But society as we know it does NOT encourage such currents.

And we above all else desire the society that DOES.

Instead of the marvelous sense of collective festivity and creative sharing which should be central to life, the casual games that lead to art, the free-floating discussions between economic and societal equals, we find an abundance of reified conformist, commodity and status oriented "entertainment" behavior. In the places where we would most expect to find unified action in imagination - poetry groups, art "scenes" - there stand instead competitive contests and social-ladder climbing, and all the paid-for artistic accountancy of the academic approach: moral outrage dressed in the soothing sing-song of L.L. Bean ecstasies. 

In the face of the most grotesque challenges to human life we find - as succor - poetic minstrel shows and the lowest burlesque. We find simple platitudes offered up as deep truths. We find pursuit of possessions and of shallow amusements offered as evidence of success and a life well-lived.  We understand that in their desire to find something meaningful in a world denuded of most possibilities and reduced instead to a few options, people will cling to whatever is available.

Such taming of the imagination dulls us into ignoring our unique potential and distrusting our collective power, as we subordinate all function to what Fredy Perlman called "Leviathanic Integuments" - "armoring" against the material and ideological control structures of capitalist civilization. Can such "poetic protectionism" suffice at the moment we most called upon to attack rather than indulge in "hobbies" and "distractions"? Can we afford to crawl back into that shell called "liberalism"?