I’m woken by a strange dream, driving Misty home through Illinois, but not any Illinois I’ve seen, or that exists, a thruway late at night, and not in winter like the endless lake effect blizzard that finally settled and gusted snowbanks around our home all yesterday until almost midnight. You couldn’t see the driveway by the end, although I had shoveled it three times during the day. Wind is the great equalizer.
But then it was Misty’s turn. She began twitching in her sleep and vocalizing small sounds of distress. I hugged her, and she woke too. She had a dream that our son Emet seemed to have come downstairs. The door to our room opened, but it wasn’t Emet there. It was an adult figure, but she could tell neither who it was nor what they wanted.
The surreal is real
If you take human contact and consideration as basic to social reality, a kind of potential and actuality that together hold daily life together as a workable and warm-enough place, then the political environment of the United States of America becomes increasingly surreal. Interpersonal consideration has been lost as if the windows of a home cracked in deep winter and the rooms began to swirl with freezing drafts. You cannot leave this home, but why are you here? It is not even your home. Why is it breaking apart?
There are obvious answers to critique: plutocracy. Character-forms to face: the selfish ones. Selfishness is now realism – unrestrained, unapologetic, brash. Realistic people are selfish, and selfishness is a real virtue. The notion of the real begins to shake. Human reality dissipates like tattered strips of fabric stuck in a tree struck by a winter storm.
Selfishness as muted panic
How could it become socially acceptable to be openly selfish? Selfishness defies self-interest. Self-interested people may still coherently consider others, de-centering themselves to think about the big picture while balancing claims and concerns. Self-interest is part of justness, equalized by the interests of others. But selfish people erase others, turning others into matters of calculus or irrelevance. There is no such thing as a society of selfish people; it is both conceptually incoherent and cannot work. Selfishness not only undermines self-interest; it conflicts with social goods. Then how can selfishness set in as social virtue?
Take the internalization of panic. The collective trust has broken down or apart. Each of us is now exposed, each in danger. Grabbing seems the best one can do, given the circumstances. Anything else is foolish and too little. You and yours will hurt if you do not act fast and get your own. You and yours will suffer if you aren’t ready for the fight. Restrain the shadows appearing at your door.
Can apparently self-possessed people walk around in muted panic? Yet I see this increasingly, even while people are laughing out at tables at the local market hall. That smugness is fear, and the deliberate in-closed stance, the ordinary elitism of Sunday brunches, is the barricade against the outside cold. We are each going to fail if we do not try to become callous.
The thugs at the top
The dominant drives the panic. Thugs with power threaten the ordinary soul. They mess people up. Their wealth and influence, entitlement, and networks seem unimaginable for anyone but the similarly placed. In their fantasies, they can appear outside your room, in the night, waiting without a word, by the threshold of the bedroom door: take, punish. Sister, brother, do not cross them.
The selfish ones recycle the cosmology of bullies, their narcissism an ongoing fear made control. The world of the happy and the unhappy arrange differently – and so too with those who know touch or cooperation as basic social facts that disclose how society can be.
To break this cycle of abuse involves collapse. With thugs on top, society needs a stand-off to protect society. You know, ordinary people can stop investing in the order with any sort of acceptance. That wind is an equalizer, too. The once scared children who are now monsters must be remembered, while the lifelong decisions that remade them remain opposed. No human flourishing in the hollowed patterns of abusive control, selfish neglect.
Gripping humanity each day
I suppose that I should have foreseen this. The social justice types I knew increasingly became self-promoters. Philosophy professors who cannot talk but regale us with their slickness. Artists and art-world feeders exploiting trauma. Protests that staged selfies shouting at the sky. These were windows already cracked, the freeze entering.
I heard the diatribes against the woke made of simplification. The internalized chaos of moral purists infighting rather than seeing the odds. There was cynicism as a cowardly way of life. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Where are others in their lives? How do I fit in or not fit in? How can people cooperate? What can people build together or while respecting each other apart? When I meet another, there’s no substitute for their thoughtfulness, nor the obligation that is mine.
February 17th, 2025.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
I went to public school in Ithaca and New Hartford, New York, graduating from New Hartford Senior High School. After spending time at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, France, I earned my B.A. in philosophy from Yale University and my Ph.D. in philosophy from University of Chicago, studying with Martha C. Nussbaum and Charles Larmore, among others. One of the most important learning experiences for me was researching a Head Start program modeled on Reggio Emilia's municipal preschools with Dan and Sandra Scheinfeld. It shaped the work that I did at Colorado College, American University of Sharjah (Department of International Studies), LeMoyne College, and in the Beamer-Schneider Professorship in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University.
I often collaborate with Misty Morrison. She's building a sense of art and of community close to economy that is ecology. It starts with family and neighborhood relationships. She's country, and I'm punk.
My current book project is under contract, Shall Planetary Justness Frame Their Homes: Environmental Wonder,Neighborhood Philosophy.
