The source of our problems

You know what fucks us up? People, I mean.

We are constantly, and have been since the beginning of our god-awful history as social creatures, trying to prove how much more superior we are to one another.

Being better than you were yesterday and today is noble. Trying to be the best at something, as long as your motive is to embody what is best rather than trying to act superior to your neighbor, is noble.

But trying to be or act superior, to believe that you are more worthy as a human being of love or decency or respect or all the rewards that life has to offer, is both ignoble and damned foolish, not to mention wrong.

We try to prove our religion is superior, our education is superior, our politics is superior, our character is superior (a particularly ironic and galling one, by my lights).

But what we are really doing is trying to prove that we are superior. Or rather I am over you.

And that is the source of about 99% of the problems that people face. That and too many people living up to their feelings of inferiority as much as superiority. And all of our efforts to sort out who is superior and who is inferior in life.

It all drives me crazy. Because it's all done in the name of being good or doing good. And yet it is responsible for so much disillusionment and destruction and self-destruction in peoples' lives.

And the great irony, of course, is that it's bullshit. There is no superior religion. In fact the effort to prove otherwise is responsible for much of the most serious brutality in the world. There is no superior politics. And the arrogance that a superior political world-view exists is the single most important impediment to a more thoughtful, engaged, honest politics and policy and cultural and life discussion. Education is a great thing, but I know people of mediocre abilities with great pedigrees (the current President would fit this category) and extraordinary people with less than glamorous pedigrees (Mark Twain left school at 12 to earn money for his family and never looked back). I do believe that character is destiny. But anyone of any real character hardly wants to monopolize that destiny. People of real character want to share it. The contrary notion is the easiest tip-off that someone is faking it to themselves as much as to others.

And that is the most important thing that fucks up humanity. Our propensity to try to prove to ourselves and one another how superior we are to one another. And our propensity to reap destruction in the lives of one another to make our case.

And the irony of the current political moment - with its background obsession with proving how superior we all are - is that we are seriously failing this test by any objective measure. Who would look at Americans or the West or liberal democracies or any culture, right now, and say, "Now they clearly are the superior culture." We do better the more liberal our democracies, I think, meaning how much freedom we afford one another. But we're far from living up to our highest values and purposes, especially our liberal democratic values that put primacy on conscience and thoughtful reflection and engagement over power or the use of force to coerce conscience or thought.

And that is the source of our problems. We spend so much time trying to prove how superior our outlook is, that we persistently fail to engage and question our own thinking and the thinking of others with better faith and a more open mind and more open heart. And it is from here that our best thinking and ideas and values flow.

But we have tried to substitute our assertions of superior religion or politics or ethnicity or education or whatever for better thinking and ideas and values, and we reap all this destruction on the lives of others and, sadly, make more shallow our own lives.

We're kind of dicks, really, much of the time. Self-righteous, mean-spirited dicks. Forgivable. But still dicks.

And forgivable. I mean, what's the point if we're not forgivable? Kind of makes for a pretty bleak life if there's no hope of facing up to our flaws and forgiving ourselves and being forgiven. I know some people have come up with all kinds of complicated formulas for calculating such forgiveness. But it's all really just another excuse for what dicks we are and why we resist forgiving as much as any other virtue.

But when it comes home is when we face the challenge that folks like Jesus of Nazareth offered us. When we start plucking the beams from our own eyes, rather than plucking the splinters from our neighbors' eyes. When we need forgiveness is when our need to forgive hits closer to home.

You gotta hope we get better at this, right? And we do get better, by any objective measure. It's just that there's plenty of failure in the meantime.

We shall overcome. But only after a lot of hobbling and tripping up that we will try to play off as what we meant to do all along.

This is what I've been afraid of all this time. This was the most pronounced insecurity that I had when Brandi and I were together. That I was inferior. Because I didn't come from pedigreed or monied or superior roots. That all my learning and making mistakes was a sign of just how inferior I was rather than just how human I am.

And that is the source of all of our problems. Our constant and fruitless efforts to prove just how superior we are. Or how inferior we're not.

It's all for naught. And it reaps so much destruction and self-destruction in the meantime.

That's why more liberal values - meaning how much freedom we offer ourselves and one another - serve us better. Because they recognize that the values that serve us best are also the values that most realistically guide our behavior. Conscience, reflection, engagement, and choosing freely. These are not just positive values, these are the the way we choose our thoughts and ideas and values and choices, as an empirical matter, whether we embrace that fact of life as a positive value or not.

And the diversity of those thoughts and ideas and values and choices means for a culture that is better served by a greater appreciation for the various routes that people take to better thoughts and ideas and values and choices than a culture obsessed with enforcing what one person or group deems to be superior thoughts and ideas and values and choices on others.

The alternative is nonsensical, really, once you grasp the empirical fact that people always do and always will make choices in their lives amongst ideas and values and actions and based upon forever limited experiences with each of these that reinforce better choices and ideas and values, over time.

And screwing up that fact is life - meaning getting impatient with our capacity and willingness to learn those lessons about better choices and ideas and values, over time, and feeling superior out of our insecurities about our flaws and shortcomings, in the meantime - is the single biggest source of problems that people face with one another. Me too. Hence my alter-ego in Mencken. In fact, facing up to the emotional defense that is my sense of intellectual superiority and my alter-ego in Mencken has been one of the most liberating experiences of my young adulthood. It's allowed me to just be me - with my friends, with my family, with my colleagues - and not be this caricature of me of that emotional defense that is embodied in any sense of superiority that we might harbor. As a friend at a party recently said, I think everyone harbors this quiet sense of superiority, at some level, as an emotional defense against the assertions of superiority of others.

And each of us letting it go might begin to get at the heart of what divides and polarizes people of all backgrounds from one another.

Love,
Ben