Robert Vouter's List: The System

• • Brilliant
• he tempering of vision by structural limitations.
• The narrative of elections is thus an elaborate ideological shadow play; it allows us to float the fictions of political agency, accountability, and choice. On the cusp of realizing that, what does a man of conscience think about? That’s the real issue, the same issue—as I suggested in the essay—runs through Plato’s Republic.

  • No matter what he does it will have no effect since he doesn't run the game
• The ideological narrative likes to focus on personal qualities as though they make all the difference in political outcomes. But they rarely have much of an effect. They’re more about presenting the public face of the political business. In
• Plato sets the agenda early on the question of what happens to people of reflective cast when they try to enter politics. His personal experiences with the Thirty Tyrants of Athens had made him cynical about this, but he was still fetched by the idea that there might be a ‘right answer’ when it comes to ordering human affairs
• The history of civilization could be written as a long series of failed attempts to articulate, and implement, that right answer.
• good-as-it-gets winner
• What a strange and wonderful gift it is. But also, what a terrible and inescapable burden.

6 more annotations...

• It's not enough, not even close. We cannot confine our political activity to choosing what products to buy and expect to make the kinds of major social transformations that we need to make. To confine our political action to choices made in the marketplace is to deny our agency as fully rounded human beings.

   

  We hear of actions that might work if everyone did them, but there are so many of those and they never go far enough. "If everyone" would stop buying plastic. "If everyone" would stop driving cars. "If everyone" would refuse to work. It just isn't going to happen.