Near Death

My reaction, when I first encountered someone undeniably under the control of unconscious drives, was not "you monster" but, at first, amazement. Then I thought that I might have similarly repressed stuff, because I must, but to a lesser degree, I hope, because the person was nuts.

This is my way, to look for the underlying core of common humanity, and then the differentiation on top of that, probably more of each than we can see. Extreme cases reveal things to us, and about ourselves, which is why I so often use interpolation, interplay and averaging, a kind of dialectic.

Too much. Not enough. Too much. Not enough. You come out in the middle, which, it is to say, with respect to the drives, that we only make sense as a people, as a species, averaged and aggregated. We are incomprehensible in isolation. You can't understand anybody out of context.

So I judge everything with a low-grade level of wry restraint, respecting those unconscious drives, since you never know how much they're in play. That awareness keeps the drives in check, the experts say, and enables the more integrated elements to run things. Now, consider near-death experiences. 

It's as unconscious as you can get, to be clinically dead. There are lessons there, whether you believe in the afterlife or not, and people come back from those as flaming, foaming liberals. They are nice to everybody and live with compassion and acceptance and happiness in the little things.

Contrast that with certain non-liberals. Oh, let's not. I don't have the heart for it right now. But it does make you want to freeze some folks, induce near-death experiences in them, and try to turn them into caring, civilized beings, capable of living in harmony and peace with everyone else.