Choosing Mass Murder?
The Donald would be glad to know that he's having such a worldwide effect. But it isn't true. Trump and his right hand man, Stephen Miller, who evokes the same fiendish creepiness as Himmler, are symptoms far more than they are causes of the disease that afflicts America.
The Guardian's putative philosopher and founder of the 'Happier Lives Institute' has hitched his wagon to the wellness craze, adding a patina of respectability by citing 'scientific research.' He offers this bromide for personal happiness and societal renewal:
'Research shows when we share meals with others, volunteer or strike up friendly conversations with strangers, we're not just making ourselves and others happier. We're rebuilding the social fabric that authoritarian politics tears apart and reducing the distrust that fuels politicians like Trump.'
That may fly in England, where Happier Lives is located, but its shallowness adds to the sinking feeling of the few thinking people left in the United States. As a true philosopher once said, 'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.'
The collapse of western civilization makes a mockery of such chicken-soup-for-the-soul remedies. Is it really necessary to point out that the polycrisis is intensifying, and the idea of 'rebuilding the social fabric' by means like this amounts to a partial remedy for half a century ago?
Volunteering and having friendly conversations are good things in themselves, but they don't come anywhere near meeting the multi-faceted crisis we face as individuals, societies and a species. A philosopher worth his or her salt is concerned with an adequate response at all levels, not with promoting more individualistic panaceas.
'A people die from too many lies,' Bill Moyers, President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary said during the Bush-Cheney prologue to Trump-Vance. When the history of this wretched period is written the consensus will be that despite America's triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, the social fabric in the US was ripped beyond repair at the same time the USSR collapsed.
So it's grating when the progressive mainstream media features fake pearls of wisdom from a professional philosopher like: 'Trump and co want to make you feel helpless and furious. Keeping your composure and finding joy are acts of resistance.' For a philosopher to write banalities like this when evil rules is philosophical malpractice.
The pretension of such 'think pieces' adds to a feeling of hopelessness in thinking people, whatever their educational level. Intellectual elites need to stop talking down to people, and start speaking to readers in the same way they speak to each other.
The fetid social fabric in the USA is the background from which a college student at Florida State University, the son of a police officer no less, used his mother's weapon to randomly shoot people on campus, killing two and wounding five.
It's inane to keep searching for individualistic motives when American society is sick from top to bottom. After decades of seeing enemies abroad and killing millions of people with impunity, from Vietnam to Yemen, Americans are now making war on each other.
Stoicism is all the rage, but it's just another word for suppressing one's emotions and carrying on. A favorite quote from Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born a Roman slave, is a wellness credo: 'We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.'
Such a notion fits perfectly with the fad about 'agency' and the entire absurd notion of 'choosing' to act ethically and happily. The truth, as Socrates pointed out, is that when we see things clearly we don't choose; we act. In the parlance of today, a chooser is a loser.
There isn't a duality and division between two things – the choice and the chooser. There is simply the choice as a challenge, and our clarity or confusion of action flowing from the depth or shallowness of our perception and insight.
No matter how much planning and 'premeditation,' the plague of mass murderers in the USA is the ultimate expression of pathological individualism. People, mostly young men, 'choose' to kill random people because their mental, emotional and social life is so sick that they strike out in horrific reaction to the internalized evil of society. Fragments kill; in-dividuals (non-divided human beings) do not.
We all face choices in life certainly, but choosing is an inherently false thing. We choose from the background of our conditioning and confusion, our unseen motivations, and from social and metaphysical compulsions of which we are unaware.
In short, there is no freedom in choosing, quite the opposite. We're free when we perceive, understand and act as a single unbroken movement.
Emphasizing individualistic happiness in a socio-political culture from which the boils of Trumpism have erupted is idiotic. And offering remedies like striking up friendly conversations with strangers as a remedy to repair a social fabric torn to shreds is ridiculous.
What can one do? Stop thinking individualistically, and in terms of the polls and movements promoted by a complicit media. One inwardly alive human being counts more than a million inwardly dead humans. But even the walking dead can awaken and come back to life.
With passion but without judgment, be self-knowing, and see society for what it is and people for who they are. Don't lose sight of things, but remain with things as they are, without becoming an activist.
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