Everybody's not Martin Luther King

I think I've finally made some peace with the question of people and their shortcomings.

Everyone has capacity for greatness. Everyone could be a Buddha or a Jesus or a Mohatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. But most people don't make that choice. Most people aren't Mohatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King.

George Bush and Hillary Clinton are just George Bush and Hillary Clinton. Which should make it easier, not harder, to call them on their bullshit, because they're no fuckin' saints. Me either. Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi and King don't even live up to their public images. How in the hell would we expect that political leaders, who aren't even playing in their leagues, should be trusted with so much goddamn power?

King and Gandhi and Jesus and Buddha were just people, too, just like you and me. Just people a little more aware of their capacity to do great things than most people. And they accomplished them.

The higher we hold that standard, the more we'll live up to it, I think. And perhaps surpass it, if we play our cards right.

But because most of us hold our expectations for ourselves and one another so low, we live down to that standard, instead, much of the time.

That's why I hold a higher standard. For myself and others.

Because the higher we hold that standard, without putting any pressure on it or ourselves, that is, the closer we are likely to get to it. And the more we are likely to inspire the same from those around us.

That's important to me as I look for someone to spend my life with and as I think about being a great dad to my kids.

I don't want to put too much pressure on me or them. But that's because I want us to step up to the biggest challenges and face them more thoughtfully and effectively together, not live down to a lower standard for ourselves.

Everybody's not Martin Luther King. And maybe if we gave them some space, they might be better. You never know. And we'll definitely never know if we're constantly trying to pressure them to live down to our minimal standard rather than live up to their best potential.

And that's the level at which I, for one, would rather be playing.

Love,
Ben

Our pride that we are better than we are

It's starting to occur to me that the way that most people make decisions is, more or less, a less sophisticated form of cost-benefit analysis. An academic or a CEO might attach more numbers and think in more long term ways about such an analysis than most people. But most people engage in this type of thinking, at some level.

How can I get the most that I want with the least cost to me? How can I get the most of what I want by taking the least responsibility and the least risks?

It's all so noble, itn'it?

Liberal democracies are more honest about this and create a freer, more honest culture for dealing with it by liberalizing and making for a more honest discussion and accounting for it. Illiberal cultures fail and often refuse to face up to it, hoping, instead that they're illiberal ways will make it go away. Come to think of it, it's not a clean break, in the least. To the extent that we are more genuinely liberal (meaning liberty-loving), we are more honest about it and create a freer, more honest culture for dealing with our baser negotiations in the world. To the extent that we are illiberal, we fail and often refuse to face up to it and pretend that our illiberal ways will make it go away. But our illiberal ways are a function of this same base way of negotiating our way through life. They are us being less honest with ourselves and hoping that if we look tough or act tough, that it will compensate for our failures to honestly face up to this fact of life and make it better by sharing, better, the risks and burdens of life.

Everyone wants the benefit without the risk or the burden. Everyone. Without exception. Me too. Me especially, when I'm particularly hard on myself.

But I'm learning to be better. And I'm more honest about this tendency with myself and with a lot of people, I think, even as I am less honest with myself and others about it, it seems always, than I want to be. But I have been much more honest about the need to choose what I and everyone knows is the better route more freely and honestly and genuinely rather than trying to substitute force for genuine commitment.

People are just kind of shitty, sometimes. They learn, I think. We learn. But we're also just kind of shitty to one another.

Better people take more responsibility and worry less about benefit.

But the real saving grace is not just our propensity to be better people, but our learning, too often, from experience the consequences of behaving worse or badly. And that includes all of us. Especially those who claim to act as moral arbiters for the rest of us. The pride in that position - the pride that they did not take the risks involved with giving all of us more freedom to learn these lessons on our own because they were more interested in following the rules or doing what was right, when really what they were and are most interested in is watching their own hind ends - is definitely one of the biggest lies of all.

Because that lie - the lie that strict enforcement of rules or repressive laws and enforcement is really about making life safer rather than looking after our own hind ends as we constantly look over our shoulders about what others think about us and might do to us, and that any of that could somehow substitute for more genuine conscience which only comes with more freedom - is the lie that has been responsible for the most murder and bloodshed and senseless tragedy in the history of humanity than any other lie we have told ourselves or one another.

We definitely need to be able to act aggressively when harm is clearly imminent. But, too often, we don't. And we need to give up our excuses for why we act more aggressively than is good or necessary. And we do so by internalizing limits on that overwrought propensity for aggression. And we do that by reflection and thought and engagement and developing our consciences.

That idea that this lie, this lie that aggression is what makes us good, could be twisted into some distorted notion of "progress" makes my stomach turn. It is the biggest lie, as Adolph Hitler would say. In fact, it was the exact strategy that Hitler used to reap all his destruction. He convinced the Germans that their pride that their aggressive and repressive ways were a function of what good people they were and that behaving so in ways that would acquire for them the most inescapable form of power was exactly how he was able to engage in so much destruction. And the Germans followed this seductive message. And millions of soldiers and civilians died. And 6 million Jews died.

And we still maintain that pride.

That pride that we are better than we really are. And that it is our aggression and not our consciences that make it so.

Hubris, the Greeks remind us. Hubris, is the sin of every generation. That they have finally found the final solution to their problems and that no more thought or engagement will be necessary to deal with those problems or any new problems they might face. Or at least that the thought and engagement is less important than their hubris.

Christian theologians called it pride. And it was and is the deadliest of all sins.
And the bane of humanity.

And the core of the current political period.

Love,
Ben