And it is possible to feel honest empathy for big problems. You can care, actually care, about world hunger, or water scarcity, or the plight of women, and either be aware of it with no present capacity to do anything about it, or you can work to alleviate these problems.
The world is filled with misery. It seems many Americans, particularly young Americans, are completely unaware of this, and assume–to the very limited extent they think of anyone else at all–that most of the rest of world lives basically the same as us. This is, of course, ludicrous. Injustice, racism, sexism, misogyny, abuses of all sorts, and profound poverty are more common than their contrary, in much of the world. I read, for example, that African Americans, as a group, would be the 18th wealthiest nation in the world. As a group, they are doing MUCH better than nearly all Africans, economically. But you would never know it.
And misery has to be contextualized. I felt genuine pity and rage when I saw the Yazidi women in cages in Iraq and Syria, in a war Obama clearly furthers, if he did not start it outright. They put them in cages and set them on fire. They made many thousands of them sex slaves, even ones as young as 10, which was the Koranic age set by the example of Muhammad. I feel pity for all the girls who are forced into sex slavery all over Asia. I was talking to a woman who had worked with Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, and there prostitution is a family business which goes on, generation after generation.
I felt pity reading about the orphans in Brazil, which are probably still a big problem, who were living homeless in the streets, and being hunted down and killed by police death squads.
I am a student of history, which in no small measure is a study of human misery, most of it completely unnecessary, most of the result of arrogance, greed and stupidity. I am no fan of arrogance, greed and stupidity, and can be counted on to oppose it where I see it.
Which brings me to the place I was bound to go. It feels like there are interrogators who have lined us up and are going down the line with clipboards and asking everyone: DO YOU FEEL EMPATHY FOR THESE MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS, YES OR NO? If you answer yes, of course, with no reservations, then they move on. If you say “Yes, but . . .” anything, then you are yelled at. YOU ARE A MONSTER, A MURDERER, A RAPIST, A CRIMINAL. YOU ARE A HATEFUL EVIL HUMAN BEING. THERE ARE NO NUANCES HERE. YOU ARE WRONG, YOU ARE WRONG YOU ARE WRONG.
And I am left to recall they had this opportunity for outrage when the pictures were first published–if I am not mistaken, by Breitbart. Back then, especially if it was Breitbart, these same people would have dismissed–indeed DID dismiss–these claims out of hand as “right wing propaganda”. They are not interested in human rights abuses committed by their people. This is why they took no interest in ISIS, or Obama’s role in helping create that horrible, true monstrosity (which seems to have become irrelevant, since I have not read about them in some time). This is why they don’t care about Pakistani rape gangs, or the crimes of Communism, or any common sense abuse of human dignity, common ethical standards, the rule of law, or anything else which would outrage anyone with a truly intact sense of empathy.
Here is what I am thinking: what they are truly doing is interacting with their own notion of self, via an imagined, puppet, interlocutor. In Martin Buber’s terminology–and he may have discussed this specifically, although I can’t remember, having read the book long go–it is I and I via Thou.
What I mean is that they are interested in themselves, exclusively. They are profoundly selfish, unempathetic, morally retarded people. But nobody wants to think bad things about themselves. So they create this abstraction, the “Great Cause”. At this exact moment in time, before they forget about it and move on in the next few weeks to something we have no idea we will be arguing about passionately at the moment, it is the separation of criminal parents from their children they have brought along in the commission of their crime. Rather than ask to immigrate legally, most of them are abusing the provision of the law that allows them to ask directly for asylum if they show up on our border. Since most of them just want jobs–jobs that have been wanting throughout Latin America because of systemic corruption, laziness, and a persistent tendency to vote for socialists in their governments–they are not truly refugees from anything. They are simply demanding we give them something for nothing, which is not something any nation can do forever without courting disaster.
Be that as it may, imagine this screen in the mind of the typical Leftist, where they watch the movie of whatever social ill, or alleged social ill, they are presently focused on. They visualize themselves sitting in that movie theater, crying. And they react to this image by saying: oh what a wonderful person this is. Look how MOVED they are by human suffering. I really like this person. He is a good person. Most people are not like him. I bet conservatives don’t cry like this. They are not like us: noble, good hearted, generous, loving, compassionate.
Then there is this subtle flip. Obviously I do a lot of emotional work, and I have noticed often there quite sequences where the middle segment is invisible until you slow it down a lot. This is particularly true with long conditioned reflexes.
There is this moment where their unconscious says: you don’t give a flying fuck about those people. You are unhappy, confused, angry, and emotionally isolated. This happens in a nanosecond. Then they respond with “I HATE CONSERVATIVES”. It is self loathing, but it is directed outward.
Ponder how often you have interacted with self proclaimed “Liberals” and the MOMENT you disagree with them, they become enraged. They go into a limbic response, into fight or flight. What are you, then, to them? You are an existential threat. They have built a fragile bubble within which to live and which allows them to manage inconvenient, unpleasant, and ugly emotions. You threaten that. This is the core reality. They use the language of love, but they don’t mean it. They use the language of compassion, but they CAN’T mean it. They lack the emotional depth for it.
I lay in bed at night and ponder, at an emotional level, how far we as a people–and I mean the West generally, and would probably include now most Chinese and Japanese–have deviated from honest, direct humanity. I SEE, some days, how the relentless news cycle, the relentless distraction, the relentless superficiality, and constant hustle and bustle, separates us from our own core, authentic selves, and from one another. We don’t just separate because we lack time: we lack time, all too often, because we make ourselves busy, precisely to make “bad” feelings we lack the cultural intelligence to process, go away. This is perhaps the true root of Nazism, and is certainly the true root of its many progeny, including Antifa. Emotionally intelligent people do not make cartoons of their enemies, put on masks, and then threaten them with violence in the streets. These can only be the results of the willing acceptance of the worst impulses human instincts have to offer, those of tribal violence, emotional dis-integration, and the overall rejection of everything good the frontal cortex has to offer.
We can and should ask what the best solution is for these border families. But one question we need to ask is to what extent we create a Moral Peril by not punishing, not disincentivizing these illegal acts. There is misery down south, clearly. There is desperation, clearly. But there is misery and desperation in much of the world. Much of Africa, if it were on our border, would be trying to get over. Much of Asia, too. We can’t take the whole world, and if we accept this logically, that there is no feasible way to accept EVERYONE who wants to come here, then we need to draw lines. And one thing we need to make clear is that FAMILIES ARE NOT WELCOME. Don’t risk the well being and safety of your kids to get here. Stay where you are, and maybe even play a role in improving your own fucking country, rather than just call it a failed state and move here. Yes, I get that this is hard. I haven’t walked in their shoes.
But the flip side of this is that Americans have rights too. By definition, people willing to commit crimes to get here are willing to engage in criminality. Illegals commit crimes of violence vastly out of proportion to their numbers. Mothers have the right not to have their children murdered, as has happened many times.
I read the Navy is contemplating building a quarter BILLION dollar facility to hold all these people. Is this not money that could be put to use serving homeless veterans? Could we not use this money to help the poor in other ways?
Every time you spend money on one thing, it is no longer available for something else. Yes, you can borrow more, but this is how nations like Argentina keep fucking up repeatedly. They don’t want to say no. They want to try and do everything for everybody, and you can’t do that. No sane adult should even try.
Well, that’s my rant for this morning. I think there are some good psychological insights in here.
Edit: this was a completion of a post I started a week or two ago and had not time to finish. The emotional tautology I=I, via Thou. You could write it as I+Thou=I+Thou, where Thou is dropped on both sides, practically.
And self evidently, the movies being shown change. There will be some new outrage in two weeks. Count on it. Everyone will feel the same feelings “spontaneously” and wonder why we are so awful that we are not mouthing the same words all of them are mouthing, feeling the same things they are feeling, and instead having the temerity not to agree with them fully, instantly, and with no conditions or reservations.
And I will add that I am willing to grant the word “liberal” to people who listen, who do not go into Amygdala hijack the moment they realize I don’t share their assumptions.
To take this concrete example, self evidently we can’t take in 5 billion people, which is probably the rough number who would benefit from being here, if their being here changed nothing. That is the impossible limit on a continuum. Short of that there is where it creates large problems. Then smaller problems. And there is a point where immigration, on balance, is a net positive. There is a range which is negotiable, because all of us are guessing about the future behavior of this complex system. This sort of negotiation is the point of Liberal society. It is how we use our freedom of speech to find the optimal solutions to real problems.
And Milton Friedman, as usual, had a very interesting comment on this topic. He notes that we used to allow unlimited immigration, but would never do so now (his now was probably the 1980’s). Why, he asks. And he then points out there is a huge difference between immigration to jobs, and immigration to welfare. One helps, the other hurts. One adds, the other subtracts.
And again, it is reasonable to ask what is most likely of those who disrespect our nation and its laws the moment they enter, in the very act of entering without permission, without being welcomed, without being invited, and particularly given how enthusiastically places like California add them to the welfare rolls because they are reliable voters.