A Note on Being an Idiot
A few days ago, before Mr. Trump’s address to Congress, I suggested the Dems coordinate a use of words and signs to shift the message and the camera. While my vision of what they might do was a little more sophisticated than what they tried, the anemia of their paddles indicates the stupidity of my (our) idea more than any failure of execution.
I wish I could do better and certainly wish the Dems could too.
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A friend of mine lost his parents a year or so ago. As part of figuring out their records, he ended up in the Social Security Administration. There, instead of deep state actors and overzealous bureaucrats, he found only folks who showed patience and kindness, folks who, in their functionality, took care of him at a time of grief.
As it happens my friend’s city is a hub for the Social Security Administration and employs a few thousand people there. This includes both members of a couple that lives in his neighborhood. Two of their colleagues have killed themselves in the last few weeks.
The neighbors were grateful when my friend’s wife took them a care package. “It’s good to know not all America hates us,” they said.
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Here is the top readers comment (from "DebE”) in response to an NYT op-ed about Musk not understanding government:
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, said on the Joe Rogan show that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy."
Here's another take: "In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy." Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
Empathy has to go or become irrelevant in any power hierarchy when it comes to making the necessary decisions about who lives/eats and who does not. (This is not a situation that defines evil or autocrats or psychopaths; it's the reality you lose touch with when you get away from the sources of your food.) Even in small, flat collectives, violence has to happen. Dispassionate, clear-headed decisions must be made by doctors, judges, and everyone else with others' lives in their hands.
There are always enemies, animals, and ill people who need to be killed, and bigger societies do this at scale. True empathy is only possible in a small, local framework and even there it can generate crippling, costly, indecisive, and fatal attachments. You constantly reduce everything to simple binaries and banal concepts, like an "empathetic" Army psychologist who was either talking about pure sociopathy (no empathy in any context) or an inability to exercise it in appropriate contexts.
It is not as if any army has won wars or battles by being empathetic. (The US Army pioneered the psychology of professional killing and the desensitization necessary to do it.)
Mileage in brutality may vary from one colonizer or empire to another, but they all brutalize people without mercy and create the legal justifications for it. Your apparent belief that your current president dropped out of the sky and is best understood as the reincarnation of Hitler, and that immoral, unjust acts are not some innate characteristic or your government/nation and all its parts (as is every other nations') is mind-numbingly naive, some kind of misguided and childish concept of how to cope with a reality you've lost grip on.
You can hear contempt in this I guess. It's a pathetic state of mind you keep expressing. Maybe some perspectives you can't possibly simplify or discount in a partisan way that take a longer, harder look at history would help. Snyder is not one. The ecological archdruid is the last entertaining blogger I read who seems like the right type of salve for your type of crying about the meanness in the world. https://www.ecosophia.net/lords-of-the-fall/