Crazy...

After this sustained, self-assured feeling about my work that I experienced, yesterday, I found myself in doubt, again, last night...

What always fuels my doubts is not any argument or logic or thinking or idea that has ever made me seriously rethink my ideas...

It's always just feeling and often perceived as so much in the minority in how force should be used...the perception that I am too soft...

Softness I regard as a good thing...as soft as is reasonably possible while still dealing constructively with serious problems and threats we face...

Clapton's Tears in Heaven reflect this kind of softness, I think...and the way it reflects greater wisdom in the face of tragedy...as does Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly (and Lauryn Hill's really incredible, if illegal, cover), in its own way...

I've never heard someone make strong arguments against the principle of least possible necessary aggression or any of the more general ideas around force that I've articulated, that I at least can't account for better, I think, with these ideas (though I acknowledge that I need to do so in a more clear, organized way so that people understand the arguments better)...

So what's crazy it's that it's not argument, at all, that fuels so much self-doubt for me, on this one...

It's just this popular prediliction against softness and my openly alligning myself with softer, more constructive approaches, as much as possible...and the way that this gets me persistently condescended by people who haven't spent nearly the amount of time or effort thinking about these things...

I've lost a lot over the course of doing this work, so I'm decided to write the work, put it out there, and if it gets rejected for good reason that can be articulated then I'll listen and change my thinking accordingly...

But if it gets rejected because of some feeling that a defense of efforts to justify more aggressive approaches on matters of international and domestic policy and the professional and interpersonal applications that I think these ideas have isn't needed and that people can go on justifying the often terribly circular and underdeveloped ideas around the often self-centered and overbearing use of force then I guess I don't quite know what I'm going to do...

I guess I'm prepared to go do something less public and more independent than teaching and writing...

Something where I can just be left alone, as much as possible, I suppose...

But first I'll write the book...I've gone to too much trouble on this, at this point...

I just believe these ideas, too much, at this point, to give them up without hearing some really, really effective rebuttal to them...

I'm prepared to give them up for the right reasons...I just haven't heard them, yet...

I guess I'm preparing myself for either the latter...or just kind of doing something else, altogether if the silence gets too deafening or if my bosses or professors decide that I'm just too much of a hassle with all my newfangled thinking to keep around...

Anyway...I've got work to do...just thinking...

Love,
Ben