Is globalization the same as the ideal of human unity?

Re: The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard Debashish Tue 28 Jul 2009 07:22 AM PDT

The individual within the capitalistic state has more choice but the choices and even the access to choices are determined by mechanisms at the service of the engines of capital accumulation. In the socialist states, the state becomes the producer of surplus and the accumulator of capital and the individual is inducted into the assembly lines of mediocirty and a state-determined common life. Both these are also driven by the necessity to sell their surplus and they can only do this by the mass production of desire and coercive mechanisms of consumption. This system has now turned into a world-machine in which all populations are inducted. The have-nots of the underdeveloped world (the African of your example) are impoverished because they are the sites of material and human resource exploitation, but they are no less part of the global system, not merely in terms of objective realties but also subject formation. Individuals and states are determined through the internalized conscience and desire to become global players.

At an earlier phase of the Modern, this is how the village became impoverished by the creation of desire in the city life - the glitter of the modern lifestyle. Today these networks are hardly even questionable. The only challenges are coming from irrational "singularities" which have themselves become global in their definition, scope and their vital tie-ins to the global underworld.

Why do you think the teaching of Sri Aurobindo has been around for so long but hardly gets into the hands of any college graduate or professor? It doesn't suit the forces of desire circulation. This is why it is such a wonder that a work such as Peter's biography could slip through the cracks and enter the mainstream academic circuits of circulation. And immediately a new irrational singularity develops to prevent it from circulating!

Re: The Violence of the Global and the aims of Integral Yoga Debashish Tue 28 Jul 2009 06:05 PM PDT More pertinently though, the people who take this stand are usually the ones who believe that globalization is the same as the ideal of human unity...

Globalization kneads world humanity into a semblance of unity - but this is the unity of determined proceses, of lowest common conditioning. It claims absolute adherence from each individual in the name of liberty, and sticks the pretense of a name tag and a smiley on each shirt front while injecting with the lethal drug of comfortable anonymity. When such persons then stumble across the writings of Sri Aurobindo, they take themselves to be the paragons of integral yoga, happily riding the inevitable boat of human unity towards the supramental. Or else, they run with sticks and stones after anyone who lifts the finger of critique, displaying the fragmented irrationality which underlies the rhetoric of the global, where Sri Aurobindo is just another appropriation of brutal messianic cults. DB Science, Culture and Integral Yoga