An internet friend (which is a friend I have not yet had a beer with or worked out with) asked me to write a post on nationalism/patriotism, and sent me an American flag emoji to clarify. This was around the 4th of July. Well, here it is. It’s not likely the sort of thing expected, but I think most people who know me come to realize at some point that I rarely walk or reason in straight lines when I’m exploring. Logic gets you from A to B, but the process of understanding something as complex as nationalism, for me, consists in something like scribbling circles over and over in random loops while I keep my mind on the topic.
And I am going to endeavor, actually, to combine two lines of related thought here. I think the emergent product will hopefully be satisfying, for me and for others.
My process, however, since I am going to try and tie a lot of things together, is going to begin with some disconnected observations.
First, I wanted to comment that the idea of a nation, from which nationalism stems, is actually quite recent. Until perhaps, say, 1800, people felt loyalty to their locale, to communities small enough that they knew the leaders, if not well enough to have over for dinner, but well enough to recognize on the streets. I think Aristotle said the proper size for what I will call a human societal unit, or Polis in his time, was no larger than the range within which someone shouting from a tower could be heard. I think 10,000 was his limit.
I’m listening to a book on the 30 Years War, and the accumulation of territories by the Hapsburgs in 1700 was interesting. Their king was in Spain, but they ruled Austria, parts of Hungary, parts of Germany, parts of Italy, etc. They might have Saxony, but not Prussia. They might have Florence but not Venice. Everything came in what we would view as small parcels of power, all of course with a king or some equivalent, like a Duke, or Viscount, or something of that nature. Some regions, depending on the people, were no doubt more open to discussion and even criticism, but democracy per se was not seen anywhere in Europe, or as far as I know anywhere else on the planet, outside the Greek Democracy, and the Roman Republic, both of which did not last very long.
And keep in mind the linguistic diversity of most of the world. Consider the language Kashubian. Have you heard of it? I hadn’t. It’s spoken in a region smaller, I would suppose, than most US States. Nearly all of the world is like that.
Look at this very interesting map: https://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/store/p315/Tribal_Nations_-_48%22×55%22.html
There are no borders, are there? You only need borders when somebody is expanding and you want them to stop. If everybody stays put, keeps their population stable, and leaves their neighbors alone, then you don’t need good borders for good neighbors. If life were not much better, for now, in the United States than Mexico, we would not need a fence to keep them out.
So here is the first point I will make: most nations are in effect empires where all diversity has been conquered and tamed or eliminated. In the United States, I have for some time said we might view the entirety of our nation as an empire conquered from natives, most of whose languages and customs disappeared. A
Now, much of this was from disease which we did not spread intentionally. There was one case of the British giving a blanket infected with smallpox to some tribe they opposed, but most of the death from disease was just a lack of the immunity most Europeans were more or less born with, since those diseases had long spread in Europe.
I recently read a very poignant story about an Indian kidnapped by the British from his home somewhere in Massachusetts, and taken in effect as a curiosity and a present to the Queen. When he was eventually allowed to return home, they–he and the English bringing him home–witnessed mile after mile after mile of deserted villages. Disease had killed everyone. People fleeing the disease in one village had unwittingly spread it to others. There is no way to calculate the cultural cost of all this. Entire societies were wiped out in months. We will never know what precious knowledge was lost. Most of these tribes had their own languages. They had their own beliefs and rituals. There was no more a “typical” Native American than there was or is Barack Obama’s “typical” white woman.
But of course we fought and beat and marginalized many Indian tribes. As I have commented, the Trail of Tears is not so very different from the Bataan Death March. Japan, then, was merely acting from roughly the ethnocentricity of America in the 19th century.
Which brings me to the second line I want to pursue. My intent is not to run down America. Rather, I want to place us in a context where we remain unique; unique not in our actuality, but in our ideals and founding assumptions.
I think it can be taken as a more or less axiomatic principle that those who condemn the imperialism, or injustice, or racism of America readily accept equal and usually much worse crimes elsewhere. This means no real principle is in play, and the criticisms personal, subjective, and tribal.
If you look at the Communists who want to criticize America, there is a perspective from which many of their complaints are valid. But compared to WHO? The Soviets? The Russians? The Chinese? The Venezuelans?
There is no nation on the planet run by people whose ancestors did not commit crimes. Without even looking at the history, I feel very sure that white people in Sweden ran the natives–the Suomi, or Laplanders–out of much of their land. But it happened 1,000 years or more ago.
France, to take another example, was never a nation. Our name for it comes from the Franks, who were an aggressive cultural group. For a long time it was called Gaul, but by the Romans, who conquered much of it. They displaced the native Celts, who largely assimilated and disappeared. This has some interesting facts in it: https://frenchmoments.eu/what-is-france-in-french/
And for that matter, one of the first peoples the Romans conquered were the Etruscans, who were in Tuscany. I remember reading somewhere that Lorenzo de Medici still spoke Etruscan, back around 1500.
So it is reasonable to say that the nation, per se, is almost always and inherently constituted by acts of violence, just as almost all nobles, wherever they are found, are the inheritors of past effective acts of violence (I think the latest Kingsman commented on that, which I liked; I also liked how the first scene showed a concentration camp in the Boer War).
So is any nation innocent? No, I don’t think so. It’s just a question of how bad the violence was, and how far back it does. Switzerland alone stands out to me as perhaps largely innocent. They originated a basic democracy a very long time ago, and have maintained it. They are a Confederation. It’s in their official name. They are overlooked by nearly everyone, and I think they like it that way. The primus inter pares Central Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, is located there. If there is a Them, it would seem They have a strong foothold in that nation. So that makes them guilty!! But I digress, as usual. That is the White Dog. I’m sniffing under that bush over there to see if any of my virtual friends–I only ever meet them by smell–have been there lately.
But I think that brings me to my second point–which is an assertion I will attempt to justify–which is a large shift, but hopefully a useful one.
All cultures, for all of human history, have been predisposed to what we would term narcissism, both in their internal relations, and in their external relations.
Bear with me for a moment, while I explore this.
What I would assert is that, just as the idea of a “nation” is modern–which is to say recent with respect to human history–so too is the idea of INDIVIDUATION.
When I look around me, I see a LOT of people who, even now, even with our focus on self determination, personal autonomy, individual conscience and the like, have failed to emerge from the fog of functional emotional and energetic disconnection.
Now, it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to feel sure of this, but why would relatively poor and stunted emotional development not have been the default for most of the life of physiologically modern humans? Life was precarious and short, and much cooperation happened to ensure communal survival, which obviously implied the individual survival most people naturally worked for. So helping others helped you. That didn’t mean you were sensitive to their deep emotional states. That didn’t imply more than the most rudimentary empathy, that necessary to see obvious feelings and react accordingly.
So when the Babylonians, I think it was, would cook captives taken in conquest slowly over fires simply because they enjoyed tormenting people, this was because THEY DID NOT SEEN THEM AS EQUAL HUMANS.
Seeing the Other as human is not something most cultures have done for most of history. Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun. China is the Middle Kingdom, which is to say the center of the world. History is largely a chronicling of one horror after another, committed with the thoughtlessness and lack of remorse of a lion killing a deer. Of animals, in other words.
This Beast, who might now be reified as, say, a goat headed man, has always been present. We WERE animals and for a very long time.
Now, I have pondered narcissism long and hard–as I’ve shared repeatedly, both of my parents were in my view narcissists, which is a bad start, but it made me who I am, whoever I am–and I want to make some claims.
Here is one: narcissism consists in the unconscious denial of an inner Shadow, specifically fear and latent aggression. I’m not sure that’s the exact list or exact formulation, but I’m going to play with it.
Primitive people, as we call them, believed the world was magical and filled with spirits who determined nearly everything. If something good happened, or something bad happened, it was spirits or gods.
Now, from at least Durkheim onwards, social analysts–who might reasonably be called deconstructionists in the obvious outer form of that word without referencing the actual history of that term–have said that all these spirits were just externalizations of emotionally charged imaginings.
If you lack true self awareness, and a true capacity for inner reflection–finding a mirror in yourself, and studying what you see there reflected back–when you feel fear it might easily seem like something OUT THERE is causing it. An evil spirit is present.
So what I think I want to argue is that narcissism is defined by seeing bad OUT THERE, and only good IN HERE. In me. In my home. In my people.
And I think this leads to the nearly universal practice of sacrifice. If evil is out there, then it can be collected out there, and dealt with out there. If a community is filled with rage or fear–which of course can happen for many reasons, from bad weather, to sickness, to personal conflicts–that rage or fear can for a time be dissipated by murdering something out there, which could be a human or an animal.
And I think in my mind to the Jewish priests ceremonially murdering spotless lambs. Two things happen at the same time. On one level they make the lamb perfect and beautiful and sacred AND THE PRIEST ACQUIRES FOR HIMSELF BY NARCISSISTIC OSMOSIS THOSE QUALITIES, while ALSO putting all the sins and disquietudes of the community or person offering the sacrifice onto the lamb, which then has its throat slit, and then is perhaps consumed whole by a fire in the ritual called a Holocaust.
So in a narcissistic community, God is created in mans image of himself as powerful, pure, and just, even when, according to our modern understandings, evil is being done, and innocents hurt and killed.
I think this is close to the truth, and it explains the odd dichotomy of religions founded on forbearance and justice acting in truly awful, bloodthirsty ways with no self awareness at all.
Just because I found it interesting, I will note that until very recently–it was most likely stopped by the Chinese, but lasted well into the 20th century–it was the practice in Lhasa to have an annual scapegoat, which was a person (it may have been two) upon whom the sins of the city were ceremonially dumped, and who was ritually expelled from the city. And it was considered a bad omen if they lived more than a week or two out the harsh Tibetan wilds. Such is my recollection from Alexandra David Neels account of it. I will note, as I likely did at the time, that her “My Journey to Lhasa” is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. She is one of my heroes.
Here is a second claim I will make about narcissism: it consists in ROLE PLAYING. The priest plays the part of the priest. The wife plays the role of wife. All of this is enforced with VIOLENCE.
And this is the root of hierarchy, in my view.
Here is the thing: a narcissist is someone who is incomplete without seeing themselves reflected back in the eyes of another. They do not have complete self awareness. It is precisely the lack of a stable felt sense of self which drives them. They have shut out conscious awareness of their own capacity for evil, and the cost of this is that they have to play roles which work to hide this fact.
And of course this felt sense of incompleteness creates anxiety. One obvious and logical correction for this anxiety is to feel different because superior and better. Social hierarchy is how one set of people enable themselves to escape this anxiety by being SEEN by others, and treated by others–this is essential–as better. Different. A hierarchy is a means of generating narcissistic supply by creating a social system, buttressed by an ideology imposed by social and physical violence, in which some people can see in the eyes of others respect and to some extent fear or even “love”.
And here is thing: living as an incomplete human being is WORK. You are living a lie. You are embodying a lie. Narcissistic supply is what makes it EASIER. You are forcing others to join you in the lie, to support you in the lie.
Do you see how Leftism embodies this process perfectly? It takes all the worst aspects of human history, eliminates God, and erects idols to psychological maladies. It makes a positive virtue of being an incomplete, relentlessly fearful human being. You simply push your own evil out to others. THE Other, who is anyone not like you.
And I will be doing whatever, musing, and sometimes thoughts will hit me that make my jaw drop a bit. Here is one: there is such a thing as suppliant narcissism. Submissive narcissism. Narcissism where you get your own supply by BEING the one in the order who is not just providing narcissistic supply to your “superiors” (who if anything are your inferiors and at least equal in most moral respects) but benefiting by the LOSS OF FREEDOM.
What do you get? Freedom from your OWN anxiety. Freedom to ignore your OWN needs, your own history, your own personality, your own spark. And freedom to be cruel by externalizing all the fear and pain you are not allowing yourself to feel and process properly.
Fear is the root of all of this, again, specifically unconscious fear that people do not allow themselves to feel and process.
And what is cruelty? Anything you do out there is something you feel in here. It is axiomatic that cruel people are unhappy people. Why are they unhappy? They are incomplete. They are playing roles that are hard to play because they are artificial and unnatural.
All of this is in the Tao Te Ching and other places. When the Tao is lost, goodness appears. What is goodness? It is set of rules you have to follow to be a “good” person. What is lost? Spontaneity. Sincerity. Understanding. GENUINE goodness, which is always imperfect, and always approximate, but always based upon acting from your real, true self.
I wrote in my notes the other day, on this score, that there is a sort of aggressive “giving” and “helping” that is actually motivated by a desire to hide. It is actually a means of keeping from conscious awareness an inner cruelty and callousness. Again, this is the Leftist mode in a nutshell. They don’t actually TRY to help people, because they are playing a ROLE, the role of the “Good Person”. And obviously the game is to be SEEN as doing so. This is literally a ritual activity that does not differ at all from the sacrifices of the druids or the Jews. It is a public piety which brings the attention of others, which works to reduce anxiety. It is a form of narcissistic supply.
And so called Equity or radical egalitarianism is, in my view, based on the core, unacknowledged sense that we are indifferent ash heaps. No moral or spiritual growth is possible, and the best way to enshrine–note the word–this idea is by rejecting morality and spirituality in practice, while invoking them for narcissistic supply.
Ironically–I use this word a lot because as someone who tries hard to think and live consistently I am keenly aware of the contradictions all around me–the only true path to honest and fruitful and happy and healthy egalitarianism is by recognizing that people ARE unequal. We differ in our talents and aptitudes and motivations, but only through acknowledging them, and teaching people HOW TO GROW do we get to a world where we are all brothers and sisters embracing one another in the light of a shared God.
What we have now is a radical hierarchicalism USING the rhetoric–the role playing, to be clear–of egalitarianism for narcissistic supply–which again is a means for reducing anxiety in insincere, incomplete people.
Another note I made was that ironically the only time People of Fear, as I have started calling them, are not wearing a mask is when they ARE wearing a mask in some sort of ritual or other. I have in mind conclaves like “Eyes Wide Shut” or the stereotypical dark room of people in hooded cloaks chanting something while they do something horrible. This event purges them of anxiety.
I read today that the New York Times recently published an editorial apparently praising the idea of cannibalism. No joke: https://www.infowars.com/posts/if-the-food-runs-out-new-york-times-accused-of-normalizing-cannibalism/
And chronic anxiety, again, is the result of denying your own capacity for evil, your own IT. So evil is done to prevent the conscious awareness of evil.
And of course conscious evil is embracing a half life. It is embracing a final defeat in the activity of becoming fully human and fully alive. I do think, though, that even most evil people find means of rationalizing, which is to say externalizing, what they do.
Sade is a hero to some people precisely because he decided to simply declare all rationalizations unnecessary, and that what he did to survive emotionally–to not kill himself from his relentless misery–a positive virtue. His vision was everyone wearing a mask in perpetuity, then disappearing into nothingness for all eternity. He specifically requested that his grave be hidden, if memory serves, and located far out in the wilds.
Actually, here is the specific request:
I categorically forbid the dissection of my body for any purpose whatsoever; I must pressingly request that it be kept for fourty-eight hours in the room in which I die … During this time an express messenger shall be sent to M. Le Normand, firewood merchant … to take my body and in his care transport it in the said firewood wagon to the woods on my Malmaison property … where I wish it to be placed, without any sort of ceremony … once the grave is filled in, acorns are to be scattered over it, so that in time the grave is again overgrown, and when the undergrowth is grown as it was before, the traces of my grave will vanish from the face of the earth as I like to think memory of me will be effaced from men’s minds
To state the obvious, he didn’t love himself, and no doubt felt that was his proper destiny. This is not a life to be wished for by anyone. It was not happy.
And this is worthy pointing out, because I am seeing Darth Vader touted as a hero. And as I’ve commented before, we made serial killers a kind of cultural folk hero long ago. These images are antidotes to fear, for fearful people. They represent Power, and Power is an antidote to helplessness. To get rid of fear they amplify it. This is not smart, happy, healthy, or likely to end well.
Now, I think all of this has been clear, to varying extents, to many people across the ages. This is the basic point genuine spiritual teachers try to share, each in their own way. Christ taught that love is all that matters. What is love? REAL love is the opposite of narcissism. It is the opposite of hierarchy and the NEED for sacrifice.
And nearly all spiritual teachers have recommended solitude. What happens in solitude? You confront your–what do we call them?–your inner demons. By doing so, you INDIVIDUATE. The narcissistic spell falls away. The Buddha taught this. The Hindus instituted this, among many ways, with the practice of the Sanyassins. The Sufis did this. Many aboriginal tribes of all places often had at least shamans that would do this. The Scandinavians had a ritual of sitting outside overnight.
And I think only as a person who EXISTS in this way can you really make contact with the one TRUE God, which is a spirit which is infinite and good, and who does not CARE what we do. We are all microbes. We can either choose to live in accordance with God, or not. The laws don’t change.
And to do what I probably often do, I will state the obvious. I’m on I think pretty firm ground in saying that I operate at a different level from most people, so I’m never sure that what is obvious to me is obvious to others.
The specifics of all existing religions are almost entirely spurious. God doesn’t care what two men do with their dicks in a closed room. God does not care if you keep the Sabbath or go to church. There are perhaps some religions, like Buddhism, more conducive to creating open, good, individuated people than others, but no religion is better than another. Some PEOPLE, as individuals, are better than others, but for my part I think all of it should be scrapped, and the whole thing brought within the realms of physics and psychology. What a beautiful thing if we actually used our technology to help people become happier, healthier, and life more harmonious for all of us.
As I have said many times, the Zero Point Field, or what Ervin Laszlo called the Akashic Field, or Lynn Taggart just THE Field is how this whole thing could and should be brought into science.
What is stopping this from happening? People of Fear.
I am reading Joan Grant’s book “The Eyes of Horus”. I really like her work, and have decided to read all her books. They feel real to me.
She says in there, in what she purports to be a memory: “Father says fear is the only real enemy. Set and fear are two names of the God of Evil.
Now, I have mentioned this before, but there is a Temple of Set in Santa Barbara. It is my understanding that among others that some Rockefellers have mansions there.
This is from that page: “Highly individualistic in basis, the Temple promotes the idea that practitioners should seek self-deification and thus attain an immortality of consciousness.”
Does everyone get to become a God? No, only a select few. Who can we assume runs the thing? Probably some very powerful people.
Here is the thing: I would conflate both this basic fantasy–which is what it is, according to how I understand the universe–with Transhumanism.
I wrote in my notes the other day that “Transhumanism is an effort to reach an eternal Now or Present without openness.”
Both of these idea and ideals are efforts at skipping the most important step in the process, which is becoming fully human, of individuating, of contacting and processing and learning from your wounds, from your rage, your fear, your sadness. Both stem from absolutely unmanageable shadows, filled with hurt, fear, loss, pain and a sense of division and separation. The fantasy of becoming a relative God in one way or another is simply Hierarchicalism taken to the next level. It is narcissism taken to the next level. It is sickness, unhappy, unhealthy sickness, taken to the next level.
It has long seemed likely to me that these hidden power elites torture their children to keep them in the fold. They grow up with the same insane need for power and unlimited wealth and privilege as their parents. The families protect their position by destroying all hopes of happiness in their children. I don’t think most people are able to grasp how unhealthy and sick some of these homes are, and will not share here any more than I already have in previous posts how I got a look at all this.
Which brings me back to Nationalism. In the modern era Nationalism as an ideology has mostly been used for war. Did the United States REALLY need to fight all the wars that it has? I don’t see it. What good did our war in Afghanistan do?
And Communism is really Nationalism simply taken onto a global stage. If every existing nation is an empire built on the bodies of conquered people–Russia certainly qualifies, as does China, France, Germany, the United States etc.–then Globalism, or Internationalism, is really just a desire to impose the same fate on the planet as a whole. It is a desire to eliminate cultural diversity, and impose a uniform anti-morality based on violence and conformity–upon generalized NARCISSISM of an ancient variety, based on fear–upon the whole planet.
The Globalists, in effect, want to do the same thing to the whole planet that Caesar did to Gaul, or the Scandinavians to the indigenous people, or the Russians to all the many varied peoples in that enormous empire called Russia, or that we ourselves did to the Native Americans.
As I see it, our two choices are stairs or the steamroller. The steamroller has been winning a lot lately. Either we embrace the notion and practice of individual flourishing, or we lose our humanity. And here is the thing: the people pushing this are only pushing it because they themselves have already decided NOT to individuate, not to grow, not to open themselves to Life. They have already lost their own battles, or at least have been losing for a long time, and of course lying about it.
I had a dream the other night I will share. I was in some sort of old cathedral. It was dark. Someone said “take the stairs. You will find it interesting.” Mozart was somehow involved–just by feeling–then I saw two men dressed like 18th century gentlemen, then I saw George Washington at the foot of the stairs. He watched me go up the stairs. As I was ascending someone said “It was Frank Lloyd Wright who figured it all out.”
I got to the top and it was absolutely astonishing. A roof had been built on the church that crossed the sky, and the whole scene was filled with amazing colors. I could see where the walls of that cathedral ended, and someone said “there are the supports”, and I looked at a support that was at least miles away rose up into the sky. It was so dizzying I had to sit down in the dream. Light was streaming in everywhere. Someone said “this is much better than windows”. The roof extended many miles in every direction, but somehow did not block the light. Then the structure I was on became buoyant in segments, and I wondered if it would fly. Then I woke up.
This brings me back to America. Most nationalisms are not that different in principle from rooting for a sports team. Germans have their history, and if they want to they can look at the good stuff and feel proud–Goethe, Bach, Kepler, Planck, etc.–and SO CAN EVERY OTHER NATION. But these are parochial attachments. They are contingent, local, subjective. And to be sure often the great heroes, as seen later, were attacked or ignored in their own times.
What I want to suggest here is that in that one respect America is no different. We can point to victories in the World Wars, putting a man on the moon, etc., but this, to me, is not the salient point. This is not different than being a Stealers fan even though you know Roethlisberger is a creep because they win a lot. America has its baggage. As many self loathing Americans, and haters worldwide, have obsessively commented, we have done a lot of bad things too.
BUT AMERICA IS THE ONLY NATION ON THE PLANET FOUNDED ON THE BASIS OF HUMANISTIC PRINCIPLES WE TRIED TO TAKE SERIOUSLY.
Did we have slaves? Yes. But slavery was universal at that time. Nobody objected to it. American Indians practiced it. Most Africans practiced it. The Chinese and Muslims practiced it. Slavery is a universal in human history. Why? Narcissism. It was in one sense practical to force people to do your work, and in another an easy way to get a sense of superiority, aka hierarchy.
But how was slavery ended? ON THE BASIS OF PRINCIPLE. Lincoln did not set out to free the slaves, but the Civil War started because he was a relentless and articulate opponent of slavery.
What does founding a nation based on principles get you? A STAIRCASE. A path for social and personal growth.
America is an anti-narcissistic project. It is founded on what was then the radical notion of HUMAN EQUALITY. It was founded on the idea that all lives matter. Did we then live out the “content of our creed”? No, but we created space for people like Martin Luther King Junior to point that out. We created a path for change, for evolution, for a system not rooted in tradition, ritual, and the ceremonial abuse of power.
Nothing like this had been done before. If Europe has often had democracies over the last one hundred years, we blazed the path. If most of the world speaks of “human rights” we did more than any other nation to make that possible.
If we say that racism is evil, then that is a white European notion, one founded in the enlightened notion that we are all equal.
True Liberalism–which is to say a true commitment to life, liberty, the right to the fruits of your own labor (versus having them stolen by whoever could, which is most societies for most of history), and the pursuit of happiness–is anti-narcissistic. It assumes that we all have both the right and the duty to grow as human beings. American was EXPLICITLY founded as a nation where ethical growth, personal growth, individuation, was protected and nurtured.
So you can really look at the flag in two ways. You can see both the triumphs and failures, and do some kind of math in your head, or you can look at it and see a dream, an ideal, a glowing city on the hill, whose defects–indeed like those in each of us–can and should be acknowledged, but which can be IMPROVED.
The way I interpreted my dream was that the initial cathedral was America, whose creation started long ago somewhere in Europe as a dream and vision. But was eventually built was a roof that was big enough for all nations.
The windows were ideologies, prejudices, subjective and narcissistic tribalistic thinking, and they were DONE AWAY WITH. The same light shined the same way on everyone. And once this was done, everyone and everything became covered in light, and fit to rise yet further, to things we cannot even imagine.
In your own life, if you do something thoughtless, cruel, unkind, stupid, you don’t put a bullet in your head. You don’t say “I made a mistake so I must die”. No, you recognize your defect, do your best to understand and correct it, and keep moving.
It is a signature aspect of the narcissistic personality that when they do something bad, they never take responsibility. They don’t grow. They can’t grow, without honest introspection, so they blame everyone but themselves. Does that sound familiar? You can see it written between the lines in the news every day.
And so there is an obvious parallelism with our worst critics. They don’t want to understand and grow. They want to destroy. Our past is their Out There, which means the Present must be sacrificed to quiet their own anxieties rooted in their very real, very large, and obvious personal character flaws; and quite often their own outright wickedness, which arises from a thirst for power, money, and privilege.
I will end this with a James Baldwin quote that I think captures this balance well:
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
What is he pointing to? The staircase.