December 1, 2010
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loving your own life
This is a quote from an interview I just listened to:
“Interviewer: ‘What makes you happy?’Bill Ayers: ‘Oh so many things! I mean getting up every morning. I mean what I said before, you know that you should be astonished, I didn’t just say at the injustices, I said at the joy and ecstasy of it all.
I mean to me, go back to this question of being an activist, to me one of the dialectics that we have to learn to dance, we have to learn to dance the dialectic of joy and outrage. You can’t build a life project of activism on outrage alone. You have to maintain the perspective that allows you to be outraged when you read Wikileaks or when you read the pentagon papers. I remember when I was a kid and Watergate happened, it took me a long time to catch up with the outrage because I was too cynical. You know? I mean of course they lie, cheat, steal, break in, and so on. No!! We should be pissed off when we see this stuff! On the one hand.
On the other hand, you have to find a way to love your own life enough. Not only to take care of the children and the elders but to enjoy the sunrise, to have a good meal with friends, to enjoy going to the museum or whatever it is: listening to music, dancing all night. You HAVE to love your own life enough for that. But you have to love the world enough to join the struggle when it’s required. And it’s that balance that allows you to neither become a complete narcissist nor to kinda burn out on the outrages that we see all around us.
I’m convinced that nobody is going to survive and develop a project of humanitarian transformation if they don’t love their own life. So you must find way to embrace life and to embrace your fellows and your brothers and sisters. Otherwise, you end up in a kind of a rut and your vision narrows. And it’s that combination of loving yourself, loving your own life, and loving others with a kinda fierceness that allows you to go forward. And that’s what I try to do every day.’”
I know what you’re thinking.
Dangerous. Terrorist.
Comments (13)
I’m not sure terrorists love life at all. Their own, anyone else’s, life in the abstract.
@SoapAndShampoo - I agree!
I feel a lot of people don’t love themselves and for them to actually get to the point where they can.,.is easier said than done. Though it can be done, because when it’s all said and done…how can you love another when you don’t love yourself?
@SoapAndShampoo - @notjus4ne1 - My point is only that to call Bill Ayers a terrorist as he was repeatedly during the 2008 campaign is absurd. Dunno about real terrorists and love, though I imagine most of them are regular kids who become radicalized. They likely have the same range of emotions as anyone else with regard to their family and immediate peer groups. But at the point just before they commit the terrorism, they’ve probably let the outrage overtake every aspect of their lives to the point that stopping the outrage is more important to them then every other joy they might choose to live for.
But honestly I’m not sure about Ayers overall message quoted here. I just wanted to share it. I find it inspiring, and it sounds good, but I’m just not sure if I agree. I really don’t understand the mechanism that leads to the impossibility of love of others or effective advocacy of causes from the fact of not loving oneself. Why can’t you hate yourself and still be a force for good?
@nephyo - Oh, is that who Bill Ayers is. I thought his name sounded familiar but I didn’t know why. I wondered why you said “I know what you’re thinking. Dangerous. Terrorist.” I was like, “But I’m not thinking that at all….” Hahaha. I figured you were being ironic but didn’t know about what.
/commenter fail
@SoapAndShampoo - no worries. I knew I was being somewhat obscure but I wasn’t sure if you got my sarcasm and were agreeing and saying that Ayers isn’t a terrorist because terrorists don’t love life but the person in this quote clearly does or if you were getting the sarcasm and disagreeing with me and saying that Ayers was indeed a terrorist who doesn’t love life, or if you were not seeing the sarcasm at all. Seems all three weren’t quite correct. You got that it was ironic but didn’t know what the irony was focused toward. Anyways, I’m glad I clarified now. I’m sure most people don’t remember Bill Ayers and the whole Obama is a terrorist because he associated with this Ayers terrorist guy controversy.
@nephyo - At any rate, more on topic… I guess I don’t believe that someone so homicidal has allowed any love to remain in them. Never mind homicidal and suicidal combined.
It’s not just terrorists. I can’t see how anyone can simultaneously contain that much hatred/anger and love at the same time. Each tends to cancel the other out.
Of course that’s purely philosophy and I have absolutely no proof of it.
@SoapAndShampoo - I think it largely depends on whether the hatred and love are connected. They don’t cancel each other out unless they meet. The key is dehumanizing the object of your hatred. If you think of those people as “cancers”, as “monsters” or as “demons” or as “beasts” or just as “evil” or as some other non-human, non-virtuous or non-self-like concept, well then yes you can hate them without contradicting the love you feel for other enttiies that don’t fit in those categories.
I don’t think this is any more irrational than the irrationality that allows homicidal and suicidal concepts to exist in the first place. Human beings are totally capable of holding all kinds of contradictory ideas in their head at the same time.
@nephyo - Holding contradictory ideas. Like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, huh? Knowing full well that Achilles would outrun the tortoise but picturing perfectly as he loses along infinite points.
i had the privilege of hearing ayers and his wife speak–it was an enlightening lecture that i really enjoyed. he is by no means the demonic anti-american crazy people like to carp about. he’s actually very soft-spoken and respectful; he even insisted that a couple hostile members of the audience be allowed to ask questions/ rant
‘And it’s that balance …’ and we all know how precarious keeping perfect balance is
@SoapAndShampoo - something like that. lol.
@Smarticus - He definitely seemed like a great person from the interview. I would love to see and hear more from him.
@SoapAndShampoo - @nephyo - Hate and love are two sides of the same experience: caring deeply and passionately about something. In fact, I would say that hate can’t even exist without love (I was going to say they’re like Orcs and Elves, but there’s a limited number of people that would get that reference.) You can’t feel angry or outraged over something you don’t care deeply about. You wouldn’t sacrifice your own life for something you didn’t love.
The complete absence of love is apathy. The complete absence of hate as apathy as well. A completely apathetic person would be narcissistic, devoid of empathy, irresponsible, incapable of righteous indignation, entirely unphased by the world around them. A person like that could do horrible things as well, but they would be a sociopath, not a terrorist.
To say that terrorists can’t feel love is to do to them the very thing you’re criticizing them for. They’re humans too. When we deny that, we become our own enemy.
@elvesdoitbetter - @SoapAndShampoo - You know I think all my life I’ve been hearing both of these theories on the nature of love and hatred repeatedly. On the one hand there’s sort of the Exclusive Theory that treats love and hatred as if they sort of don’t mix or can’t touch. The idea generally is not that a person is fundamentally capable of one or the other but sort of that you’ve got like a cup which can hold your hatred and love which are represented by two different colored liquids. The liquids themselves don’t mix but you can have any share of each up until your cup is full. So if you fill the cup with the ‘hatred’ liquid then you don’t have room for any more ‘love’ liquid and thus become incapable of ‘love’.
On the other hand there’s the Equivalence Theory. That theory is not to say that Hatred or Love are the same thing but that they are sort of joined at the hip as it were. Two sides of the same coin is the analogy most often used. Anything that arises hatred is just as capable of creating love and sort of the size of your coin represents your capacity for either. The bigger your capacity for love the bigger your capacity for hatred automatically.
I’ve never really thought deeply about these two ideas. But they appear frequently in all kinds of literature and stories and even in discussions of historical events. I never really thought about how very contradictory they are. Both can’t be true, not as formulated. And yet I think a lot of people grow up BELIEVING both of them.
I don’t even pretend to be capable of figuring out which is true or which is closer to the truth. But if I had to guess at the answer Id’ imagine that the relationship between hatred and love is a lot more complex than either theory allows. It must be some sort of functional relationship. Like to give a simple example maybe we could think of lovve and hatred as inverse linear functions. They act on the same set of inputs and they produce results of the same magnitude so in that sense they have characteristics of ‘equivalence’ but on the other hand they results are contradictory polar opposites and when added together cancel each other out so in that sense they are exclusive. For a sociopath then both funcitons return 0 for all or most inputs. A terrorist, or other passionate violent criminal, might be a person who is simply prone to rely heavily on their hatred function to the exclusion of their love function. Perhaps some are even so hard wired into certain ideologies that certain inputs are no longer capable of being funneled into their love function leaving only their hatred function to process them. Or perhaps some are not so hard wired, and can simply be taught to use the two functions in a better balance but no one has ever really given them a chance.
That’s way too simple. The reality is probably more complex but I only offer up the idea to suggest that there might be ways of looking at things that validate both views. But I can’t possibly stress enough how utterly unqualified I feel these days in discussing matters of love and hatred so I’ll stop speculating right there.
I’ll just end by saying that I agree that the set of sociopaths and the set of terrorists probably don’t overlap nearly as much as we tend to assume. Though there are terrorist sociopaths and there are sociopath terrorists, the majority are one or the other.