WITHOUT ATTACHMENT

i have recently been tasked with considering the present without attachment to a future, a stance that is perhaps closer to reality than most people understand, and have found it manageable. i now have left only the much more arduous task of separating the present from the past. in that task i am failing utterly.

UNDERSTANDING DESPERATE ACTIONS

there is a genetic component to tribalism but i think it is indirect — more it seems to be a precursor to a strong group identity that makes young people susceptible to influence in their earliest years. this varies between individuals in every group and the strength of a group identity that overwhelms the individual identity varies also between groups. this is largely dependent on how existential the threat to that group is perceived by its members. if you were growing up white in america in the fifties (as i was) there was no real perceived threat to the identity of your group, since it clearly dominated the surrounding culture. very little pressure was exerted on me to extract an adherence to loyalty to my group — in fact, when i became critical of it quite early on i was treated as a serious young critic and not condemned out of hand, though i think my thoughts along those lines would have continued unabated in any case and might have become more vehement the more external pressure was applied to me to conform to popular views. that was my nature.

this is not the case when a child is not a member of the dominant culture. the perceptions of the individual, family and group of a minority are quite different. that is why there is an inevitable link between the actions of the dominant group and the reactions of the minority. in these days of superpower almost all groups that are excluded will feel an existential threat and coalesce into enemy. the problem of america (or britain, or germany, or any other dominating power throughout history) will always be the same — in the desire to dominate and control others, whether you believe (like the above plus the french and other colonizing imperialists) that it is for the betterment of all and that the lives of all will be improved, or just that somehow you are exceptional (america's current gambit) and deserve to use others for whatever improves your own circumstances, the net result is the same — you will create enemies and enemies will resist you. and enemies under siege will become more extreme as individuals within perceive the threat to their group to be unequal and existential. the middle-eastern states, which were created largely without regard to tribal identities, are and always have been an unuseful construction, territories divvied up by the conquerers to suit their pleasure and their cat, and the present continued involvement by the same offending western nations will never resolve anything and may prove in the end to threaten the entire globe, or what of it is left inhabitable after we are finished degrading much of it for life in human form.

WILD AND FREE

the problem with being wild and free — one of mr thoreau's most famous lines and one i (qualifiedly) love and understand his meaning for — was the same problem for mr thoreau that the libertarians have; they never talk about competing freedoms. in mr thoreau's life he courted one woman ardently, but in the end, unsuccessfully. he wanted nothing more than to share his life with her, wildly and freely. she apparently wanted nothing of the kind. so yes, he felt free to court her, but no, he was not free to love her wildly and freely, and even loving her for the rest of his life — which he probably did — was not the thing he was after and may even have been worse for him than never having loved her at all. she, on the other hand, wanted a life without his love and she got it.

freedoms always compete. in the end, very often that equates with one person having a particular freedom at the expense of another's. we do not act. we interact. we take our chances. and we are sometimes barred from exercising the most poignant freedom there is, the freedom to love another, to share love with another, wildly and freely.