I love your frankness. Your criticism of the prevalent mind-set in the US is very valid. The evidence of this is all over, for example, US prisons are full of stigmatized people only guilty of finding themselves situated in the wrong intersection of culture , status and economics.
Poor Harambe, another of the innumerable victims of human stupidity and rashness.
Whilst America may represent the most extreme case of lacking a sense of proportion, especially in the attitudes of "me first" that it inculcates into its citizens, this same problem is prevalent throughout the modern world. If a greater power does not show forbearance, it lacks leadership, and cannot project its might into the future. By the same token, it is not part of the modern mindset to show leadership. Modern individuals diminish their power by taking the view that they need to get everything they can out of a situation before it starts to turn bad. That is how a potentially great power is reduced into a very small one. By contrast the colonials understood the art of power very well indeed, and so could regularly show forebearance.
He's somewhat of a pop intellectual, but Sartre did lucidly articulate the dynamic of inter-subjectivity and political divisions within a society, especially in his essay The Anti-Semite and The Jew, and of course in Being and Nothingness; really elucidating what is required of the individual in order to maintain an authentic existence. Have you read and analyzed his stuff? I'm curious about what you think of his theories.
I have quite a few thoughts on this. I will say, though, that I am not an anti-semite. Anti-semitism has very much to do with the tensions of modernity, which stretch into the realm of economics, not just narrow psychology. I haven't spent much time with Sartre, but I think his particular project of authenticity is too narrowly individualistic and precious. I don't mean that we should not be individualistic, but my way of looking at it is that the individual is a historical production, so we need to find where are roots are, deep into history, especially to understand the way our psyches may have been fractured through the historical process. After that, we can redeem our past and our ancestors by achieving psychical wholeness.
I do think that the realm of intersubjectivity is mostly unexplored terrain today. It is huge. Much bigger than anything that Sartre hints at, or indeed any of the particular modern theorists. Actually, everything is intersubjectivity, and our present identities come about as a result of various battles fought in history. That is not the least of it either, because as part of this whole underworld, there are those who use various very dark means to try to reclaim more psychical territory for themselves whilst stealing it from others. This is the dimension of " dark shamanism" (or what I have given that name, for lack of any better term). This is the means by which identities can be stolen or corroded from within, without anyone on the surface of reality even noticing what has happened. The Jews, I think, tend to fight back against this, using their own dark shamanic techniques. But they are not the greatest offenders, and like every group they simply want their own survival. The worst offenders are probably those of the contemporary pseudo-left, who pretend they want equality but actually want only narcissistic supply. And the cultural rightists of course use their own brand of a particularly dark shamanism, dividing the world into genders to try to extract the goodness and nourishment from each other. It's all a hidden battleground, with sometimes some very desperate struggles for survival. When I studied the writer Dambudzo Marechera, I saw this most clearly. One has to be very shrewd indeed to read his work, because the ideas are not laid out of the reader in a simple, structured way, like a pre-prepared TV dinner, divided into useful compartments. Rather, one has to in effect enter this underworld for oneself, to see with one's own eyes what lurks beneath the surface level of reality. I think Marechera's struggle for psychical existence is so fierce that one can learn a great deal from it. The kind of knowledge we can glean from his writings, however, is way beyond any contrivance of "authenticity" on the surface level of existence. This kind of depth of knowledge takes us way beyond what is available to modern academia.
Poor Harambe, another of the innumerable victims of human stupidity and rashness.
I do think that the realm of intersubjectivity is mostly unexplored terrain today. It is huge. Much bigger than anything that Sartre hints at, or indeed any of the particular modern theorists. Actually, everything is intersubjectivity, and our present identities come about as a result of various battles fought in history. That is not the least of it either, because as part of this whole underworld, there are those who use various very dark means to try to reclaim more psychical territory for themselves whilst stealing it from others. This is the dimension of " dark shamanism" (or what I have given that name, for lack of any better term). This is the means by which identities can be stolen or corroded from within, without anyone on the surface of reality even noticing what has happened. The Jews, I think, tend to fight back against this, using their own dark shamanic techniques. But they are not the greatest offenders, and like every group they simply want their own survival. The worst offenders are probably those of the contemporary pseudo-left, who pretend they want equality but actually want only narcissistic supply. And the cultural rightists of course use their own brand of a particularly dark shamanism, dividing the world into genders to try to extract the goodness and nourishment from each other. It's all a hidden battleground, with sometimes some very desperate struggles for survival. When I studied the writer Dambudzo Marechera, I saw this most clearly. One has to be very shrewd indeed to read his work, because the ideas are not laid out of the reader in a simple, structured way, like a pre-prepared TV dinner, divided into useful compartments. Rather, one has to in effect enter this underworld for oneself, to see with one's own eyes what lurks beneath the surface level of reality. I think Marechera's struggle for psychical existence is so fierce that one can learn a great deal from it. The kind of knowledge we can glean from his writings, however, is way beyond any contrivance of "authenticity" on the surface level of existence. This kind of depth of knowledge takes us way beyond what is available to modern academia.