Re: How may kids you want to have?
Never before in my life have I met anyone else who feels that a child is the responsibility of the community....if YOU have a child, then the child is YOUR responsibility. Of course a community is PART of the child's life but it is in no way responsible for the life of your child. Your views are just so off-balance here E and it aint gonna work in the world. Unless of course, your small community of "intellegentsia" would be willing to change diapers and do night feedings for your surrogate-borne offspring. Sorry, your back-patting about how much smarter you are than the rest of the planet doesnt cut it no matter how you slice it. These intelligentsia to me sound more like those who follow teachings of those like David Koresh - utterly and completely convinced that THEY are right - its the rest of the planet thats wrong. I wonder what it was that made you this way.
When we look back at history, we have a tendency to see it as uniform and linear. We don't realize that there is constant radical change. That, as Hegel said, there is a thesis, then an antithesis, then a synthesis. You are living in a synthesis. Because change occurs slowly, what is happening is that you are unable to delineate the thesis from the antithesis. Hegel said this would keep happening until a certain point. My views are working in the world actually; this is an antithesis. The point is not to make my views the thesis (to extend the Hegelian terminology and to bring in Marx, as a new - permanent - thesis is what he desired; I see communism as a new hegemony), nor to sustain this antithesis (as that would be to remain forever on the fringe and Sartre said that that would be the neutralization of it - he was speaking of the Jews though, I am just extending him), nor to establish a synthesis (as that implies a Rortian compromise that would not satisfy us). The point is to halt the perpetual motion, to break the order, and to have freedom through anarchy.