Let’s tackle a big subject today, which is how to live our lives thoughtfully. I’ve been giving this some thought and would like to share them with you on this Presidents’ Day. Forgive its length, but, c’mon, the market is closed, so what else are you gonna do?
I’ll begin with the core question that has plagued me: collectivism versus individualism. That is to say, is it better to live one’s life with the collective body as the primary consideration, or our individual selves?
My own inclination throughout my life has been the latter. Perhaps part of it comes from being the youngest child of the family, which makes me a mama’s boy, and another comes from how I was raised.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a family that was in many dimensions traditional: we went to church without fail every Sunday, my dad worked in an office while my mom stayed at home, we were decently multitudinous (six family members), and we were told every day to be good and listen to our teachers. (My mom would even lay that line on my dad as he went to work downtown each morning, and his rejoinder every single time was “I am the teacher.”)
Besides this, my household was persistently Republican in their voting habits (the actual GOP, not the sadistic freak show we have today) and were I to do a poor job doing some basic task such as making my bed, my mother would scowl at me and say to me, “Union laborer!”
Keep in mind, this is when I was seven years old. Anyway, I got the message.
Thus, meritocracy, persistence, and the Protestant work ethic ruled the Knight household. It is thus no surprise that everyone in my family is successful, everyone has built their own happy family, and there hasn’t been a divorce in the entire Knight family tree going back to Adam and Eve. It’s a good family.
In sum, the way we were raised worked. Our parents did us right.
Yet how could I reconcile those principals with a Christian upbringing as well as my own theological ethics? How could I simultaneously believe it was every man for himself but that also we are all united as one and that loving thy neighbor was the greatest commandment of them all? I cannot offer you an answer, but I do know that whatever that answer is, it remains an important mystery we should ponder frequently with the hope of untying that knot.
I have an inordinate amount of time to think, and I tend to stew on questions like this quite a bit. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that I probably value freedom more than anything else, and coupled with that, I need to be in control of whatever I consider my own domain. This is probably why I’ve never managed to play the corporate game and climb the ladder. I like to run my own show, even if that show is just a one-man band, and being out of control, even partly, entails a contemporaneous loss of freedom, or at least agency.
Catch Her!
As much as I cherish freedom, I know it shouldn’t be absolute. Exercising one’s freedom should never harm another person or oneself, and sometimes freedom has to be constrained by those wiser than us simply because it’s for our own good and we don’t know any better.
Take my precious puppy Mishka, for example. She loves freedom as much as any living creature, but it would be reckless of me to just let her run around the neighborhood without boundaries, since she would probably be killed by a car. She doesn’t know that, but I do. I have a perspective that she lacks, through no fault of her own, thus it is incumbent upon me to oppress her freedom inasmuch as it is for her own safety and benefit. I am denying her a little freedom for her welfare.
Thus, as the sadder-but-wiser presence in her life, I curtail her freedom by doing everything I can to make sure that she doesn’t go outside the boundaries of our property unless she’s on a leash and harness. My love for her vastly supersedes any respect I may have for her rights as a free being.
I have a real-life example for you, and it’s recent. Earlier this month, a young woman came over to watch after the dogs and the house while we went on a brief trip. The house sitter wasn’t careful enough, and when she tried to carefully slip through the front door again to get her suitcase, Mishka pushed past and ran out the door toward the big wide world.
Naturally, I freaked out, because I had no idea what was going to happen. We do not live on a busy street, but my brain is wired for What Can Go Wrong (which probably explains the whole permabear thing), so I was frantically chasing my puppy dashing down the sidewalk while trying to think of what in the hell I should do.
It was a horrible and helpless feeling. I felt powerless, which sits poorly with me. Like I said, I need to be in control. Then I had an idea. Hoping it would work, I called out her name, “Mishka!” and she stopped in her tracks. I then bent over, extended two fingers, and said, “Touch!” (Which is something we practice in puppy preschool, since that command is supposed to compel them to run back and touch their nose to your fingers and get a treat).
To my astonishment, delight, and relief, she came bounding back just as fast, and the moment she got back to me, I picked her up and gave her a big hug. telling her what a great girl she was. She was probably wondering where her treat was, but I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more relieved in my life. I hope my affection was as satisfying as the dried anchovy that she probably expected.
So, yes, I’m denying her a certain amount of freedom, but it’s the right thing to do.
This lines up with how my attitude toward capitalism has changed. When I was in my teens, I very much embraced a laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog, may-the-best-man win kind of attitude. I felt that there should be pretty much no regulations or curtailment of market dynamics, and I considered those laying down such laws to simply be officious meddlers who couldn’t hack it in the real world.
Well, I’ve greatly modified my views. It dawned on me decades ago that absolutely unrestrained capitalism would lead to precisely the same kind of disaster that Marx envisioned, so a hybrid of some sort – – capitalism with the guard rails of rules, anti-trust, and frequent examination – – was the way to go about it. Sure, it wasn’t as “free“, but it also wouldn’t get run over by a car, allegorically speaking.
A counterexample of this came last week in the form of Trump blowing up the EPA’s ability to regulate polluters. Free-for-all capitalists celebrated this as the liberation of the bedraggled, over-regulated, over-oppressed corporations, but if you seriously think this isn’t going to also mean a more polluted, toxic, and dangerous environment, I’ve got a cross-eyed FBI Director to sell you.
Facts with Fiction
It isn’t hard to find works of fiction that help examine this topic of collectivism. A recent favorite of mine is the series Pluribus, which presents an Earth whose entire population has been subjected to a virus which gives them a universal hive-mind. Every single individual among the billions on the planet is part of the same mega-brain, with access to that entire collection of knowledge, wisdom, language, skills, and so forth.
For whatever reason, about a dozen humans on Earth aren’t affected by the virus (such as the protagonist of the show, the blonde in the picture below), and they struggle with the question as to whether to join the collective or not.
What has happened to humans isn’t all bad. On the contrary, now that humanity sees things from a universal perspective, there is no greed, no crime, no violence, no stealing, no lying. It is a truly sinless world, because the entire notion of “self“, which is the basis of all sin, doesn’t even exist anymore.
In a way, what has happened by way of this virus is that pure, unadulterated Communism has been established. The core problem with the Marxist/Leninist Communism that was tried in the 20th century was that it is utterly incompatible with human nature. It was destined to fail, and even as a small child, I understood that. Human beings are not wired for an utterly selfless society, because, in varying degrees, we are self-interested creatures. It simply doesn’t work, and it never will.
In the imaginary Pluribus world, however, it works beautifully, because there is no longer any self-interest except in the context of the “self” being every living being on the entire planet. There is a problem, however, which Carol (the aforementioned protagonist) intuitively recognizes.
In this new world order, humans will continue to live peacefully, largely based on the inertia from the tens of thousands of years of human effort acting as a tailwind. Yet Carol seems to understand that without any self-interested human drive left, humanity will actually die off over the course of time. Indeed, in spite of all their good intentions, the billions of humans on Earth have actually resorted to cannibalism, since consuming the flesh of their dead compatriots is preferable to them to harming any other life forms for nourishment.
As the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
(As a side note, this is actually closely related to the challenge AI is having, since it is running out of training data. The “data” is the collective knowledge humans have created and discovered. Now that the computers have run through it all, the question is whether they are just going to regurgitate what humans already figured out in infinite different forms, or if they’ll actually muster a truly new thought up at some point. Humans are innately creative; blend them together into a self-satisfied hive-mind, and the urgency to create ceases.)
A Cold Mountain and a Mirror
My affection for freedom, including modified freedom, isn’t especially unusual. My desire was to convey my own perception of this value since, one, I like to write about what I’m thinking, and two, I like my readers to know who it is behind this keyboard.
The second topic is closely related and more political, which is the culture of increasing cruelty and callousness which has pervaded our swiftly stumbling republic. I want to preface this by addressing head-on a rejoinder I get quite a lot, which runs along a very simple line: Oh, Tim hates Trump, so I guess he must have loved Biden. And, hey, what about Biden? He was, like, old and stuttered and stuff! The laptop! Dur-hay!
Look, folks, let me make one thing plain: in more normal times, I seriously gave about two craps about whoever lived in the White House. Whether it was Clinton or Bush (either number I or II) or Obama or any of the other many Presidents that have been around since I was born…………..I just…………didn’t………….care. Got that? Didn’t care! Not at all!
Sure, I was more inclined to like a Republican like Reagan than a Democrat like Clinton, but that’s just how I was raised. But any of those men, irrespective of party, didn’t really make me upset. Just this current one. It also was easier not to care about the former Presidents, because I didn’t read their surname 53,830 times every single day in every stinking article about every stinking subject on the planet. With this one, it’s ceaseless.
Returning to the theme of using fiction to conjure up present-day reality, I’d like to offer a couple of relatively contemporary examples. The first is the movie Cold Mountain, which is set in the Civil War and is the story of a young man who has deserted the Confederate army to make his way back home to the love of his life.
The bad guys in this movie are those charged with making sure the men are where they are supposed to be, which, specifically, is off fighting the war. The “home guard” patrols the land, torturing or killing anyone who gets in their way or who has, for whatever reason, chosen not to be fighting the war.
Here is one scene from the movie which depicts the home guard – which is basically the ICE of its day – terrorizing a farmer whose sons are supposed to be fighting but, as the home guard correctly believes, are hiding at home. They murder the father and then, in an effort to coax the boys out of hiding, mercilessly torture the mother until the boys emerge, at which time they shoot them dead. Greg Bovino probably has this scene in his spank bank.
There are many people in the early 1860s who would have supported this kind of brutality. After all, they would say, the law is the law. Every man has to fight for his country. There shouldn’t be any excuse for not fighting such as cowardice or, let’s say, bone spurs. Thus, the home guard (again, an old-fashioned ICE) terrorizes the citizens and murders them in cold blood with impunity. This is the age we live in, once again.
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, having been born the same year the show was, I know all the original series episodes quite well, and I have many favorites. One of them, The Squire of Gothos, has an exchange between Trelane, the antagonist, and the crew of the Enterprise. It reads as follows:
KIRK: (holding Trelane back) Yeoman Teresa Ross. I believe you have met our science officer Mister Spock.
TRELANE: You do realize, don’t you, that it’s in deference to the Captain that I brought you here?
SPOCK: Affirmative.
TRELANE: I don’t know if I like your tone. It’s most challenging. That’s what you’re doing, challenging me?
SPOCK: I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline. I object to power without constructive purpose.
TRELANE: Oh, Mister Spock, you do have one saving grace after all. You’re ill-mannered.
Power without constructive purpose. What a marvelously succinct way to express this administration. Vainglorious. Callous. Venal. Vain. Unscrupulous.
An even more fitting Star Trek reference is in the episode Mirror Mirror, in which the premise is that a transporter malfunction sends four crew members into a parallel universe in which all the ships and the people are the same, except all the values are inverted.
The Federation is now an Empire. Ascent in rank is accomplished through treachery and murder. If a lifeform does not bend to the will of the Empire, they are killed. And, worst of all, their uniforms are now designed by Victoria’s Secret.
As a little boy, I was fascinated by this episode but also horrified that my heroes like Spock were now sinister (plus, the beard). I felt unmoored by the experience, since the crew of the Enterprise had always represented decency, virtue, principles, and doing the right thing, and now they were all just vicious, self-interested thugs. Remind you of any changes that have happened in our culture lately?
The climax of the episode is when Kirk encourages Spock to be the one brave man in this sinister universe to defy authority and to be a leader for change. It’s an awesome speech, carried out in a way that only William Shatner could pull off.
These days, I I feel like I’ve beamed into a parallel United States in which the roles which used to garner admiration and respect – – – Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, Speaker of the House, President, and all the rest – – are now populated by grifters, drug addicts, charlatans, sociopaths, and crooks. The wisest words ever uttered were “This, too, shall pass”, but as we as living day to day through this Fourth Turning, I ask myself what are the odds that in January 2029 the results of the election will be honored, a peaceful change of power will take place, and we can all move back to normalcy and a day of reckoning for all those who have caused harm. I’m thinking something like 80% at this point.
Stay In Your Lane
Yo, Tim, stick to charts! Stay in your lane, libtard!
Errr, no. Not gonna happen. And if that makes you uncomfortable, Yahoo Finance is right over there.
I listened to an interesting interview with one of the girls of the Little Rock Nine who is now, obviously, an elderly woman. She was the in the group of black kids who were permitted to go to the formerly all-white Little Rock Central High back in the 1950s, and of course she was constantly subjected to taunts, screaming, cruel names, hatred, and death threats. You can just see the unalloyed contempt of the girl walking behind her in the photo below (I can guarantee you 100% if that same scowling girl was living in the modern age, she’d be wearing a red hat).
In the interview, the elderly woman said that among the 1,800 or so students at the school, about 40-50 of them were the truly mean and vicious, and no more than ten of the students took the risk of being kind or even just smiling. At that time, those very rare smiles helped give her strength in the face of the derision and unalloyed hatred of the bullies.
What struck me, though is that besides the vicious ones, and the handful of kind ones, the vast majority – – the 1,740 out of 1,800 students – just stayed silent in apparent indifference. “Don’t get involved” would have been their motto. They didn’t hate the black kids enough to spend energy on it, but they also didn’t dare take the risk of being decent to them for fear of being targeted themselves. So, in modern terms, almost all the fellow students there were NPCs: non-player characters. Just background noise.
That’s not for me. Again, evil cannot recognize itself. Everyone thinks they are right, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t think that way. Regrettably, stupidity doesn’t recognize itself either. The stupid are too stupid to know they are stupid, whereas the intelligent, paradoxically, are consumed with constant self-doubt.
It doesn’t help that we live in times which celebrate crime, brutality, and stupidity and smirk and sneer at reason, logic, and the rule of law.
Violence is not strength, and compassion is not weakness. We live in dark times, as the Fourth Turning predicted, and they are going to get much darker, but hopefully not so dark that we do not survive this nightmare. It is, to me, simultaneously fascinating and horrific, as both an observer and participant. I sincerely believe the next thirty-five months will be the most dangerous and fraught in our lives. All I can manage to do is try to think through it and, when I can, try my best to write what I’m thinking. Plus, most important of all, to remain in the light.
All I can do in the meantime is wait, hope, think, and write, and to the extent my very imperfect self is able, be kind when I have the opportunity to do so, especially when it’s hard. Witnessing the monsters around us at least has provided the benefit of showing what actual Christianity is and, for the first time in my life, deeply clarified what Jesus was talking about. I’m going to keep trying.
