personalism

Personalism

For a good start on an education on the history and personalities of personalism see the Wikipedia article on "Personalism" and the Roots of the Catholic Worker Movement page. The Why personalism? page of the journal Personalism gives a sort of introduction.

Introduction

Philosophical "personalism" is a multifarious thing and has been the basis of a wide variety of political positions. But for what I'm doing with it it is boils down to saying that any individual human is worth more than any number of ideals, ideologies, institutions, nations, corporations, or what-have-you.
Peter Maurin, Katherine Temple, Jacques Ellul.

Positive I

God is personal and a personalist. Love is foundational to ontology/metaphysics.
Not anti-moral, at least not for me. But (the meaning of "Christian ethics") the will of God / salvation / sanctification / discipleship defines this "morality." (Does it overrule it? No, because the "rules" are part of an attempt to express what God's will is. God's will is not individualizing in the sense of anti-moral.)

Negative I

critique/neutralization/demotion of ideologies/institutions/governments (iig)
    bigger than just a sum of humans (= demonic?)
Babel = exaltation of iig
    We are so deep into Babel that we can't even imagine what "human" means apart from iig.
    the optimism of liberalism
Organizing is what we do to each other out of fear. The attempt to organize along polarities. Once I am pigeon-holed, most of my "views" can be known. But people are a lot more interesting and complicated than that, than our attempts to assign them to categories.

Positive II

what is it important to do for humans?
the love command

Negative II

So am I a libertarian? No:

sin; the optimism of liberalism
"It shall not be so among you."

But if were I to succumb to the temptation (sort of like O. J. saying "I didn't do it, but if I had, I'd do it like this"), it would be some kind of anarcho-syndicalism, which sounds like a good way to organize people. It would work beautifully, if people would just behave. Anti-utopianism. Ideals become iigs.

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