I support the overall goals of Occupy, but the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent meme is not viable long term, in my humble opinion. It’s divisive and distracts us from the core issue: our societal problems require systemic change. Individuals and groups of individuals such as the 1 percent are not the problem, per se.
Saints and sociopaths are at the extremes of the bell curve that has most of us somewhere in the middle in terms of our benevolence, as is also the case with intelligence, where we find geniuses and the mentally retarded at the extremes.
Advancing our understanding of morality might involve the social and the hard sciences. We may no longer regard individuals or groups of individuals as good or evil in a manner similar to how we no longer regard schizophrenics as demonically possessed.
Are humans inherently good as some secular thinkers have suggested or inherently bad as some theologians have argued? I say neither.
Barring mental illness that leads us to having sociopaths, the core problems and solutions are institutional or systemic. In light of this, my own steps toward advocating revolution are based on higher love, derived scientifically. I hope to love people enough to act on the belief that our systems need to be replaced.
I humbly suggest it’s folly to focus on individuals. For example, liberals shouldn’t think demonizing Santorum is a viable way to come to terms with the forces likely to affect our country such as sovereign insolvency, and other aspects of the decline in US power in relative and absolute terms which involves the risk of right wing populism and theocratic fascism.
But as for “soaking up my share of the good things,” if you don’t mind the following highly personal detail, the past couple of years, I’ve used the mantra “do my best to love” or simply “love” to manage my obsessions by way of a simple directive.
More recently, short of jotting notes in the shower or in my sleep, I’m letting go of the need for a mantra. With cognitive silence, I don’t need to tell myself what I should be doing. Instead, I know it by way of feeling the presence, so to speak, of what might be referred to as my ‘higher self.’
This is spirituality. But it doesn’t involve duality nor does it conflict with reason. It involves a sometimes joyfully overwhelming sense of wonder and appreciation of mystery, as well as empathy. What I once thought was a relationship with God I now regard as my own engagement with an often dissociated part of my own personality.
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