autonomous creatures. As children, we yearn and learn to act independently of parental governance and rules. As we grow older, we correctly posit that “being our own boss” will make us feel unique, special, and different – something worth having around, something not redundant, something original! And so, it seems, it is by our autonomy that we measure our self-worth; it is our autonomy that makes trailblazing important. We fear merely going the way of the buffalo, of going where wagons have already gone, and thus, as the emotionally and inspirationally rift call it, “getting into a rut.”  ¶  I’ve been familiarizing myself with the Greek-French philosopher, economist, and psychoanalyst, Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis sought to understand the relationship of the human individual to social life. (For while we are all autonomous creatures, we do have social and communal connections.) One of Castoriadis’s many important contributions to social theory was the idea that change in a society involves radical disruptions of the society that cannot be understood in terms of any definite causes or shown as any specific sequence of events. Put another way, in order to be socially recognized, change must be instituted as revolution. Any knowledge of society and social change, he says, “can exist only by referring to…singular entities” …to the trailblazers of society! Just google “Think Different.” The resultant video sums this idea up, and ends with the line, “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” And maybe that’s the secret :p.  ¶  So why am I trailblazingly writing about trailblazing?  That’s either a rhetorical question, or a reference to the point of my last entry…maybe a little of both.  Castoriadis addresses the latter:  ¶  Autonomous individuals – the essence of an autonomous society – must continuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflection. He writes:

…psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy. For, each person’s self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannot have an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would not interrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes] tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn’t exist outside the individuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society depends essentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society.