AnPing

Photos from Anping (安平), outside of Tainan on July 14:

‘Truth’ is Whatever Enables Revolution

What is it, psychologically, that divides the ‘two Americas’ of the Left and Right?

For several weeks I’ve toyed mentally with the concept of ‘fear of suffering’ (left) vs. fear of non-being (right).

But even more recently as I look around at the society I inhabit and think about the few places I’ve been, there’s an even greater horror for a man of the philosophical Right;
that everyone is the same; that every human life really does matter.

I have often mocked the idea that mere suffering is somehow worse than death. “How could something so fleeting as pain be so bad as not existing at all?” I ask myself. But there are times when I read history and experience the language of the dead, I succumb to an even greater fear than the fear of death:

That all these other souls, all the teeming millions and billions of men and women, young and old on this Earth, have as much of a spirit as I do. That not only are we all destroyed by time, but that there are so many of us running back and forth inside of our cage that nothing any of these individual souls do will ever matter. Not only can I not transcend death, I can never aspire to build something that won’t dissolve into the Earth sooner or later.

But even convinced wholeheartedly of this; I wake up in the morning with the light shining through curtain-less windows, and decide what I will do. I stand up, walk outside, and feel the sun on my skin, and engage the people in the space around me. I am armed with my imagination; my own interpretation of events, and do not drown.