I obviously hold a growing obsession in observing this scale of self-sacrifice vs self-aggrandizing, meeting the needs of others prior to self-fulfillment vs asserting self-fulfillment prior to meeting the needs of others. It’s the root of the left/right paradigm, helping or not. Uplifting anyone above the rest, even one’s self, is supremacist rightwing. Divas are rightwing, all political parties are rightwing, celebrity worship is rightwing, brand loyalty is rightwing, religious fervor is rightwing. It all implores the same logic of inequality, which personality cults perpetually make allowances for.
And I bet the farm that, until our culture is made to acknowledge this, enough to remember that there are far more rewarding things to stroke than egos, nothing about our lives will ever find reason to improve. Anything troubling you boils down to ego, either your own or that of an infringing other. Regardless of whichever wealth, power or authority you may lack, cohabitation with your ego, that of another or discerningly neither, is your call to make and yours alone. In or outside of mirrors, principles and conviction mean infinitely more than positivity for the sake of positivity. Fragile egos are no less worrisome.
Any form of hierarchy, no matter its declared intent, which does not strengthen the weakest links to its chain is morally and ethically in the wrong. When any collective effort, be it bent on behalf of state or church or industry, is not generating independent equals without exceptions it is creating co-dependents. It’s Capitalism, which can’t help but to make commodities of people when profit is the endgame. There are ongoing debates among overpaid economists on how to rationalize measurements of workers and customers as human capital in company portfolios. Ongoing because it’s unethical. The business-minded tell themselves that NDAs/non-competes exist to protect corporate IP, but shy from addressing how that IP evidently encompasses the free will of workers themselves even after their employment ends. Likewise, every possible variety of governance invariably self-implodes, because controls cannot possibly exist without their being exploited for self-interest. Money is power even when you rent a game rather than buy a homeless lady a meal. Guns are made to shoot, even were society not oblivious to the fact that while some persons might be able to control their liquor it must still be regulated for the sake of the great many more who allow it to do their thinking for them. Etc. Even with the fetishists of communism or socialism, putting anybody into a position of authority raises their ego, so that inevitably they behave as capitalists. And it’s not communist or socialist agendas undoing democracies foreign or domestic, it’s capitalism. It’s ego-centrism.
While there is enough crow to end world hunger forever, I do think there’s a difference between stomaching some humble pie and “settling” or “giving up”. In the sense that salvation and sacrifice are indistinguishable in the end, despite everyone demanding only the one for themselves and the other for their enemies. And it’s thoroughly ironic, as welcoming sacrifice so that one’s enemies might come to know salvation is the definition of love which each and every orthodox religion claims to be selling. Yet not one can leave the judging for their maker. They want the cake of the non-believers. But the struggle to avoid megalomania must be internal first and foremost, elsewise it becomes “Do as I say, not as I do.” None of us is freer than the comforting rationalizations we put ourselves through to survive the day, but we do have so much more purpose than we want to be responsible for, and letting the more selfish Bogart all of that purpose is no less harmful than letting them Bogart all resources.
When verifiably none of us are the universe, no matter how enticing the diamond gap to the yoga pants. Your shit *does* stink, as does that of the people you wish to befriend, wish to be or wish to fuck. If icons are truly so helplessly great, then what need could they possibly have of you, of your attentions, your affections, your resources and your preciously dwindling time? And of far graver importance, the very obscene thing nobody will confess of themselves, if you yourself are truly so great, why do you not exist aside from dependence on church, state or capital?
Why not instead be for those with nothing to give of themselves? Where is the threat to that? If it’s competition, then for what exactly? To be the one taking from those down below?
To be the villain rather than hero in the tales of others, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?