The Ideology of Isolation

When Love Thy Neighbor Is a Cry of Resistance

At the very heart of almost all our crises is a conflict between two worldviews, the worldview in which everything is connected and the world of isolated individualism, of social darwinism and the war of each against each. I call the latter the ideology of isolation.

…the contemporary right would like to divorce cause and effect from everything. Theirs is an anti-systemic worldview in which they deny that, for example, poverty and poor health are very often the result of how the system is organized rather than personal failure, so they preach personal responsibility while denying collective responsibility and their own responsibilities, deny the collective overall.

…It is a sad and lonely worldview and one whose most devout believers often seem miserable, angry, and eager to punish and harm. They have in recent years even directly attacked the idea and value of empathy. The word empathy literally means feeling into, the imaginative extension of the self into the other. I believe that this feeling at its best, as compassion, extends the boundaries of the self, literally makes you bigger as it makes you more connected; the intention of feeling compassion is the intention of expanding and relating and connecting. Its opposite withers you into the smallest version of yourself, a hard knot of ungiving. It robs you of the wealth of relationship; from that comes the sense of poverty and the insatiable hunger for more

…I believe the isolationists will lose in the long run because they are not only out of step with the majority but they are out of step with reality and because theirs is an impoverished version of who we can be, walking away from the possibilities of love and joy and the sense of abundance and connection from which generosity springs.

…In the white world we often talk about responsibility but I prefer what Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, calls reciprocity. Responsibility sounds dismally dutiful, but reciprocity begins by recognizing that nature has given so much and therefore responds with gratitude and love, which makes the work not just giving, but giving back, a beautiful and natural response to abundance.

There is something brewing out there. The violent symptoms of the old are causing more people to consider something new. It doesn’t matter what words you use to describe the old or the new. It doesn’t matter what your moral framework is [assuming you have one] or if you think that framework is supposed to align with some political ideology. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read Hakim Bey and Immediatism or understand the effects of capitalist mediation (or think that has something to do with our relationship with god) or the dramatic irony of the idea that AI predicted american salvation. Maybe algorithms were the final perfect agent of our alienation, maybe you just caught yourself uncomfortably entranced by your phone. Call it the dissolution of techno-optimism, but it is starting to feel like hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope…¹

📺 When I see Gandolf pontificate on the experience of live theater and then recite Shakespeare on late night television, it feels like a moment.

I spontaneously posted this week:

I’ve blogged and tooted about it repeatedly, but Clem Snide’s Forever Just Beyond calms me down no matter what has me anxious.

“God is simply that which lies forever beyond the limit of what we already know”

It doesn’t stop the cold sweats or anything, because I’m still a human and still very afraid, and the systems of power want to keep me that way, but it helps. And I assume it would be less helpful to atheists, but maybe it doesn’t matter what you call it. Call it potential. Call it hope.