Absolutism isn’t difficult in practice, just undesirable as it leaves no openings for flattery, saying quite a fucking lot for priorities. What if these are not bridges I burn, but rather the formless spines of your angels and demons sent to conform me? Egalitarianism as an ideal is easy to toss around, but there is no public discourse on the implications of its real-world applications. Which I admit to spending much time with here, but any essay on my portal is somebody’s first, and I feel rephrasing arguments strengthens said arguments.
Martin Luther King Jr advocated judging by content of character. Black, white, male, female, trans, gay, none of these terms are synonymous for good or evil. Ethically, we cannot either support or condemn someone based only on gender, skin-tone or sexual identity because anyone is capable of anything. To judge not by packaging means going by our merits underlying the song and dance, not what we want to be or what we wish we were but how our actions affect those around us. When everyone’s self-serving there is no collective, but when egos are deflated, shit gets done. Meaning in part that if you feel yours alone is the only banner subjugated, you are no less self-centered than your oppressor. Everybody’s in these shoes and anyone declaring otherwise is striving to sell a used car. It’s why digital socials are big, for DIY segregation and news bubbles where the masses are empowered to hide our heads in the sand together. Life is rarely glorious, but we can make it interesting in ways beyond self-defeat.
True leftism is self-sacrifice before self-interest, whereas rightwing is asserting the preferences of self before anything else, from personal matters affecting ourselves to foreign policy afflicting the world. If it sounds confusing, consider how Democrats are no less rightwing, as pursuing positions of authority in a setting where self-enrichment is long-standing and systemic is helplessly self-aggrandizing. Nancy Pelosi said they’re all Capitalists, implying the “partisanship” is nothing more than competing business interests, with threats to national security by this light seen as domestic politicians overeager to sell. Our identities are graffiti on the walls of our prison cells, and expecting others to oblige our own ignores the fact they’ve their own cells to fret. It’s not about us. All groups are undone by ego, all forms of government collapse when leaders prioritize their bias, fetishes and whims. Anyone who won’t abolish the whip only wants to wield it. A healthy society cannot allow exemptions, exceptions to rules or get out of jail free cards as none of that is equality. Hero-worshiping the most selfish leads to personality cults, which only service the centerpieces. I should imagine any elected leader’s first priority would be protecting their people rather than versa vice, because if they promote the idea a leader can do no wrong what they really want is a cult and not a democracy. I think elections should be randomized like jury duty or anonymized, but the system guarantees that not all of us are created equal, and the parties would freak over the inability to have their egos waxed. When the inability to infringe upon the rights of others is not unto itself an infringement of any established right. End all deification, I’m saying.
All the way back across centuries to kings and their private harems, wealth is a meal ticket for those who can do nothing without help. It’s worshiped idiocy, criminality and immorality, enabling their selfish lot to get away with everything up to and including forbidding us from our own time and resources. Yet “no man is an island” when it takes a village to manifest a cult of personality. People are horrible. A badge isn’t vital to help anybody, but badges make it possible to oppress. The great anarchist Fred Woodworth said back in the 1960s that law enforcement comprises the largest gang in US history. Today their unions actively get away with everything that right-wingers supposedly despise about unions generally, yet the rightwing reflex is to welcome and support the kindred ambitions for authority. It reminds me of the passages in Howard Zinn’s history textbook citing examples of the army and reserves being called in to break up strikers on behalf of tycoons, some cases resulting in hundreds of fatalities. If corporations are people too, when do they get tanks out their door? Same sense, nobody enters politics to help others but to indulge their own power fantasies. The Nazis weren’t bested by well-meaning persons looking for employment opportunities among their ranks. This is exponential down to individuals not campaigning. All it takes to be a good person is to refrain from lying, cheating or stealing, but everyone rationalizes themselves just as they make excuses for whomever they personally want to befriend, to fuck or to be. That favoritism meets no definition of equality. Saying a woman would be horrible because of her gender is just as wrong as saying she’d be excellent because of her gender, when she could be Mother Theresa or she could be Ma Barker. It’s generalizing, and judging books by their covers.
Demand substance from people wanting power over your time, your life. Many erroneously lament an imaginary American culture represented by its political spheres that, once upon a time, at least pretended to emphasize ideologies more intrinsic than who wore it best, catch-phrases or pissing contests. And I am clearly neither nationalist or Capitalist, but maybe my immunity to advertising lets common fucking sense take the place of jingoism. Nothing can be more treasonous for first world nations than destabilizing their economies by sitting on trillions. #FAANG board-members have done more harm to the USA than every foreign government combined. Publicizing or trading state secrets is small potatoes by comparison. Ego-centrism is wanting to get away with bullshit. Economies struggle because con-artists withhold their pillaged billions from reentering the revenue streams, investing in cheap candidacies to turn a blind eye and deregulate on their behalf. They are enemies of the state and enemies of the people.
And, just as most liberals today are more rightwing than they will confess to, so too are most people today more egocentric than they will allow themselves to be made aware of. I dated a rightwing girl for a time, who explained to me that as a rape survivor she’d have issues sharing the intimate space of a public restroom with a stranger’s penis, which I can understand. Were this a rational society, we must leave that minor controversy to A) the proprietors to decide for their own establishments and B) the public to choose to support them or not. Not everyone thinks as we do, which just goes to show how impossibly foolish it is to try honoring the wishes of everybody. By all means boycott environments which do not serve our personal needs, but insisting that all environments serve our bias, fetishes and whims explicitly robs others of their own free will. Nobody’s comfort zone trumps anyone else’s. Whether or not a proprietor can afford a baker’s dozen restrooms or opts for a singular unisex bog, each and every person has the same equal right of self-determination to choose for themselves whether to support them or not, and for anyone to make that decision for anyone else either which way is ethically wrong. In this fine example an opening for flattery is no more virtuous than a glory-hole.
It’s a particularly American ego to believe anywhere and everywhere we might go must cater to our bias, fetishes and whims personally, and that anything not catering for our ego is somehow a threat to our well-being, as if survival and flattery are by any stretch of the imagination synonymous. In matters of foreign or domestic policy for the USA, the need for “nuance” always implies requiring evermore room for bias, fetish and whim. People complicate situations only because they want excuses for their bias, fetish and whim. I’d bet all across the country, deflating egos would make 90% of our taxes obsolete overnight. We could use a fraction of that to save lives instead and still be paying less in the end to assure free education, free healthcare and reliable infrastructure for all citizenry universally. There’s no justification for working or struggling as much as we do, but to maintain excesses for the ego of the few.
For the USA, saving lives is extreme when the long-standing status quo has been permitting the demise by bang or whimper of folks foreign and domestic for god and country’s Wall Street. Doors to diplomacy are never blasted open. What if multi-billion-dollar corporations do not actually need federal grants or subsidies, tax exemptions or tax forgiveness or tax leniency, especially when outsourcing jobs and indulging tax havens and tax shelters and full-on tax avoidance? Frankly at this point I am dandy with treason. Better the moral high ground than American solidarity, not for its governance, its law enforcement or military, its healthcare or education systems or exploitative creative industries or abject denial that its most dire problems are always home-brewed and distilled down to the worldview of the singular ego. But we cannot dare pardon any beg because the American way is to help themselves without asking. They invented marketing and social optics and then weaponized them, turning demographics into profiling and projections, with manufactured cultures informing identity rather than versa vice, and ostracizing the immediate reaction awarded to anyone varying from the right brand or symbology or political icon of whichever 15 minutes. Reality is awesome however, about evading all attempts by ego to set its definitions, relentlessly proving how all marketing is as one-sided a discourse as the self-assurances of therapy.
There’s a valid argument to be made that religion was the earliest form of egotistical superiority complexes. The Judaeo-Christians in particular are historically bad about lacking faith that their god’s setting a whole day aside for judgement might be accomplished without their explicit assistance in the here and now. I think those most vocally inflating god and country have in common the belief that their own desires are the desires of god and country. From the KKK to UKIP to Wahhabism. We can nervously laugh at how those far-right adherents mindlessly admit to no evil on their parts, but it is fundamentally no different and no less a thing when we as individuals insist or demand that our own desires be met and that our own wills be done.