In my opinion, the key is using one’s own pain in order to better empathize and be kind toward others, instead of being absorbed in it.
Also key is seeing the philosophical and moral relevance of intense feelings of meaninglessness or what Camus and maybe also Sartre referred to as “absurdity.”
Maybe thru the process of squarely facing ‘absurdity’, one more actively creates purpose. Sometimes that is part of deciding why to continue living.
I erred. ‘Loneliness’ isn’t the best term. For me, during the past several years it’s been a sense of having wasted my life personally and vocationally, and a sense of having never actually lived, due to an inscrutable inability to have close personal ties, thus far in life.
Philosophically or ‘spiritually,’ there is the approach of not taking one’s life too personally. In other words, there is a subtle form of egotism when one too harshly looks upon one’s own life.
As for MLK, he loudly, clearly, and without apparent doubt said in his words and actions that life has meaning : it is to love others by fighting for justice, (though King Holiday observances have depoliticized that via “a day of service” with mostly non-political volunteering.)
Some of the discreditable info about King’s private life is questionable. Having a lot of affairs doesn’t mean he was an abuser.
As you know, the FBI sought to blackmail and smear him, before arranging for his assassination.
His murder and the murders of JFK and RFK as well as Black Panther Fred Hampton offer a window into how in the 1960s the surge of democracy and civic engagement was so robust as to lead to political assassinations as part of the establishment’s attempt to beat back the threat of democracy.
JFK would have easily won a second term. RFK would likely have beat Nixon. MLK was seeking multiracial coalitions of poor and working class people and seeking to combine that with the anti-War movement.
Old interviews on Youtube show Bobby Kennedy making, like MLK, a good case against continued US war against Vietnam and a case for getting serious about the ‘War on Poverty.’ Then as now, economic exploitation and systemic racism are linked.
Some people might think that systemic racism persisted and in some ways intensified (ie under Reagan with the War on Drugs and cuts to social programs) because black folk weren’t militant enough in the late 1960s.
I disagree. In my opinion, what went wrong is that in the late 1960s, social democracy did not make a further stride in building on the New Deal because multiracial coalition building lost two of its most potent figures, MLK and RFK.
Without such figures to frame the issues in terms of economic justice, rioting and violent protests enabled law-and-order propaganda and spurred white flight and gave rise to the racist, corporatist ideology on which Reagan surfed into the White House, and toward which liberals such as Clinton and Biden were accommodating.
Fortunately, at least some of the BLM organizers are of a general democratic socialist orientation. [EDIT: Is that what’s necessary for undoing systemic racism and white supremacy ?]
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