To wax poetic, I’d say the soul is a nuclear blast, and the spirit the shock-waves connecting it to its surroundings as well as fallout afflicting what comes after. It needs someone or something beyond itself to set it off, however.
I’m no fan of author Neil Gaiman, but I love this quote by him: ‘Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.‘
If “no man is an island” then I believe this is what sharing in a society must amount to. Not fellows to buy from or to sell to, but our consciously living alongside contrary ideals. Diversity is the opposite of both monopoly and inbreeding. It makes for better conversation, and growth. And conflict whether societal or interpersonal *only* arises when the ego is asserted, when entitlement or privilege to superiority is declared for one’s own ego, or for the ego of someone we wish to be, to befriend or to fuck. A closed loop preferred to an endless horizon. Any flavor of brand loyalty is a denial of this, no differently from fantasies of political partisanship or religious zealotry, and certainly as much as whichever trending variety of cultural or ethnic supremacy. All of which categorically thrives on an ideological inbreeding.
Liberty does not entail infringing upon the rights of others. The standards for domestic law enforcement recruits nationwide and in all likelihood globally hangs on low IQ, employing ignorant soldiers to divide the public under nationalist banners of racism, sexism and homophobia. So that it’s never really a matter of supremacists infiltrating police precincts, but of their simply showing up for work.
Maybe billionaires themselves are rarely actually racist or sexist or homophobic, because any demographic omitted is a potential sale lost. And maybe they require imbeciles to keep the masses divided on their behalf, from piecemealing their fragments together to see who is price-gouging and overcharging *everybody*. I am convinced domestic police are themselves the largest traffickers of sex and drugs, their core function being to penalize victims of those trades, trades so old they predate civilization itself. Law enforcement from the DoJ down to your local county sheriff exists only to manifest criminality, in order to separate the masses, serving the public trust through self-fulfilling prophecy. MLK Jr was notably harassed and demonized nonstop by law enforcement all the way up to federal levels, but attempts on his life did not occur until he progressed from fighting against racial inequality, exorbitant as that is, to the broader fight against social inequality, which affects everybody. First world nations compel themselves to vilify neighbors rather than landlords screwing them all, vilify co-workers instead of employers short-changing them all, vilify anyone seeing equality as the better path than living to feed egos of those actively lessening choices and livelihoods for one and all.
What’s unraveling with the Reserve Bank in South Africa is the same as the repeated PM elections in Israel and Brexit shenanigans in the UK and constant consolidation of power in Russia, and it’s status quo in the USA. Every administration of my lifetime has nudged the boundary for what the White House might get away with in broad daylight, each that much more than the last with the opposition party never truly taking it to task for want of exploiting those expanded privileges come its own turn. The side-effect being all competition with enough backing from millionaires and billionaires to even be able to afford to run going further and further to the right in political ideals, drunk on power with assertions of an immeasurable supremacy of brand before the evermore blatant needs of its constituents, at the expense of all constituents. Yet no matter the ruling party of the time, it does not hold majority support among the public. So, song and dance of ongoing tokenization and triviality, giving voters the same lazy marketing again and again as the party in power does just what it desires nonetheless and all the more.
When half the national budget for the USA comes by way of weapon sales, when patients are fined for not being customers to insurance companies, when campaign finance laws regularly get bent over and when billionaires are publicly taxed less than my bed-bound mom, it’s a lie to suggest Wall Street can answer to the feds when versa vice is clearly the case. Any voice preaching to get money out of politics by any means short of bloodshed is only seeking to sell a variation of the routine. One cannot simply vote for an ego to lose its god complex, evidently not in a place where self-enrichment is long-standing status quo. It dramatically underestimates the functions of governmental machinery which handed away billions in taxpayer monies to bankers as bailout for losing billions which was not theirs to begin with. The controls are so systemic and ingrained, should anybody fail to be a worker or consumer in this society, they are automatically belittled and ostracized by this society. There honestly needs to be a nationwide ideological reawakening, one guaranteed never to happen when so many still believe the advertising of a “good” Capitalism to ever magically save all the lives that matter. Neither exploitation or extortion is ever good for the lowest common denominators. Re-appropriating the billions coming from overcharging and price-gouging will not undo how it gets produced, even should our for-profit law enforcement abruptly grow either a spine or conscience, and even were the Electoral College not manifestly enabled to renege and to undermine each and every vote in the country. Have fun with that shit though.