no one is to blame
try to pick someone to blame for all the things going wrong. i bet i can convince you, or at least myself, that they are not to blame.
hopefully no one disagrees with these two assumptions:
1. a person’s genes are not their fault.
2. a person’s childhood is not their fault.
given these, let’s look at hitler as a case study. is he to blame for the holocaust? i heard enough about his childhood to know that he wasn’t raised very well. he tried to cope with the fundamental pain that comes from terrible parenting, and the coping methods he used were the worst i’ve ever heard of in history, up until the present (which i’ll get to in a bit).
we have condemned his actions, and his words have rightly become helpful warning signs to future generations. if he had survived the war, we would have had to hold him responsible in the most legal and forceful way. but the person, the soul, the child in him, he deserves love and empathy. poor little guy.
in 2020, as we try to figure out who to blame for things going wrong, trump usually tops the list for at least half the population, understandably. his actions are reprehensible and his words suck. he also happened to have a fucked childhood which explains a lot about why he acts the way he does. his coping methods, i would argue, are even more insane than hitler’s. to quote noam chomsky, “there have been many monsters in the past, but it would be hard to find one who was dedicated to undermining the prospects for organized human society, not in the distant future — in order to put a few more dollars in overstuffed pockets.”
trump and many other people are not only ignoring environmental collapse, they’re racing to make it worse. i should do everything i can to stop them, hold them responsible, and reverse their actions, but i want to do all that with love and empathy.
if trump is suffering so much that he would make these truly insane decisions, i feel really sad for him. and i can love him, which means i may be able to love myself, because i suffer from the same things as trump. currently his actions have more perceptible impact, but our coping process is more or less the same: i feel inadequate, unloved, alone, scared, any number of negative emotions, there’s a hole in me and i think more of something will fill it. somehow it only tears the hole open larger. it’s the modern midas touch.
here’s an example: sometimes i feel sad, so i pay a person to keep a cow in a cage, artificially inseminate her, steal her child away as soon as they’re born, never to see each other again, then milk that cow, mix some sugar with the milk and pour it into a bowl for me. doesn’t cost that much.
for anyone that thinks the cow might have an opinion on all this, we are talking about barbarism, torture, mechanized and economized to scale. and i’m one of those people, yet i sometimes still buy ice cream, often when i’m sad. this is another discussion but it’s not hard to argue that supporting and demanding this kind of torture is partly the cause of my somewhat chronic sadness.
so i’m the same as trump and hitler. don’t blame us, we’re all trying our best. sometimes we try really hard at a dumbass idea, but that’s because we were made that way by people who treated us poorly when we were young.
my parents were not hitler’s or trump’s. in almost every way, they taught me love and respect. in other ways, they fell short, and i’m still coping.
the difference between me and trump is only scale. his suffering seems to be a lot worse. where he purposefully starves tens of thousands of yemeni children, i only have a timeshare on a slave cow.
obviously scale matters enough to decide what’s an actionable risk: a person may want to stop me from stealing some milk from a baby cow, but i would say you got bigger fish to fry, although they probably wouldn’t care for that phrasing. but other than scale, it makes me love everyone to think we’re all the same, scared little kids coping with some bad stuff from our past.
