empathy

Compromise is great for business deals, arbitration, professional workplace disagreements, property-line disputes, and the like. At lawmaking governance levels, it’s often needed to get something done (say, to get enough legislators of the opposition party aboard to pass a budget).

However, compromise is, like most concepts involving social interaction, prone to abuse.

Stay alert to ways you can be compromised adversely, manipulated and taken advantage of, and resist those — whether at personal levels by abusive “friends” and “lovers”, or on larger scales, by government and media. Yes, you can be on the hurt side of an abusive relationship with a governing authority. History is chock full of examples.

A large-scale, abusive use of the concept of compromise is when high authorities wish to restrict the liberty of the people. That’s called tyranny. Genocides under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are famous large-scale examples just in the last 100 years. Without quite as much overt killing (yet still a lot, per the Uighurs), is the ongoing, worsening, Orwellian techno-control dictatorship in mainland China.

Less extreme, but just as insidious, are slow-drip, incremental tactics here and anywhere else in the so-called Free World, acclimatizing people to each seemingly minuscule sacrifice of freedom, until one day, you are in a de facto prison. How does that occur? Convince you to give up your own liberty, and it’s rather easy.

Gaslighting occurs not just in personal relationships, but by Big Bureaucracy. Situational types:
“Confused? We’re the experts at telling you what’s real, all else is disinformation.”
“Here, this pain I’m doling out is for your own good.”

We’re conditioned early to these vulnerabilities by having to accept needed pain as kids, at the behest of parents — such as by enduring awful-tasting medicines, painful shots, or stinging antiseptics applied to scrapes, that truly were for our own good. This conditioning renders us vulnerable to systemic, governance-level gaslighting as adults, via the same persuasive tactics. Furthermore, the process can be sudden, or creep along in tiny steps spanning years, or even generations. Generations!

Don’t we owe it to our children, and theirs, to ensure their liberties are greater than ours, not less?

At societal scales, freedom almost never returns after being sacrificed for what command-and-control figures plea is the “common good”. Who are they to define it? Who are they to make my decisions for me regarding anything I do that doesn’t directly and provably (in a legal, beyond-reasonable doubt sense) harm another individual?

Better it is to leave “common good” decisions to local scales, where groups of neighbors can better contextualize solutions to local needs. Neighborhoods and towns, perhaps even cities if not too large and diverse, work best. Above that, the bigger the scale of government, the greater the fallacy of “common good” when it comes to anything affecting freedom. Why? Simple: one size doesn’t fit all. In a physically and culturally vast nation like ours, the people and their situations are too diverse (by the true meaning of diversity) for that.

To wit, water restrictions in Las Vegas are rather inappropriate for Upper Michigan, on whose shores wash the three biggest Great Lakes. Fuel taxes hurt the Kansas wheat farmer or the poverty-level working single mom in Bakersfield more than the Boston loft dweller with no car. The same federal and state red tape involving business books and taxes burdens the margin-straddling machine shop in Minnetonka proportionately harder than the Minnesota Vikings, whose owner hires legions of accountants at the snap of a finger. Even within one city, zoning must vary, because development, drainage and land-use needs are nonuniform. More examples abound, by the millions, in countless situations.

Big bureaucracy commonly imposes, after gaslighting us into accepting they’re for our own benefit, or the benefit of others, one-size “solutions” justified off “the common good”. Again one size does not fit all.

Beware simple tactics of propaganda, such as the use of the words “compassion” or “empathy” in the political context; those are quite often little tools of psychological manipulation to soften resistance against top-down theft of freedoms. Bureaucracy cannot have “compassion” nor “empathy”. Only individuals and God can.

Freedom is God-given, per the concept of free will. As the Founders rightly recognized and wrote, our rights come not from the government, but are bestowed by the Creator on the governed. Liberty is a divinely inspired ideal! We should treat it as no less important than that.

Give the agents of tyranny an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Therefore, those who value life and liberty should not yield even an inch to those who wish to take it. “Compromise” with tyranny only incrementalizes its takeover.

Hard as it may be, and as much as it (should) matter, let’s set aside whatever attributes or flaws that liberals and conservatives may find in the judicial record of the newest nominee for the Supreme Court.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

From the lecture, “A Latina Judge’s Voice” by Sonia Sotomayor, U. California-Berkeley, 2001

Let’s use the very same logic for a moment and reword the quote.

I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latin female who hasn’t lived that life.

From the hypothetical lecture, “A White Male Judge’s Voice” by Bubba B. Justice, U. Mississippi, 1959

What’s the difference? Don’t over-think this one, because it’s not difficult.

Guess what…there is no difference!

Racial and gender bigotry go both ways. And in neither case should the person spouting forth racist or sexist viewpoints, pandered before a friendly audience of those who look much like her/him, be allowed to skate by uncontested. In this case, she’ll be challenged, but those challengers are sure to be outvoted.

Do you think hypothetical Judge Bubba’s candidacy could survive the Supreme Court vetting and nomination process today? If so, what on Earth would lead you to believe such foolishness? If not, then neither should Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. Both the real and fictional figures’ statements represent precisely matching levels of racial and gender bias. It’s a form of equality we don’t need.

This example teaches our kids that skin color and the shape of the organs hidden beneath our underwear — tangible physical traits unrelated to judicial expertise — matter more than qualifications, credentials and, yes, “empathy”. How is either racism or sexism empathetic, much less both at once? How are we going to get over racial and gender inequity when nominees for the Supreme Court go on record with their bigotry?

So much for “empathy”, President Obama. Shame on you. You should know better than this, but given the present makeup of Congress, it is a disingenuous political maneuver; and as such, you probably will get away with it.

I’ll sign off for tonight with one more quote.

I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 2008

Now, how firm is that conviction, really? How does nominating a racial and gender bigot further that wonderful ideal?

The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny

Sonia Sotomayor’s Bigotry