Theme: Agency

(diary)

More soul searching.

In Seattle, and in Boston, my reputation was a smart and ruthless one. I wanted to change that reputation twice. First when I met Allora, and secondly after my last major illness and I moved to Ukraine to ‘simplify’ my life. It worked with allora because we functioned as a unit, with her opinions regulating my aggressiveness.

But perhaps the leopard cannot change its spots. And I have been no happier trying to make others happy than I have been by simply seeking empirical ends regardless of whether people were happy or not.

I’ve usually told people that power always benefits you and kindness might. And that it’s very important not to treat people as if they have ill intentions, because you remove all incentive to have beneficial intentions, and increase the incentive to have predatory intentions.

If you are already damned, then there is no premium on predation.

So the best approach is to take the moral high ground at all times, and forgive human error, treating it as an opportunity to learn, and therefore preserving the incentive to cooperate rather than engage in predation.

Because really, people are very easy prey. Especially the ambitious and vain. We may have incrementally suppressed direct violence and substituted it with indirect violence, but violence is all around us in systemic ways even if it is not visible to us in physical ways.

Is there a reason why your cable/phone/internet/cell are so much higher than your water, gas, and power? Is there a reason we can implement catastrophic health care reforms at immeasurable cost, yet we cannot implement border controls, and fences at measurable cost? Of course not. These are easily inverted.

I felt the shift in my thinking today.

And perhaps it is just that I am finally over my illnesses and divorce.

Nietzsche uses foreign language but gives us the right advice.

Out of life’s school of war, that which does not kill us only serves to make us stronger. And the strong must not be bound by the limits of the weak.

Yet I understand that best way to defend against the weak, the best way to make use of them, is in the economy. Leaving arts, letters, and the creation of history to those with ability and will.