Washington DC Abstractions Isolated From Reality - Misplaced Concreteness
If you think values are ideals, then you make harmonization impossible because your values are right and theirs are wrong and there is no room for harmonization. Ideals are abstractions. Abstractions do not hold the entire reality in which they are thought to function. Thus they cannot be achieved, and even if they could be, given the dynamics of life, there is no absolute right and wrong set of ideals that apply to everyone all the time.
I've been looking for some way to address this craziness in Washington,DC.
This mornings' Op Ed NY Times peice by Paul Krugman said it all. "If he's (Obama) for it, I'm agin it." But it doesn't get to what can be done. If holding to one's ideals, that is abstractions about reality, would allow them to come into being, we'd all be rich and happpy. So why doesn't that work? Because ideals work as part of a whole reality but in isolation they make impossible situations like we're seeing...people acting in the context of their reality, each one trying to find what works for that reality as they see it or feel it. And that is a huge set of variables in each human being. But when we come down to life - the processes that push us along to new possibilities, it requires something beyond rules, or ideals. It doesn't work by a set of rules someone made up arbitrarily as a disjunct truth from all experience.
Our unconscious and inner relations of relations (value dynamics) have to function by laws of coherence. When the moment arises that people see the foolishness of their position and they will, how they resolve it will be by a masterful act to call out the higher values of what works for the greater good of ALL people. Be ready President Obama - helping those to save "face" may be the greatest good you can perform as they try to find a resolve to their closely held ideals that only serve some "misplaced concreteness" or abraction that has nothing to do with reality on any level but self interest of a very small few.