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No need to apologize. If this is how you genuinely feel - and I use the word “feel” because your post is very loaded with emotive language and invective - then you have every right to tell me so. Obviously, you and I have very different moral foundations, and when faced with such a massive gulf in moral instincts, it is natural to feel revulsion. It’s useful for me to hear from people who are genuinely appalled by my views. Of course, I believe that your worldview is probably very adaptive on an individual, personal level - mawkish as it may be - but maladaptive at the level of “seeing like a state” and trying to actually build a great civilization. I don’t begrudge you the empathy that you feel for “the wretched of the earth”, but I personally have made peace with the practiced hard-heartedness which I believe is going to be extremely necessary in the years to come.
Your haughty affectation is a defense mechanism to protect yourself from having to see the ugliness in your heart and the uncharitableness you approach the world with. I don't know if you are rich or poor but regardless you display no sense of noblesse oblige and have no class. You can delude yourself into thinking you've made peace with your hard-heartedness but at some point you will face a very human obstacle and the flimsy affectations you are relying on will crumble and you'll be left with a cold heart that offers no warmth for yourself or the situations you face.
Are you engaging with my views on an emotional level or are you protecting yourself by holding them at an analytical distance to try to perfect your artificially constructed worldview?
Can you tell me your secret to being so above the rest of the wretched of the earth that you can operate on some theoretical transhumanist plane of great civilization in spite of your own humanity?
Yea, first an american comes to your country to kill your family and then 10 years later to film a movie about how killing it made him all depressed.
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That's quite a philippic, but it's still just a bunch of personal attacks. Don't do this.
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I think it’s a bit rich to be accused of “affectation” by someone who writes like a character in some didactic nineteenth-century novel or religious tract.
I’m neither; I’m just your standard-issue lower-middle-class American, with a job that allows me to live comfortably in a shitty apartment in a run-down neighborhood of a big city. While I’m not exposed to Third World poverty, I do live in a city with a massive and an ever-expanding homeless population. You hit me earlier with the old “I used to be like you” canard, and two can play at that game. When I was in my teens and twenties I would agonize over the homelessness I saw all around me; I’ve never owned a car and commute primarily via public transit, so I see the homeless up-close every day and interact with them frequently. My scrupulosity cascades would make me miserable every day, and I got very into socialism partially as a result of what I perceived as the unacceptable levels of injustice and deprivation and inequality I was observing.
At a certain point, though, I realized that I have no idea how to help these people, and apparently neither does anybody else. It also became acutely clear to me, slowly at first and then all at once, the extent to which, when it comes to homelessness and poverty in 21st-century industrialized nations, it’s actually not that hard not to be homeless/impoverished, as long as you’re not profoundly mentally ill. And if you are profoundly mentally ill, then I really really don’t know how to help you! And so if there’s a huge, complex, and intractable problem that surrounds me every day and is causing me to agonize impotently and blame myself - unfairly - for not fixing it, then isn’t the adaptive strategy to stop caring about it? What good does guilt do me if I can’t do anything about it?
Again, it is perfectly normal and natural to develop psychological strategies to defuse and sublimate negative and maladaptive emotions. You presumably do it every day, and so does everybody else. We find ways to suppress anger and frustration and jealousy on a daily basis, because we live in a society and those emotions would do more harm than good if translated into action. You believe that extreme empathy is a positive emotion - apparently in all cases, even when it comes to problems that you yourself seem to acknowledge that you have no power to fix - but I believe that it’s maladaptive in just as many - if not more - situations than it’s adaptive. Especially, as I said, if you’re trying to think like a government, or a social engineer - which is the hat I’m wearing when I’m writing in this forum - rather than as an individual in an interpersonal context.
Look, I’m a fuck-up in all sorts of ways. I’m acutely aware of my own fallibility and poor judgment when it comes to many different areas of life. I’m certainly not living up to my own potential, let alone achieving what I wish I could if I were smarter, more ambitious, more high-agency, came from a wealthier background, etc. I don’t think that I’m personally cut out to build the glorious future, and I have no illusions that I’ll occupy a position of any significant power or prestige if the glorious future arrives in my lifetime. I’m probably cut out to be, at best, a minor scribbler and scholar.
But since my society has no way to help the wretched of the earth, and because the quality of life of its own citizens would be substantially decreased were that society to start seriously trying to help them, the primary approach I want my elected officials to take toward the Third World is keeping it as far away from me as possible. Whether or not I’m “better” than an impoverished person in Africa is irrelevant; I’m not an impoverished African, I don’t want to be an impoverished African, I don’t want to live near an impoverished African, and I want my society to look less like the Third World, rather than more like the Third World. Since I can’t fix Africa, that’s where I’m at in regards to the problems you’re talking about. I hope I never have to confront the problem on any level that is more personal and up-close than that.
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