It is our birthright as biological systems designed for self-replication, the baseline condition of our existence, at the macro level of the organism and the micro level of its cells.
But the self which we serve admits of vast variations occasioned by individual differences in capacities and temperaments and by societal differences in cultures, some acquired by birth, some acquired by choice.
Culture acquired by choice can be a renunciation of one’s culture by birth, accessories to it (as are the subcultures of occupation, profession, vocation or hobby interest), or adornments of it (as are the subcultures of dress and lingo, association and lifestyle).
Selves to be served also differ in the degree to which they are anchored in needs and desires that are asocial and atomistic, social and group-oriented, or idealistic, that is, expressing an allegiance to a code of conduct purer than any real society, a higher law.
One can think of this third, most abstract, ideological category as a self defined by a virtual community (e.g. the community of the saints, men of science, voices in the dialogue of thought). One can also think of this as a community of two, the moral agent and their ultimate all-seeing and all-knowing judge (whether that judge is conceived of as a personal God or as the judgment of History).
So, of these three most fundamental kinds of selves, the first is a selfin the individual context, the second in the social context and the third in a virtual social context.
In each case, self-determination, also known as freedom, would mean the subjection of the needs and desires of that self to no external force or authority (autonomy, in Kant’s terminology).
In the first case, we would call the person selfish.
In the second case we would call the person either fair-minded, just or righteous (accountable to more than their own self-interest) or socially conformist or opportunistically amoral, depending on our evaluation of the moral worth of the community to which it adheres.
In the third case we would call the person selfless, meaning that their ultimate loyalty is to a creed or code of ethics, above any real-world community, all of which are likely to be flawed.
Only the third case are fully realized moral agents in the strictest sense of the word, assuming, of course, the moral worth of the virtual community to which they aspire.
Presumably, everyone who sacrifices for either a real or virtual community assumes that that community has moral worth.
But real communities are inevitably flawed because they include many flawed moral agents and some defective ones — often in positions of authority, for authority and the consequent power over others draws ambitious souls.
Only virtual communities can be perfectly moral (think of them as composed of the all-stars of the league of moral agents).
But that is not to say that anyone claiming — or indeed, thinking — themselves to be perfectly moral is so. Fanatics assume their own infallibility, yet fanaticism comes from a weakness of character resulting in a need to dominate those around them.
The first case produces persons characterized by vices (bad actors, defective moral agents) and possibly even lawlessness (criminals).
The second case produces heroes, that is, persons willing to make sacrifices for their society, up to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. Honored by all in their society, imitated by few.
The third case produces martyrs, that is, persons willing to sacrifice not only life itself, but also their social standing in their real-world community, even to the extreme of being mocked and derided as criminals. Some obvious examples of this are Jesus Christ and Alexei Navalny, alongside such fictional characters as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or movies like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Hello, who is this?
What’s In Your Self?
The me I want to be?
The self is a fun-house hall of mirrors.
Every aspect of the self, each of the big three, and all of the subordinate facets, is its own mirror with its own distortions.
What’s in your self?
Which of these many mirrors reflects you as you really are, in all your complexity and your changeable moods, in the limitations of your present, the baggage of your past, and the dreams of your future?
And is the self you think you are the same as the self you really are? Is it the same as the one you appear to be to others, friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, the perceptive and the oblivious?
And, if you have a God, does your God — who alone sees into the hearts of men — see you as you would wish Him to? or does he see through a whited sepulcher to the corruption inside? or maybe just to a boastful, harmless phoney, a pretend do-gooder, faking it until they make it, but never quite making it, salvageable after a stint in Purgatory.
Alternatively, taking the secular perspective, does your image of yourself — the star of the show in your own inner moral telenovela— play a real and constructive role in the world at large? Or are you in a siloed theater, you and your tribe, playing to the home crowd but no closer to a goal than when the play started, and no more in search of a common ground with the fellow citizens sharing your Constitution than are your bitterest political foes?
And sectarian red voters are doing the same thing, while thinking of themselves as marching in the vanguard of God’s earthly army, which just may be a contradiction in terms — if Jesus is the model of God meant for imitation by man.
For what weak mortal vessel has the presumption to model himself on God the Avenger, a God full of wrath, looking down scornfully on lesser beings, the smiter of the Old Testament? (And how very attractive to a certain turn of mind!)
For those who march in the Vanguard, whether millenarian Christians or loyal cadres of the Communist Party, see themselves as so immersed in a life-and-death struggle of Good against Evil that none of the usual rules apply to them.
All is permitted in a cause so absolutely just. None of the constraints and compromises of little r republican government — with its tedious separation of powers, its painfully slow consensual procedures for establishing facts and vote count and verdicts, its universal franchise and one-man one-vote districting — none of that can be allowed to slow them in their righteous advance toward goals that leave no room for any other authority, any other voice!
Extremists and fanatics are the enemies of republics — which live by compromise between distinct parts permitted to flourish as best they can, each in their own way, and by the shared constitutional consensus that holds them together as a nation and a people.
In our time, the ultimate alternative to fractious but stable and united republics, and federations of republics (like NATO and the EU), are tyrannies of the nationalist Russian type, the Communist Chinese type, or the theocratic Iranian type.
Whatever kind of self you decide yourself to be, which of these delightful paradises would like like to park that self in?
And what, fellow citizen and voter, do you intend to do about it?
Identity is bipolar, and its chicken-and-egg poles are culture and self, reflecting each other back into infinity, like the facing mirrors in a barber shop.
mini me, many me
Afterword, whether Ill-advised or Not
From this perspective, the culture wars begin to look like a pissing match between two kinds of selves, each disrespectful and dismissive of the other, when not busy demonizing them.
That kind of crap should stay in bars — and by that I mean dives. It has no place in the politics of a republic and anchor of the Free World, which for the moment looks like it’s on the ropes.
Speaking of which, someone’s been playing Rope-a-dope with the West, reform KGB officer, now prince of peace — if J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are to be believed.
And that would be forgetting about the GOAT cheapshot artist, Donald Trump, who would happily address your kind inquiries, if he were not busy stumping up funds (and converting political donations into payments for legal fees) to placate judges and juries who are now being heard from as the slow wheels of justice (precede by investigation, evidence, testimony and unbiased reflection by jury and judge, after the caterwauling of advocates on either side ceases)grind to a conclusion.
Too bad elections are held with just time enough for viral cheapshots to hit home, eh. I mean, who needs evidence? We know what we know, right? And who has the patience, or the stamina, to wait for careful, considered deliberation? Why, it would make politics a dead bore!
Sorry for that outburst, but it’s hard to watch the possible sinking of the Republic without a twinge of emotion.
We as a nation have spent too much blood and treasure in the making of the republic to see its degradation and decline without the occasional outburst. And I just finished watching Band of Brothers, all about how we made that golden era that the MAGA crowd of America Firsters celebrates by undermining its chief and underlying basis.
But, there I go again!
What I really meant to say after apologizing for going all soapbox on you was that the original Thought was intended as a psychological and social insight, not a partisan jibe.
So, if you prefer your insights straight with no chaser, kindly disregard my subsequent lamentations.
We are all broken machines, until the moment when we choose to fix ourselves, to rise to our full potential.
Moral agents are not born, they develop under influences from without and from within.
They make themselves out of the materials they were given, and these vary with upbringing, with the society they find themselves in and with their personal experiences of those around them.
The moldable clay of infancy is shaped by many influences.
Even when given a helpful start, we must own the good in that legacy as we grow into adulthood.
It is always a choice, whether by accepting a legacy, improving or reforming it or rejecting it, whether slow and gradual or sudden and cathartic.
The need for self-repair may be a gradual acceptance of the responsibilities that come with our better self, or it may come as an epiphany, or even as the perhaps overdramatized conversion of Saul to Paul on his way to Damascus.
But such moments of passage are dangerous as well as hopeful.
Out of such moments can be born fanatics, whose crystalline vision of a new world and of their place within it is brittle and full of sharp edges — in short, the newly-forged self-image of a fanatic has no room for doubt, or for others who doubt.
These twisted creations of fire, hammer and anvil view outsiders as objects and obstacles to their self-redemption, adopting a scorched-earth policy towards them.
This forming of a new self-image, this reformation, this rebirth, falls along the same bell curve as all other human traits and actions.
There is a small leading edge of well-formed rebirths, designed with thought and skill, with grace and integrity, whose subjects really are what they purport to be.
There is also a trailing edge of impostors and monstrosities who so pervert the vision in their heads that it serves only their own bottomless egos and thinly-disguised lust for power.
These badly broken machines of self-infatuation are eager to convert the attention they draw — their fame or notoriety — into the power and authority to move masses in accordance with their will.
This is nothing but the will to power disguised as a call to redemption.
Then there is the much larger center, the fat middle of the bell curve, the mixed blessing of the great middle ground — neither prominently good nor irredeemably evil, no better or worse than the next one over — that becomes the battleground across which surge the truly good and the truly evil.
Always the likelier outcome
The Sad Cycles of History
Caesar at his Rubicon: should he or shouldn’t he? will he or won’t he?
So spin the cycles of history, in their brazenly repeating cycles of hope and despair.
This, our earthly purgatory — unlike the classical Purgatory, which issues, after varying terms of penance, into the single issue of Paradise — issues with equal ease into widespread reformation or widespread retrogression.
The more there is of raw emotions and tribal sympathies, the more likely is this rebirth to take a wrong turn into culture-wide evil and tyranny by the strongest faction, hijacked by false prophets, demagogues and others craving power (or the crumbs of power due the lackeys and mouthpieces of the Big Men, and, occasionally, Big Women).
The more reasoning, knowledge and understanding, the more openness to evidence and dialogue, the more likely is this rebirth to widen and deepen both moral agency and the capacity to engineer a well-constructed life, culminating in self-realization worthy of the name.
Rebirths that become politicized inevitably become polarizing, with opportunists exploiting concentrations of wealth and power, and exploiting media that spread widely but thinly across masses of people– whether state-controlled media or the Wild West social media guided by algorithms that prioritize viral messages of unknown provenance and dubious content over thoughtfulness, credibility or evidence.
We live in an era of accelerating change and disruptive innovation.
Always the likelier outcome
Land of Liberty, Where the Buck Stops
America has led the world into this New World and, being at its cutting edge, is the first to suffer its pervasive technological, economic, demographic and cultural disruptions.
No good comes without fundamental change to this tired old world of entrenched unfairness and inequality, of undeserved privileges and unmerited oppressions.
But every such change triggers crises of self-image and of self-interest. These two crises combine to make all such passages fraught and frenzied.
But, as in all of life, great advances entail great risks. Without risk come no rewards.
America and the rest of the Free World have pulled through before and will, I believe, pull through again.
We have nothing to fear but failure of nerve in the leading edge, and loss of moral backbone and thought for the long-term in the great middle.
This new contest is ours to win — and ours to lose.
We will have to own the success or failure of this latest experiment in human agency, this latest leap on the path to realizing the best potentials of the human being.
When All Is Said and Dunn 