What is not healthy, though, is obsession which takes you constantly out of the present moment. Even if you build a huge stockpile of weapons and food, if you continue to obsess about possible dangers, you are not healthy. Which life are you defending, if you live in continual fear? We all die. Your family will die. Defending the present life consists mainly in living in peace, happily, and with contentment. This sort of defense few talk about.
It seems to me that many people who carry psychological and more particularly developmental wounds into adulthood–which is just about everyone–feel an exaggerated need both to be protected and to protect. It may seem paradoxical, but I think many people in dangerous professions feel more fear than the population as a whole, and are pushed into professions like the military, law enforcement, and fire fighting because in those places fear is a valid emotion, and taking aggressive precautions for ones safety are not seen as unwarranted or excessive.
But even beyond this, I think people who feel the need to “stick up” for people who have not asked for their help are enacting the same impulse. Think of the people who feel the need to “stand up” for blacks and other minorities, and who feel not just the right but the DUTY to get angry on their behalf. This is dysfunctional protective impulse. We cannot save the slaves, now. We cannot undo the wounds and horrors of history. For that matter, we cannot resurrect the Union or Confederate dead. We cannot undo the horrific wounds and violent deaths of the soldiers who suffered in their own ways every bit as much as any slave who was ever flogged or hung or burnt alive, and about whom no one talks.
We cannot LIVE in any place but the present, even if our imaginations may give us the illusion of life in other times and places, even if it may anoint us as guardians of some sort, even if it may soften the tensions and uncertainties of the present by presenting us what appear to be the certainties of the future or past.
It is an interesting seeming fact, presented in my NARM book, that while hypervigilence is a common and expected outcome of certain types of trauma, so too is HYPOvigilence, which is an exaggerated and unrealistic sense of ones own safety. It seems to me this trait is on display among all those who seemingly have a compulsive need to believe the best of people, when we all know the truth is usually in the middle somewhere.
Enough is enough. The right amount is the right amount. Since none of us are omniscient–even if the psychological defenses of some cause them to compulsively assume they know more or less than they do–we all must guess where things stand, what is appropriate.
These things can and should be discussed. A multiplicity of views should be welcomed, not hated. The whole point of a pluralistic society, one dedicated to the gradual improvement of human individuals, and the improvements in society which such improvement enables, is to allow ideas to compete, and the best ones to win.
One cannot speak of Socialism without speaking of the suppression of dissent. There is a fundamental homology between the government picking winners and losers in the economic realm, and that of the ideational realm. There is a fundamental homology between the notion that no people are better than others, and that no ideas are better than others, even if one idea–that of egalitarianism uber alles–reigns both supreme and unquestioned.
I feel cool breezes on pleasant days, and watch the clouds drift by. I am thankful for my modest home, a pantry filled with whatever I choose to put in it, and the ability to dictate the actions of my day. I do not blindly assume that this situation must continue forever, and I do not look at the past and assume that all of the cruelty, emotional detachment, vain attachment to ones people and ones cause, and all of the violence associated with them cannot return, and do so quickly.
It seems to me many Democrats have vivid visions of Trump supporters burning in fire, all while nourishing their own sense of their own righteousness, their own compassion, their own empathy, and their own vision for a peaceful and just world.