When an individual is crushed, the greater and louder portion of onlookers will usually find a retroactive reason for it. The body politic habitually sutures itself around the murder of one of its members. Sometimes we do it by condemning the victim. Sometimes we do it by deifying him. Either way, we remove him from humanity, alienate him, and make our feelings toward him impersonal — often ideological.
A couple of current examples:
1. Abandoned women and children
Leftist ideologues dehumanize them by elevating (reducing) them to emblems of the progressive program. “Women’s Marches” and sloganeering (“children are the future”) and the whole industry of corporate and political feminism come to mind — together with the ritual manipulation of children whose agency is clearly not yet fully their own in political demonstrations sponsored by public school administrators.
Rightist ideologues dehumanize abandoned women, meanwhile, by blaming them exclusively for their own lot and pretending women are not what they are: prophetesses; Cassandras whose laments and desperate actions are indeed emblematic of their environment, which in turn is the creation of men's work (or negligence). As for children, if the common expressions of open contempt and simple dislike of children among many self-identified conservatives have somehow never come to your attention or shocked your conscience, I can only say you have a blind spot.
2. Victims of war, for example the women and children and fathers of Gaza
Leftist ideologues, again, use these victims as emblems for their empty and loveless political demonstrations (including rallies designed to increase the winning odds of a presidential candidate who has explicitly vowed to further victimize Gazans). Again, this reaction to victims is totally impersonal and ideological.
Rightist ideologues, meanwhile, even more directly dehumanize the victims of Gaza, falsely categorizing them (as they do the victims of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Syria, Iraq, etc.) as in league with enemy combatants. They must die that we may live, and no murderousness toward them could be unjustified.
The Body Politic Writ Small
Similarly, when an individual is himself crushed, he usually finds a retroactive reason for that as well. We suture ourselves around the wounds in our souls. Sometimes we do it by condemning ourselves. Sometimes we do it by deifying ourselves. Either way, we remove ourselves from the human condition — the condition of being suspended between eternal death and eternal life, of having an immortal soul in our charge, of our actions being eternally significant, amounting always either to the humble carrying of the Cross and attendance at the Crucifixion or to the proud refusal to serve and worship, and to the Satanic decision to fall like lightning rather than die and rise again.
A freewheeling set of examples:
A lot of people act like useless drunks and selfish prodigals and sluts not because they wholeheartedly want to, but because it’s their way of saying with their lives – half-relishingly and half unwillingly – that they think of themselves as being those things.
Usually at the point of some grave and humiliating trauma, an opportunistic demon promised each of them godhood – only to make them merciless gods whose only realm was their own lonely victim souls.
That's what the suturing of the soul-wound often looks like internally. But here, also, is where the body politic — perhaps possessed of the same demonic advisors that oppress its members — reinforces self-damning behavior.
As it happens, Leftist ideologues more or less openly endorse such behavior. They give our wounds and humiliations agency and identity and speak to them directly as if they were ourselves.
They say to the victim of pederasty "You are gay." To the woman driven to the unthinkable by the cruelty of men "Shout your abortion." To the abandoned and lonely "You are an icon of rugged individualism," and "You are so strong — you go, girl!"
Rightist ideologues aren't blameless here either. We hurl crude words at people whose tragic actions already serve to accuse them more cruelly than any of our insults could. And when we do so, we only serve to confirm them in their despair of themselves.
“Yes,” we might say, “the assessment of yourself that you and the predatory demon agreed upon in your darkest and most bewildering hour was correct and binding. Let it overpower you and define you forever. Be the god, and damn yourself.”
It took me three days to get to this site. Or whatever it is called.
I did not understand a word of it.
I am not going to try again because this is not a college course that I have to ace.
Wow....this is a really good read and have only read it once. But will read it again soon.
Thanks
Stephen