There is no problem with compromise as long as it doesn't result in immoral actions being taken. Compromise can be highly creative and socially productive. Mr. Obama currently still wishes to be able to snatch foriegn people out of their communities and hold them in detention centers for indefinite periods of time. One must only read descriptions from those subjected to this practice to see clearly how awful it is. That it is illegal and counter-productive to our national security is also not hard to surmise.

Compromise by an ethical individualist will still result in free deeds. What you refer to above as a "broader coalition" is often the very pernicious political corruption that must be eliminated from our nation. In my opinion it is very dangerous to quickly label any corrupt policy by a president as necessary compromise. We need not set up situation where we get to feel proud of Mr. Obama when he does good and bad. It is no good to this country if we grow fuzzy on his immoral actions just so we can see even them as examples of his glory.

A question might be: is there even one good justification that an active citizen of this country would not have a list of Obama's actions that they oppose. I have thought hard about this and can not come up with one. However, I would equally expect us to be ready to list off his accomplishments as well. The latter practice simply is not as critically important a function of civil society.

SS

If I consider my best option in a complex situation and make a choice to act in that way, is that a compromise?

What makes a person an ethical individualist is that their action is an expression of their ethical intuitions. So if you know what you should do but don't act or you act driven by anything other than an intuitive impulse then you are not an ethical individualist in that moment. This is a high standard to be striven for.

Does he compromise the intuitive impulse, or does he stand firm on the principle? This is a false choice. Ethical individualism is a situational ethics that can change according to a changing situation. If Obama always appied the principle of human rights to Guantanamo prison just because of one intuitive moment then he may have a fixed principle. To sustain a strong will we need to be regularly empowered by moral impulses to meet a changing situation.

We can reevaluate a situation at anytime and select a new moral principle. Of course this new principle cannot be determined by any perceptible content on the ground such as political pressure but must again be determined intuitively by ideal content alone. We are aware of changing political conditions and form a concept of them to be part of our conceptual thinking but the perceptible conditions cannot be the decisive reason for selecting a new principle.

So we can remain ethical in changing life conditions without compromise while remaining open-minded to new ethical impulses.

Guantanamo is smoke and mirrors...Obama doesn't care to end torture. I'm afraid people have been completely lied to, yet again.

As the LA Times reported here: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/01/nation/na-rendition1 , Obama's executive order still gives the CIA the authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States

But his executive orders are full of loopholes http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/122154 and more loopholes http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12041 allowing for the business of torture as usual.

But perhaps the biggest lie about Gitmo is this: If Gitmo is ever actually closed, all that will happen to the alleged terrorists being held there is that they'll be shipped off to other secret, American-run detention camps. ABC's Brian Ross obtained the secret list of U.S. Denention Camps to replace GItmo here: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6664947&page=1

I'm tired of the lies. At least with Bush you had the media out there exposing the lies everyday. Aside for a few real journalists, the rest of the media is engaging in idol-worship...the result is that good, principled people are being held in the dark, shackled by not-knowing, unable to resist a tyrant growing in power everyday.

No doubt you're correct, the media was beind Bush after 9/11, which is why we didn't ever have a real investigation of the events of 9/11, is why laws like the Patriot Act came into place, and is why we went into the Iraq War without any real opposition. But at least the mainstream media began to wake up and ask questions at some point, which is critical in a free society.

But I think I could make a case for the media being even worse under Obama. During his campaign...which is the proper time to really dig up dirt on a candidate, the media instead engaged in a love-fest. The problem is that real journalism doesn't exist. Corporate media, controlled by Turner and Murdoch, rewards the mainstream, status-quo journalists who promote stories and angles within the phony left-right paradigm, and fires the fringe-journalists who are many times the best ones. And because you have mostly liberal mainstream media, the sit on their hands and engage in idol-worship, never questioning the man. (Conservative media attacks Obama, but only from the false right-perspective, never from a stance of reality...but that's an entirely different subject altogether.) 

The media at least woke up with Bush...I'm afraid, based in what I've seen, they will have a much more challenging time waking to Obama.

Dear Friends,

I have always taken the view that it was quite impossible for me to think my way into the moral life of another human being, lacking knowing them from their inside.   In fact, you could say that my own moral intuition regarding such an action on my part (thinking I could make a judgement about another's inner life) fits quite exactly the teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount of the Mote and the Beam.  This being the case, I hesitate to describe another other human being's moral actions (especially public figures) in moral terms.  Through years of introspection, I've also become aware that my soul reacts to events on the Stage Setting (the maya of history), and that these reactions tend to either be sympathetic or antipathetic, unless I am inwardly free enough to strive to think deeper into the events in which my biography finds its context.

Another way of saying this: I don't see any point in the hypothetical discussion of what Obama would or would not do that fits any category of concepts described in PoF, because I don't consider us capable of seeing from his point of view.  We are left then with our reaction to what public figures do, which remains (however) our reaction - our Beam.

That Beam can be an idea as described in this the last sentence in the original preface to PoF: "One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage."

Christ advises us in the Sermon on the Mount to tame our tendency to judgment (confront the Beam and experience it), so that we become free before any such ideas.  The actual practice of PoF may be a bit harder than some people believe.

love,

joel

Tom,

As you know, I don't rely on PoF as much as on my own introspective observations and life experience, having practiced introspection now for over 30 years.  It is failures that have taught me to resist thinking I can know certain things about another person.  I've made what I thought were quite circumspect judgments in the past, only to discover later that my judgment was flawed.  Then in examining the flaws, this led to deeper self knowledge - a better appreciation of how the shadow (and the sub-conscious feelings) create the Beam in spite of my belief in my own best intentions.

Also, you and I perhaps have different standards as regards what it means to "know a person" especially a public figure.  It is possible to see their wounds, as these are often more on the surface and plain to observation in their behavior.   But to know the deep inside, where they make moral choices, that to me is something in the soul that one European correspondent some years ago called: the holy of holies.  We can think we may be able to form a conception of their moral nature from their behavior, but to do that (in my view) you actually make two mental pictures, either or both of which can be false.

In the first mental picture we make a comparison of their "behavior" with the outside value.   This outside value is a second mental picture.  In a sense, instead of creating a true individual moral law to apply to our own specific life choices, we universalize our own moral law, as if it should apply to everyone.  That is the mental picture of the outside value.  Then, second or first (either can be done in whatever order), we create a mental picture of their behavior, AS IF it can be read as representative or their inner moral choices.  Then we compare the two and find their behavior wanting.

Let's take a specific example: Cheney and torture.  We all know through his behavior that former Vice President Dick Cheney supported torture (his behavior).  We can form our own moral law that says we would not do that, and using the process described above come to the conclusion that Dick Cheney acted immorally.  In this we can be completely wrong.

Suppose the truth goes like this:

In order for certain events to happen in the Stage Setting, in which all our biographies take place, certain biographies must behave in certain ways - that is the Stage Setting of the maya of history acquires its general characteristics from the "actions" of certain characters in the Play.  This we can observe from the outside, especially if we've trained ourselves in organic thinking about Social Life via A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception.  We learn to live into (with our thinking) the phenomena of Social Existence, and it speaks into the soul.

But to appreciate why this particular actor in the Play acted the way he did, we need to have fully developed the pure thinking of PoF, which again I suggest is not so easy as some believe (see the 12th Lecture of the Gospel of John on the purification of the astral body and the relationship of this purification to the success at achieving the goal of PoF).  To fully understand his behavior, we have to know quite exactly the field of mental pictures and life experiences in which his I was embedded.   He sees the world through this field of mental pictures, and any moral judgement he makes is formed in relationship to that quite individualized (and very different from ours) mind set.  It is entirely possible to learn that he was acting fully morally according to his particular understanding of the world at the time he encouraged the use of torture in order to protect the fortunes of the people of the United States in accord with the moral imperatives of his Oath of Office.

One of the confusions that can happen if one doesn't read enough Steiner, is that we fail to understand the spiritual world's relationship to the unfolding of life on the Earth.   For example, in Pastoral Medicine Steiner advises that if we were to draw a straight line on a blackboard as if it represented 3000 years linear time, we would be mistaken.  Instead we draw a line just as long, but it is formed not in a straight line, but in a complex and very small knot, with much overlaping and many intersections.  We cannot understand the truths of Earth Existence if we apply to it our biases toward linear time (as well as three-dimensional space).

Now you made much of the idea of a "free" individual.  You perhaps will recall a question I put to you some months before regarding some thoughts of others about the concept in PoF that free individuals will find the same moral ideal.  I don't disagree with that concept, but I have found in my experience of many anthroposophists that they apply this concept rather superficially.  First, most don't understand what spiritual freedom truly is.  The shadow loves to encourage us to think we are free inwardly, when we are not.

Second, the only way the choices of different individuals can find the same moral ideal (the same intuitive perception of the Good and the True - see Steiner's conception of the Consciousness Soul in the book Theosophy), is if they are seeing the world of choice through the same mind set or group of mental pictures.  If their biography is in any fashion significantly different, their world view will also be different; and, if as seen from the outside they may seem to be faced with a similar moral question, in reality, from the point of view of their own I, they see their individual moral question in an entirely different context than do we.  Again, as I titled my previous comment: apples and oranges. 

This is in fact one of the wonder's of the Creation of the Social World - this capacity for different individuals in different biographies to experience the same or similar Stage Stettings, while all the while being engaged in entirely different transformative life trials.

joel

I agree with much of what Joel writes. I would add that any notions we form of another's moral character should play an extremely limited role in how we relate to his or her specific actions.

It should matter almost next to nothing how one feels about Mr. Obama's morality when judging his proposals and actions. Some of them should be strongly supported. Some of them must be strongly opposed.

It worries me to see people take extreme views such as Obama is the greatest leader or the worst. He has already shown that he deserves compliments and opposition. There is something in the nature of the human lower ego that struggles against letting our leaders simple be taken action by action.

SS

Remember Woodrow Wilson? Remember how much disdain Steiner spoke about this man while he was President? Only because Steiner was free from left/right polarilies and free from national prejudicies was Steiner able to clearly see this originator of Americanist nation building, this ennabler of the Federal Reserve takeover, this birther of world government through the League of Nations. Steiner didn't allow himself to become distracted by analyzing only each issue within itself... That is materialism! No, Steiner saw each issue, but instead fixed his gaze on the source of each issue, Wilson's ivory tower. Therefore, each issue was seen in spirit. Each issue was seen in light of the larger picture, of what was behind the scenes.

Steiner was much to intricate a thinker to blame one man for the shadow destiny of this country. His attacks on Wilson were mainly symptomological, in my opinion.

A very powerful adversary is at work when we fail to see political corruption as a function of the sleeping nature of civil society. Wilson (and all other "great" leaders) was merely an image of a not-yet-active civil socity.

We are fortunate that a member of the KKK simply could not get elected on face value. Yet this KKK member would be awful if somehow elected. Wilson had no power to make himself an option of the electoriate. Any power we ascribe to him is a fear to stare deep into the abyss of civil societies failure.

Nothing I have said above is in arguement with the idea that Wilson was a perfect picture of corruptly dense one-sided thinking.

SS

Well Steiner clearly saw in Wilson an abstract thinking removed from reality, and then saw everything that Wilson did stemming from that worldview, his ivory tower.

He certainly didn't blame Wilson for causing the shadow society...but you can surely see what I mean when I say that Wilson's worldview and even his unconscious strivings were certainly key in allowing the shadow government to unravel its tentacles.

And my point was really a response to your line of thinking which... correct me if I'm wrong... seems to be that we should not judge Obama for what his worldview and both conscious and unconscious strivings...but rather take each issue alone and judge it arrordingly. As I see it, the problem with that thinking is that each policy action, each speech, everything Obama does should not be judged within an iron-vault by itself, but should be weighed in light of his motivations.

And as I have been saying, you can clearly see his motives. Take today's announcement from Obama that he wants to increase the powers of the FED. If one knows anything about the reality of that orginization, one must conclude that either:

1)Obama is a complete idiot and is totally clueless and simply has puppetmasters telling him what to do

OR

2) Obama has a sinister agenda

I think we can all agree that Obama is a genius and there's no way he could be duped by the shadow government into doing their will for them. Therefore, the only probable conclusion is that he has adopted a worldview that is even more extreme than Wilson's. Woodrow Wilson still had the benefit of ignorance and didn't fully realize the extent of what the shadow govt. intended to do. This is shortly befor his death, Wilson said,

"A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our
system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our
activities are in the hands of a few men. ...

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely
controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a
Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and
vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of
small groups of dominant men".

Obama, however, has inhereted and is partnering with the grownup version of what Wilson birthed, a far greater crime than Wilson ever committed! It is a system that creates false-flag terror events in order to justify wars to benefit industrialists, a system that scares its people in order to justify torture.

As a secondary support, Powell's birth chart for Obama sheds light on who he is and what he incarnated for. While I never think that it is appropriate for people to use such knowledge in and of itself, it, coupled with real factual evidence gives a resounding picture of an individual's spirit...how they see the world and what they intend to do.

I'm very sorry.. I made a horrible mistake. A friend of mine had emailed me a chart a few days ago and because of the similarities in content, and because of an inferrence of something Kevin Dann had said, I made the assumption that it was Powell's. It was not. I should have questioned myself better because Powell never stoops to naming names in regards to this subject in his book (even though the implications are clearly there) and even makes honest attempts to be as positive, thoughtful and non-sensationalistic as he can and after reading some of my posts, an uneducated reader might make the false assumption that Powell does not. Hopefully, I've been able to clear his good name for those present/future googling his name.

I emailed my friend where he got the chart and he found it here: http://lifeoracle.com/2009/06/obamas-chart-kenya/

Perhaps SS is right when he talks about the support for the beam in my eye and he sees something about me which he's trying to clear up...By temperament, I tend to be a very agressive, very energetic and loud person and I tend to get overly excited and passionate about something, then wind up tripping over my words and making mistakes, insulting people, and having to apologize frequently. I ought to relect more before I speak and I know that. I'm very, sorry and I'll shut up now about Obama, even though I know alot of what I see is true, because I do need to reflect and digest more.... or else I simply spew vomit and bile.