by evilgenius » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:04:24
I think it might be helpful to understand the view of one's self as a self, and how that can reflect upon other's as selves. Not every person recognizes other's as selves. It's one of the things about psychopathy that those people view others as objects to be manipulated, for instance. But, if you aren't a psychopath, can you still view others in a fashion where you limit them? I think it's obvious that other people are not carbon copies of me. Other people aren't going to think or feel like I do. They aren't going to want all of the same things I want. Largely, that's a good thing. But it constricts the role that empathy, where I use how I would feel in response to what I see them going through, can play in my understanding of them. Instead, I have to use compassion, which is much more open ended.
This realization has something to do with another thing I have mentioned a time or two on this site, the importance of right-of-way in human dealings. Something like the law given at Sinai is functionally an in-group self identifying thing. It takes a group of people and makes them alike enough such that empathy works in understanding other people in the group. In secular society, before the age of information, there had always been a similar kind of experience. Americans, for instance, had a sense of Americana.
Now, however, various groups who always perceived themselves as downtrodden have risen up, claiming the very 'rights' that the old order gave to its members. To have rights, though, isn't the same thing as for it to be your turn. Right-of-way is fundamentally about whose turn it is. When you can't recognize everything about an other and they seem so very different from you, you can still, at least, recognize it is their turn. In that way rights becomes something about establishing who can take a turn, not something about sacrosanct static versions of other selves.
The real challenge becomes figuring out the rules for taking turns. Who does that? I believe society does that. It's a collective thing. It gets embedded in the law, but the law is responsive to society. It changes as society's norms change. Everything else is a kind of conversation. It's a conversation that is constructed of both people acting upon exercising the right-of-way and/or yielding it, and how we feel about what that means to us as we experience that every day. Along the way we discover that we do belong, even though sometimes only loosely, to small groups within the greater construct of the society at large. Not unlike the law at Sinai, the things that tie us into those groups can seem sacrosanct themselves. Trouble arises for us when those similarities become so important that they threaten to infringe upon the very idea that there are others. When that happens they invite the same kind of thinking as that of the psychopath. It works that way for any group we identify with, whether it is a born condition or some privileged set we run with.
What we really need, I think, are assurances that, if we yield the right-of-way, it will be our turn again. That there can be a system where if we are just ourselves, and don't have to conform to being like some other ideal, we can go along and get to where we are going without having to either incessantly yield to those who make outrageous demands of us, using a sort of infinity of those to prevent us in real ways from ever getting there, or that we fail to see how others really can step in front of us because of both their desires and their position relative to us. And there is the inner challenge inherent to that of realizing that an other can be weak as well as strong, and that we can be tempted to treat them differently for that. Also, that we can change as we go along. We don't have to always be the same person. We can learn from others. They can learn from us.
The problems we are currently arguing most about in society seem to relate to that central issue. The things we are discussing have mostly to do with concentration of power and whether that concentration ought to remain or dissolve. We've yet to come to the point of designing how that power can revolve, can go away and come back again. Right now, it's still a sort of winner take all mentality at play, the literal survival of the fittest when this is purely a human minded and not an evolutionary game, like we can stuff all of our winnings into barns and store them forever.