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Comments re:Anti-American sentiment and US diplomacy by Stephen Holmes of NYU Law. Emphasis mine.
Man. Is that last sentence, not the most beautiful line. Negligence comes effortlessly. Yeah. It sure does.
We should not assume, without looking into it, that anti-Americanism will necessarily affect our national interests. Indeed, hatred of the U.S. should concern our national-security community only if it galvanizes individuals and groups with the capacity to harm us, either positively, by inflicting grave injuries, or negatively, by withholding the cooperation on which we depend to solve our most urgent problems. The latter method of inflicting damage merits special emphasis. WMD proliferation and offshore plotting by terrorist cells may or may not require active sponsorship by rogue states. But they can both benefit decisively from slovenly oversight by disorganized, distracted and incompetent states. Public officials around the world can inflict the most serious imaginable damage on the U.S. by simply being negligent. And negligence, it so happens, comes effortlessly to most human beings.
Man. Is that last sentence, not the most beautiful line. Negligence comes effortlessly. Yeah. It sure does.
Re: We have met the enemy...
It's thinking like this that perpetuates the system. It is part of us, so we can at best deal with it. That's wrong. It's this thinking that makes it part of us. It isn't natural. Greed is a perversion of our nature, not our nature. Greed results from scarcity. Tell me what is still scarce. Why are we still hording? Why do we accept this behavior in others?
Pettiness and greed, just like the dehumanization of our enemy, are something that were learned. It isn't a natural part of us. To accept it as part of us is to accept a perversion and damn ourselves. The only chance we have is to realize this isn't us and get back to what we are.
The system is not humanity any more than the clothes I wear is me. I can discard it and start a new one. It has done before and it will be done again.
Re: We have met the enemy...
Because it is in our nature, because it is instinctual to do so, because it is an inborn survival urge. Excessive greed is a perversion, yes. Greed is not. It isn't going away.
We are humans. We possess the urge to perform acts of charity and compassion. We possess the urge to sin. Specific sins, yes, may be learned. But the urge is innate. We can strive to learn ourselves, so that we might better approach our 'perfect' selves instead of fulfilling the baser aspects of our nature. But it would be folly to delude ourselves into thinking it isn't our nature. To deny that, is to deny that we are human.
The system is not humanity any more than the clothes I wear is me. I can discard it and start a new one. It has done before and it will be done again.
And the new system will be infected by the same humanity the old one possessed. Because it's not just the clothes. It's your skin. It's your heart. It's your brain. The System isn't something external or alien - it's an extension of our humanity. And you will discard again ad infinitum - because the system is you.
You can rail about how "thinking like that perpetuates the system". Mere existence perpetuates the system.
Re: We have met the enemy...
Sin cannot be learned and innate. They are sort of opposites. To "sin" under certain circumstances is innate. It is natural to strive to fulfill our needs. To continue this behavior once those needs have been met is not acting innately. Greed is not fulfilling our needs. It is exceeding them. Greed is acting because of behavior we learned when we were acting innately. IMO to act that way under conditions of scarcity isn't necessarily a sin. To act that way when scarcity is no longer present would be a sin.
This doesn't deny our humanity. It embraces what is really us and allows us to express it. Humans aren't angels and devils. We are humans. We can act like devils, but we aren't devils.
And you have done nothing to demonstrate how greed is our nature. You have just asserted that it is. Why not explore this assumption rather than just accept and work with it? If we were born greedy, my child would have gorged herself on breast milk and her stomach would have burst. We have an instinct to meet our needs, not to exceed them.
The System is not something we are born with. It is something we are born into. It isn't an extension of us. It is an extension of our parents and grandparents. As we mature, it is harder and harder to tell where we end and the system begins. We get more and more away from who we are and become what we are molded into.
And that is where our salvation lies, figuring out what is us and what isn't and living who we are. It is realizing we don't have to be this way. It is realizing that the system can be changed. It is realizing that we aren't demons and things aren't inevitable. We can kick the board over.
Re: We have met the enemy...
I understand the argument about greed, but not so much about pettiness. When we're born, all we care about, or are even aware of, is ourselves. Which may be better described as being selfish, but is also petty insofar as petty is marked by having a narrowed viewpoint. It's only through experience and education that one's worldview is expanded to consider the needs and wants of others.
Compassion and mercy are also things that must be learned. It seems that in order to be compassionate, you have to understand other's viewpoints. And in order to truly understand, you need the proper experience or ability to understand and then care about what others go through. Same with mercy. I definitely don't think those are innate, though I think the capacity to express those feelings are.
Honestly, I'd say pettiness is more innate than compassion or mercy, because I think it's a hell of a lot easier to do for yourself first. It's easy to ignore the plight of others, if you don't consider them worthy of your attention. It's only when you realize the wrongness of doing so, that you are able to rise above it and express such kindness. And eventually, it becomes innate. But I think our first inclinations are often to be selfish.
Then again, this attitude may be reflective of the stage of life I'm at. I definitely struggle with doing the right thing at times. I don't think it comes very naturally for me, though I'd like it to.
My viewpoint is colored by two things
First my background, which is surprisily similar to DL's. 5 years can make a lot of difference, I suppose. Not sure when DL came to the DC metro area, but I moved there in 1979 when I was 8. The next year (actually, we moved in Sept, so the next few months), Reagan was elected to the presidency in reaction to the Iran Hostage Crisis. In his journal, my husband
I was fortunate enough to be educated in Montgomery Public Schools (just like DL) and had rather liberal teachers. Carter losing the election was a great blow to these people. His service record after he left the presidency is unlike any prior occupant of the White House and shows what a truly great man he is. I never really did accept Reagan as a good thing.
As I got older, since the Reagan-Bush years are so long we are looking at ages 8-20, I did not like things I heard coming from that administration. I can sum up my feelings about the Reagan administration in two words, "evil empire." Gone was any sort of identification with those oppressed by totalitarian regimes that Kennedy demonstrated with his famous jelly donut speech in Berlin. Gone was the mutual respect of Carter that allowed him to negotiate peace between Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat or Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel.
Instead the enemy was demonized. They were evil. They were dehumanized. We are seeing the effects of this with our treatment of POWs. First on Gitmo where we are trying to torture other human beings because of a loop hole in The Geneva Conventions. Second when we ACTUALLY are in GROSS BREACH of Geneva. This isn't just the effects of war. These are the effects of administrations that didn't believe in the oppressed people, but in realpolitik where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
When I see someone say that we should work with this attitude and try to use their tactics to get them to behave, I see someone enabling what I perceive to be one of the greatest threats to world peace. My country is the greatest threat to world peace. The world organizations that we set up, the international treaties that we wrote, we don't believe in. We use them according to "national interest." What is in my best interest is to see human beings treated as human beings. I don't care about the economic interests of a select few which really have nothing to with "national" anything.
The first thing I listed colors my impression of what we are naturally the most. My daughters didn't have to be taught to recognize people as people. They have a face. They are human. When one isn't feeling well, the other tries to comfort her. When they see someone crying, they try to help them. I didn't teach them this.
The thing with ego boundaries is we are born without them. We may be self centered, but everything is self. We have to learn that we are separate from others. When we start to learn this, we are still operating under the Golden Rule. We see others as separate in theory, but we don't know any other way to treat them except as we want to be. We want to be comforted and helped when we need it, so we do that. This stops when our own needs start to take precedence. This happens when those needs aren't met, scarcity.
We aren't naturally petty. We become petty when our needs aren't met. If our needs are met, naturally we aren't petty. When our needs are then met, we sometimes continue to be petty. We are taking a natural reaction and using it at a time when it isn't natural. That is a learned behavior.
Our needs are met. We are told by various organizations that they aren't. We are taught to try to keep up with the Jones or that we need more of X. We don't. We are operating under false assumptions and the only way to get out is to see this.