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2. Mixture
been for our, or at least for my, generation. For my generation, the emancipation model was the
central way of thinking and acting.
Nowadays, other models appeal to people, the emancipation models no longer do so. The gay
movement has had its emancipation and liberation. The ped-movement has not. These people
have to emancipate in an era when the model of emancipation no longer holds any appeal. Also
the Civil Liberation Movement no longer concentrates on liberation, but on human rights. The
paradigm has been shifted.
Foucault studied especially those paradigm shifts in history. These shifts are the lines of history,
not the straightforward lines thought before. Two such shifts that he described are the ways of
thinking about homosexuality and about the prison system. The history of western thinking is a
history of paradigm shifts. This is ‘the archaeology of knowledge’, the different ways of
thinking in the past. This is the actual way of knowing: exploring the worldwide different ways
of thinking. It is impossible to understand the modern world by thinking along western lines
only.
Nowadays, in the post-modern era, that new kind of thinking is still not a harmonious whole. It
is still a kettle with a brew, a mixture of ways of thinking without any structure. We see this, to
take the earlier example, in the churches. A mixture of different beliefs exists with and near to
one another, with the common task of mutual acceptance. In the past, it was a world of
opposing beliefs, orthodoxy versus heresy. This is no longer accepted nowadays.
Now, it is a pluralistic world in which we live, a world that accepts differences between people.
The old stable models like Christianity, communism, socialism and capitalism – the one against
the other - have lost their strength and stability.
Well, speaking now about people with pedophilic feelings, the time has passed for seeing them
– or for them to see themselves - as people with a particular belief that other people have to be
persuaded to accept. In our pluralistic world, one can better view them as people who ask for a
modest place under the sun – and who give their opponents the same right. But not to have the
right to start witch-hunts and systematically to persecute people who hold particular feelings.
A problematical factor relates to our latter-day emperors and popes: the media, with their
enormous influence on people’s way of thinking. Just as with former rulers, the media want to
control people’s thought – or want to maintain their power by mirroring the public’s way of
thinking.
Powerful counter forces nowadays exist in the level of social consciousness and in pleas for
pluralism and human rights. Therefore, be conscious of the post-modern society we live in,
analyse society and pluralism, and also analyse the way of thinking of our opponents.
Remember, too, to use more models than just the western one in that analysis. Discover and
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