There Go I

I don't know that I was taught this as a kid but I remember concluding that people who suffer suffer for all of us. And not only in a 'there but for the grace of God' way. They bear a burden for us more directly and specifically but also more generally. Specifically in that the burden fell on them but generally because these burdens are arbitrary and unintelligible except at the level of larger social groups. I was never a utopian. There was never going to be a Salk vaccine for everything, I thought. Suffering and difficulty are a part of life. We're mortal. We age and our bodies break down.

Somewhat maddeningly a part of us, a kind of consciousness, stands separately from that, an observer part. There's still a child and an adolescent and a young adult running around in all of us, in layers, as an aspect of healthy personality development. If that's gone it's unrooted and not healthy. If someone gets stuck in adolescence or some phase or state it's not healthy either but arrested. If this outlook is taken on deeply it changes everything. Competition can still make sense but in a circumstantial way. People aren't winners and losers they win and lose and that's incidental in the larger scheme.

Individualism, again, is fine within limits but people are unintelligible in isolation. Some hierarchy is okay and differentiation is good but within limits. We only make sense collectively, but collective associations enable individualism. Persecutory, antisocial impulses result from individual self-hatred or existential anxiety over being alive and mired in an absurdity common to all. Real justice is only seen and encountered collectively but of course that depends on its being sought individually in its application of the principles of fair play and interpersonal graciousness and generosity.

High levels of individual ambition are pathological, antisocial and hallucinatory, in that they don't own interdependency. But societies are ecosystems and odd drives can and should be harnessed for the benefit of everyone. Again, a matter of balance, which is where utopianism and dualistic and unintegrated ways of thinking fail, from a loss of dynamism and integration. Paradox is an encounter with human inadequacy. Being unwilling to accept something as true because we can't reduce it to analytical sense within our reason is wrong and destructive. So-called 'powerful' models exist by abstraction. 

That is, by removal from the human situations outside of which everything is meaningless anyway. And meaningless is not good, which should go without saying but power-seeking has a love of unreality and, as a means to an end, meaninglessness. Power-seeking is the attempted theft of life. Financial capital is human preserves, your life in a jar on a shelf. And a good thing if it's used properly, like food that is saved to get though winter. And we are always in winter, just as we are always in spring and summer, another thing that is only intelligible at a balanced levels of abstraction and immersion. 

Abstraction and analysis allow us to achieve things, empathy and immersion to use the achievements for a common benefit. Balance seems to be a hard political sell, in the time of Trump and Musk, because that's already a puritanically abstract and pathological place. They can't see beyond their limitations which is both a failure of imagination and a failure of humanity. They've dehumanized themselves, but it's wrong to attribute intention to that. Intention matters, but so does effect. Intention is judgeable, as inferred from behaviors, but no need. The effects and behaviors are plenty enough. 

And the place they're in is so pathological it defies comprehension. They can't be said to have intent because they're too sick, candidates for quarantine and isolation. Limiting their opportunities for harm is an emergency. It's a crisis. It shouldn't have gotten this far but a big segment of the American voting public is also sick. And it's contagious. We must stop them. Circumscribing or ideally eliminating their destructive opportunities is essential because destroy they will. With abandon and without compunction or ever looking back. I think we need charismatic leadership. And I see nothing.