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Rebecca Solnit is a wonderful source of thoughtful commentary in these dark times. I found her latest piece particularly insightful, on the topic of MAGA being simply unable to comprehend empathy, unable to give a shit about anything beyond themselves and their own narrow self-interests. Here are some excerpts, and here is the link to her full newsletter:
The poet W.H. Auden wrote in a review of the final book in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, “Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.”
Rebecca Solnit, from Meditations in an Emergency
This is one of our strategic advantages: they routinely fail to comprehend motives that are not selfish, so the idealism, the altruism, the commitment to ideals and principles, that motivates the resistance is seen as a cover-up for the real motives, which helps them cast progressives as criminal or delusional. Empathy is itself an act of imagination, that begins with attention and care: what is it like to be this other being, what are they feeling, what do they need. It arises from and reinforces a sense of non-separation, a sense that we’re all in this together, that everyone is your neighbor and no one is a stranger…..
They have made a massive gamble, and I believe they are losing that gamble. One part of it is as I have written before about the nature of power itself: that they have most or all of it, because they do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Another part is about human nature; they seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we’ll come on over. Like Sauron they suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us.