politics & the personal
No, what I hate about politics is that it is antithetical to the personal: to the local arena of human compassion and action that has actual transformative power. In massing humans, politics reduces their humanity and transforms them into expressions of ideologies and systems. It takes what is real and makes it facile, reductive, and subordinate […]
I do not like the world of intellectuals or the world of power. I like the world of the personal, the individual. I like the small world. My favorite bumper sticker: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you mourn the dearth of compassion in our society, be compassionate and inspire by example. If you hate injustice, be just in all your ways […]
Moreover, I believe that only though ethically decent behavior on the individual level does society improve; in the end, I think, politics is -from a moral perspective- a distraction, more often about identity-association than about actual compassion […]
The paradox: While the personal may be inherently political, the political struggles to remain personal. The personal is swept into the ether of a dehumanized electorate, whereupon it is transformed into a caricature of all that which is truly human.
Or, perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps we find ourselves alienated from the political realm precisely because it is too human; too full of lies, deceits, and shamless appeals to our baser passions. The political realm thus holds up a mirror to a horrified society that does not like what it sees.
