I don’t agree with your assessment. Caring for humanity-as-a-whole is not a function of youth or age. I’d say that, if anything, “having been there” may/should/ought/could (pick your conditional) cause one to become more compassionate not less.
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It’s not just “me”. Or “me+family”. Or “me+friends”. Or “me+teachers”. It’s “me+everybody”. Everybody becomes your child, your parent, your aunt or uncle or ne.
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The Kirk v Spock debate is easily resolved in that it’s both. “many vs few vs one” have contextual clues which are case-by-case. General maxims can be expressed which cover each of them : that’s why we have so many contradictory proverbs / aphorisms : the field of ‘proper / improper” action is diverse.
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“Caring for humanity as a whole is a function of intelligent self-concern?”
That sounds Randian to me. I’m not well studied but it sounds like it fits that family of thought.
I see caring for humanity as a whole as a function of empathetic concern, not intelligent self-concern.
If you lack empathetic concern, then as a function of intelligent self-concern could perform a similar function, but it’s sweet ‘n low to sugar.
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I care about strangers I’ve never met. Maybe one day I’ll meet them and they’ll be friends. Maybe I won’t. But even my friends are strangers to me and sometimes strangers become friends.
I guess I don’t see a hard-line distinction between stranger and friend, the “us” vs the “other” is a handshake or a beer together away.
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Example: Who is Jera Wolfe to Kenneth Udut?
A stranger. I’ve never met you. We haven’t hung out together. Families don’t know each other. We haven’t grown up together. We might look entirely different than our profile pictures. Don’t know what each other sounds like.
Strangers.
Yet, do I have empathetic concern for you? I do.
Why? Because despite all of the reasons one could put forth that we’re strangers to each other, we’re friends.
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Now one thing you *do* tend to see with experience, is that your level of influence over other people is NOT what you thought it was, if you once thought you had great influence over others.
Have you ever had a dream where you stood in front of a crowd of people and they were mesmerized by your every word? Spellbound at your ability to say everything in just the right way and it was at that moment that they TRULY understood the way things REALLY are?
I have. As a teenager.
Do I still believe I can do that?
Well, I discovered it’s hard. I discovered I prefer typing to talking. I prefer conversation over broadcasting opinion. I also discovered I don’t like people being spellbound by what I’m saying. I prefer some back-and-forth.
I know it’s tangent but I believe it’s related: I read the OP as “one day you recognize your limitations”.
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I had a free pass to not care about the actions of politicians for a long time. I didn’t know I was riding on a free pass but I was.
Now, I have to care. I hate it. I don’t want to. But I have to.
It’s a sense of duty, an obligation. I wouldn’t force it upon others: it wouldn’t be fair. I got to ride the bus for free, so should they. But now that I’m more activated than I once was, I can see things a little differently now. So, I watch.
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I believe you’re right. I think the current administration is hoping to bring us over a hump so that we land into a new … ugh the only term coming to mind is strange attractor but there’s another one involving saddle points – here we go. Local minimum.
I think they’re hoping for a new local minima, driven by the chaos of the current activities, so that by the time we reach the “new normal”, many of their goals will be included and seen as normal that at one time might have been unthinkable.
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The reason why I do what I can now is to *avoid* going into the _wrong_ new local minimum. That’s not to say that we need to return to the current local minimum : I wasn’t heavily invested in either staying or leaving this one.
But if we’re going in the wrong direction, it’s critical to be sure that doesn’t happen so that wherever we *do* end up at the end of this period of time, isn’t a future we don’t want.
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guess I have a fascination with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system …. I mean, I don’t know if is a good metaphor for politics or not… it’s just what comes to my mind]
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[while I don’t bother with math, I love the concepts. Now I’m inspired to learn more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9 which I really should, as I’m using metaphors based upon his stuff way too much. ]
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