My experience in academia and many other realms of life has shown me that the desire to humiliate others and thus putatively raise one’s cache of social capital—an impulse I can honestly say I’ve never quite understood—is a cardinal trait of many human beings, most of whom are desperately and futilely trying to use these public demonstrations of would-be dominance to very fill large affective holes within their spiritually empty selves.
Perhaps it is time to admit that much of what occurred during the acute phase of the Covid crisis was, in many ways, the culmination of a long multi-decade process of intense, top-down social pedagogy designed to separate us from our most basic empathic instincts.
Since time immemorial super-elites have worked assiduously to convince the second-tier elites and the masses further below that their highly class-specific “victories” are, in contrast to what simple observations would tell us, of great benefit to society as a whole.
A disease that leaves 99.85 percent or more people perfectly alive as an “unprecedented threat” to humanity allegedly requiring palliative measures that just so happened to induce massive social fragmentation and one of the biggest upward flows of wealth in history. Sure no problem Papa, whatever you say.
Someone who believes that hearing or reading opinions that do not precisely ratify their particular way of viewing self and other is tantamount to physical harm or extinction has a very, very tenuous sense of identity and/or self-possession. What they are, in effect, saying is that when it comes to this thing called “me” that there is no semblance of a solid and autonomous self within and that they are, rather, a mere sum of the informational inputs delivered to their device at any given moment.
While it may make a lot of people feel good about themselves at the moment, it will only further corrode trust in the rule of law— a shift that always favors the powerful—and take valuable energy away from the urgent task of fighting massive and systematic government and corporate assaults on our dignity and freedom.
What passes today for ideological convictions, in our supposedly terminally divided country, are nothing of the sort, but rather labels to which many quickly and lightly affix themselves precisely because they haven’t really thought deeply about what they believe and why, but don’t want to be seen as being out of step, or of not having really done their homework.
Like people, paradigms get tired, mostly because the humans that work within them, as Kuhn suggested, increasingly lose touch with the problems that originally elicited in them the intense and sacrifice-laden drive to create urgently desired new things. But humans aren’t always very good at recognizing when they have begun going through the motions. This is especially so with those in the thrall of a purely linear vision of time in which the perennial reality of intellectual and spiritual regression is afforded no legitimate space.
Understanding all this makes it easier to think of those who provided the vociferous support for the government-imposed destruction of freedom of association, commercial freedom, bodily sovereignty, mass firings, record-shattering numbers of injuries and deaths and who knows how many future health complications with a greater degree of forgiveness and compassion. But I’m not there yet.
As every great religious tradition reminds us, the proclivity to do ill to others is vividly present in everyone during the entire course of our lives on earth, and that the first and most effective step towards ensuring that this inner monster does not take control of our destinies is acknowledging its enduring presence within us. It is then, and only then, that we can shape effective and enduring strategies to keep it at bay.
These are classic “controlling practices” designed to gradually leach from each and every one of us—and most infuriatingly those not yet fully socialized—what is arguably our greatest instinctual drive: the desire to weave stories of our own in the company of others that remind us not of what they tell us we are and must be for them, but of the sense of dignity that we all want to feel and, to the best of our abilities, extend to others.
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