We don’t seriously need to make any priority of the thoughts and feelings of others, or replicate them, not when we’ve our own angels and demons wrestling for the emphasis.
Many would read such a sentiment as arrogant, but by embracing it, we’d inhibit ourselves from making undue demands of others. In which case, it would be an arrogance gone deprived of enrichment, threatening only towards the sustainability of ego and not a physical survival. I’d argue that physical survival is by fact further hindered by all things unnecessary, and emotional or spiritual codependency is certainly no exception. What is ego, but exception after exception after exception? Hardly the syntax for “exceptional”.
I say, that with no exceptions all those who subscribe to whichever personality cult promising the largest or most appealing returns, and most assuredly all those who strive to be the feature of a personality cult, will absolutely never be stronger than the blasphemer. Self-interest is the nature of evil and as such, goodness is the absence of self-interest.
We don’t have to love anybody or praise anyone, certainly not their self-importance or self-righteousness, as feeding of egos causes exponentially more actual harms than does the feeding of trolls. What’s generally regarded as positive reinforcement is just the liberal variant to thoughts and prayers, a way to pat yourself on the back without actually doing anything constructive to help. But that’s no cause to disregard the total package. Hatred is not unequivocally the vacancy of love. Let friendships be earnest. Let love have value, instead of flooding markets by giving it away right and left. Maybe, freedom’s just the right to not buy into whichever hogwash. But nobody really has the right to condemn others. You won’t expand alliances, demographics or readership that route in keeping with the standards of society. Rather, you’d leave yourself fewer choices for workers, voters and soldiers, audiences, customers and consumers, and fewer potentials for allies, for friends and neighbors and the people you can sleep with, all declared deal-breakers for the sustainability of any ego. Meanwhile the strongest people in the world require for themselves none of those. Their strength actually defines itself by the capacity to endure alongside rather than at odds with the autonomy of others. Agreeing to disagree really is a stupid sentiment if you think it through, and only ego obliges us never to disagree, for even while proven useless toward our vanities everyone might nonetheless prove useful to the people who lack our vanities. Now, the people we can all agree on as bad, the pedos, rapists and murderers and bankers, the sorts who have proven they can’t be around others without doing harm, well, that can be accomplished without killing them either. If we hate contrarians and reactionaries and extremists so much, why should we want to be like them as individuals or as any variety of a collective?
You do not have to praise or worship anybody anywhere, under any circumstances. You do not have to be a fan of any person, place or thing. But you also do not have to turn away when a life is actually on the line. Avoiding those extremes is how problems go uncreated. Any contributing member to modern society by definition condones the basic idea of investors and followers, of crowds and fan-girls and victims, when absolutely none of those roles are necessary to anybody’s survival.
Give others the liberty to fuck up royally without responses of love, and save love and cruelty both for those willing and able to earn them.
What evils might ever possibly be nurtured from such a principle?