It’s easy to argue against pure freedom and total mutuality. You don’t have to comb through or fight Hayek or Mao to land on livable ground. From reading a little and living a little, it seems the human animal needs some other human animals (even superuberultimate-Nietzsche didn’t want to be the last person). And people (even non-millennials) like to be themselves, to differentiate, to feel exalted & special.
Where’s the problem, then? If everyone likes a little connection and a little personal grandiosity, where’s the rub? Well, here comes theory and extremity to ruin dinner. “Either we’re going to drink every bottle of wine in the county or I’m going to break the chairs!” A half glass is an insult to a prospective perfectionist. “If we can’t have ideal things, we must have nothing!” “If people I don’t like have things I don’t have, I will rage!”
What’s going on here? Belief and theory got together with stories to turn human mind-bodies into jealous, wrathful monsters. Get too little sleep, find a reason to fear, discover a simple threat source, rage. If I’m sounding centrist or anti-radical, that’s not exactly right. I’d like to deconstruct the sources of my rages, of my kneeing-jerky reactions and land myself on ground that is neither lava nor thin ice. And I’m very susceptible to theory and prognosis and recommendations, so this is a constant deconstruction project (until I find a way to block out new inputs).
To disable these absurd resonances and responses, we need to divert from ranking as a way to understand and respond to the world. Perhaps the sharpest deconstructionists among you will claim that rank-avoidance is tantamount to down-ranking ranking. Red herring fishermen! If the lenses through which you see the world are valuation lenses that are constantly evaluating good, evil, mediocre, invalid, you’re missing the rest of the view. There’s the smell of a boat engine. There’s the oak tree rustling above the sidewalk. There’s the nervous energy in the eye of the adolescent rabbit looking at an excited (leashed) dog. There’s the infinite blue chords. There’s meeting a friend in the eyes. There’s coming to understand oneself through ten minutes of solitude.
Totality is like bleach, it runs the senses through the wash and leaves a colorless cloth with a vicious chemical odor. Take a look and a listen and a feel around. There are ten thousand thousand things to notice and engage.