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J Wilson's avatar

Our liberal center’s failure of imagination, its inability to “speak to the soul” of our national constituencies - and to connect with other cultures at large - seems more a failure of myth-making and imagination than of morality. For morality alone - untethered to compelling stories that move us at the deepest levels - is nothing more than “the law”. Sterile, abstract, imbued with the threat of force, devoid of the emotional power needed to collectively bind and unite us, to challenge and entice us to believe and deeply feel that we are so much greater than our smaller tribal preferences. More Joseph Campbells we could use about right now. Those who well know the power of mythological storytelling to help us preserve, update, and perpetuate the enlightened humanism upon which our liberal democracy is premised. A humanism that discerns - and elucidates through compelling and connecting story - the differences between a system of governance that coheres with inherent and universal truths about us and our endless quest for balance, dignity, integration and harmony, and a system that decoheres us from these truths, objectifies us, and reduces the infinite complexity and beauty of our lives to mere datapoints and algorithms, to manage and manipulate us as tools for the oppressive whims and dictates of oligarchs and authoritarians…

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Jeff's avatar

In fairness to Mearsheimer, it should be noted that his theoretical framework is primarily descriptive, not normative. He's been unflinching in his public condemnation of the genocide in Gaza (sure, on realist grounds to a large extent, but certainly on moral grounds as well).

Honestly, I don't know how much longer you and others like you can keep up the facade about moral seriousness and shared principles of human dignity. There's a giant fucking elephant in the room, which you adamantly refuse to address. I'm dumbfounded by it. The incoherence is staggering. If you doubt that, you haven't been paying adequate attention to Gaza, which is among the most grotesque, gleefully sadistic, exterminationist horrors of the modern era. Fully armed, funded, and enabled by the US. The Trump admin and the Biden admin, equally. US empire managers have made it abundantly clear--if it wasn't already--that they're nihilistic to the core.

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