TOGETHER
Channel: D. GRDN
Date: 2012-04-18

- A contribution to the first Annual Sociology Meeting at Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg by Carmen, Jurre and Dustin

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This is not about Big Politics and how to heal the World, this is about you and me, about us.

The capitalist dream is upside down, because instead of paying off for all, we all have to pay. Not only those who dig, assemble, provide, produce, but also those who pay, pay.
-- with alienation, boredom, toxication, and ultimately with the devaluation of life itself.

Where there were exclamation marks, we now see question marks!
By having been given the chance to disagree, we have come to appreciate and celebrate critique as a source for healing, finding, for rediscovering ourselves and the places we inhabit.

These things, could seem like abstract, metaphysical concepts, but in fact they immediately relate to us, our personal lives, experiences and troubles -- a sociology as psychology.

Issues and paradoxes don't cease to exist through the act of deconstructing, but new options and spaces for negotiating them became visible. (how and more over why is our behavior conditioned? why do we perform? who or what do we blame? how do we divide the world into good and bad? who is responsible?)

In a rationalized world, emotions have revealed themselves as sources for authenticity and guidance, appreciating them when they unveil themselves. Revalidating things, that have been disqualified as insufficient, weak, female or primitive.

We see power and possibilities in vulnerability, because it entails and directly leads to reflection and cooperation. It is not to overcome individuality, but to complement it by collectivity.

Real strength and stability, result from balance. Vulnerability, not as insufficiency, but as a different word for modesty. We see modesty as the basic condition for respect, reciprocity and ultimately, for celebrating differences. In an age of insufficiency and isolation, there can be no learning without modesty.

Fear results from singularity. Confidence from understanding fear,.. together.

In other words, what we have learned is not how to read and write, calculate, operate and function. But to collectively achieve something, we could have not achieved by ourselves. 

We have learned to value and appreciate the group. Without regarding ourselves to be insufficient, we acknowledge our own partiality and conditioning,.. our differences.

We see the group as a principal necessity... for review, healing and growing.

A network and a group are not the same. A network is meant to connect, over distances. A Group involves proximity and accessibility. 

As a group we create, share and reinforce our own space. Our intention is to continue being a group. Togetherness as an end, and as a means.

This is why we are sharing this with you, even though we might not know you.
Not because of self-centered motives, like to seem superior, but to simply share what we've collectively come to discover, hold on to and cherish. Something we believe has the potential to become meaningful,... for many.

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And then the sun becomes our clock
and the shared consciousness our home

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Society in all its nihilism of emptiness
Destroys and denies all that is meaningful except for the banal
In doing so it creates its own fatalism of progress
A false supremacy of capitalism
The empty truths of science
The marketization of life and relations
The cheapness of sexuality
We have witnessed that this cycle can be broken through
Collective questioning
Collective criticizing and
Collective dreaming

(Jurre Zwart, 2012)