Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	November 21, 2007

The Politics of Monogamy One of the things that has surprised me most about my recent voyage into polyamorous love is the effect it has had on my appreciation of music and film. As most of you know, I'm a hopeless romantic, and music and films about discovered and celebrated and lost love transport me. But now I'm starting to look at these films, and listen to this music, with a completely different eye and ear. They are almost all about: Couples making monogamous love work against all odds Women rescued from loneliness or from loss of one monogamous love by a new, originally stupid and or selfish and or polyamorous love who eventually realizes that his purpose for living is to love only her Songs declaring someone to be their one true love Heartbreak over loss of one's one true love, and the misery and emptiness and/or anger it leaves behind The search for and discovery of one's one true love (after much foolish misadventure) So now I find myself hitting the fast forward to next song button on my mp3 player over and over to get past these really annoying songs about monogamous love being the one true way. What's that about? How come I never noticed before that these seemingly great songs and seemingly heartwarming movies are actually political propaganda? I don't by any means think this is deliberate. This is just one more example of the "only life we know" phenomenon, by which we extol the virtues of the only way we know to do things, through good and bad, and laugh about how crazy it all seems to be. It's the same reason that books about entrepreneurship reinforce the deadly and dangerous myths about the only way to make a living, and the same reason that our political and economic and educational debate is all centred around how to tweak the existing systems (to the left or right, usually) when any fool should be able to see that the existing systems are hopelessly broken and that tweaking them or depending on them is simply being co-opted by them, a distraction from the essential work of imagining and creating wholly new models that can be tried when the old ones collapse. We are, alas, our own propagandists, urging each other on to be 'everybody else' in an insignificantly and unhelpfully different way. When will we start listening to the artists and the dreamers? They have been telling us this all along. Why can't we, won't we, hear them? Category: Our Culture 4:25:56 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2007 Dave Pollard. Last update: 01/12/2007; 3:06:20 PM.