Power

I was just thinking, today, about all of the foolish ways in my life that fighting undermined important relationships and goals in my life, either lording over others or being lorded over or just fighting that goes nowhere.

The most important losses in my life - other than the deaths of others that I had no control over - have occurred because of this fact of life. And it just so sad to me that I and everyone have to repeat this mistake over and over again until we learn the lesson.

I lost the closest friendship I've ever had in my life as a consequence of this kind of fighting. And most of my mistakes in relationships with others have happened similarly. Still do.

I've gotten tons better. I'm a better teacher, today, as a consequence. And a better friend. And son and brother. And student. And just a better person, today, as a consequence, I think.

I've watched all of the power-mongering over the last 7-8 years or so, the whole time I've thought exactly what I said to a friend of mine this weekend, "How in the world could people behave in such snarky, dishonest, ugly, mean-spirited, power-obsessed ways and think that other people should take their example or judgments about the world seriously?"

They shouldn't, is the answer. And less and less people do, these days. We're in kind of a crisis of confidence, these days. Liberal democracies. Our confidence in our political leaders and our important institutions, like the press and universities, is at a serious low. And yet they keep moving in the same ugly, dishonesty, power-obsessed directions until they can finally learn the lesson.

They will. We will. We always do. It just takes time.

Imperialism did not unravel in a day. It took most of the 20th century post-World War I and post-World War II for us to finally give up its ugly logic.

And commitments to freedom, similarly, have taken many, many years to take root. America was only committed as the first nation to sustainably predicate itself on the principles of freedom and democracy 232 years ago. Liberalism, as we know it today, dedicated to freedom and independence of conscience and choices of individuals, was a serious coherent philosophy for less than that. And democracy and liberalism as presumptions for how the world should organize itself and as the clearly stronger means of doing so has only been plain and clear within the 20th century, or the last 100 years or so.

It will take time for freedom to take more unshakable root and for power to be limited in the imaginations of free peoples, nevertheless unfree peoples, and, thus, in its use and justification, in the 21st century and forever beyond that time.

And, today, as I reflected on my own failures when it comes to power and aggression and way I've treated others and the ways that I've been treated, it was just reinforced for me what a small, petty, and ignoble aspiration it is to have power over others rather than caring about their own free and self-determined aspirations for themselves.

That was Twain's big problem with the world, I think. That we could never give up the pettiness. And, in the face of that, what are you going to do but laugh? And maybe help us laugh at ourselves.

Same shit. Different era.

Until we learn to give it up, that is.