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I Don’t Care About Your Feelings
I’m writing this post for anyone on the Left who might be curious about the political Right. Not for your leaders or political elites, but for you: the everyday person who believes the stories and the rhetoric of the Left, and feels that those on the political Right are to be feared and condemned.
But before I tell you why I don’t care about your feelings, let me tell you about myself and how I suspect you might feel about me.
I’m a Conservative. I live in a quiet community with friendly neighbors who join together to decorate our street for the Christmas holidays.
I like to read the news. I read books mostly about current events. I love dogs and watching TV shows about Alaska and veterinarians. My friends are people who raised good kids, and now in their later years, indulge their grandchildren. They often visit them because they have the time to do so.
Some of us love to cook; others dine out. We get together at Thanksgiving and have a neighborhood Christmas party. Some of us are couch potatoes; others fight off the challenges of aging by getting exercise at the gym.
Some of the guys play golf. Some of the women do, too. We bring meals over when people are unwell. Some of us go to church, others don’t. Some of us take vacation trips; others are homebodies.
In other words, we are ordinary people. In many respects, we are just like you.
We are not white supremacists.
We are not domestic terrorists.
We are not racists.
We want to live our lives in peace; isn’t it your deepest wish to do the same?
But I have come to believe that goal doesn’t ring true for you, at least not at a conscious level.
You trust in your feelings to make judgments and decisions.
You think those of us on the Right are cruel because we rely on not only feelings but on reason.
You hate this country, not for what it has become, but because you think we must bear the guilt of our country’s history, forever.
You want those of us on the Right to take the responsibility for every disappointment, poor decision, and crisis simply because you have become convinced that we are the best people to blame.
Your blame is not connected to evidence, facts, or truth but upon fear and hatred. It is also convenient and easy to blame us, and your feelings confirm your dissatisfaction with our country for not being a perfect place. You feel the country, and those of us who love this country, are guilty. Of horrendous crimes.
* * * *
By relying on your feelings, however, you are living a life of delusion and unhappiness. Feelings can be wonderfully satisfying in certain contexts. But when you rely on your feelings, you create a narrow and limited pathway for comprehending your life. Data outside of your feelings is deemed hateful, non-compassionate, and destructive.
When are feelings a satisfying and appropriate indulgence? When we embrace our friends and families. When we cook our favorite meal. When we make homemade chocolate chip cookies and eat them when they are still warm. When we are overwhelmed with joy at a child’s first birthday party. Even when we grieve the loss of a friend’s passing, our feelings allow us to appreciate what life offered him, and has offered us.
That experience of feelings is a personal investment that allows us to fully engage with our lives in an intimate way.
But it is not sufficient for making important decisions, to explore the pluses and minuses of the world around us; it ought not to be the sole way for choosing our friends and our aims in life.
If we limit ourselves only to our feelings, without expanding our life’s experience with information, or with resources that challenge our own ideas, preferences, and biases, we are locked into a mindset that will isolate us, making our lives ugly and dark.
I’m not suggesting that you use only reason to make your life’s choices. Nor am I saying that relying on your feelings is a poor approach.
I am saying that if you rely solely on your feelings without expanding the way you see the world, the way you see the political Right, the way you see me, I am compelled to make a choice.
I can’t make you change your mindset.
I won’t change my own view of the world.
As long as you indulge your feelings to justify your hatred, your attacks on America, and on our citizens, I will condemn who you are and what you stand for. I’ve made a heart-wrenching choice.
I choose not to care about you and your ideas.
And I couldn’t care less about your feelings.
Published in Culture
I misunderstood. Yes, in general you’re right.
I think it’s both. The consensus of what is acceptable has changed, and has become more radical. And the consequences for speaking out are more severe, including losing one’s job.
It’s always been that way for people who spoke up on some “forbidden subjects”: Norman Finkelstein, Salaita, arguably Helen Thomas.
There was no principled Conservative defence of these because “free speech”.
All that’s changed is the list of “forbidden subjects”.
And when the pendulum swings, it’ll be the Left being cancelled again.
jmho.
Now people on the left or right can be/are cancelled, because someone raged that they said something horrible. I hope the pendulum swings soon.
Ah, yes — Auntie Semite.
Is it cancel culture itself which is corrupting to the body politic, whether practiced by the Left or Right [misleading terms, it’s always only been able to be practiced by the majority in the middle], or is the problem only a matter of who gets cancelled so sometimes it’s okay?
With my Indian experience hat on, I’d suggest it’s the practice itself. The US has free speech enshrined and de facto in a way that few other countries do. It’s something precious, I’d suggest too precious to allow it to be undermined to pursue a partisan agenda.
We are now in compulsory 2+2=5 territory.
Well if that’s how you feel….
Cancel Culture is how the kids refer to denunciations and show trials because they lack the frame of reference to understand that this has all happened before. That too is by design.
The US also has the essential right of armament enshrined, in stronger terms than even speech, for increasingly obvious reasons.
And it’s all teetering. “Constitution?” Piffle. Scribbles on scraps. Forward!
I think it is useful – where we are talking about firing a person for their communicated views – to differentiate between a public face, such as a reporter or a company spokesperson, and some shmoe in accounting.
You seem to be missing the notion that the purge of former Nazis in Germany and Austria came about after the atrocities those individuals had inflicted on millions of others. Not before.
You know, I remember reading a biography of that time by a woman from Austria. Her father was purged after the war because he was a member of the Nazi party. But he worked for the postal system. A bunch of them were signed up to the Nazi party as an administrative thing. So – some of the broad brush approach can give you results like that, which actually diminishes the moral aspect of the purge.
Ditto with purging all members of the Baathist party in Iraq. Or the Communist Party in Eastern Europe. (I’m pretty sure they weren’t purged in Russia.)
Holding individuals responsible for individual acts is a clear thing. Holding members of a very big, administrative, non-democratic organisation responsible for all the actions of that organisation makes less sense.
Why? And how, without violating a whole class of people’s freedom of speech?
Yes! A thousand times, Yes!
What difference, at this point, does it make? I was only following orders. I was young and I needed the money. He promised he wouldn’t [~]. I can always have another.
By allowing people to sue for wrongful termination unless the comments significantly affect the company.
So all members of the US Military are responsible for Abu Ghraib? I don’t think so.
That’s not a very good parallel. Do you feel that is a good parallel? If so, I have some follow-on questions.
Is everybody in an organisation responsible for the actions of anybody in the organisation, carried out to implement that organisation’s objectives? It’s a straightforward question.
That’s not an answer, but probably as close as we shall get. Look how far you had to abstract in order to cover both. Oh well.
Is your response an answer?
Yes, because you’re trying to move the question from:
“Is everybody in an organisation responsible for the actions of anybody in the organisation, carried out to implement that organisation’s objectives?”
To:
“The US Military is like the Nazis”
Why would you try to strawman like this?
No problem. Just go ahead and make your case for the equivalence of US in Iraq and Nazis, and I’ll be happy to deflate it. You brought it up. You defend it.
Well thank you for your answer.
Edited to add:
This has gone strangely on point for the OP.
Maybe what you perceive as people’s feelings taking higher precedent than others was actually a determined moral reason that was solidly embedded in a culture so that feelings of disgust was simply a byproduct of the foundational rationale for why the other feelings break with moral reality.
Currently, the topsy turvy that is inverting the feelings supremacy matrix is built on very flimsy, very recent, and unsuccessful (in terms of civilizational survival) moral reasoning, unlike what it has replaced.
*Case in point:incest*
It could be. But I’m sure everybody would feel that – no offence. If you asked people who believed miscegenation was a bad thing, they might give you similar reasoning as justification.
I guess we’ll see, or not see, as the case may be. But it seems to me that if what came before was so solid, and based in reality, it would be less vulnerable to challenge.
I don’t think the reality is the issue. Morality and Truth transcend what we think is reality, or what is real. Just because people try to change norms doesn’t mean they are entitled to change reality.
Ha. Truth is always vulnerable in the hearts of men because it is uncomfortable. But it lasts longer and always wins because reality doesn’t conform to what we want.
There’s always negative consequences to bad ideas.
In fairness humans have been undermining reality for probably the entirety of history. This isn’t some new phenomena that is unique to our time and place. Relativism is a new word but the concept isn’t. Ancient sophists were relativists. Pilate summed nicely when he asked “What is truth?” Now we have the woke believing they can change the universe based on their feelings. It isn’t such a stretch. It has been done and thought before. It just doesn’t work that is all. Truth is. It doesn’t really matter if someone, or even a majority prefer otherwise.
And we’ve all been convinced that we’re the ones upholding truth while it’s those “other people” who are ignoring reality. Sounds about right.